RBS systems down for over a month. G4S needing the military to provide Oylimpic security coverage. And now O2 entire netowrk goes down for 24 hours.
More and more we are seeing the end results of private sector incompetence. Large companies, run by feckless playboys and professional bullshitters, cutting costs at every turn, slowly crumbling from the inside out.
It's like an accelerated private sector version of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it is happening across the IT/service economy at an accelerating pace. How long before a major news network, private hospital, transport network, or airline goes belly up entirely and needs the public to step in any bail it out once again?
Forget "Too Big to Fail". It appears these companies are "Too Big to Succeed". I don't see why they should be given special privileges and handouts anymore, or in particular why any significant portion of our societies infrastructure must be placed in their care.
These companies should either be nationalised, or else wound up.
Wikipedia is Not Ugly. It has a simple, readable, and dare-I-say even attractive design. It is the essence of quiet typographic design, emphasising content over appearance.
Which isn't to say that I always agree with the content itself. But like it or not, you have to admit that Mediawiki content is always clearly readable.
That Cupola dome on the ISS has been worth every penny put into it. The sheer volume of photo and video being transmitted back from the station and into the public domain is staggering.
And as this incident reveals, these photographs serve as an important observational record too.
In fact, it's rather disappointing that we have so few satellites capable of simply taking pictures of the earth(excepting spy satellites which take pictures of only very small parts of it). It might seem frivolous, but the reality is that we really don't know what phenomena or new perspectives we are likely to see from space. To say nothing of the public and educational outreach afforded by such images.
Would it really cost so much to send up small satellites with embedded cameras? Couldn't we do without one or two bank CEOs in return for high def pictures of our planet?
They run billions of experiments. At that rate, you need higher confidence to be really certain.
And aside from that, it's very important to point out that what's been found is a "new particle". Whether it's the Higgs or not has yet to be confirmed.
It means that the article's author, the editor, and indeed most of the commenters and readers of this story will all have no idea what this story is really about, no idea of what to say in response to it, and no idea of how to respond to the comments that are made.
This thread is basically going to be the online version of an art student stoner party discussing the Nexus. Enjoy reading 100 commenter talking past one another.
I have curtains on my windows not because I just want to stop the government seeing what I do in private, but because I want to stop everyone else seeing what I do in private.
But if you have nothing to hide, then you have no reason to have curtains!
You have to remember what "way" do people advertise in the first place.
Typically, they hire an advertising company. Such a company is typically staffed by half-manic artistic types, not skilled enough to for a solo career, but talented enough at faking to be able to impress executive who really haven't got a clue themselves. Thus you have the incompetent leading the blind.
It goes without saying that almost everyone involved in this group is male and scientifically illiterate. Hence, throw in a requirement concerning both women and science, and you end up with this video: A shock production born of ignorance and probably contempt for both topics.
The unfortunate thing is that no-one responsible for this will even be fired, and everyone involved got paid and will probably remain in the positions and/or be contracted again. Our society once again rewards failure, or at least tolerates it.
When you go into politics, what kind of device do they ram up where to rip your ability to feel embarrassment out?
The "device" is a large wad of cash and cheques which is shoved repeatedly into either the subjects hand or pockets. Other side effects of this treatment include: a deranged mindset, inability to distinguish fantasy from reality, and voluminous stools emerging from both digestive orifices.
I'm curious: how much do you think that someone who runs the internet should be paid?
2.718 times the average industrial wage.
I believe that's somewhere in the region of $135,000, but I don't have exact figures for the median US wage. The multiplier is obvious.
Do you think it should be less than priceline.com ($50M), Qualcomm ($36M), Viacom ($31M), Time Warner ($20M), and eBay ($15M).
Yes. Moreover, I think that such salaries should not be permitted in publicly listed, limited liability companies.
Presumably, he has the skillset to do most of these jobs.
A screaming money casting its dung around the office probably has the skillset to run run them as well, since running them into the ground appears to be the only thing modern CEOs actually do in return for their compensation. That and engage in crime, but I digress.
I find that I am comfortable with this number.
Then doubtless you will be comfortable with the corresponding increase in your tax bill required to pay for it and the multitude of linked salaries. Moreover, you will of course be perfectly contented in seeing your own wages decrease in value of in real terms to support the increasingly bloated and unearned salaries of the class you so admire. Enjoy your banana republic.
