That's sorta like saying that people have a right to produce child pornography, and they can also be held responsible for their actions.
In other words, no, you DO NOT have a right to yell fire in a crowded theatre (that isn't really on fire). A right is something that is unimpeded and unencumbered by threats of legal action against you.
The right to free speech in the US was originally framed around political speech ONLY. That is, the government could not act against someone who said the current president (whoever it would be at the time) was an idiot and deserved to be impeached. I haven't seen anything that would say that the framers thought of it any differently, and much that points to this definition, including the political censorship around kings and the like which they were rejecting. Years of common law since have extended this to nearly any speech that was not obviously/objectively irresponsible. Apparently, this now includes nearly anything printed by the Fourth Estate (including pornography), but not slander/libel or yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre. Truth is always a valid defense (I think).
As a rabid right-winger, who dislikes the issues Obama stands for, I have to disagree on the remedy. In my mind, it's both. Disclosure, but participation in the discussion. And no voting (actual say) on the decision. Allow the rest of the team (and citizens in general) to know his background, but recognise that though there may be a vested interest, he may actually be an expert in the field. Making such a decision without people who actually care (vested interest) and are technical experts in a field is pretty much about as stupid as making the same decision and letting the vested interest (especially an economic interest) run roughshod over the process.
By all means, bring in the experts. Just don't let the ones who will financially benefit actually vote on the outcome.
lets have something to show for it that will still be useful in 80 years.
You're neglecting present value theory and opportunity cost; if we can save people money by developing free software over the next 10 years, the money they saved and spent elsewhere will improve other parts of the economy, which could have longer-term benefits.
Aw, jee, that sounds like Reagonomics. I thought that the world accepted that as a busted myth once Clinton took office.
Including the potential for your system (body) to be pwnd before you reload your anti-virus (vaccinations)? Hope you have a good firewall installed (live in a bubble)!
(Though, really, no one here will understand any of this unless we can force it into a car analogy...)
Apparently, it's a form of steganography using the GPL text as the carrier. If my decoding is correct, I think it says, "This is the geekiest troll EVAR!" but I think they misspelled "EVAR" so I can't quite be sure.
Just wondering why they don't just post the cleaning executables, and then talk to the local media about their fix for the botnet, and include the URL to the cleaning executable? Invite the public to run it for free. Then convince the media to post their story as a video on their own website (not youtube or anywhere that can be faked).
It won't get everyone, but it'll start. And then users can pass the story around by word of mouth to extend it to others. Hopefully they'll get media in other countries/languages interested, and then get those to also post their stories on their websites. If the University then tracks these and provides all the links (including languages) back to the media sites, we might be able to convince large numbers of people to clean their own systems without hacking anything. All perfectly legal.
While I have to admit that hacking the botnet itself is worth huge geek points, they may still be able to do a lot of good for the internet with the work they've done so far without running afoul of the law. If users download and run it themselves, that is authorisation right there (especially if the software does what they claim it does).
Or Kopete or gaim or... if, you're really adventurous, you could probably even use telnet. Of course, there are always people who will use butterflies.
I'd love to do a parody website about the environmental benefits of obesity.
Obesity has a NEGATIVE effect on the environment. Obese people eat more. Food is everything but carbon-neutral. Transportation, fertilizers, pesticides, cooling, etc.
And that's why GPP said parody. Part of that parody, it seems, is where he focuses on one tiny, insignificant aspect of the study and ignores everything that doesn't fit his (satirical) world view. The point of the website, then, would be to encourage people to think holistically, and not get suckered into fad-of-the-day thinking on carbon credits or anything else. By reading/watching the news with skepticism, perhaps we can have a real, intellectual conversation about the real state of the world, and what can and should be done about it. You know, planning for an honest future. Together. Instead of having marketing drones do the thinking for us.
If I have to choose between two comparable TVs... Roughly the same quality picture, same inputs on the back... I'd sure as hell pick the one that'll save me $20/year on electricity.
You're assuming the same cost, too. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the cost difference was $200 (more for the eco-friendly version). Would you still go with the eco-friendly version? $300? $100? What is your projection on the lifespan of the TV?
