Ogg just sounds stupid. If you don't think so, then I guess you are one of the few people who just don't get it. It sounds like something a retarded caveman would say.
Names matter. It's why significant amounts of marketing money are spent coming up with names for products. If Ford named a car the "Ogg" do you really think that having such a dumb name wouldn't prevent people from buying it?
I have heard alot of dumb technology names in my time, but Ogg is *far and away* the worst. I used to think Athlon sounded dumb, and it did, but after a while it stopped sounding that way. However, Ogg sounded terrible the first time I heard it 10 years ago or so, and it STILL sounds stupid. It is just a terrible name, plain and simple, and trust me, it's hurt the adoption of that standard, and will continue to do so.
I agrew with the O.P. Changing the name of the standard will do more good than that $100K and won't cost anything.
I think you'd find that most reasonable and intelligent Americans would agree with you on every point you have made (except about the French; I've never worked in France so I don't know if your characterization is accurate, but I'll take your word for it). It does suck for you to be put in such a precarious position, where losing your job would be much, MUCH more personally costly to you than it would be to a citizen or green card holder.
However, I'm betting that just about every other country in the world has similar policies. I know that here in NZ it is the same, you cannot be hired as a foreign employee unless the company can demonstrate that there is no domestic employee available for the job. H1B is an American program to make the same process easier in the USA but "balanced" wih conditions that make it harder for people who come on such a work visa to stay once the job is no longer there for them. I guess the idea is that if the only reason you let the person in is to work, and they can't work, then they can't stay.
And I'm sure that those on H1B know this ahead of time, and ought to be able to plan for it - don't even come unless you've got enough savings to tide you over and get you and your family back home if you lose your job.
Anyway, like I said, the policies in the USA on this sort of thing are probably very similar to those of other countries around the world. I can't see any country being non-protectionist about their jobs, it's just a question of how many pragmatic exceptions the country allows, and I think the USA probably does pretty well there.
Not every U.S. citizen thinks the same way; it's a country of over 300 million people (the third most populous in the world in case you didn't know) and your over-generalization combined with your own elitism means that the USA will actually be better off if shitheads like you stay where you are. So by all means, stay out. The USA is not the only place in the world to travel, there are thousands of other beautiful countries for you to visit and shit upon, so by all means go be a prick elsewhere. Thanks.
The thing you have to realize, is that nobody will ever really accept preventable misfortunes to others as reasonable, no matter how much sense it makes. By which I mean, the populous of the USA as a whole will always want to bail out people who have made stupid mistakes (or taken stupid risks) and are now suffering for it. So it's not really possible to have a completely hands-off system in the USA where people really do pay fairly for their mistakes or misfortunes. Sure it would be great if it was entirely up to each individual to fund every aspect of their own lives, and to live (and die) with their choices, but when people start having to step over people lying on the sidewalk dying of preventable diseases, they're going to demand that the government do something about it.
In the end, it's just not practical to believe that the USA (or any society, for that matter) will accept a completely laissez-faire system. Given that, we should be working towards the most efficient and sustainable health care system that operates within the boundaries of what society deems acceptable. Also, we should be making slow changes to gradually alter the types of health care that are provided; terminal patients and people over 80 should not be using the majority of health care dollars in the USA, more money should be dedicated to preventative medicine and aggressive care for young people, who actually have a chance to live long enough to benefit from expensive care, and also have a chance to actually contribute back to the system that helped them out. Notice I said working slowly towards this. The first step would be to do away with the current medical policies of the USA that allow families to decide when to remove care for terminal patients, and put that decision back in the hands of doctors.
My wife has worked as a doctor in the USA and here in New Zealand also (we are U.S. citizens) and one thing that really struck me was when she told me that on her first day working at a NZ hospital, she was told by another doctor that she should never make a family feel like whether or not to continue care for a terminally ill relative was their choice, that she should always consider what she thinks they want, weigh it against her professional opinion, and present it as a choice that she has made so that the family would never feel guilty about ending care for a loved one. Contrast this to the USA where she is completely disallowed from deciding when to end care for terminally ill patients, and has to order 90 year olds who will never recover onto expensive life support because the family just won't accept reality.
Maybe it was your grandmother's time to go??? I don't know the specifics of your situation, obviously, but since she was your grandmother, presumably she was old, and old people die, you know.
The U.S. system spends a ridiculous amount of money keeping alive old people who should, quite frankly, be dead. My wife is a doctor and in American hospitals there are huge numbers of old people on life support and other expensive systems to keep them alive for no real benefit to anyone. Pull all those plugs, and maybe the U.S. system would be workable, who knows.
