I was actually going to say TNG because Gene Roddenberry was largely uninvolved and unlike The Original Series doesn't come across as campy, badly written out-of-era awkward schlock.:P
"Captain the intensity is increasing by 0 to the 10th power every 3 minutes". You mean by zero?! Was I the only one who cheered spock's death in the movies?
I think they're going to do better than tell their "partners" to go pound sand. What they're saying is "look we're fucking sick and tired of you guys releasing shitty hardware. Want to keep releasing shitty hardware? Find, go ahead. But don't come whining to us when we release something that actually works. You brought this onto yourselves by releasing nothing but substandard crap for over a decade. We aren't doing anything any of you couldn't have done. We're running the exact same code. So put up or shut up. Mad? Good. Now release a better product than us and make us 'suffer'."
Just to be clear there is a LOT that goes on under the hood beyond DX/OpenGL calls and AI.
A substantial part of an engine involves efficiently managing all of that data so only subsets of the data are getting streamed/updated at any given time.
I've done it multiple times. I'm always amazed by what gets TSA's attention. I know they say "Leave the science experiments at home" but when your job is to travel with 'science experiments' to do your job it gets kind of tricky. But yes, you don't even have to take an ultrabook style laptop out of your backpack now. +1 for orderly travel.
This. I can hardly imagine how terrible it would be.
1) Projectors don't work in daylight so you won't be able to see your screen. 2) Projectors need a nice flat white surface... good luck finding one. 3) Keyboards and Mice are huge and unwieldy. 4) What do you use to power it? I've made home-made auxiliary batteries and they're messy ugly and a PITA.
Linus Torvalds is also not required to enjoy or approve of NVidia's policies, particularly when they generate bad publicity for Linus Torvalds' project
Except that's bullshit. Linux Torvald's project is generating bad publicity because it's bad at graphics drivers. ATI is more than accommodating and helpful--and the open source community fails miserably at creating stable drivers. So just about everybody demands Nvidia or ATI *fix* Torvald's failed project. If Nvidia opened up their specs more there's nothing to suggest that the drivers would be any better than the Open Source community's crappy job with ATI drivers. At least Nvidia offers a workable driver set even if it's a binary blob that gives Linux a workable video card option.
If it weren't for Nvidia's blob drivers getting anything done in Linux that requires a video card would be a hell of a lot harder and far less interesting. I sure as hell wouldn't rely on an operating system that performs as well as Linux on ATI's open source drivers. Having a working driver option for Linux generates far more good publicity for Linux than the alternative of a crappy but ideologically pure driver.
You do realize I mentioned that we're moving towards an economy in the not terribly distant future where we can harvest solar energy and maybe even Fusion energy which provide ridiculous amounts of energy at potentially low prices?
We could also grow industrial help and other fast growing biomass in stacked solar powered grow-houses. Then burn it in solar-powered furnaces and presto, cheap carbon in exchange for oxygen.
We don't have an energy problem, we have an economical energy harvesting problem. Crack that nut and a lot of things that are currently too expensive come into play that can dramatically alter our economy and society. Our energy usage today is analogous to bandwidth in the 80s, rationed and extremely limited.
Sure your money might diminish by 5% but if it's sitting in a savings account its value is 0% as far as GDP is concerned.
If I have $100 and I spend all $100 on a haircut and then you spend $100 on a massage and then the masseuse spends $100 on software and so on and so forth. From the GDP's perspective you have 400% the value of the $100 being spent in a day, great return!. Obviously that example is impossible since there is going to be loss of value at each step of the stage due to expendables (e.g. fuel and other overhead items). But unlike someone's money sitting in a bank account that $100 can move through lots of hands and contribute to GDP.
And our impact on the environment per person is generally diminished by technology. For instance a wood fired steam engine is probably less environmentally sound than an electric scooter.
We're at that super awkward point where our usage of resources is higher than the inefficiencies being reduced. But I suspect we're nearing the peak of energy usage per-person.
Imagine 10 years ago what it took to power a computer. Now many people use a lightweight tablet. My old CRT tv would heat my apartment to the boiling point of water. Now my giant LCD puts out a little bit of heat but nothing comparable. OLED is incredibly efficient.
Eventually Matrix-like experiences will save tons of fuel on commuting to work or traveling to see relatives. Just meet online.
