Why do I think getting online should be a lower priority? That sounds like the trip of a lifetime, even without 300 or so females in their late teens / early 20s.
How should we know? The DoD has never released an official complete list of names of those who are and who have been detained in GITMO, let alone a list of what they were detained for.
Is that true???? I mean, I know the guantanamo detentions have violated many American laws and common law, but I didn't know that the public wasn't even allowed to know whose rights had been violated. That just adds another level of disgustingness to the whole thing.
You have a lot to learn about how Wall Street works. Being profitable is not enough to keep stock prices high. Brokers and analysts come up with figures [investopedia.com] (sorry for the ads) that corporations have to meet or exceed for fear of a massive sell-off. As a result, corporate executives often order massive layoffs in order to meet these expectations made by Wall Street to keep the value of their stocks high.
In my opinion, this is a major flaw in the way our economy operates as these layoffs ultimately do more harm than good. Corporations that do these types of layoffs often hire many new employees as soon as it looks like they will beat The Street's expectations and will spend massive resources to train them, only to get rid of them down the line. Employee's are all unique and should be treated as an investment, not a commodity. [wikipedia.org]
You, as an employee and as a potential investor, have access to this information (okay, not impending layoffs, but in general). Why do corporations lay people off? Because they feel they have an obligation to their shareholders to protect shareholder wealth. There may be other concerns, and we can certainly quibble about short term versus long term, but that's the basic obligation they see. (BTW, focusing on short term results is a much better harbinger of good long term results than is focusing on long term results, statistically.)
Fortunately, as a middle class person in the USA, you have an alternative: you can choose to invest in companies which you believe have the right long-term orientation. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you haven't done that, as it seems nobody but me does anything but try to follow the trend. But, you do have every chance to put your money where your mouth is. (I am up 7% in about 2 months with a value investment strategy, so it can work.) The key is to take responsibility for your actions, not blame the system.
I never worked for GE, but I did study the firm in business school and have had friends who worked there, some for decades. I don't dispute anything you've written, I'm sure it's true. But...
GE at the time Jack Welch took over was in serious financial trouble. He pioneered investing in human resources (e.g. Crotonville) in ways that hadn't been done before, because they were too expensive. He was, IMO, the classical American entrepeneur: he invested in businesses which would make money, and sold businesses which wouldn't meet his standard for making money (GE's hurdle rates in those days were insanely high, but seemed to work).
I don't think he was a nice guy, nor do I think he was the devil. He was the essence, however, of what made American great, descended from Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Like them or hate them (IMO, Edison in particular was a right bastard), they are what made America. Welch did invest great sums of money in empowering employees, through Crotonville and 6-sigma, amongst others. Your critique is there, in my opinion, unsupported by the facts.
Most companies when faced with having to do layoffs offer buyouts. Those most likely to take a buyout package will be those who can easily find another job. Therefore most companies ending up culling the top 10-20%. From what I've heard (and I have no inside information on this) Microsoft is going to be doing targeted layoffs to counter the effect of the hiring binge they've been on for a few years now.
Well it's not often on/. that I feel qualified to disagree with the experts, but since I am pretty good in this area I will. Getting rid of bottom performers is how pretty much every company (in the West) goes about layoffs. To do anything else would be called asinine only by the very polite. Getting rid of your top 20% would be corporate suicide.
Why does this matter? Because, obviously, managers owe an obligation to shareholders. That's a legal obligation, by the way, and they don't have any similar obligations to customers, employees or anyone else. Treating those folks well is usually good business for the shareholders, but not an obligation.
Soooo, what Microsoft is doing (according to these unsubstantiated reports) is no different from what any other corporation would do, and is in fact a reflection of their legal obligation to shareholders to maximize shareholder value. Sorry if that disappoints you, but it's done pretty well for a big chunk of the world for a while now.
I'm guessing you've hit on the critical flaw: the atmosphere. The basic physics look fine to me, albeit with adaptations to handle some of the criticisms raised. A kind of "balancing mechanism" to store energy, like a flywheel, would store the energy used in pulling the anchor towards the Earth. I think the killer is atmospheric friction along a 100,000 km cable. No matter how smooth you make it, it will generate friction with the atmosphere moving in any direction, and over that long a span I suspect the friction will be a deal breaker.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares?"
You're provision of a grammar lesson in your sig, while simultaneously misquoting the expression "for all intents and purposes," is ironic to the max. Congratulations on setting a new standard!
