"If they can be so horribly wrong on one topic, why should we trust them regarding anything else?"
And that's why people become, um, "disenchanted" with the news media in general. If they botch or slant the coverage of some event or topic about which you are familiar, why believe their other coverage?
This can be overdone. Just because a venerated newspaper keeps a plagiarist on staff, or a popular documentary maker edits footage dishonestly to portray events out of their actual sequence doesn't mean you should automatically ignore everything in all newspapers and all documentaries. If the offending newspaper/documentarian/pundit/broadcaster/whatever appears to have addressed the problem in competence/honesty/supervision/bias/whatever, even ignoring that offender might be overdoing it.
I've accumulated an informal list of news sources that I approach with much skepticism, because they have less credibility with me than a random page of Wikipedia, especially if there's politics involved. Lying about yesterday's h/i/g/h/ t/e/m/p/e/r/a/t/u/r/e/ rainfall would not advance any political cause, and would also be pretty easy to detect, so I would tend to take such reporting at face value.
Plus, I can check it for plausibility. Rainfall of 5000 inches would set off my B.S. dectector. So would a report of a huge lizzard approaching Cincinnatti, even though I believe, with God as my witness, that Les Nessman would not deliberately tell a lie. -Eric
This assumes the Supreme Court will act as you (and I) would in this matter. Given their past behavior, it's far from certain. Better than even-money, IMO, but still not a sure thing. Maybe 3-1, maybe 9-1.
After all, this is the institution that ruled that a farmer raising grain to feed his family and livestock is engaged in "interstate commerce" by doing so, and thus his grain-raising activities are subject to federal regulation. -Eric
What gets me about the compensating-the-teen's-lawyer angle is that apparently the taxpayer's are paying for it.
Shouldn't -- in a more perfect world -- the people who actually misbehaved pay, not the political entity that they were elected to? Which ultimately means, the taxpayers?
Now to work. And when I get home, I'll see if the issue is addressed in the actual article, or in posts I haven't read yet. -Eric
Sounds like the Control Data 6000 series machines, though no doubt done to a much greater degree and with more speed. (On those things you could count the transistors without using a microscope, after all.)
They had a part of the CPU called the "switchboard" which kept track of which registers were in the process of getting results and which instructions were waiting on register values and which "functional units" (ALU parts) were in use calculating results. As instructions would complete and make their respective results and functional units available, other instructions would start up.
Oh, and most of the A registers and their associated X registers were used to move data between the CPU and memory. So setting an A register to an address could result in a memory read (A1..A5) or write (A6..A7) for the associated X register. Complicated things a bit, I suppose.
Now to actually RTFA to see if there is anything to add to the above. (Or apologize for.)
When The Powers That Be lay off a bunch of people to make a short-term profitability goal, do you think the undocumented or partly-documented processes and code and such are on their minds? Are they even aware that there is anything to document? Possibly not.
So when the now-understaffed (or more understaffed) folks have to fix or enhance something they haven't touched before, something that lacks documentation, it takes them longer and they don't do as good a job. It works inefficiently or unreliably or both. Code becomes a nightmare to maintain because the ones who knew it best wouldn't have made decisions the ones who actually did make the change did. Good code gets mediocre, mediocre code gets bad, bad code gets nightmarish. (I could tell you stories, and I haven't even seen that code. Word gets around. I'm told one part is 17K lines of unstructured COBOL, with multi-line deeply nested IF statements -- lots of them, with complex conditionals.)
But to look on the bright side -- if The Powers That Be don't know that the application's documentation is important, and becomes more important after the departure of those who know the system from personal experience, it doesn't hurt to be professional and document what you have done. You won't be any more a layoff target than those who think they have made themselves indispensible by keeping their knowledge a secret. Wally and Dilbert are equally likely to get the boot. (Not that Wally actually knows anything worth documenting, anyway...)