Solar Cells are decreasing in price and increasing in efficiency. With super cheap and emission free electricity we can build large 3 dimensional hydroponic farms in dense urban environments and grow 24/7 like a pot house but without the $5,000 electricity bill.
Carbon fiber and nano-tube derived packaging doesn't need petroleum--carbon and graphene is abundant and renewable--it can be pulled out of the atmosphere.
Automated machinery will simplify and reduce the cost of building up and down. We will be able to afford to put more underground and build taller buildings with material research and robotics. Suddenly building a 300 story sky scraper gets affordable and we can all just live in one place. Materials like aerogel if they can reduce in price will make cooling and heating less expensive--and improved sound insulation will reduce the inconvenience of living in close proximity.
Technology is causing a lot of problems--but it's also going to provide a lot of solutions. The worst thing we could do is go half-assed and return to an 18th century technological standpoint but our current population.
Facebook you can rate ads and then you never see them again.
Which is nice because really wasn't interested in buying the hemp/bone necklace that it was pitching me for months on end. Now it's a lot of HBO show promos which is actually useful to me.
North Korea is the perfect example of *WHY* all wealth comes from government.
If your government refuses to allow you to have wealth... you won't have wealth. If your government allows you to have wealth then you can have wealth.
Now you can say "oh well I just won't live in a region without a government. Ok... then the first roving gang that comes along will take your wealth and all wealth comes from roving gangs--at which point roving gangs are essentially your form of government.
Someone is going to determine the rules by which you 'play the game'. If you don't setup a government of sufficient strength then someone else will impose their rules on you--and you might not get to participate in its decision making process so it behooves you to establish a sufficiently powerful organization that you can control. In our case the government is "of the people" therefore we are self governed. Therefore all wealth comes from "The People". It's a fine line between this distinction and circular logic but ultimately all wealth comes from the government (which establishes the rules by which property ownership is determined) and all government derives its power from various source. If that's the military then ultimately all wealth is from the military. If it's from the people then all wealth is ultimately from the people but sanctioned by their manifestation of will which is the government.
Now the fox news paranoid survivalist says "ahh but I have GOLD! The government can't control bartering of gold!" Sure. But the government is sufficiently powerful to take said Gold from you. So the fact that the government doesn't use its power to take your gold by force isn't thanks to your impressive weapons collection (however much you have isn't enough to stop a navy seal team) it's thanks to the governments lack of *desire* to take your gold.
ALL wealth comes from the government because the freedom to live ultimately is held by the most powerful organization in the land. And the most powerful organization in the land is your defacto government. The Taliban in many parts of Afghanistan isn't the "Government" but seeing as it controls the territory and is capable of writing the rules by which those living in the territory will behave it's the "Government".
The libertarian who thinks the government hasn't done anything for him is ignoring the fact that the government is protecting the libertarian rule-set. It could just as easily use that power to say that nobody can own anything and the state has absolute power.
So participate in your government and ensure it's the most powerful force in the land--so that it's actually the government and not a proxy for another interest but also participate so that it's acting as a proxy for the people who give it authority.
They only thing government can do is take from the productive and give it to those that are not productive.
Ummm, yes that is something government can do. For example it can take money from a productive 40 something worker and give it to an unproductive 18 year old student and subsidize their education so that some day they too can be a productive 40 something worker paying for an unproductive 18 year old student... and so on and so forth.
Also it can rebalance out of scale productivity compensation. If one employee is twice as productive as another but getting paid 1,000 times as much then the scale of productivity is out of whack and it makes sense to try and correct a legal system that evidently has an inefficient glitch in it which is over-rewarding players for only marginal success.
Also it can stabilize economies by acting as insurance. If my house burns down and I have insurance then the 'productive' policy holders whose houses are still standing are paying into my costly home replacement. But by sharing risk it becomes affordable. Without that insurance *everybody* would need $200k-$400k saved up for the possibility of their house burning down and needing to be replaced. If everybody did this then everybody would be wasting money that would be sitting uselessly idle. Instead we spend a fraction on insurance in case we need it.
This is how taxing productive employed members of society helps the economy. If getting layed off results in economic strife then everybody starts saving unnecessarily even though the chance of being laid off are maybe 1 in 20 (but everybody has to prepare for that possibility and everybody starts spending less). With less demand more people get laid off and a downward spiral begins. If however you provide good unemployment benefits then those who are employed can have confidence in their job and continue to spend regularly knowing that they don't need to switch over into potential survival mode. This keeps more people employed and doesn't add costs to those who aren't actually at risk of being laid off.