Just as a disclaimer: I used the same question when evaluating my hybrid VUE: it had what I needed/wanted, the question was hybrid or not. The cost difference vs the savings in gas over a projected 9-year ownership (since my previous vehicle lasted me that long) at projected costs of fuel, looked like I'd come out about $1000 ahead with the hybrid vs the regular 4-cyl model (I don't drive very much). With current gas prices being about half of my projection, I'm really not coming out ahead, but presumably over the next 7 years gas prices will get back up and surpass where they were before, which should make it a better deal.
It's far more complex than simply evaluating the electricity savings, but, I definitely agree that it should be there for people to take into account. Because, sometimes I'd be willing to go with a "worse" TV for the same cost if I saved $20/year on electricity, making that TV actually cost ~$200 less (or, likely, even more, since I would anticipate electricity costs to go up as oil gets more expensive again).
If I offer my services for, say, 1% less than you, the employer may come back to you and offer another 1% less than that. And, if you agree, they may come back to me for a further price reduction. And this might go on until we get, say, 10% less than the original price and someone bows out.
Instead, I may offer 5% less, and that may be too much for you right off the bat to counter with (or the employer may decide that this is good enough), and I'll be making 5% more than the scenario where I start out with only a 1% discount on my wage.
By risking an extra 4%, I might save myself an extra 5%. And the headache/stress of a bidding war.
More likely, I just want to cut the interview process short by eliminating the employer's desire to look at further, possibly better ROI, candidates, to further improve my chances of getting the job.
After all, we're not talking about which store can get you the latest blockbuster movie on Blu-Ray for the cheapest where all copies are really the same. We're talking about highly subjective "purchases" where candidates are NOT the same, and where those candidates really want to improve their own lot in life, often FROM ZERO to 60-90% of the going rate - that's huge for them.
Really? If, say, I offer my services at exactly the same cost as you're offering, I have a 50-50 chance of getting zero (assuming all else is equal). That means, a 50% chance of being REALLY short. In probabilities, that averages out to 50% of the pay. However, if I offer my services for a 10% discount, it "averages out" (for me) to 90% of the pay. A much better option. For me.
Of course, not everything is equal. So, if I'm not as good at the job as you are, I need to offer those services for MUCH lower for your employer to think s/he's getting a better ROI by hiring me instead of you.
The only problem here has been management's continued insistence that developers are interchangeable, and not realising that the new foreigner actually isn't as good as you are, even if only for cultural reasons (the Indian culture being, objectively speaking, vastly different than the standard American culture - I'm not saying one is better than the other, only different), which makes integration much more expensive, and not considered into their ROI projections.
Free market still lets me offer my services for whatever rate I deem reasonable, subject to being accepted by a client who is willing to pay whatever they think is reasonable, given appropriate negotiations. If you don't like it, join/form a union.
So, when you come over as an H1B, don't settle for a reduced wage. Find out how much they are paying for someone with your experience in the area and then ask for that.
But, but... that's not how the free market works, is it? If I can offer services (me) for less than someone else, why shouldn't I?
I'm sure this was modded Flamebait by someone assuming that Hognoxious is obnoxiously racist. And s/he might be. But, as in police work, you only hamper yourself if you're unwilling to look at culture ("Gah! Not profiling!") or other pigeonholing to narrow down your search.
Personally, from what I know about the Indian culture, I'd be surprised if they were the source of statistically significant amounts of data breaches. But the concept of looking at recent changes to the corporate world to see what has changed is completely valid, and not flamebait at all.
It's also like how airport security tearing apart an old lady's luggage looking for weapons of terror is a waste of resources, when it's far more economical (more likely to find what you're looking for) to tear apart the luggage of someone from countries known to support terror. Or to tear apart luggage of people coming in from known drug countries when looking for drugs. You need to carefully weigh the likelihoods, and spend your time and resource first in the likely places before the unlikely.
So, I think that Hognoxious has a valid point. We need to examine recent changes to the corporate world to figure out what this new statistic means. Does it mean, as many have already said, that we're just reporting better (seems likely to me)? Does it also mean that outsourced workers are selling our data? This seems like a reasonable myth to investigate to determine if outsourced workers are more, less, or similarly likely to sell insider data to the black market, so that we can better focus our efforts on reducing breaches. But it should be based on thorough investigation, and not on knee-jerk calls of racism.
