No honestly getting a sane girlfriend seems easier.
One piece of advice I got given many years ago, "there is no such thing as a sane woman, just pick your insanity". Applies to men too don't get me wrong. If I can pick a woman who gets annoyed over weird TV programs I have no interest in I'll pick that any day over some of the stuff I've put up with over the years.
All that gross sexism over and done with a fairer version of the above advice would be people are different, even your best friend or life partner will piss you off about some weird stuff at time. It's ok, just remember you do it to them too.
which in this case is easy because it has already been agreed they need these computers. He just needs to prove that extra staff is cheaper. What he needs to do is say: Buy from Dell = $1000 * 1000 units Build ourselves = $500 * 1000 units + 2 * $100,000 in extra salary
It's an easy win for build ourselves. Then that extra headcount justified you never get rid of it.
Okay this is overly simplistic and only works if you're dealing with short sighted people with no knowledge of the real world, but it's good enough for government work;-)
Right, to paraphrase Yes Minister a private company defines success by profits, a bureaucracy defines success by the number of employees. So internalising the workforce would be to the aspiring manager's benefit. Just make sure that you have the cost benefit analysis correct/signed in triplicate.
In other words a prototype experimental weapon would be much more dangerous than subsequent designs that weren't designed under such unusual conditions.
Look I don't care if the initial designs had faults or problems as long as they were fixed. Chernobyl, TMI, Apollo 1, The Pinto, etc all had problems that did kill people. I believe that in most of those cases the engineers responsible were aware of the potential for the problem before the accidents that killed people but for various reasons they were ignored. That does not mean we should abandon the technology or run for the hills as technology destroys civilisation. It means we should constantly try and design better safer products and be vigilant against idiot managers. Sorry I have clearly worked in engineering too long when my first response is to blame the managers;-p
Fast forward a few years and what happens when everyone with an internet connection has access to that data for free from Google Stalk or whatever it appears as on their labs page? Information wants to be free works both ways... Could make job interviews quite interesting when you've gStalked your interviewer, know what websites they all liked and all the past candidates and use this in your bargaining process.
I've been thinking about this and I seriously can't come up with a way to improve the patent system in a way that will mean it can't be abused in some way. All the current abuses of the patent system I am aware of involve doing things that are already banned under the current rules: obviousness, prior art etc. It used to be that a patent would be to prevent the large corporation copying your idea and running you out of business. Nowadays the patent system prevents the inventor even selling anything in the first place because it is impossible to come up with a device that doesn't infringe someone's patent. It seems now that a patent protects the large corporation from the small corporation.
All said and done I don't know what change would make it any better, perhaps: * Corporations may not own patents, only individuals * Corporations are not allowed to force an employee to give them access to one of his patents. * No individual may own more than 100 Patents(so make them count).
But these are all open to abuse, the first would mean some hairy employment contracts, the second would lead to some individuals trolling their company (sometimes fairly, sometimes much less so), the final one maybe the least vulnerable to abuse, but IMO quite unfair to a really good inventor.
That all said and done though I have been royally screwed by the patent system myself so I'm hardly the best person to ask about this..
They do help a little. I have a number of friends involved in startups and the patents they own are valuable, but they are not everything. As with all things in life if the big guy wants something they'll find a way to get it.
IME if you have done a startup (e.g. electronics company) then you have three things of value: 1) Your customer: lets say you have interest (but not sales) from a large company A and another large company B wants to sell to A. By buying you if they can get a foot in the door to company A that would be worthwhile. 2) Your employees: startups tend to attract the bright go-getters - often useful to infuse a big old company 3) Your IP, the code and the patents, although given the fact that the big company can out compete you in terms of bruteforce coding then once they know what you are up to, which if you have come onto their radar they will do; then once you have proved your technology then you have a very short window in which to get bought before this last item becomes worthless because they can set 100 monkeys onto the job.
I've seen on a number of occasions the patents protect the small startup, but only as far as the demonstration of the specific technology they have developed.
"this irrational belief that everything around us is for us to exploit." Sure, why shouldn't we? Who else is going to use it? I'm reminded back to Dr Manhattan's "would this [Mars landscape] be improved by the addition of an oil pipeline?" To which I would say maybe not in the eyes of whoever is going to observe it. But it doesn't matter what it looks like or how pretty it is if there is noone there to appreciate it.