John Postel used to do the same job of ICANN CEO and an entire swathe of their senior management for free. That was only 20 years ago.
While the net may have increased in scale since then, its complexity has not, and its has not grown to the point where someone needs to be paid $800,000 a year plus bonuses etc just to keep it all ticking over.
As for the "competition" at the CEO level; while there is indeed a worldwide race to the very bowels of vapidity, fecklessness, and incompetence in this field, again, the cream of this crop are not worth paying $800,000 a year for.
There is a clear and distinct difference between using a dead animal as a work of art (which is pushing the limit of what art really is) and using man-made tools to go after people who have expressed in both word and deed they want to kill us.
Yeah. One of those things is legal. The other is not.
This has nothing to do with "possession" or even crime in and of itself.
This has to do with the hysterical overreaction of the general public towards anything which is so much as suspected as being involved with or related to child pornography. Victims of this ransom-ware may well pay in fear of being ripped to pieces by an angry mob, and their fears would not be all that far fetched at this point. At the very least, they stand a good chance of having their entire life ruined should even a hint of suspicion fall on them.
Child pornography, like all hysterias, has become an excuse for a segments of the public to indulge in chaos, anarchy and criminal behaviour in their reaction to it. Even a pointed finger can now be a life or death sentence for innocent people. This is why it was important not to let the rule of law slide on this or any other issue.
But no. People wanted to indulge their outrage. I suppose democracies get what they deserve.
I use Wikipedia extensively, often wasting hours on mammoth wiki-trips that lead all over the place. I can report that I very rarely come across porn of any description.
Possible exceptions to this rule are: Tales of scandals involving mistresses/concubines, etc in historical articles, and passing references to homosexuality in articles related to Great Britain.
The calculation in the study required 54 million processor hours on the IBM BlueGene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Laboratory, the equivalent of 281 days of computing with 8,000 processors.
And yet the entire article does not contain a single equation, much less a link to the paper. I am disappoint.
Because we're talking about attacks of Nanotech and Nuclear workers, and you've just derailed a derailed Star War's meme joke with this Culture War bullshit.
Honestly, can we go three stories without some American Cult-War/Political derailing in the first thread. Can the mods please apply the "Offtopic" option instead of giving an "Interesting" rating to every random brain-fart?
And could people at least attempt to re-rail derailed threads back to the topic. For example: "Yeah Eco-anarchists. basically jerks who think their own views and options are more important than all other topics, and who will inject themselves drastically into even completely unrelated matters just to gain attention for their cause." So, let's get back to the topic.
You are right. This article is awful, conveying no sense of the nature of the problem or its complexity, and giving no idea of the solution at all.
The only equations I'm aware of for a falling particle subject to air resistance take the form
m v' = -mg -a*v-b*v^2
which is a constant coefficient Riccati differential equation for the velocity v. I'm reasonably sure this would have an analytic solution.
Maybe complications arise in the 2D motion case, or perhaps the problem includes a particle which is also spinning. Maybe the drag terms take more complicated forms. I don't know. The article is pretty dreadful to be honest.
The worst generation ever is the current generation of decision makers(55-65) who are crushing all beneath them in order to save their inflated pension pots.
If there is really a national or international "Demise of guys" among young men, it has a lot more to do with youth unemployment levels than video games or internet pornography.
... but it also is true that a few years ago we had a well-ordered world with 3 platforms at most and now with the mobile revolution we pratically are back in the 80ies with a bazillion proprietary platforms none of which are really compatible to one another....
The bottom line is that smartphones are taking the computer software industry backwards. About 20 years backwards in fact.
We have legions of shiny but shallow "apps" instead of useful, usable, and comprehensive applications. We have appallingly restrictive vendor control of OSes instead of free private development AND distribution. We have users stuck with small screens, no peripherals, and slow and expensive connections instead of quad core power machines with broadband connections and 20'' widescreens.
It's 1993 again. Shovelware crap is ubiquitous, there are no set standards, no-one knows how to use their devices, and worse the devices aren't yet actually useful for anything more serious than playing low resolution games and "surfing the web" for recreational purposes.