KDE 4.0, and to a lesser degree, 4.1, were not targeted at production. They were targeted at getting feedback and bugreports from a wider audience. Yes, a lot of features were missing. In 4.2, I'm sure a lot of features will still be missing. But, the feedback they get from the early(ish) adopters lets them know what to prioritise. If no one complains about panel hiding, then the devs are better to spend their time on other issues that people actually complain about. Otherwise, we may wait another two years for ANY version of KDE 4 to come out, with lower quality (fewer testers due to less excitement), and they'll have wasted a bunch of time on features that, really, no one complains about.
This is the open-source way. It's far better than the proprietary way of fixing everything at high-cost when no one actually cares.
There's one thing you're not quite taking into consideration: patents. MS can't release anything in any form (including beta) and then file for a patent. They need to file for the patents first, and only once the paperwork hits the US PTO can they release a beta.
They may have a claim here that they didn't really release it, so it probably won't count against them when it comes time to file patents.
When speaking broadly, you do some more mainstream of the group a huge disservice. Not that many around here will call you on it.
Saying "Christians do not deny...", you are speaking far too broadly. You should say, "proponents of creationism" or some such. The simple reason being that the Vatican has claimed otherwise. Maybe you'll next claim that Catholics aren't really Christian, but most people, I think, understand them as such.
Personally, I don't find any contradiction from evolution to ID to creation, as I merely see evolution as the how, not the why. And, even then, I see small and large holes in evolution, holes that remain to be answered, not as disproof, similar to how the laws of relativity merely filled holes in Newton's laws rather than disproving them.
Thus far, my virtual boxes have all been on a private network. I'm not even sure if they see each other, though I've not really tested that. I'm not even really sure how to open up the guests to the public network, though I'm 100% positive that it can be done. It's just that the defaults are all pretty secure.
That all means that your host is acting as a NAT router (by default anyway) and thus all the firewall that the host has will protect the guest(s).
Yes, if your guest gets infected, it's inside the firewall. Though, like I said, I'm not sure it can see the other guests, just the host. However, it's fairly easy to solve: turn off the VM, and roll it back to a clean state. I mean, if you're paranoid enough to be worried about such issues, you'll have old states which are known-good to roll back to. However, I've turned off pretty much all of WindowsXP's protections because it's hiding inside my Linux box, behind a cable-router (another NAT). The ability for something to get in and infect it is pretty much nil. Especially as I don't use IE or Outlook inside there (I use kmail for email, and firefox and konqueror on Linux for browsing, so no need) either.
I'm just not sure what I count as... I use firefox for about 60-70% of my browsing, but nearly any time there's a URL to click on elsewhere (in my konsole, in kmail/kontact, xchat), it opens in konqueror. Should some of these numbers add up to more than 100% then? Or, more likely, does it just count whatever I happened to use at their site(s), and thus be somewhat biased toward primary browsers, ignoring the strength (and importance!) of secondary browsers.
Conversely, DNA can't be everything. I have a set of identical-twin cousins who are excellent examples. Their mother left them when they were young (somewhere between 4 and 6, I don't remember too well as I wasn't that old, either), leaving their father (my dad's brother) to raise them (and get remarried and have a slew of kids with his new wife, too). Anyway, one turned out as a risk-taker and gay, the other is neither. Same household, even same genes. There's gotta be more to it than that. (Of course, I'll get modded down for pointing out that genes also can't be the end-all and be-all of determining sexuality, either, since these two ARE identical twins and still ended up not having the same sexuality. Anecdotes != data, but this is simply a counter-example that seems to me to disprove that theory.)
Neither of the boys (well, they're over 18 now, so "men") are psychologically perfect (who is?), but they are definitely quite far apart in personality despite both same genes and same upbringing.
That'll just slow down the warm-up by delaying the current draw. By itself, an inductor simply turns the current 90 degrees from the voltage, which is generally a bad thing for efficiency. Combine it with a capacitor (which turns the current 90 degrees the other way), and you might be getting somewhere. Combine it with a bunch of other logic (parallel/series components), and you end up with... basically complexity.
Seriously, if you start your thought process with "I only pulled a B in something, but couldn't you fix..." when the people working on it have bachelor's degrees (or master's or PhD's) in the subject area, it probably would not solve the problem
-- got an EE degree over 11 years ago, and never used it in the field, so details are hazy.
Slashdot Mirror
I usually do that by rolling back the VM to a previous known-good state. ;-)
If that's not evidence that advertising targetting the subconscious works, I don't know what is.
Gives a whole new meaning to "Old Boys' Club", don't it?