"...the galaxy is rotating at a speed of 965,600 km/h, compared to previous estimates of 804,672 km/h, the astronomers report."
Anyone else think it odd that the previous estimate had six significant digits, yet was apparently off by ~20%?
Anyone else think it odd that they measured angular velocity in linear units? WTF?
This article reeks of being written by low-level tech support who think they know more about computers than they actually do.
I'm glad somebody else wrote this, as I thought I was the only one. I did tech support for a CAD/CAM company in the mid to late 80s, and I worked hard at it. If a client needed a patch for his Sun Fortran compiler, I drove 6 hours to get it for him. We knew our stuff well, and were sometimes asked by manufacturers (IBM, Calcomp) how to get their stuff to work together.
My experiences with other tech support is that it has been a complete waste of time. I know how to ask to have something elevated to the next level, in hope of getting a more experienced hand, when that is what I need. Of course, often it isn't, in areas where I claim no particular expertise. I can think logically, though, and I get way too frustrated having someone follow a script when I have, clearly and succinctly, already explained why none of those things matter. I now just give up, and buy something else. Tech support is mostly neither, for me.
(Interesting aside: if you Google "ligament businesses" the first hit is a page called "Business Representation (Greek Ligament Service)". Those clever Greeks are ahead of the rest of medical technology again!
And I can't stand that these news articles use a comparison such as "three light bulbs" (which in the middle of the growing popularity of CF bulbs is more vague than ever - 7W? 11? 13? 25? 50? 60? 75? 100??? What's an order of magnitude between friends, anyway?) instead of just stating the number of watts of electric power the thing consumes.
Yeah, why can't they use regular units we all understand? What does it draw in kiloergs per fortnight?
Ok, sorry to interrupt the thread. I've got a degree in mechanical engineering, and a graduate degree in science. I'm happy with what I know and what I don't know, in a very general sense, with one exception: I don't get genetics. I know there's DNA, I know there are things called genes, which I think are strands of DNA coded in some specific ways. What makes something a gene, versus the wasted space bits. What do genes do (general sense)?
Rather than answers to those specific questions, which I'm sure are the tip of the iceberg, can someone point me to a useful resource / reference?
Dean
P.S. In general I am generally comfortable with my level of knowledge of things, at the age of 45. Genes are the exception: I know nothing, and it's frustrating.
My HSBC account in Indonesia also uses one of those, and I love it. With the improved security, I can log in and transfer money (subject to daily limits) anywhere in the world. I've used it extensively for domestic transactions, and occasionally for international ones, and it just plain works.
Compare that with my Canadian bank account (Bank of Montreal) where the online capabilities are so crippled it's useless to me. I can pretty much only transfer funds among my own accounts, because they don't trust their own security.
I'm outta mod points, but I wanted to praise one of the most complete and thoughtful posts I've seen on/. I see you don't post much these days; please do.
Dean
Ethernet started as a daisy-chained garden-hose-size coax cable with vampire taps. Then RG-58 with BNC connectors, then twisted pairs to a hub, then switching hubs, then wireless...
You're taking me back now. I started on "thin" ethernet, the RG-58 version, then later had to adapt to "thick" ethernet, with external tranceivers and cables that had to be, for some reason, exactly some multiple of a meter long. Thick like a garden hose, but less flexible. Fast though -- theoretical maximum of 1 MB/s. You wouldn't get that in practice. All daisy-chained together, with terminators at two ends.
Those were the days, but that performance came at a price -- as I recall about $750 per host.
Is it? How about kids being fingerprinted to enter Disneyland?
I can, I think, top this. In July, on a flight from Hong Kong to Toronto, the plane made a refueling stop. Nobody, repeat nobody, had bought a ticket to Anchorage, this was a refueling stop and there were no tickets for sale Hong Kong - Anchorage. Nonetheless, everybody was ordered off the plane and had to show passports to American immigration officials. The people in front of me also had to press their thumb against an electronic fingerprint scanner. When it was my turn, I asked what would happen if I refused to surrender my fingerprint, or that of my two children. He said not to worry, they didn't do that for American and Canadian citizens. Only everyone else.