People need to wake up and realise that smartphones are little more than expensive toys with a phone tacked on. People need--at the very least--a laptop to get actual work(and play) done. And developers make money supplying the tools to get it done.
Slashdot Mirror
RBS systems down for over a month. G4S needing the military to provide Oylimpic security coverage. And now O2 entire netowrk goes down for 24 hours.
More and more we are seeing the end results of private sector incompetence. Large companies, run by feckless playboys and professional bullshitters, cutting costs at every turn, slowly crumbling from the inside out.
It's like an accelerated private sector version of the collapse of the Soviet Union, and it is happening across the IT/service economy at an accelerating pace. How long before a major news network, private hospital, transport network, or airline goes belly up entirely and needs the public to step in any bail it out once again?
Forget "Too Big to Fail". It appears these companies are "Too Big to Succeed". I don't see why they should be given special privileges and handouts anymore, or in particular why any significant portion of our societies infrastructure must be placed in their care.
These companies should either be nationalised, or else wound up.
Ah! Another candidate for Editor then.
Wikipedia is Not Ugly. It has a simple, readable, and dare-I-say even attractive design. It is the essence of quiet typographic design, emphasising content over appearance.
Which isn't to say that I always agree with the content itself. But like it or not, you have to admit that Mediawiki content is always clearly readable.
That Cupola dome on the ISS has been worth every penny put into it. The sheer volume of photo and video being transmitted back from the station and into the public domain is staggering.
And as this incident reveals, these photographs serve as an important observational record too.
In fact, it's rather disappointing that we have so few satellites capable of simply taking pictures of the earth(excepting spy satellites which take pictures of only very small parts of it). It might seem frivolous, but the reality is that we really don't know what phenomena or new perspectives we are likely to see from space. To say nothing of the public and educational outreach afforded by such images.
Would it really cost so much to send up small satellites with embedded cameras? Couldn't we do without one or two bank CEOs in return for high def pictures of our planet?
They run billions of experiments. At that rate, you need higher confidence to be really certain.
And aside from that, it's very important to point out that what's been found is a "new particle". Whether it's the Higgs or not has yet to be confirmed.
It means that the article's author, the editor, and indeed most of the commenters and readers of this story will all have no idea what this story is really about, no idea of what to say in response to it, and no idea of how to respond to the comments that are made.
This thread is basically going to be the online version of an art student stoner party discussing the Nexus. Enjoy reading 100 commenter talking past one another.
But if you have nothing to hide, then you have no reason to have curtains!
You have to remember what "way" do people advertise in the first place.
Typically, they hire an advertising company. Such a company is typically staffed by half-manic artistic types, not skilled enough to for a solo career, but talented enough at faking to be able to impress executive who really haven't got a clue themselves. Thus you have the incompetent leading the blind.
It goes without saying that almost everyone involved in this group is male and scientifically illiterate. Hence, throw in a requirement concerning both women and science, and you end up with this video: A shock production born of ignorance and probably contempt for both topics.
The unfortunate thing is that no-one responsible for this will even be fired, and everyone involved got paid and will probably remain in the positions and/or be contracted again. Our society once again rewards failure, or at least tolerates it.
The "device" is a large wad of cash and cheques which is shoved repeatedly into either the subjects hand or pockets. Other side effects of this treatment include: a deranged mindset, inability to distinguish fantasy from reality, and voluminous stools emerging from both digestive orifices.
2.718 times the average industrial wage.
I believe that's somewhere in the region of $135,000, but I don't have exact figures for the median US wage. The multiplier is obvious.
Yes. Moreover, I think that such salaries should not be permitted in publicly listed, limited liability companies.
A screaming money casting its dung around the office probably has the skillset to run run them as well, since running them into the ground appears to be the only thing modern CEOs actually do in return for their compensation. That and engage in crime, but I digress.
Then doubtless you will be comfortable with the corresponding increase in your tax bill required to pay for it and the multitude of linked salaries. Moreover, you will of course be perfectly contented in seeing your own wages decrease in value of in real terms to support the increasingly bloated and unearned salaries of the class you so admire. Enjoy your banana republic.
John Postel used to do the same job of ICANN CEO and an entire swathe of their senior management for free. That was only 20 years ago.