That's sorta like saying that people have a right to produce child pornography, and they can also be held responsible for their actions.
In other words, no, you DO NOT have a right to yell fire in a crowded theatre (that isn't really on fire). A right is something that is unimpeded and unencumbered by threats of legal action against you.
The right to free speech in the US was originally framed around political speech ONLY. That is, the government could not act against someone who said the current president (whoever it would be at the time) was an idiot and deserved to be impeached. I haven't seen anything that would say that the framers thought of it any differently, and much that points to this definition, including the political censorship around kings and the like which they were rejecting. Years of common law since have extended this to nearly any speech that was not obviously/objectively irresponsible. Apparently, this now includes nearly anything printed by the Fourth Estate (including pornography), but not slander/libel or yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre. Truth is always a valid defense (I think).
As a rabid right-winger, who dislikes the issues Obama stands for, I have to disagree on the remedy. In my mind, it's both. Disclosure, but participation in the discussion. And no voting (actual say) on the decision. Allow the rest of the team (and citizens in general) to know his background, but recognise that though there may be a vested interest, he may actually be an expert in the field. Making such a decision without people who actually care (vested interest) and are technical experts in a field is pretty much about as stupid as making the same decision and letting the vested interest (especially an economic interest) run roughshod over the process.
By all means, bring in the experts. Just don't let the ones who will financially benefit actually vote on the outcome.
And I say this without regard to political party.
lets have something to show for it that will still be useful in 80 years.
You're neglecting present value theory and opportunity cost; if we can save people money by developing free software over the next 10 years, the money they saved and spent elsewhere will improve other parts of the economy, which could have longer-term benefits.
Aw, jee, that sounds like Reagonomics. I thought that the world accepted that as a busted myth once Clinton took office.
Including the potential for your system (body) to be pwnd before you reload your anti-virus (vaccinations)? Hope you have a good firewall installed (live in a bubble)!
(Though, really, no one here will understand any of this unless we can force it into a car analogy...)
Apparently, it's a form of steganography using the GPL text as the carrier. If my decoding is correct, I think it says, "This is the geekiest troll EVAR!" but I think they misspelled "EVAR" so I can't quite be sure.
Just wondering why they don't just post the cleaning executables, and then talk to the local media about their fix for the botnet, and include the URL to the cleaning executable? Invite the public to run it for free. Then convince the media to post their story as a video on their own website (not youtube or anywhere that can be faked).
It won't get everyone, but it'll start. And then users can pass the story around by word of mouth to extend it to others. Hopefully they'll get media in other countries/languages interested, and then get those to also post their stories on their websites. If the University then tracks these and provides all the links (including languages) back to the media sites, we might be able to convince large numbers of people to clean their own systems without hacking anything. All perfectly legal.
While I have to admit that hacking the botnet itself is worth huge geek points, they may still be able to do a lot of good for the internet with the work they've done so far without running afoul of the law. If users download and run it themselves, that is authorisation right there (especially if the software does what they claim it does).
Or Kopete or gaim or ... if, you're really adventurous, you could probably even use telnet. Of course, there are always people who will use butterflies.
I'd love to do a parody website about the environmental benefits of obesity.
Obesity has a NEGATIVE effect on the environment. Obese people eat more. Food is everything but carbon-neutral. Transportation, fertilizers, pesticides, cooling, etc.
And that's why GPP said parody. Part of that parody, it seems, is where he focuses on one tiny, insignificant aspect of the study and ignores everything that doesn't fit his (satirical) world view. The point of the website, then, would be to encourage people to think holistically, and not get suckered into fad-of-the-day thinking on carbon credits or anything else. By reading/watching the news with skepticism, perhaps we can have a real, intellectual conversation about the real state of the world, and what can and should be done about it. You know, planning for an honest future. Together. Instead of having marketing drones do the thinking for us.
If I have to choose between two comparable TVs... Roughly the same quality picture, same inputs on the back... I'd sure as hell pick the one that'll save me $20/year on electricity.
You're assuming the same cost, too. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that the cost difference was $200 (more for the eco-friendly version). Would you still go with the eco-friendly version? $300? $100? What is your projection on the lifespan of the TV?