Bill Gates is one of the greatest philanthropists to have ever lived because he ignores people like you.
Instead of investing money in companies which have a low return (and will continue abusing the earth one way or another) he makes the pragmatic decision to put his money into at least capturing the profits of these companies and using their own profits to work against their interests. If you wanted to screw Microsoft you should have bought their stock and invested your returns in funding open source projects. That's a better use of your resources. "Voting with your dollars" doesn't work. They don't need your dollars. However, as a significant stock holder you do get voter rights. Vote with your stock. Get together with like minded share holders and vote in board members who are conducive to your cause. This is like the difference between the tea party and the occupy wall street movement. The Tea party is achieving their goals of dismantling government... by electing themselves government officials. If you want to change a corporation's behavior you don't try to ignore it you become the corporation's leadership and direct its behavior.
And yes he's concentrating his philanthropy in areas that dollar for dollar pay of the most dividends. Instead of wasting money on trendy diseases he's simply seeing how many people can benefit and callously making those choices. This is what Philanthropy *needs*. Do 100 people in the Niger delta lose their charity so that 1,000 people in Darfur get their malaria medication? Yes. Because like an ER trauama ward you need to triage cases based on who has the best chance of using your limited resources most effectively. Sucks to be the person who doesn't get the resources but sucks less overall for all the people you help.
Gas taxes are a tiny fraction of the cost of infrastructure for automobiles. We heavily subsidize the costs of our auto-infrastructure through general taxes. We do this because if people paid the real cost of gasoline we would be alarmed and outraged --demanding we lower the price of gasoline.
Gas taxes are also extremely regressive. If you are min wage and need to drive to McDonalds you pay the same or more than the yuppie who drives their Prius to Apple every day. If anything the person picking up a $150k a year check is benefiting *more* from the road access than the McDonalds worker since every mile they drive gets a substantially higher return on investment.
I think by "financial crisis" he meant "a minor market crash due to autotrading algorithms", and not the real crisis being caused by thieves running trillion dollar banking, mortgage, and insurance scams.
You're right about the cascading failure but wrong about the financial crisis. The larger financial crisis was a crisis because banks had circular loans and insurance on one another. So if one bank failed it would suddenly stress the next bank to the point of failure and bankruptcy which would trigger another bank to fail and so on and so forth. What we had in 2008 was a cascading financial failure because everybody was insuring everybody else assuming that everybody wouldn't fail simultaneously.
That's one of the problems though that the researcher is flagging.
1) If a company has one instance on AWS and one on Azure and AWS fails... Azure suddenly doubles in load ( and also fails due to everybody piling on unexpectedly).
the other being:
2) Everybody uses Azure for SQL and AWS for hosting and Azure goes down... suddenly SQL dies and the AWS hosts all fail with the database down. Or the converse happens and AWS goes down and the SQL is useless without a head.
The more services you rely on the more likely that on any given day one of them will be down. If you have 99% reliability and 20 services that you depend on (without any redundancy) then your failure rate could be up to 20% since any one of the 1% failures could kill your service.
It's interesting but it seems like most of the cloud failures have been due to #1 internally so far. One sector fails and in an effort to load balance it starts taking out its peers who then also overload and take out their peers.
Too much bureaucratic crap that basically condemns you to pay increases that are pegged to your base salary, and not to any real world metric of what you're worth.
/Thread Closed.
The author's HR department most likely has their hands tied. It doesn't matter if you can tell them that you're a 50 year veteran of anything--if their list of approved positions that qualify for pay increases aren't met there is nothing they can do.
This is one of the unfortunate side-effects of worker protection laws. If they give a woman for instance the position and they negotiate out a certain wage--and it turns out she is getting paid significantly less then she can sue for pay discrimination. If however *everybody* gets paid exactly the same based on a very clearly codified pay/raise schedule then they are legally immune. HR is full of paranoid bureaucrats, they would rather lose talent than risk a lawsuit (It's easier to lose their job for a discrimination lawsuit than it is to lose their job for the company losing their potentially talented employees to better offers.)