If we are alone in the universe then there will always be more wilderness to appreciate for its wilderness qualities. What you then have to ask is do we have the right to carry on expanding? I can't tell you how to have a moral system, but if you think humans as a species have no right to expand and grow I would ask you if you plan to have children in the future. If you do, then why, because if you have the right to expand, why doesn't humanity?
Now if there are others in the universe we have to compete with then we have a problem, because there is bound to be at least one who has chosen to expand as fast as they can. I don't see why the laws that operate at a galactic level with regards to evolution and competing for resources should be any different to those at the planetary level except that the speed of light limits the intermixing.
Correct, it would not be worth going to get with current technology. Now if you have reduced the cost of entry into this market then that changes everything. Remember it's not like we're boosting 1Kg of material into LEO to get 1Kg back. If we do this 1/2 right we're boosting 1Kg of aluminium and carbon into orbit to get 10Kg of platinum back. If we do it very right then we have an automated mine that drops capsules of already mined and processed platinum into a area where we can go and retrieve it for no ongoing cost to us whatsoever. That is worth an awful lot of money...
Let's not forget getting to Mars would be a whole lot easier if we had a decent LEO infrastructure (construction facilities, fuel depots, am i asking too much to dream of a mine on a captured asteroid?) If shutting down the space shuttle program allows private companies to take full responsibility of trucking cargo/people to LEO and then start to compete on cost which then allows us to afford a decent LEO infrastructure, then please please let be the one to turn the off switch on the shuttle.
Right, but if SpaceX gets that far (50 years) then they will have proved that a private company can develop and launch an orbital rocket system and be profitable in the long term doing so. Assuming they have stuck to their stated goals at all this will have noticeably reduced the cost of spaceflight, especially if they get involved in and survive a price war with then encumbants.
Once all that has been proved then that opens the doors for others to do it and _that_ is IMO the most important thing needed to develop a technology, as soon as you can have technology startups then IME that develops the state of the art at wartime levels of progress but with consumer level costs. So who cares if in time SpaceX gets full of bureaucracy? There'll then be plenty more ready to do so as long as it can be proved that the launch business is profitable for the newcomer.
You may be able to bodge on threads overnight, but a language that supports multiprocessing from the ground up (occam springs to mind) is not an overnight addition. Handal-C perhaps might be a good example of multi-processing built into the language that is beyond current popular programming models, but I don't see the ecosystem to go with it and that will take time...
Erm they will pass those savings onto us as long as there is a free market. They will have no choice. Locally for me online shopping reduced the cost of CDs from approx £14 to approx £5. Now it's an interesting question as to how we keep the free market operating in the world of big media, but the advantage of none physical media is that anyone is now a distributor. As long as we oppose things like Itunes and their monopoly on content then we have hope that this can remain true. Or did i forget to take my pessimism pill this morning?
You're predicting the end of youtube? I am well aware of this trusted computing rubbish, but everything I see at the moment with social networks, blogs, youtube etc is showing the individual becoming more responsible for the things that entertain us, not less. I know I am not a typical person, but I spend far more time during the average day reading blogs, checking facebook, keeping up with communities on flickr, watching the whatever videos people have sent me etc than I do watching stuff produced/owned by corporations. This appears to be true for most of my peers too, and if what I see from the latest smartphones (and particularly android ones) is carried out then this can only carry on getting more so.
I think it's down to respect for elders or some similar such thing. If you force kids to be less than a full citizen in as many ways as possible it helps to get them to do what they're told in other ways. It's all part of beating them down and forcing them to conform to the rules of society. Knowing what little bastards a lot of kids are like they will always push the boundaries, so you set the boundaries to be artificially narrow for them then when they probe them, they are less likely to harm themselves. If you get them used to being less than an adult then it is easier to enforce rules that don't seem to make sense to them like the fact that they're not allowed to play with daddies knives, or that they can't help mummy with that boiling pan of water, or that uncle Chris' car keys are for him only, and even though Auntie Gwen's pills look a lot like sweeties you're not allowed to taste them yourself...
You know I always wondered why many parents were happy to watch TV/Films about murder rape torture etc. Things we really hate and would never allow our children to do. Yet forbid them from watching shows about/including sex. The one activity we all take great pride in doing (Slashdot meme's notwithstanding).