This was not, I repeat, was not, a flight into the United States, except for a refueling stop. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but the US government is going far beyond what used to be considered acceptable.
i mean, if we don't have money to lend other nations, the IMF & World Bank would cease to be relevant. and without the power and influence of the IMF/World Bank, we wouldn't be able to dictate the domestic policies of other nations anymore
You don't, you haven't and you can't, not recently. America imports more than it exports, so by one of the hard-and-fast rules of economics, others invest in America. So, we've been lending to America for a generation or so. The IMF has been pretty much silent throughout this crisis, giving credibility to the view that it is no longer relevant. The World Bank gets money from a lot of different governments, and does not extend American policy or interests -- it tries to improve conditions within borrower nations. It certainly doesn't dictate domestic policies to make them more amicable to American interests.
A ton is exactly 2240 lbs. Otherwise it wouldn't be a round number of hundredweights (or stones) and that would just be silly.
Unless it's a metric ton, which is spelt "tonne", and is exactly 2204 and a bit lbs. Simple, no?
Being scientists, the quantity in this instance was probably more or less a shedload.
Well, 2240 lbs. is a long ton. A short ton is only 2000 lbs. Isn't this a great system?
All you damn whipper snappers....in my day, you would access NNTP binary newsgroups via CLI, capturing the text as it scrolled by and saving to unencode to view.
And we LIKED it complicated. It made us look smarter than we were. So WHAT if it took two hours to get a half dozen nekkid pics.
Ah, those were the days....I'm off to fire up my Archie client.
I know you're kidding, but I really did use Archie when I first started using the Internet in 1993. As an Canadian far from home in Indonesia, I missed my friends and family and hoped they'd get on email or something on this newfangled "network of networks". I used pine, archie, some news reader I don't remember and eventually lynx for the newfangled "world wide web," all on a vt50 terminal emulation program on a DOS command line, and later OS/2.
As someone who apparently skipped the Usenet generation - I'm actually not surprised and, to be honest, not that bothered. There are other, more important, things which should be phased out (plaintext FTP, plaintext SMTP, plaintext POP3) etc. I've never used Usenet in any significant amount and only ever found it full of more spam than an advertised hotmail account. The etiquette is all other the place (top-posters, multi-group postings etc.) with little to no control for the end user. The bandwidth required is substantial for even a basic set of related groups. And in the end, web-forums are more targetted, more controlled, better moderated, less spamified and more responsible for their content - even if that just means no 7-Zip-RAR'ed-uuencoded binaries.
Well, your opinion, based as you admit on ignorance, is interesting but perhaps not germane. I used Usenet years ago, and I use it today, to follow groups on things like pool (billiards), sourdough baking and jokes (for my Rotary luncheon). It takes seconds to download the headers, and a few seconds more if I choose to download the messages posted each day in these groups. Web forums? I'd have to check several, where each one takes some time to browse several pages of unthreaded posts with avatars, profile links, favorite luncheon meats, etc. From a cell phone, I'd be paying through the nose for this.
I want content, not avatars, and Usenet is so far superior for my uses it's ridiculous. If only you, and the others who got online after the web became usable, would try it, and contribute to interesting discussions, those of us who appreciate saving time while enjoying high-level content (not always, but usually) could share interesting discussions with you.
But, I hate to say, your prognosis of Usenet is probably right on. The ISPs are shutting it off, rather than just closing off the binary newsgroups, and since it depends on networking, I suspect the writing is on the wall. Not that it pleases me...
If you want to go and live in an islamic country, you will be expected to follow the existing rules, you will be expected not to eat pork etc... You don't see people from the west migrating to islamic countries and demanding the right to eat pork, expected to learn the language or anything else that islam forbids...
Well, I am a westerner, and have lived in an islamic country for 16 years, so that's clearly not universally true. I can eat bacon and drink beer any time I want. I don't demand the right to do these things (well, I might for the beer) but they are freely given in Indonesia.
Western countries bend over backwards to accommodate immigrants, most other countries do not...
I'll agree that all countries are different in this respect. Further, in general, North American countries, at least, are more welcoming to immigrants than others. I'm not sure if that goes for European countries or not, as I've never lived in one for more than three months. I think you overstate the case dramatically, however, based on my experience. Indonesia, for one, is much more tolerant of the quirks and foibles of its guests than, say France. In my experience, etc.
In my opinion, if you choose to move to another country you should know what that entails and what laws and customs are already in place there... And if you are not willing to obey those laws, respect if not follow the customs, and learn the local language then you have no business going there.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do I think getting online should be a lower priority? That sounds like the trip of a lifetime, even without 300 or so females in their late teens / early 20s.
Is that true???? I mean, I know the guantanamo detentions have violated many American laws and common law, but I didn't know that the public wasn't even allowed to know whose rights had been violated. That just adds another level of disgustingness to the whole thing.