The author should be lucky they can even get on a new (higher paying) track at all. My brother in law works for a company that has no promotion track. He just found out that his assistants can't be promoted to full fledged agents since they aren't getting paid enough. So even if he thought one of his assistants should get a recommendation for a promotion the company is incapable of giving it due to the wage rate for the new position being slightly outside of any raise limits -- and their current position at the maximum pay for the position. In other words the only way they could get the promotion would be to quit and get rehired.
That's great and all. But if a satellite hits your house in order to bring the joys of Satellite TV to the masses and the enrichment of the shareholders... why should you shoulder the cost?
People always really hate lawyers right up to the point where they've been wronged. Let's be honest. People are douche bags. Especially corporations. If they don't have to pay, they won't pay. Doing freelance work I've seen this first hand. If it weren't for contract law people would essentially just be screwing one person after another and profiting from it.
Is it risky? Yes. If you are going to profit from the risk should you also pay for the potential damages to other people? Yes.
You speak as if all space exploration is "for the benefit of mankind." A substantial portion of space exploration is for the benefit of all the stock holders. So when things go sideways--it's the stock holders that should pay. And if they don't have enough money--which they probably don't, then they should pay for insurance to ensure that someone can pay for their screw ups.
This is where libertarianism fails. I libertarian says that anybody who harms another party simply has to pay for it. But the reason we have regulations like this is because a lot of times people can't pay--which means you can act without the capability to correct their damages. As soon as you're incapable of actually fixing one of your actions you need to be regulated so that you can be excused from liability. When a rocket plows into another satellite, you need to be able to say "well, I bought as much liability insurance as was required by the government."
Slashdot Mirror
I was actually going to say TNG because Gene Roddenberry was largely uninvolved and unlike The Original Series doesn't come across as campy, badly written out-of-era awkward schlock. :P
"Captain the intensity is increasing by 0 to the 10th power every 3 minutes". You mean by zero?! Was I the only one who cheered spock's death in the movies?
I think they're going to do better than tell their "partners" to go pound sand. What they're saying is "look we're fucking sick and tired of you guys releasing shitty hardware. Want to keep releasing shitty hardware? Find, go ahead. But don't come whining to us when we release something that actually works. You brought this onto yourselves by releasing nothing but substandard crap for over a decade. We aren't doing anything any of you couldn't have done. We're running the exact same code. So put up or shut up. Mad? Good. Now release a better product than us and make us 'suffer'."
More likely Dell is planning on shipping PCs with Linux so that they can sell them for less (assuming Windows will get pirated on to it).
They already did that. It's called WP7. It's full of features that nobody else has. This is a case of adding all the ones that everyone else had too.
But I really doubt Intel will ever sell anything that is "affordable".
Do you live in the third world? Since when has a $150 computer considered "Unaffordable"?
but I have yet to encounter a processor that runs both fast and cool
As the benchmarks a few days indicated, Ivy Bridge is both cooler and faster per performance than ARM.
PowerPC is RISC but the Xbox360 is notorious for its heat. Performance per Watt is actually quite friendly to x86 right now.
Can I run regular x86 Windows apps on it or do I need to write it specifically for this chip? I'm thinking rendering applications specifically.
Just to be clear there is a LOT that goes on under the hood beyond DX/OpenGL calls and AI.
A substantial part of an engine involves efficiently managing all of that data so only subsets of the data are getting streamed/updated at any given time.
I've done it multiple times. I'm always amazed by what gets TSA's attention. I know they say "Leave the science experiments at home" but when your job is to travel with 'science experiments' to do your job it gets kind of tricky. But yes, you don't even have to take an ultrabook style laptop out of your backpack now. +1 for orderly travel.
This. I can hardly imagine how terrible it would be.
1) Projectors don't work in daylight so you won't be able to see your screen.
2) Projectors need a nice flat white surface... good luck finding one.
3) Keyboards and Mice are huge and unwieldy.
4) What do you use to power it? I've made home-made auxiliary batteries and they're messy ugly and a PITA.
Just buy a cheap ultrabook or netbook.
Linus Torvalds is also not required to enjoy or approve of NVidia's policies, particularly when they generate bad publicity for Linus Torvalds' project
Except that's bullshit. Linux Torvald's project is generating bad publicity because it's bad at graphics drivers. ATI is more than accommodating and helpful--and the open source community fails miserably at creating stable drivers. So just about everybody demands Nvidia or ATI *fix* Torvald's failed project. If Nvidia opened up their specs more there's nothing to suggest that the drivers would be any better than the Open Source community's crappy job with ATI drivers. At least Nvidia offers a workable driver set even if it's a binary blob that gives Linux a workable video card option.