The only explanation I have for this is while all parents seem to want to become grandparents some day, they don't want to become grandparents too soon. Or it could be linked to the negative connotation of slut, but that doesn't fully explain it with the positive connotation of stud...
I don't know if you're trying to be a PITA, but they are orthogonal things. Whether google is evil or not shooting at transformers/insulators is not a good thing to do. If the person in question considers them evil and wants to take them down then there are better ways to do it that petty target practice, As to the use of guerilla tactics against a powerful enemy, well that certainly has its place when civilisation in the area has broken down or the ruling power/government does not command your allegiance, but I would hope that this was not the case in Oregon. If there really is a guerilla uprising taking place in Oregon then google's fibre is the least of our concerns. If there isn't then what better explanation have you for this than a bunch of bored/drunk people with firearms and insufficient skill to hit a moving target...
Speaking as an engineer who designs mobile multimedia processors that include things like HDMI, it'd be great job security for me. Since people already replace their smartphone every couple of years maybe this isn't such a problem. It'd also be good for those who sell all this equipment so great for the retail sector. You do know you don't HAVE to always have the latest toy, my old record player still works fine... *ducks before things get thrown at him*;-)
Ah but they do exactly that in the UK Speed bumps everywhere damaging a car that goes at the speed limit forcing you to slow down to about 2/3rd of the speed limit or you damage your car. Even when you do slow down for the bumps that gives increased fuel usage and extra wear on brakes. Many rural roads are being dropped form 60 to 50 because of the actions of a few going much much faster than 60. So no that's exactly how we do it here.
Ok, but who else has carriers that size? AFAIK even the Royal Navy the second largest navy in NATO doesn't have carriers that can match the french ones (yet). Last time I checked France had the 4th largest Navy in the world (behind the soviet and ahead of Japan) But I could be wrong... Also see CERN for technological leadership...
Slashdot Mirror
No honestly getting a sane girlfriend seems easier.
One piece of advice I got given many years ago, "there is no such thing as a sane woman, just pick your insanity". Applies to men too don't get me wrong. If I can pick a woman who gets annoyed over weird TV programs I have no interest in I'll pick that any day over some of the stuff I've put up with over the years.
All that gross sexism over and done with a fairer version of the above advice would be people are different, even your best friend or life partner will piss you off about some weird stuff at time. It's ok, just remember you do it to them too.
which in this case is easy because it has already been agreed they need these computers. He just needs to prove that extra staff is cheaper. What he needs to do is say:
Buy from Dell = $1000 * 1000 units
Build ourselves = $500 * 1000 units + 2 * $100,000 in extra salary
It's an easy win for build ourselves. Then that extra headcount justified you never get rid of it.
Okay this is overly simplistic and only works if you're dealing with short sighted people with no knowledge of the real world, but it's good enough for government work ;-)
Right, to paraphrase Yes Minister a private company defines success by profits, a bureaucracy defines success by the number of employees.
So internalising the workforce would be to the aspiring manager's benefit. Just make sure that you have the cost benefit analysis correct/signed in triplicate.
In other words a prototype experimental weapon would be much more dangerous than subsequent designs that weren't designed under such unusual conditions.
Look I don't care if the initial designs had faults or problems as long as they were fixed. Chernobyl, TMI, Apollo 1, The Pinto, etc all had problems that did kill people. I believe that in most of those cases the engineers responsible were aware of the potential for the problem before the accidents that killed people but for various reasons they were ignored. That does not mean we should abandon the technology or run for the hills as technology destroys civilisation. It means we should constantly try and design better safer products and be vigilant against idiot managers. ;-p
Sorry I have clearly worked in engineering too long when my first response is to blame the managers
Fast forward a few years and what happens when everyone with an internet connection has access to that data for free from Google Stalk or whatever it appears as on their labs page?
Information wants to be free works both ways...
Could make job interviews quite interesting when you've gStalked your interviewer, know what websites they all liked and all the past candidates and use this in your bargaining process.
I've been thinking about this and I seriously can't come up with a way to improve the patent system in a way that will mean it can't be abused in some way.
All the current abuses of the patent system I am aware of involve doing things that are already banned under the current rules: obviousness, prior art etc. It used to be that a patent would be to prevent the large corporation copying your idea and running you out of business. Nowadays the patent system prevents the inventor even selling anything in the first place because it is impossible to come up with a device that doesn't infringe someone's patent. It seems now that a patent protects the large corporation from the small corporation.