So I'm not going to tell TPTB. No sense adding to the work environment a strong disincentive to document your work. I like doing The Right Thing. -Eric
P.S. A year or two after a round of layoffs at one employer, there seemed to be a flurry of articles in the business press about the importance of "human capital", the vital business knowledge carried in the heads of employees which is never documented and may not even be recognized as such. What to do in such-and-such a situation. Why it's a terrible idea to do what seems obviously the right thing to do about the monthly whatever process. And so on. The unstructured knowledge that comes from experience.
You know, the stuff known only by the staff -- or in some cases, ex-staff. -ESH
Just because the energy is "there" doesn't mean it can be used. If the cost (including recouping the initial construction costs) are greater than existing methods, it's not feasible.
This is location-specific. Costs vary by location. In some parts of the world unskilled labor is especially cheap, making some types of construction especially affordable. In some places, land is expensive. Grabbing kilowatts from the sun or the wind takes up real estate, and lots of it, so solar power from photovoltaics or whatever is not a good choice there.
No doubt there are innovative ways to harvest energy from sources which are used little or not at all. But not all of those approaches will pan out in practice.
You might considering starting a business -- if you see an opportunity that fits the resources you personally can bring to bear -- or investing in an existing or startup firm that is using one of the approaches you find especially appealing -- if you can't do the whole thing yourself.
In other works, do something to prove the skeptics wrong. (And incidentally make a buck or two.)
"Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself."
To bring this back to the poster you were replying to: so what if it's not feasible on a global scale? Nobody uses energy on a global scale. They use it where they are: Phoenix, Johannesburg, en route to Madrid, wherever they happen to be.
For the armchair quarterback, a global solution is necessary, I guess, but for the real world, an individual solution for the particular situation is all that's needed. And it's only needed by the people who are in that situation. The armchair quarterbacks would do well to stick with managing teams in fantasy football leagues. -Eric
"Tell" meaning "advise"? Or "tell" meaning "command"?
If the latter, numerous unfortunate consequences are apt to follow. The early part of the middle third of the 20th century provides some (I hope obvious) hints about what those consequences might be. -Eric
Beware! This link is not as in-depth as the other one(s).
If you're not interested in every last detail about the thing and do want a general overview, this link provides it.
Not everyone wants or needs to know how the chip supports floating point numbers, or the thickness of the unobtainium packaging, after all.
Of course, this post would be more informative if I had first followed the links and could say with confidence which (if either) of those explanations holds.
And I rather suspect his successor -- regardless of party -- will be president when more of the same occurs.
And let's not forget the Congress's role in all of this.
For the most part, presidents don't do bad things without the assistance -- or at least silent assent -- from the Congress... regardless of which political party -- if either -- controls the Congress.
The U*S*A P*A*T*R*I*O*T Act was a bi-partisan creation, after all.
Pick your metric of the overall size and abusiveness of the federal government, and you can be rather certain it will be worse after 4 years of the next president, or 2 years of the next Congress.
As I understand it, those "Free Speech Zones" were not a creation of the administration in DC, but of the local pols (or police departments). (Unless they were mandated by "Homeland Security", which I suppose they could have been.)
Well, that should do it. Vague orders ("with respect" means what, exactly?) don't necessarily get followed to the letter. (As if you could.)
For that matter, specific ones don't necessarily get obeyed, either. Especially ones without provisions for punishing those who violate them.
If regulations were so wonderful, why do they bother with laws for the general populace, when reguations are sufficient for bureaucrats and appointed officials?
Finally: does the name "J. Edgard Hoover" ring any bells?
Slashdot Mirror
"If they can be so horribly wrong on one topic, why should we trust them regarding anything else?"
And that's why people become, um, "disenchanted" with the news media in general. If they botch or slant the coverage of some event or topic about which you are familiar, why believe their other coverage?
This can be overdone. Just because a venerated newspaper keeps a plagiarist on staff, or a popular documentary maker edits footage dishonestly to portray events out of their actual sequence doesn't mean you should automatically ignore everything in all newspapers and all documentaries. If the offending newspaper/documentarian/pundit/broadcaster/whatever appears to have addressed the problem in competence/honesty/supervision/bias/whatever, even ignoring that offender might be overdoing it.