Just as a disclaimer: I used the same question when evaluating my hybrid VUE: it had what I needed/wanted, the question was hybrid or not. The cost difference vs the savings in gas over a projected 9-year ownership (since my previous vehicle lasted me that long) at projected costs of fuel, looked like I'd come out about $1000 ahead with the hybrid vs the regular 4-cyl model (I don't drive very much). With current gas prices being about half of my projection, I'm really not coming out ahead, but presumably over the next 7 years gas prices will get back up and surpass where they were before, which should make it a better deal.
It's far more complex than simply evaluating the electricity savings, but, I definitely agree that it should be there for people to take into account. Because, sometimes I'd be willing to go with a "worse" TV for the same cost if I saved $20/year on electricity, making that TV actually cost ~$200 less (or, likely, even more, since I would anticipate electricity costs to go up as oil gets more expensive again).
That's not how it really works.
If I offer my services for, say, 1% less than you, the employer may come back to you and offer another 1% less than that. And, if you agree, they may come back to me for a further price reduction. And this might go on until we get, say, 10% less than the original price and someone bows out.
Instead, I may offer 5% less, and that may be too much for you right off the bat to counter with (or the employer may decide that this is good enough), and I'll be making 5% more than the scenario where I start out with only a 1% discount on my wage.
By risking an extra 4%, I might save myself an extra 5%. And the headache/stress of a bidding war.
More likely, I just want to cut the interview process short by eliminating the employer's desire to look at further, possibly better ROI, candidates, to further improve my chances of getting the job.
After all, we're not talking about which store can get you the latest blockbuster movie on Blu-Ray for the cheapest where all copies are really the same. We're talking about highly subjective "purchases" where candidates are NOT the same, and where those candidates really want to improve their own lot in life, often FROM ZERO to 60-90% of the going rate - that's huge for them.
Really? If, say, I offer my services at exactly the same cost as you're offering, I have a 50-50 chance of getting zero (assuming all else is equal). That means, a 50% chance of being REALLY short. In probabilities, that averages out to 50% of the pay. However, if I offer my services for a 10% discount, it "averages out" (for me) to 90% of the pay. A much better option. For me.
Of course, not everything is equal. So, if I'm not as good at the job as you are, I need to offer those services for MUCH lower for your employer to think s/he's getting a better ROI by hiring me instead of you.
The only problem here has been management's continued insistence that developers are interchangeable, and not realising that the new foreigner actually isn't as good as you are, even if only for cultural reasons (the Indian culture being, objectively speaking, vastly different than the standard American culture - I'm not saying one is better than the other, only different), which makes integration much more expensive, and not considered into their ROI projections.
Free market still lets me offer my services for whatever rate I deem reasonable, subject to being accepted by a client who is willing to pay whatever they think is reasonable, given appropriate negotiations. If you don't like it, join/form a union.
So, when you come over as an H1B, don't settle for a reduced wage. Find out how much they are paying for someone with your experience in the area and then ask for that.
But, but... that's not how the free market works, is it? If I can offer services (me) for less than someone else, why shouldn't I?
I'm sure this was modded Flamebait by someone assuming that Hognoxious is obnoxiously racist. And s/he might be. But, as in police work, you only hamper yourself if you're unwilling to look at culture ("Gah! Not profiling!") or other pigeonholing to narrow down your search.
Personally, from what I know about the Indian culture, I'd be surprised if they were the source of statistically significant amounts of data breaches. But the concept of looking at recent changes to the corporate world to see what has changed is completely valid, and not flamebait at all.
It's also like how airport security tearing apart an old lady's luggage looking for weapons of terror is a waste of resources, when it's far more economical (more likely to find what you're looking for) to tear apart the luggage of someone from countries known to support terror. Or to tear apart luggage of people coming in from known drug countries when looking for drugs. You need to carefully weigh the likelihoods, and spend your time and resource first in the likely places before the unlikely.
So, I think that Hognoxious has a valid point. We need to examine recent changes to the corporate world to figure out what this new statistic means. Does it mean, as many have already said, that we're just reporting better (seems likely to me)? Does it also mean that outsourced workers are selling our data? This seems like a reasonable myth to investigate to determine if outsourced workers are more, less, or similarly likely to sell insider data to the black market, so that we can better focus our efforts on reducing breaches. But it should be based on thorough investigation, and not on knee-jerk calls of racism.
Aha. What you want is for everyone to join /. so we can hand out appropriate karma. ;-)
It's a good thing.