If it weren't for Nvidia's blob drivers getting anything done in Linux that requires a video card would be a hell of a lot harder and far less interesting. I sure as hell wouldn't rely on an operating system that performs as well as Linux on ATI's open source drivers. Having a working driver option for Linux generates far more good publicity for Linux than the alternative of a crappy but ideologically pure driver.
The problem is if an app comes out it comes out for:
iOS -> Android and then WP7.
*That's the only problem I have with WP7. Once it gets critical mass to get every app it'll be successful. Android had the same problem for years.
You do realize I mentioned that we're moving towards an economy in the not terribly distant future where we can harvest solar energy and maybe even Fusion energy which provide ridiculous amounts of energy at potentially low prices?
We could also grow industrial help and other fast growing biomass in stacked solar powered grow-houses. Then burn it in solar-powered furnaces and presto, cheap carbon in exchange for oxygen.
We don't have an energy problem, we have an economical energy harvesting problem. Crack that nut and a lot of things that are currently too expensive come into play that can dramatically alter our economy and society. Our energy usage today is analogous to bandwidth in the 80s, rationed and extremely limited.
Yep. The economic term for this is "Velocity".
Sure your money might diminish by 5% but if it's sitting in a savings account its value is 0% as far as GDP is concerned.
If I have $100 and I spend all $100 on a haircut and then you spend $100 on a massage and then the masseuse spends $100 on software and so on and so forth. From the GDP's perspective you have 400% the value of the $100 being spent in a day, great return!. Obviously that example is impossible since there is going to be loss of value at each step of the stage due to expendables (e.g. fuel and other overhead items). But unlike someone's money sitting in a bank account that $100 can move through lots of hands and contribute to GDP.
And our impact on the environment per person is generally diminished by technology. For instance a wood fired steam engine is probably less environmentally sound than an electric scooter.
We're at that super awkward point where our usage of resources is higher than the inefficiencies being reduced. But I suspect we're nearing the peak of energy usage per-person.
Imagine 10 years ago what it took to power a computer. Now many people use a lightweight tablet. My old CRT tv would heat my apartment to the boiling point of water. Now my giant LCD puts out a little bit of heat but nothing comparable. OLED is incredibly efficient.
Eventually Matrix-like experiences will save tons of fuel on commuting to work or traveling to see relatives. Just meet online.
Solar Cells are decreasing in price and increasing in efficiency. With super cheap and emission free electricity we can build large 3 dimensional hydroponic farms in dense urban environments and grow 24/7 like a pot house but without the $5,000 electricity bill.
Carbon fiber and nano-tube derived packaging doesn't need petroleum--carbon and graphene is abundant and renewable--it can be pulled out of the atmosphere.
Automated machinery will simplify and reduce the cost of building up and down. We will be able to afford to put more underground and build taller buildings with material research and robotics. Suddenly building a 300 story sky scraper gets affordable and we can all just live in one place. Materials like aerogel if they can reduce in price will make cooling and heating less expensive--and improved sound insulation will reduce the inconvenience of living in close proximity.
Technology is causing a lot of problems--but it's also going to provide a lot of solutions. The worst thing we could do is go half-assed and return to an 18th century technological standpoint but our current population.
Facebook you can rate ads and then you never see them again.
Which is nice because really wasn't interested in buying the hemp/bone necklace that it was pitching me for months on end. Now it's a lot of HBO show promos which is actually useful to me.
North Korea is the perfect example of *WHY* all wealth comes from government.
If your government refuses to allow you to have wealth... you won't have wealth. If your government allows you to have wealth then you can have wealth.
Now you can say "oh well I just won't live in a region without a government. Ok... then the first roving gang that comes along will take your wealth and all wealth comes from roving gangs--at which point roving gangs are essentially your form of government.