All said and done I don't know what change would make it any better,
perhaps:
* Corporations may not own patents, only individuals
* Corporations are not allowed to force an employee to give them access to one of his patents.
* No individual may own more than 100 Patents(so make them count).
But these are all open to abuse, the first would mean some hairy employment contracts, the second would lead to some individuals trolling their company (sometimes fairly, sometimes much less so), the final one maybe the least vulnerable to abuse, but IMO quite unfair to a really good inventor.
That all said and done though I have been royally screwed by the patent system myself so I'm hardly the best person to ask about this..
They do help a little. I have a number of friends involved in startups and the patents they own are valuable, but they are not everything. As with all things in life if the big guy wants something they'll find a way to get it.
IME if you have done a startup (e.g. electronics company) then you have three things of value:
1) Your customer: lets say you have interest (but not sales) from a large company A and another large company B wants to sell to A. By buying you if they can get a foot in the door to company A that would be worthwhile.
2) Your employees: startups tend to attract the bright go-getters - often useful to infuse a big old company
3) Your IP, the code and the patents, although given the fact that the big company can out compete you in terms of bruteforce coding then once they know what you are up to, which if you have come onto their radar they will do; then once you have proved your technology then you have a very short window in which to get bought before this last item becomes worthless because they can set 100 monkeys onto the job.
I've seen on a number of occasions the patents protect the small startup, but only as far as the demonstration of the specific technology they have developed.
"this irrational belief that everything around us is for us to exploit."
Sure, why shouldn't we? Who else is going to use it?
I'm reminded back to Dr Manhattan's "would this [Mars landscape] be improved by the addition of an oil pipeline?" To which I would say maybe not in the eyes of whoever is going to observe it. But it doesn't matter what it looks like or how pretty it is if there is noone there to appreciate it.
If we are alone in the universe then there will always be more wilderness to appreciate for its wilderness qualities. What you then have to ask is do we have the right to carry on expanding? I can't tell you how to have a moral system, but if you think humans as a species have no right to expand and grow I would ask you if you plan to have children in the future. If you do, then why, because if you have the right to expand, why doesn't humanity?
Now if there are others in the universe we have to compete with then we have a problem, because there is bound to be at least one who has chosen to expand as fast as they can. I don't see why the laws that operate at a galactic level with regards to evolution and competing for resources should be any different to those at the planetary level except that the speed of light limits the intermixing.
Correct, it would not be worth going to get with current technology.
Now if you have reduced the cost of entry into this market then that changes everything. Remember it's not like we're boosting 1Kg of material into LEO to get 1Kg back. If we do this 1/2 right we're boosting 1Kg of aluminium and carbon into orbit to get 10Kg of platinum back.
If we do it very right then we have an automated mine that drops capsules of already mined and processed platinum into a area where we can go and retrieve it for no ongoing cost to us whatsoever.
That is worth an awful lot of money...
Let's not forget getting to Mars would be a whole lot easier if we had a decent LEO infrastructure (construction facilities, fuel depots, am i asking too much to dream of a mine on a captured asteroid?)
If shutting down the space shuttle program allows private companies to take full responsibility of trucking cargo/people to LEO and then start to compete on cost which then allows us to afford a decent LEO infrastructure, then please please let be the one to turn the off switch on the shuttle.
Right, but if SpaceX gets that far (50 years) then they will have proved that a private company can develop and launch an orbital rocket system and be profitable in the long term doing so. Assuming they have stuck to their stated goals at all this will have noticeably reduced the cost of spaceflight, especially if they get involved in and survive a price war with then encumbants.
Once all that has been proved then that opens the doors for others to do it and _that_ is IMO the most important thing needed to develop a technology, as soon as you can have technology startups then IME that develops the state of the art at wartime levels of progress but with consumer level costs. So who cares if in time SpaceX gets full of bureaucracy? There'll then be plenty more ready to do so as long as it can be proved that the launch business is profitable for the newcomer.
You may be able to bodge on threads overnight, but a language that supports multiprocessing from the ground up (occam springs to mind) is not an overnight addition.
Handal-C perhaps might be a good example of multi-processing built into the language that is beyond current popular programming models, but I don't see the ecosystem to go with it and that will take time...