You, as an employee and as a potential investor, have access to this information (okay, not impending layoffs, but in general). Why do corporations lay people off? Because they feel they have an obligation to their shareholders to protect shareholder wealth. There may be other concerns, and we can certainly quibble about short term versus long term, but that's the basic obligation they see. (BTW, focusing on short term results is a much better harbinger of good long term results than is focusing on long term results, statistically.)
Fortunately, as a middle class person in the USA, you have an alternative: you can choose to invest in companies which you believe have the right long-term orientation. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you haven't done that, as it seems nobody but me does anything but try to follow the trend. But, you do have every chance to put your money where your mouth is. (I am up 7% in about 2 months with a value investment strategy, so it can work.) The key is to take responsibility for your actions, not blame the system.
GE at the time Jack Welch took over was in serious financial trouble. He pioneered investing in human resources (e.g. Crotonville) in ways that hadn't been done before, because they were too expensive. He was, IMO, the classical American entrepeneur: he invested in businesses which would make money, and sold businesses which wouldn't meet his standard for making money (GE's hurdle rates in those days were insanely high, but seemed to work).
I don't think he was a nice guy, nor do I think he was the devil. He was the essence, however, of what made American great, descended from Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. Like them or hate them (IMO, Edison in particular was a right bastard), they are what made America. Welch did invest great sums of money in empowering employees, through Crotonville and 6-sigma, amongst others. Your critique is there, in my opinion, unsupported by the facts.
Well it's not often on /. that I feel qualified to disagree with the experts, but since I am pretty good in this area I will. Getting rid of bottom performers is how pretty much every company (in the West) goes about layoffs. To do anything else would be called asinine only by the very polite. Getting rid of your top 20% would be corporate suicide.
Why does this matter? Because, obviously, managers owe an obligation to shareholders. That's a legal obligation, by the way, and they don't have any similar obligations to customers, employees or anyone else. Treating those folks well is usually good business for the shareholders, but not an obligation.
Soooo, what Microsoft is doing (according to these unsubstantiated reports) is no different from what any other corporation would do, and is in fact a reflection of their legal obligation to shareholders to maximize shareholder value. Sorry if that disappoints you, but it's done pretty well for a big chunk of the world for a while now.
I'm guessing you've hit on the critical flaw: the atmosphere. The basic physics look fine to me, albeit with adaptations to handle some of the criticisms raised. A kind of "balancing mechanism" to store energy, like a flywheel, would store the energy used in pulling the anchor towards the Earth. I think the killer is atmospheric friction along a 100,000 km cable. No matter how smooth you make it, it will generate friction with the atmosphere moving in any direction, and over that long a span I suspect the friction will be a deal breaker.
You're provision of a grammar lesson in your sig, while simultaneously misquoting the expression "for all intents and purposes," is ironic to the max. Congratulations on setting a new standard!
Anyone else think it odd that they measured angular velocity in linear units? WTF?
I'm glad somebody else wrote this, as I thought I was the only one. I did tech support for a CAD/CAM company in the mid to late 80s, and I worked hard at it. If a client needed a patch for his Sun Fortran compiler, I drove 6 hours to get it for him. We knew our stuff well, and were sometimes asked by manufacturers (IBM, Calcomp) how to get their stuff to work together.
My experiences with other tech support is that it has been a complete waste of time. I know how to ask to have something elevated to the next level, in hope of getting a more experienced hand, when that is what I need. Of course, often it isn't, in areas where I claim no particular expertise. I can think logically, though, and I get way too frustrated having someone follow a script when I have, clearly and succinctly, already explained why none of those things matter. I now just give up, and buy something else. Tech support is mostly neither, for me.
I can't wait to get me one of those.
Are you implying that none of these guys have any backup procedures? Have you personally contacted all of these guys:
connective-tissue.com
Bones-to-bones
Bones2bones.com
JointsRus
bone-glue.com
Fibrous Tissue Cultures (FTC) Ltd.
(Interesting aside: if you Google "ligament businesses" the first hit is a page called "Business Representation (Greek Ligament Service)". Those clever Greeks are ahead of the rest of medical technology again!
Yeah, why can't they use regular units we all understand? What does it draw in kiloergs per fortnight?
Rather than answers to those specific questions, which I'm sure are the tip of the iceberg, can someone point me to a useful resource / reference?
Dean
P.S. In general I am generally comfortable with my level of knowledge of things, at the age of 45. Genes are the exception: I know nothing, and it's frustrating.