Someone is going to determine the rules by which you 'play the game'. If you don't setup a government of sufficient strength then someone else will impose their rules on you--and you might not get to participate in its decision making process so it behooves you to establish a sufficiently powerful organization that you can control. In our case the government is "of the people" therefore we are self governed. Therefore all wealth comes from "The People". It's a fine line between this distinction and circular logic but ultimately all wealth comes from the government (which establishes the rules by which property ownership is determined) and all government derives its power from various source. If that's the military then ultimately all wealth is from the military. If it's from the people then all wealth is ultimately from the people but sanctioned by their manifestation of will which is the government.
Now the fox news paranoid survivalist says "ahh but I have GOLD! The government can't control bartering of gold!" Sure. But the government is sufficiently powerful to take said Gold from you. So the fact that the government doesn't use its power to take your gold by force isn't thanks to your impressive weapons collection (however much you have isn't enough to stop a navy seal team) it's thanks to the governments lack of *desire* to take your gold.
ALL wealth comes from the government because the freedom to live ultimately is held by the most powerful organization in the land. And the most powerful organization in the land is your defacto government. The Taliban in many parts of Afghanistan isn't the "Government" but seeing as it controls the territory and is capable of writing the rules by which those living in the territory will behave it's the "Government".
The libertarian who thinks the government hasn't done anything for him is ignoring the fact that the government is protecting the libertarian rule-set. It could just as easily use that power to say that nobody can own anything and the state has absolute power.
So participate in your government and ensure it's the most powerful force in the land--so that it's actually the government and not a proxy for another interest but also participate so that it's acting as a proxy for the people who give it authority.
They only thing government can do is take from the productive and give it to those that are not productive.
Ummm, yes that is something government can do. For example it can take money from a productive 40 something worker and give it to an unproductive 18 year old student and subsidize their education so that some day they too can be a productive 40 something worker paying for an unproductive 18 year old student... and so on and so forth.
Also it can rebalance out of scale productivity compensation. If one employee is twice as productive as another but getting paid 1,000 times as much then the scale of productivity is out of whack and it makes sense to try and correct a legal system that evidently has an inefficient glitch in it which is over-rewarding players for only marginal success.
Also it can stabilize economies by acting as insurance. If my house burns down and I have insurance then the 'productive' policy holders whose houses are still standing are paying into my costly home replacement. But by sharing risk it becomes affordable. Without that insurance *everybody* would need $200k-$400k saved up for the possibility of their house burning down and needing to be replaced. If everybody did this then everybody would be wasting money that would be sitting uselessly idle. Instead we spend a fraction on insurance in case we need it.
This is how taxing productive employed members of society helps the economy. If getting layed off results in economic strife then everybody starts saving unnecessarily even though the chance of being laid off are maybe 1 in 20 (but everybody has to prepare for that possibility and everybody starts spending less). With less demand more people get laid off and a downward spiral begins. If however you provide good unemployment benefits then those who are employed can have confidence in their job and continue to spend regularly knowing that they don't need to switch over into potential survival mode. This keeps more people employed and doesn't add costs to those who aren't actually at risk of being laid off.
Bill Gates is one of the greatest philanthropists to have ever lived because he ignores people like you.
Instead of investing money in companies which have a low return (and will continue abusing the earth one way or another) he makes the pragmatic decision to put his money into at least capturing the profits of these companies and using their own profits to work against their interests. If you wanted to screw Microsoft you should have bought their stock and invested your returns in funding open source projects. That's a better use of your resources. "Voting with your dollars" doesn't work. They don't need your dollars. However, as a significant stock holder you do get voter rights. Vote with your stock. Get together with like minded share holders and vote in board members who are conducive to your cause. This is like the difference between the tea party and the occupy wall street movement. The Tea party is achieving their goals of dismantling government... by electing themselves government officials. If you want to change a corporation's behavior you don't try to ignore it you become the corporation's leadership and direct its behavior.
And yes he's concentrating his philanthropy in areas that dollar for dollar pay of the most dividends. Instead of wasting money on trendy diseases he's simply seeing how many people can benefit and callously making those choices. This is what Philanthropy *needs*. Do 100 people in the Niger delta lose their charity so that 1,000 people in Darfur get their malaria medication? Yes. Because like an ER trauama ward you need to triage cases based on who has the best chance of using your limited resources most effectively. Sucks to be the person who doesn't get the resources but sucks less overall for all the people you help.
Gas taxes are a tiny fraction of the cost of infrastructure for automobiles. We heavily subsidize the costs of our auto-infrastructure through general taxes. We do this because if people paid the real cost of gasoline we would be alarmed and outraged --demanding we lower the price of gasoline.
