We do need to talk about cost but we need to talk about ALL the costs not just the operating costs but all the externalized costs as well.
We don't need to talk about costs at all. Costs are measured in the monopoly money we call "currency", and subject as they are to the vagaries and panics of the financial classes, are not an indicator or metric which we should rely on when planning our energy policies.
We need to talk about watts, mega-watt hours, materials, hours of labour, and disposal of waste. We need to talk about physical things, things we know, understand, and can do in the physical world. Not about intellectual casino chips which are magicked in and out of existence like pixels in a video game.
Energy policy is a long game that humanity is playing with the forces of the natural world. Our (dysfunctional) systems of money are about as relevant as our spoken languages in this debate.
Data is easy to keep but it's also easy to leak. And given the consequences of leaks, companies need to start asking themselves whether it is worth storing all this data in the first place.
How many times did Mozilla ever actually use all this personal data internally? How many times on average the data for each of the 76,000 developers used? How many records were never accessed at all?
If you don't need all this data, then just don't store it. It's easy!
Property Rights? Trespass to Chattels? No abuse of state powers for private gain? How easily the mask slips when a few cold pounds are involved.
But the people I feel really sorry for are the victims of crime in London, whose cases go unsolved due to precious police resources being wasted on internet nonsense like this.
I love how pretty much every country has come to the same conclusion: We can bypass our own laws if we have someone else do it for us.
There's nothing surprising in this. Most countries hire consultants and advisors from the same international legal/accounting firms, who themselves have been trained in the same schools of thought, and often the same universities. The international ascendancy is mostly a mono-culture.
I think this is less about genetics and more about how "Evolutionary Biology" and "biological anthropology" are entire disciplines founded on the notion that present day sexual prejudices can inform the study of extinct mammals.
Perhaps it's time for companies to realise that they cannot keep data secure. That they will never be able to build, much less be willing to pay for, the security required to keep this information under any kind of seal.
Perhaps it's time for companies to ask themselves: "Do we really need to store this?".
Well, if you've already trusted your national defence, university education, ideological belief system, and popular cultural to the homeland of said foreign company, entrusting your national telecoms infrastructure is a relatively small step.
Reading between the lines here, it seems fairly probable that Truecrypt has either
a) Very serious security bugs, or b) Had backdoors introduced by the NSA.(Does Truecrypt use elliptic curve cryptography?)
In either event the code is basically tainted and shouldn't be used for any future projects.
The vague and sometimes bizzare nature of the statements from the Truecrypt dev team, including this one, lead me to believe that they have been placed under a standard NSA gagging order and have decided to burn Truecrypt rather than see it be turned against its users. Comments like "Forking is Impossibe" appear to be an open code for communicating that they are essentially unable to communicate, but that Truecrypt is no longer a trustworthy piece of software.
Reading though the Lavabit case, it's clear that those placed under NSA gagging orders have very, very little room for legal/media maneuver, but nevertheless still retain the freedom to walk away from their projects and tell others not to use them. Such actions appear to be the last defense of cryptographers in the US, and I think that is what we're seeing with Truecrypt.
Launch the data into oputer space on a satellite, programmed to transmit the data after a set time period. For best results, send the machine on a massive period orbit to the outer solar system, or in a pinch, crash land it it on the Moon or Mars.
Governments will either have to give up, or else fund massive space project. Either way, we win.
Doing this in your head the traditional way would be hard.
I would not do it in my head. I would take out a pen and a piece of paper, and slowly work through the problem step by step until I had a final answer I was confident in. If the pen was in front of me, I'd probably finish faster than someone trying in their head, and I'd be guaranteed to be more accurate into the bargin.
Mental arithmetic should not be the goal of primary education, outside of the times tables. Children need to learn methods which reward care, patience and effort to find the final answer. This has benefits beyond the classroom.
A kid shouldn't be allowed out of sixth grade if they cannot quickly answer the following questions:
40 - 16 8 * 9 1/2 - 1/3
I must disagree here. Quick mental proficiency should not be the ultimate goal. (Times tables excepted)
What should be expected of a sixth grade student is that they be able to take out pen and paper, and carefully through systematic methods to obtain the correct answer. In addition to this, they should have enough sense of number to know whether the answer is reasonable.
Pen and paper proficiency should be preferred over all other mathematical skills in primary education. Students should feel confident in their own ability to, with patience and care, work out the answer themselves.
You can teach kids to do the "borrowing" from the next column, and they will be able to do it, but they won't understand why they are doing it, which is a bad precedent to set.
There comes a point in mathematics, at all levels, where understanding of "why" needs to stop and being able to "do" becomes more important. Ultimately, we learn mathematics so that we can actually solve problems, learn technologies which make calculation simpler and which given us a robust platform for moving on to more powerful techniques.
A student who needs to use the Common Core methods to add and subtract will forever be hobbled as they progress through mathematics. While they may "understand" these simple operations, in practical terms they will be solving questions with a screwdriver instead of the power-drill they could have learned to use instead.
This isn't a subtle point or academic issue.
Of course you need to know the shortcut way to do it, but if you learn just that then you won't really be learning division, you will just be learning an algorithm which gives you the answer.
I think Dijkstra's quote about long division in Medieval universities is relevant here. It's worth noting that the invention of logarithms, printing of their tables, and their "rote" application to multiplcation, division and exponentiation is regarded as one of the keystones of the scientific revolution. We can talk about understanding until the cows come home, but at the end of the day we do need to teach students how to "do" things, and give them the tools to do them quickly and accurately.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't need to talk about costs at all. Costs are measured in the monopoly money we call "currency", and subject as they are to the vagaries and panics of the financial classes, are not an indicator or metric which we should rely on when planning our energy policies.