While the net may have increased in scale since then, its complexity has not, and its has not grown to the point where someone needs to be paid $800,000 a year plus bonuses etc just to keep it all ticking over.
As for the "competition" at the CEO level; while there is indeed a worldwide race to the very bowels of vapidity, fecklessness, and incompetence in this field, again, the cream of this crop are not worth paying $800,000 a year for.
Only if you rip off a small amount. Embezzle enough and you'll get his job.
Yeah. One of those things is legal. The other is not.
This has nothing to do with "possession" or even crime in and of itself.
This has to do with the hysterical overreaction of the general public towards anything which is so much as suspected as being involved with or related to child pornography. Victims of this ransom-ware may well pay in fear of being ripped to pieces by an angry mob, and their fears would not be all that far fetched at this point. At the very least, they stand a good chance of having their entire life ruined should even a hint of suspicion fall on them.
Child pornography, like all hysterias, has become an excuse for a segments of the public to indulge in chaos, anarchy and criminal behaviour in their reaction to it. Even a pointed finger can now be a life or death sentence for innocent people. This is why it was important not to let the rule of law slide on this or any other issue.
But no. People wanted to indulge their outrage. I suppose democracies get what they deserve.
I use Wikipedia extensively, often wasting hours on mammoth wiki-trips that lead all over the place. I can report that I very rarely come across porn of any description.
Possible exceptions to this rule are: Tales of scandals involving mistresses/concubines, etc in historical articles, and passing references to homosexuality in articles related to Great Britain.
And yet the entire article does not contain a single equation, much less a link to the paper. I am disappoint.
"More matter, with less art!"
Because we're talking about attacks of Nanotech and Nuclear workers, and you've just derailed a derailed Star War's meme joke with this Culture War bullshit.
Honestly, can we go three stories without some American Cult-War/Political derailing in the first thread. Can the mods please apply the "Offtopic" option instead of giving an "Interesting" rating to every random brain-fart?
And could people at least attempt to re-rail derailed threads back to the topic. For example: "Yeah Eco-anarchists. basically jerks who think their own views and options are more important than all other topics, and who will inject themselves drastically into even completely unrelated matters just to gain attention for their cause." So, let's get back to the topic.
Dega704 is a "New Submitter", whatever that means now. Perhaps this is an echo of something taking place in the Slashdot backrooms?
You are right. This article is awful, conveying no sense of the nature of the problem or its complexity, and giving no idea of the solution at all.
The only equations I'm aware of for a falling particle subject to air resistance take the form
m v' = -mg -a*v-b*v^2
which is a constant coefficient Riccati differential equation for the velocity v. I'm reasonably sure this would have an analytic solution.
Maybe complications arise in the 2D motion case, or perhaps the problem includes a particle which is also spinning. Maybe the drag terms take more complicated forms. I don't know. The article is pretty dreadful to be honest.
The worst generation ever is the current generation of decision makers(55-65) who are crushing all beneath them in order to save their inflated pension pots.
If there is really a national or international "Demise of guys" among young men, it has a lot more to do with youth unemployment levels than video games or internet pornography.
Millions of us in the gutter, looked up at the stars.
If people thought Idle was bad, the Business Intelligence takes Slashdot an order of magnitude lower.
How long until the BI editors demand outright access to the frontpage?
The bottom line is that smartphones are taking the computer software industry backwards. About 20 years backwards in fact.
We have legions of shiny but shallow "apps" instead of useful, usable, and comprehensive applications. We have appallingly restrictive vendor control of OSes instead of free private development AND distribution. We have users stuck with small screens, no peripherals, and slow and expensive connections instead of quad core power machines with broadband connections and 20'' widescreens.
It's 1993 again. Shovelware crap is ubiquitous, there are no set standards, no-one knows how to use their devices, and worse the devices aren't yet actually useful for anything more serious than playing low resolution games and "surfing the web" for recreational purposes.
People need to wake up and realise that smartphones are little more than expensive toys with a phone tacked on. People need--at the very least--a laptop to get actual work(and play) done. And developers make money supplying the tools to get it done.
For fucks sake! Four posts down from an actual ontopic TOP, and you're already talking about the administration and the election.
Can we please get add a "political" tag so I can filter this shit out of stories where it doesn't belong.