Now we live in New Zealand and my wife works for a hospital here. They have a much more balanced approach to medicine here, which is what I think allows their nationalized health care system to work. They don't give million-dollar cancer treatments to 85 year olds here. They understand that more resources should be dedicated to those who have a chance to be healthy than those who don't. You might think it is heartless, but consider how heartless it is for health care to be unaffordable to young healthy people as it is in the USA.
Oh and, taxes here aren't any higher than in the USA. I calculated my full tax burden from all sources in the USA, and it's very approximately the same (40%) as it is here. And considering how much more you get for your money in New Zealand (oh except a huge military blowing people up on your behalf), I'd say the USA could learn a thing or two from NZ.
That's actually a good thing. Linux is not appropriate for 99% of the general population to use. It just isn't. I don't know why everyone wants it to be so badly, but it isn't. Linux is for a technically competent end-user who doesn't mind having to work to learn and understand their system. Any non-technical end-user who wants to use Linux is 100% REQUIRED to have a Linux-competend friend or family member on call to help them with technical support as they need it, which they will.
I think it's GOOD for average computer users to think Linux is too hard for them. BECAUSE IT IS.
A sincere thank you for taking the time to write all of that, solely for my benefit. I really do appreciate it.
And a clarification: it's not that I think Apple is the only company that is going to do well over the next 10 - 20 years. It's just that Apple is the only technology company that I can think of that I feel truly excited about. I fully admit that I have not done much market research, and your points about IBM and 3M are very well taken, and convincing. If I have more money to invest, I will definitely look into those.
What I'm trying to say is, the criteria I have for making my own decisions about what stocks are worthwhile are based on a personal subjective opinion about which companies are in a strong position to innovate and increase their market share as well as create new markets for themselves. The top of that list for me, for companies bigger than start-ups, is Apple. I don't want to get into all of the reasons that I feel this way (the biggest one is that they have successfully wed a kick-ass Unix operating system with an innovative graphical desktop, which I think is something that should have happened 15 years ago and I'm glad that Apple has finally been the one to do it), because obviously arguments about the technical value of any particular technology can go on forever. My point is that I know more about some companies and less about others, certainly not enough about any of them to feel that I am a super well informed investor, but that in the little bit that I do know, Apple is the company that I have been most impressed by and have the most faith in. So I'm putting my money there.
It's only $5,000 in the end anyway. My 401K is (or WAS, a year or two ago) 20x that, and that's all in very large index funds, so it's not like a significant part of my retirement is based on pretending like I know what I'm doing. I know that I'm not the most competent or well-informed investor. But I've been very happy with the performance of AAPL in any case, it's done nearly as well as Google over the same time period that I've owned the Apple stock, and I don't know how one can realistically expect to do much better.
Don't get your panties in such a bundle. I said that if an HTTP request takes longer than 10 seconds to service, it's very, very, VERY likely never going to be serviced. This is based on years and years of using a web browser every single day.
Maybe 10 seconds is too short a time, I'm not really trying to quibble about the specific timeout. I'm just saying that in general, I find that programmers are too conservative when they choose timeouts. I'd rather prematurely terminate 1% of my requests that take longer than 10 seconds but would have been serviced if I'd just waited long enough, than wait 30 seconds for the other 99% of the requests that really were never going to complete.
In my NFS case, we *never* had a failure that resolved itself in a matter of minutes. If things went down, there was no reason to sit and wait indefinitely for them to come back up. Which is my point - on a fast network with a dedicated server, if a request takes longer than 10 seconds to service, you really should immediately timeout, because in such a situation, you can be 99% sure that it's never going to be serviced. If it was going to be serviced, it would have been within 10 seconds. A similar thing happens occasionally when I configure a new Linux system and mess something up and the network doesn't work, and some service on reboot wants to do a DNS lookup or something and it totally hangs my entire boot for MINUTES while it times out. In this day and age, minutes is too long to wait to timeout.
I wonder if the same concept applies to these devices that have to be queried. What hardware cannot respond nearly instantaneously to a discovery query? Why do bus controllers wait multiple seconds for responses? They should time out after like 20 milliseconds or some really low amount. Is there any device that doesn't respond nearly instantaneously? If so, WHY?
Divest... and buy what? A stock I had less confidence in?