Ah, he's drawing a straight line on a growth curve/random market fluctuations. What's he doing in engineering? Shouldn't he be in finance?
Erm they will pass those savings onto us as long as there is a free market. They will have no choice. Locally for me online shopping reduced the cost of CDs from approx £14 to approx £5.
Now it's an interesting question as to how we keep the free market operating in the world of big media, but the advantage of none physical media is that anyone is now a distributor. As long as we oppose things like Itunes and their monopoly on content then we have hope that this can remain true.
Or did i forget to take my pessimism pill this morning?
You're predicting the end of youtube?
I am well aware of this trusted computing rubbish, but everything I see at the moment with social networks, blogs, youtube etc is showing the individual becoming more responsible for the things that entertain us, not less.
I know I am not a typical person, but I spend far more time during the average day reading blogs, checking facebook, keeping up with communities on flickr, watching the whatever videos people have sent me etc than I do watching stuff produced/owned by corporations. This appears to be true for most of my peers too, and if what I see from the latest smartphones (and particularly android ones) is carried out then this can only carry on getting more so.
I think it's down to respect for elders or some similar such thing. If you force kids to be less than a full citizen in as many ways as possible it helps to get them to do what they're told in other ways. It's all part of beating them down and forcing them to conform to the rules of society. Knowing what little bastards a lot of kids are like they will always push the boundaries, so you set the boundaries to be artificially narrow for them then when they probe them, they are less likely to harm themselves. If you get them used to being less than an adult then it is easier to enforce rules that don't seem to make sense to them like the fact that they're not allowed to play with daddies knives, or that they can't help mummy with that boiling pan of water, or that uncle Chris' car keys are for him only, and even though Auntie Gwen's pills look a lot like sweeties you're not allowed to taste them yourself...
You know I always wondered why many parents were happy to watch TV/Films about murder rape torture etc. Things we really hate and would never allow our children to do.
Yet forbid them from watching shows about/including sex. The one activity we all take great pride in doing (Slashdot meme's notwithstanding).
The only explanation I have for this is while all parents seem to want to become grandparents some day, they don't want to become grandparents too soon.
Or it could be linked to the negative connotation of slut, but that doesn't fully explain it with the positive connotation of stud...
I don't know if you're trying to be a PITA, but they are orthogonal things. Whether google is evil or not shooting at transformers/insulators is not a good thing to do. If the person in question considers them evil and wants to take them down then there are better ways to do it that petty target practice,
As to the use of guerilla tactics against a powerful enemy, well that certainly has its place when civilisation in the area has broken down or the ruling power/government does not command your allegiance, but I would hope that this was not the case in Oregon.
If there really is a guerilla uprising taking place in Oregon then google's fibre is the least of our concerns. If there isn't then what better explanation have you for this than a bunch of bored/drunk people with firearms and insufficient skill to hit a moving target...
Speaking as an engineer who designs mobile multimedia processors that include things like HDMI, it'd be great job security for me. Since people already replace their smartphone every couple of years maybe this isn't such a problem. ;-)
It'd also be good for those who sell all this equipment so great for the retail sector.
You do know you don't HAVE to always have the latest toy, my old record player still works fine...
*ducks before things get thrown at him*
Ah but they do exactly that in the UK
Speed bumps everywhere damaging a car that goes at the speed limit forcing you to slow down to about 2/3rd of the speed limit or you damage your car. Even when you do slow down for the bumps that gives increased fuel usage and extra wear on brakes.
Many rural roads are being dropped form 60 to 50 because of the actions of a few going much much faster than 60.
So no that's exactly how we do it here.
http://miscellanea.wellingtongrey.net/2008/02/18/enginneers-vs-sociologists/
Please get your grammar correct it's:
ewe ewe's
Kids these days...
So we should still be paying Shakespeare's Family? And Beethoven's? How about Homer's?
Yes and my 747 filled with DVDs beets the pants off the latest multi-terabit cross Atlantic fibre.
Ok, but who else has carriers that size? AFAIK even the Royal Navy the second largest navy in NATO doesn't have carriers that can match the french ones (yet).
Last time I checked France had the 4th largest Navy in the world (behind the soviet and ahead of Japan) But I could be wrong...
Also see CERN for technological leadership...