I've accumulated an informal list of news sources that I approach with much skepticism, because they have less credibility with me than a random page of Wikipedia, especially if there's politics involved. Lying about yesterday's h/i/g/h/ t/e/m/p/e/r/a/t/u/r/e/ rainfall would not advance any political cause, and would also be pretty easy to detect, so I would tend to take such reporting at face value.
Plus, I can check it for plausibility. Rainfall of 5000 inches would set off my B.S. dectector. So would a report of a huge lizzard approaching Cincinnatti, even though I believe, with God as my witness, that Les Nessman would not deliberately tell a lie. -Eric
This assumes the Supreme Court will act as you (and I) would in this matter. Given their past behavior, it's far from certain. Better than even-money, IMO, but still not a sure thing. Maybe 3-1, maybe 9-1. After all, this is the institution that ruled that a farmer raising grain to feed his family and livestock is engaged in "interstate commerce" by doing so, and thus his grain-raising activities are subject to federal regulation. -Eric
What gets me about the compensating-the-teen's-lawyer angle is that apparently the taxpayer's are paying for it.
Shouldn't -- in a more perfect world -- the people who actually misbehaved pay, not the political entity that they were elected to? Which ultimately means, the taxpayers?
Now to work. And when I get home, I'll see if the issue is addressed in the actual article, or in posts I haven't read yet. -Eric
Sounds like the Control Data 6000 series machines, though no doubt done to a much greater degree and with more speed. (On those things you could count the transistors without using a microscope, after all.)
They had a part of the CPU called the "switchboard" which kept track of which registers were in the process of getting results and which instructions were waiting on register values and which "functional units" (ALU parts) were in use calculating results. As instructions would complete and make their respective results and functional units available, other instructions would start up.
Oh, and most of the A registers and their associated X registers were used to move data between the CPU and memory. So setting an A register to an address could result in a memory read (A1..A5) or write (A6..A7) for the associated X register. Complicated things a bit, I suppose.
Now to actually RTFA to see if there is anything to add to the above. (Or apologize for.)
-Eric
Oh, yes. Absolutely.
When The Powers That Be lay off a bunch of people to make a short-term profitability goal, do you think the undocumented or partly-documented processes and code and such are on their minds? Are they even aware that there is anything to document? Possibly not.
So when the now-understaffed (or more understaffed) folks have to fix or enhance something they haven't touched before, something that lacks documentation, it takes them longer and they don't do as good a job. It works inefficiently or unreliably or both. Code becomes a nightmare to maintain because the ones who knew it best wouldn't have made decisions the ones who actually did make the change did. Good code gets mediocre, mediocre code gets bad, bad code gets nightmarish. (I could tell you stories, and I haven't even seen that code. Word gets around. I'm told one part is 17K lines of unstructured COBOL, with multi-line deeply nested IF statements -- lots of them, with complex conditionals.)
But to look on the bright side -- if The Powers That Be don't know that the application's documentation is important, and becomes more important after the departure of those who know the system from personal experience, it doesn't hurt to be professional and document what you have done. You won't be any more a layoff target than those who think they have made themselves indispensible by keeping their knowledge a secret. Wally and Dilbert are equally likely to get the boot. (Not that Wally actually knows anything worth documenting, anyway...)
So I'm not going to tell TPTB. No sense adding to the work environment a strong disincentive to document your work. I like doing The Right Thing. -Eric
P.S. A year or two after a round of layoffs at one employer, there seemed to be a flurry of articles in the business press about the importance of "human capital", the vital business knowledge carried in the heads of employees which is never documented and may not even be recognized as such. What to do in such-and-such a situation. Why it's a terrible idea to do what seems obviously the right thing to do about the monthly whatever process. And so on. The unstructured knowledge that comes from experience.
You know, the stuff known only by the staff -- or in some cases, ex-staff. -ESH
Just because the energy is "there" doesn't mean it can be used. If the cost (including recouping the initial construction costs) are greater than existing methods, it's not feasible.