Gas taxes are also extremely regressive. If you are min wage and need to drive to McDonalds you pay the same or more than the yuppie who drives their Prius to Apple every day. If anything the person picking up a $150k a year check is benefiting *more* from the road access than the McDonalds worker since every mile they drive gets a substantially higher return on investment.
I think by "financial crisis" he meant "a minor market crash due to autotrading algorithms", and not the real crisis being caused by thieves running trillion dollar banking, mortgage, and insurance scams.
You're right about the cascading failure but wrong about the financial crisis. The larger financial crisis was a crisis because banks had circular loans and insurance on one another. So if one bank failed it would suddenly stress the next bank to the point of failure and bankruptcy which would trigger another bank to fail and so on and so forth. What we had in 2008 was a cascading financial failure because everybody was insuring everybody else assuming that everybody wouldn't fail simultaneously.
That's one of the problems though that the researcher is flagging.
1) If a company has one instance on AWS and one on Azure and AWS fails... Azure suddenly doubles in load ( and also fails due to everybody piling on unexpectedly).
the other being:
2) Everybody uses Azure for SQL and AWS for hosting and Azure goes down... suddenly SQL dies and the AWS hosts all fail with the database down. Or the converse happens and AWS goes down and the SQL is useless without a head.
The more services you rely on the more likely that on any given day one of them will be down. If you have 99% reliability and 20 services that you depend on (without any redundancy) then your failure rate could be up to 20% since any one of the 1% failures could kill your service.
It's interesting but it seems like most of the cloud failures have been due to #1 internally so far. One sector fails and in an effort to load balance it starts taking out its peers who then also overload and take out their peers.
Too much bureaucratic crap that basically condemns you to pay increases that are pegged to your base salary, and not to any real world metric of what you're worth.
/Thread Closed.
The author's HR department most likely has their hands tied. It doesn't matter if you can tell them that you're a 50 year veteran of anything--if their list of approved positions that qualify for pay increases aren't met there is nothing they can do.
This is one of the unfortunate side-effects of worker protection laws. If they give a woman for instance the position and they negotiate out a certain wage--and it turns out she is getting paid significantly less then she can sue for pay discrimination. If however *everybody* gets paid exactly the same based on a very clearly codified pay/raise schedule then they are legally immune. HR is full of paranoid bureaucrats, they would rather lose talent than risk a lawsuit (It's easier to lose their job for a discrimination lawsuit than it is to lose their job for the company losing their potentially talented employees to better offers.)
The author should be lucky they can even get on a new (higher paying) track at all. My brother in law works for a company that has no promotion track. He just found out that his assistants can't be promoted to full fledged agents since they aren't getting paid enough. So even if he thought one of his assistants should get a recommendation for a promotion the company is incapable of giving it due to the wage rate for the new position being slightly outside of any raise limits -- and their current position at the maximum pay for the position. In other words the only way they could get the promotion would be to quit and get rehired.
I'm so glad I don't work for a large corporation.
Maybe I'm crazy, but the menus are not only easily readable in the article but I would say more readable in the font/all caps they chose.
That's great and all. But if a satellite hits your house in order to bring the joys of Satellite TV to the masses and the enrichment of the shareholders... why should you shoulder the cost?
People always really hate lawyers right up to the point where they've been wronged. Let's be honest. People are douche bags. Especially corporations. If they don't have to pay, they won't pay. Doing freelance work I've seen this first hand. If it weren't for contract law people would essentially just be screwing one person after another and profiting from it.
Is it risky? Yes. If you are going to profit from the risk should you also pay for the potential damages to other people? Yes.
You speak as if all space exploration is "for the benefit of mankind." A substantial portion of space exploration is for the benefit of all the stock holders. So when things go sideways--it's the stock holders that should pay. And if they don't have enough money--which they probably don't, then they should pay for insurance to ensure that someone can pay for their screw ups.
This is where libertarianism fails. I libertarian says that anybody who harms another party simply has to pay for it. But the reason we have regulations like this is because a lot of times people can't pay--which means you can act without the capability to correct their damages. As soon as you're incapable of actually fixing one of your actions you need to be regulated so that you can be excused from liability. When a rocket plows into another satellite, you need to be able to say "well, I bought as much liability insurance as was required by the government."