KDE 4.0, and to a lesser degree, 4.1, were not targeted at production. They were targeted at getting feedback and bugreports from a wider audience. Yes, a lot of features were missing. In 4.2, I'm sure a lot of features will still be missing. But, the feedback they get from the early(ish) adopters lets them know what to prioritise. If no one complains about panel hiding, then the devs are better to spend their time on other issues that people actually complain about. Otherwise, we may wait another two years for ANY version of KDE 4 to come out, with lower quality (fewer testers due to less excitement), and they'll have wasted a bunch of time on features that, really, no one complains about.
This is the open-source way. It's far better than the proprietary way of fixing everything at high-cost when no one actually cares.
There's one thing you're not quite taking into consideration: patents. MS can't release anything in any form (including beta) and then file for a patent. They need to file for the patents first, and only once the paperwork hits the US PTO can they release a beta.
They may have a claim here that they didn't really release it, so it probably won't count against them when it comes time to file patents.
When speaking broadly, you do some more mainstream of the group a huge disservice. Not that many around here will call you on it.
Saying "Christians do not deny...", you are speaking far too broadly. You should say, "proponents of creationism" or some such. The simple reason being that the Vatican has claimed otherwise. Maybe you'll next claim that Catholics aren't really Christian, but most people, I think, understand them as such.
Personally, I don't find any contradiction from evolution to ID to creation, as I merely see evolution as the how, not the why. And, even then, I see small and large holes in evolution, holes that remain to be answered, not as disproof, similar to how the laws of relativity merely filled holes in Newton's laws rather than disproving them.
Oh, he's good. He's really good...
Of course, he's no Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris can stand at a 45 degree angle to everyone at the same time.
Thus far, my virtual boxes have all been on a private network. I'm not even sure if they see each other, though I've not really tested that. I'm not even really sure how to open up the guests to the public network, though I'm 100% positive that it can be done. It's just that the defaults are all pretty secure.
That all means that your host is acting as a NAT router (by default anyway) and thus all the firewall that the host has will protect the guest(s).
Yes, if your guest gets infected, it's inside the firewall. Though, like I said, I'm not sure it can see the other guests, just the host. However, it's fairly easy to solve: turn off the VM, and roll it back to a clean state. I mean, if you're paranoid enough to be worried about such issues, you'll have old states which are known-good to roll back to. However, I've turned off pretty much all of WindowsXP's protections because it's hiding inside my Linux box, behind a cable-router (another NAT). The ability for something to get in and infect it is pretty much nil. Especially as I don't use IE or Outlook inside there (I use kmail for email, and firefox and konqueror on Linux for browsing, so no need) either.
I'm just not sure what I count as... I use firefox for about 60-70% of my browsing, but nearly any time there's a URL to click on elsewhere (in my konsole, in kmail/kontact, xchat), it opens in konqueror. Should some of these numbers add up to more than 100% then? Or, more likely, does it just count whatever I happened to use at their site(s), and thus be somewhat biased toward primary browsers, ignoring the strength (and importance!) of secondary browsers.
Conversely, DNA can't be everything. I have a set of identical-twin cousins who are excellent examples. Their mother left them when they were young (somewhere between 4 and 6, I don't remember too well as I wasn't that old, either), leaving their father (my dad's brother) to raise them (and get remarried and have a slew of kids with his new wife, too). Anyway, one turned out as a risk-taker and gay, the other is neither. Same household, even same genes. There's gotta be more to it than that. (Of course, I'll get modded down for pointing out that genes also can't be the end-all and be-all of determining sexuality, either, since these two ARE identical twins and still ended up not having the same sexuality. Anecdotes != data, but this is simply a counter-example that seems to me to disprove that theory.)
Neither of the boys (well, they're over 18 now, so "men") are psychologically perfect (who is?), but they are definitely quite far apart in personality despite both same genes and same upbringing.
That'll just slow down the warm-up by delaying the current draw. By itself, an inductor simply turns the current 90 degrees from the voltage, which is generally a bad thing for efficiency. Combine it with a capacitor (which turns the current 90 degrees the other way), and you might be getting somewhere. Combine it with a bunch of other logic (parallel/series components), and you end up with ... basically complexity.
Seriously, if you start your thought process with "I only pulled a B in something, but couldn't you fix ..." when the people working on it have bachelor's degrees (or master's or PhD's) in the subject area, it probably would not solve the problem
-- got an EE degree over 11 years ago, and never used it in the field, so details are hazy.