Compare that with my Canadian bank account (Bank of Montreal) where the online capabilities are so crippled it's useless to me. I can pretty much only transfer funds among my own accounts, because they don't trust their own security.
I'm surprised there's been no mention (at browsing +3) of Nicholas Negroponte. Isn't he a viable candidate, say what you will?
I'm outta mod points, but I wanted to praise one of the most complete and thoughtful posts I've seen on /. I see you don't post much these days; please do.
Dean
You're taking me back now. I started on "thin" ethernet, the RG-58 version, then later had to adapt to "thick" ethernet, with external tranceivers and cables that had to be, for some reason, exactly some multiple of a meter long. Thick like a garden hose, but less flexible. Fast though -- theoretical maximum of 1 MB/s. You wouldn't get that in practice. All daisy-chained together, with terminators at two ends.
Those were the days, but that performance came at a price -- as I recall about $750 per host.
I can, I think, top this. In July, on a flight from Hong Kong to Toronto, the plane made a refueling stop. Nobody, repeat nobody, had bought a ticket to Anchorage, this was a refueling stop and there were no tickets for sale Hong Kong - Anchorage. Nonetheless, everybody was ordered off the plane and had to show passports to American immigration officials. The people in front of me also had to press their thumb against an electronic fingerprint scanner. When it was my turn, I asked what would happen if I refused to surrender my fingerprint, or that of my two children. He said not to worry, they didn't do that for American and Canadian citizens. Only everyone else.
This was not, I repeat, was not, a flight into the United States, except for a refueling stop. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but the US government is going far beyond what used to be considered acceptable.
You don't, you haven't and you can't, not recently. America imports more than it exports, so by one of the hard-and-fast rules of economics, others invest in America. So, we've been lending to America for a generation or so. The IMF has been pretty much silent throughout this crisis, giving credibility to the view that it is no longer relevant. The World Bank gets money from a lot of different governments, and does not extend American policy or interests -- it tries to improve conditions within borrower nations. It certainly doesn't dictate domestic policies to make them more amicable to American interests.
Of course it does, 'coz it's a 'nukular' reaction (as I just suffered through hearing from Sarah Palin several times).
Well, 2240 lbs. is a long ton. A short ton is only 2000 lbs. Isn't this a great system?
Actually, if you check, that figure is capped at 10.6 trillion and they're now negotiating to get the cap raised to 11.3 trillion.
This is the only time on /. where I think the appropriate comment is that someone should be thinking about the children. Sigh.
I know you're kidding, but I really did use Archie when I first started using the Internet in 1993. As an Canadian far from home in Indonesia, I missed my friends and family and hoped they'd get on email or something on this newfangled "network of networks". I used pine, archie, some news reader I don't remember and eventually lynx for the newfangled "world wide web," all on a vt50 terminal emulation program on a DOS command line, and later OS/2.
Those were the days...lol
Well, your opinion, based as you admit on ignorance, is interesting but perhaps not germane. I used Usenet years ago, and I use it today, to follow groups on things like pool (billiards), sourdough baking and jokes (for my Rotary luncheon). It takes seconds to download the headers, and a few seconds more if I choose to download the messages posted each day in these groups. Web forums? I'd have to check several, where each one takes some time to browse several pages of unthreaded posts with avatars, profile links, favorite luncheon meats, etc. From a cell phone, I'd be paying through the nose for this.
I want content, not avatars, and Usenet is so far superior for my uses it's ridiculous. If only you, and the others who got online after the web became usable, would try it, and contribute to interesting discussions, those of us who appreciate saving time while enjoying high-level content (not always, but usually) could share interesting discussions with you.
But, I hate to say, your prognosis of Usenet is probably right on. The ISPs are shutting it off, rather than just closing off the binary newsgroups, and since it depends on networking, I suspect the writing is on the wall. Not that it pleases me...
Well, I am a westerner, and have lived in an islamic country for 16 years, so that's clearly not universally true. I can eat bacon and drink beer any time I want. I don't demand the right to do these things (well, I might for the beer) but they are freely given in Indonesia.
I'll agree that all countries are different in this respect. Further, in general, North American countries, at least, are more welcoming to immigrants than others. I'm not sure if that goes for European countries or not, as I've never lived in one for more than three months. I think you overstate the case dramatically, however, based on my experience. Indonesia, for one, is much more tolerant of the quirks and foibles of its guests than, say France. In my experience, etc.
I couldn't agree more.