We need to talk about watts, mega-watt hours, materials, hours of labour, and disposal of waste. We need to talk about physical things, things we know, understand, and can do in the physical world. Not about intellectual casino chips which are magicked in and out of existence like pixels in a video game.
Energy policy is a long game that humanity is playing with the forces of the natural world. Our (dysfunctional) systems of money are about as relevant as our spoken languages in this debate.
He probably works in finance now.
None of these or any other internal arcana of c have anything to do with designing algorithms or programming computers.
Data is easy to keep but it's also easy to leak. And given the consequences of leaks, companies need to start asking themselves whether it is worth storing all this data in the first place.
How many times did Mozilla ever actually use all this personal data internally? How many times on average the data for each of the 76,000 developers used? How many records were never accessed at all?
If you don't need all this data, then just don't store it. It's easy!
Property Rights? Trespass to Chattels? No abuse of state powers for private gain? How easily the mask slips when a few cold pounds are involved.
But the people I feel really sorry for are the victims of crime in London, whose cases go unsolved due to precious police resources being wasted on internet nonsense like this.
There's nothing surprising in this. Most countries hire consultants and advisors from the same international legal/accounting firms, who themselves have been trained in the same schools of thought, and often the same universities. The international ascendancy is mostly a mono-culture.
I would read it as:
Dear Interconnected Computer Network Customer. Would you like your children to think like Daily Mail readers?
[ ] Yes. God Save The King!
[ ] No. I am unfit to raise Britain's future ruling class.
I think this is less about genetics and more about how "Evolutionary Biology" and "biological anthropology" are entire disciplines founded on the notion that present day sexual prejudices can inform the study of extinct mammals.
It's hard to take your point seriously when the only link you provide is to a webcomic.
And very unfortunately, such jerks are more likely to be able to grub funding for their research labs from government offices.
Perhaps it's time for companies to realise that they cannot keep data secure. That they will never be able to build, much less be willing to pay for, the security required to keep this information under any kind of seal.
Perhaps it's time for companies to ask themselves: "Do we really need to store this?".
"Buy My Book! Buy My Book! Buy My Book! ....."
Daikatana was about as Japanese as the Teenage Mutant Turtles.
Well, if you've already trusted your national defence, university education, ideological belief system, and popular cultural to the homeland of said foreign company, entrusting your national telecoms infrastructure is a relatively small step.
What about the Cloud? The great workaround to constitution in the digital age?
Reading between the lines here, it seems fairly probable that Truecrypt has either
a) Very serious security bugs, or
b) Had backdoors introduced by the NSA.(Does Truecrypt use elliptic curve cryptography?)
In either event the code is basically tainted and shouldn't be used for any future projects.
The vague and sometimes bizzare nature of the statements from the Truecrypt dev team, including this one, lead me to believe that they have been placed under a standard NSA gagging order and have decided to burn Truecrypt rather than see it be turned against its users. Comments like "Forking is Impossibe" appear to be an open code for communicating that they are essentially unable to communicate, but that Truecrypt is no longer a trustworthy piece of software.
Reading though the Lavabit case, it's clear that those placed under NSA gagging orders have very, very little room for legal/media maneuver, but nevertheless still retain the freedom to walk away from their projects and tell others not to use them. Such actions appear to be the last defense of cryptographers in the US, and I think that is what we're seeing with Truecrypt.
Launch the data into oputer space on a satellite, programmed to transmit the data after a set time period. For best results, send the machine on a massive period orbit to the outer solar system, or in a pinch, crash land it it on the Moon or Mars.
Governments will either have to give up, or else fund massive space project. Either way, we win.
It's about making people feel better about their car. Who cares about your outdated value-add notions like "efficiency" or "safety"? Pshhh! BTFD.
Traditionally, Valve have always extensively playtested their game offerings. Most of the development process has been based around player feedback.
Actually, with the rise of the internet, I imagine quite a signifiganct percentage of modern geeks actually come from such societies.
Vindictiveness is not an excuse for revenge.
Taking the zenith of US supremacy in the 1960s as a baseline, the US has been in constantly decline in a multitude of fields since that time.
I would not do it in my head. I would take out a pen and a piece of paper, and slowly work through the problem step by step until I had a final answer I was confident in. If the pen was in front of me, I'd probably finish faster than someone trying in their head, and I'd be guaranteed to be more accurate into the bargin.
Mental arithmetic should not be the goal of primary education, outside of the times tables. Children need to learn methods which reward care, patience and effort to find the final answer. This has benefits beyond the classroom.
I must disagree here. Quick mental proficiency should not be the ultimate goal. (Times tables excepted)
What should be expected of a sixth grade student is that they be able to take out pen and paper, and carefully through systematic methods to obtain the correct answer. In addition to this, they should have enough sense of number to know whether the answer is reasonable.
Pen and paper proficiency should be preferred over all other mathematical skills in primary education. Students should feel confident in their own ability to, with patience and care, work out the answer themselves.
There comes a point in mathematics, at all levels, where understanding of "why" needs to stop and being able to "do" becomes more important. Ultimately, we learn mathematics so that we can actually solve problems, learn technologies which make calculation simpler and which given us a robust platform for moving on to more powerful techniques.
A student who needs to use the Common Core methods to add and subtract will forever be hobbled as they progress through mathematics. While they may "understand" these simple operations, in practical terms they will be solving questions with a screwdriver instead of the power-drill they could have learned to use instead.
This isn't a subtle point or academic issue.
I think Dijkstra's quote about long division in Medieval universities is relevant here. It's worth noting that the invention of logarithms, printing of their tables, and their "rote" application to multiplcation, division and exponentiation is regarded as one of the keystones of the scientific revolution. We can talk about understanding until the cows come home, but at the end of the day we do need to teach students how to "do" things, and give them the tools to do them quickly and accurately.