This is location-specific. Costs vary by location. In some parts of the world unskilled labor is especially cheap, making some types of construction especially affordable. In some places, land is expensive. Grabbing kilowatts from the sun or the wind takes up real estate, and lots of it, so solar power from photovoltaics or whatever is not a good choice there.
No doubt there are innovative ways to harvest energy from sources which are used little or not at all. But not all of those approaches will pan out in practice.
You might considering starting a business -- if you see an opportunity that fits the resources you personally can bring to bear -- or investing in an existing or startup firm that is using one of the approaches you find especially appealing -- if you can't do the whole thing yourself.
In other works, do something to prove the skeptics wrong. (And incidentally make a buck or two.)
"Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn't have to do it himself."
To bring this back to the poster you were replying to: so what if it's not feasible on a global scale? Nobody uses energy on a global scale. They use it where they are: Phoenix, Johannesburg, en route to Madrid, wherever they happen to be.
For the armchair quarterback, a global solution is necessary, I guess, but for the real world, an individual solution for the particular situation is all that's needed. And it's only needed by the people who are in that situation. The armchair quarterbacks would do well to stick with managing teams in fantasy football leagues. -Eric
"Tell" meaning "advise"? Or "tell" meaning "command"?
If the latter, numerous unfortunate consequences are apt to follow. The early part of the middle third of the 20th century provides some (I hope obvious) hints about what those consequences might be. -Eric
Two possible reasons some to mind.
Beware! This link is not as in-depth as the other one(s).
If you're not interested in every last detail about the thing and do want a general overview, this link provides it.
Not everyone wants or needs to know how the chip supports floating point numbers, or the thickness of the unobtainium packaging, after all.
Of course, this post would be more informative if I had first followed the links and could say with confidence which (if either) of those explanations holds.
Hey, if it's good enough for Ghostbusters ...
Yep.
... regardless of which political party -- if either -- controls the Congress.
And I rather suspect his successor -- regardless of party -- will be president when more of the same occurs.
And let's not forget the Congress's role in all of this.
For the most part, presidents don't do bad things without the assistance -- or at least silent assent -- from the Congress
The U*S*A P*A*T*R*I*O*T Act was a bi-partisan creation, after all.
Pick your metric of the overall size and abusiveness of the federal government, and you can be rather certain it will be worse after 4 years of the next president, or 2 years of the next Congress.
As I understand it, those "Free Speech Zones" were not a creation of the administration in DC, but of the local pols (or police departments). (Unless they were mandated by "Homeland Security", which I suppose they could have been.)
Bush is hardly the first U.S. politician to engage in such suppression, or even the first U.S. president.
The evisceration and ignoring of the Bill of Rights (and much of the rest of the Constitution for that matter) is a bi-partisan affair.
My neighborhood would be OK.
...
Certainly better to have a nuclear power plant nearby than a coal-fired plant.
I'm not so keen on whirling multi-ton windmill blades atop high towers, accumulating stress fractures and/or metal fatigue.
A hydroelectric plant wouldn't be so bad, as long as I was a ways above the level of the lakeside waterline.
To return to ethanol as a fuel
If it costs more to make it than is profitable w/o subsidies, clearly it's a loser of an idea. (Except from a political standpoint, that is.)
You say that now, sure. You will have did changed your mind by this time next decade. I will have did seen it. -Eric
Well, that should do it. Vague orders ("with respect" means what, exactly?) don't necessarily get followed to the letter. (As if you could.) For that matter, specific ones don't necessarily get obeyed, either. Especially ones without provisions for punishing those who violate them. If regulations were so wonderful, why do they bother with laws for the general populace, when reguations are sufficient for bureaucrats and appointed officials? Finally: does the name "J. Edgard Hoover" ring any bells?
Don't hold yer breath on that last. They're not doing to harass them, but for the money. Plain and simple: pay up or else.
As "Lazarus Long" once said, "Taxes are not raised for the benefit of the taxed."
Which I bet you knew already.