Is that how you do your investing? "OK, stock A has doubled since I bought it, I'd better sell it. Hm, I think I'll buy stock B. I don't expect it to do as well as stock A going forward, but I don't want to lose my earnings on stock A. Oops, except I already think I'm more likely to lose those earnings by putting the money into stock B. Whatever shall I do?!?"
And what exactly should I have put it in? I am still confident that Apple is the best investment. You're saying I should have sold my Apple and bought something that I didn't expect to do as well? You're saying that because Apple went up 300% in that time period, that it would not do very well going forward?
I think you should only sell a stock and buy another if you think the other stock has a better chance of performing well than the one you already own. I feel that Apple is a good stock to own and I can't think of another that I have more confidence in. I will hold my Apple stock until my opinion changes.
I'm already heavily diversified. The amount I have in 401K is many times larger than the amount I have in AAPL. And AAPL has done much, much better for me over the last four years than my 401K has done. I kinda wish I'd put it all in AAPL to be honest:/
I could spend time researching and trying to figure out what would be a good stock to complement AAPL in a diversification scheme, and sell off half of my AAPL when it gets back up to $100 (which it will, I have no doubt) as you have suggested. But that just seems like too much *work* when the only company I can really say for certain that I have a sincere belief in the future of is AAPL. I'll just keep it all in AAPL. I'm still confident that when my daughter is ready to go to college in 16 years, AAPL will have done quite well for me.
Why does it take so long to discover those drives and other devices? Why does a CD-ROM drive take hundreds of milliseconds to be recognized during a POST? These things should happen basically instantly at modern hardware speeds, and yet they don't.
It reminds me of NFS timeouts. Years ago when I worked in an environment where everyone NFS mounted a shared filesystem, there would occasionally be outages on the server or in the network. My local system would lock up and hang for MINUTES while it timed out on requests to the NFS server. I could never understand why the thing didn't just time out in seconds rather than minutes. Even at that time, we were running 10 MBit or maybe 100 MBit network connections; if the remote system is going to respond, it's going to happen at MOST after a few second delay. Waiting for minutes just seems dumb.
The same sort of thing happens alot with web browsers too that wait far too long for servers to time out. If the server doesn't respond in 10 seconds, it's not going to respond. Ever. There's no reason to wait 30 seconds or longer to timeout an HTTP connection...
I bought AAPL at $50 a few years ago, it's the only individual stock besides AMD (which I got burned on in the late 1990s) I have ever purchased. For a while there AAPL was touching $200 and my wife and I said that our stock in AAPL is going to pay for our daughter's college education someday.
With the way that AAPL has been going lately, I think she's going to have to go to a community college:/
Ah, I see you actually know something, unlike me who just makes stuff up to complete the little bit that I do know.
Do you understand the point I was trying to make though? At one point I also believed that mass was some physical concrete thing. One day I realized that there are no physical concrete things at the atomic level and below; it's not really possible to describe things at that level using terms applicable to our macro world.
I get the feeling that the O.P. wants to believe that light must have mass because he's trying to reason using concepts that make sense at the scales that we can perceive, but those concepts do not apply at the atomic and subatomic scales.
It's my understanding that light is a series of alternating electric and magnetic fields, propogating through space. A changing electric field produces a changing magnetic field, which produces a changing electric field, which produces a changing magnetic field, and so on, and so on, forever, until something interrupts this process. And somehow (I can't remember how) each field is created at some infinitesimally small distance away from the previous one, after an infinitesimally small time has passed. And it's the ratio of the infinitesimally small distance over the infinitesimally small time which produces the constant speed of light, c. Is this overly simplistic definition at all accurate?
If so, then what causes this propogation to occur at a different rate in a medium? Is it just a fact of physics that the rate at which electric fields cause magnetic fields and vice verse is slower in the proximity of gravitational mass? Glass is composed of atoms with large gaps in between, in what 'parts' of the medium does light travel at 'c' and in what 'parts' does it travel at less than c? Does it travel at less than c when the light is passing within the electron shell of the atom? Or just sufficiently close to it? And whatever effects the medium has on light, why does it only have these effects when light is 'inside' it? Why isn't it like gravity, where the force is exerted an arbitrary distance away from the source of gravity, just with exponentially smaller and smaller effects? Shouldn't the speed of light be affected by whatever the medium is composed of even *outside* the medium? I mean, if I have a diamond the size of Jupiter, why does its effect on the speed of light only start the moment that light crosses the 'surface' of the medium?
Perhaps you'd like to define what you mean by 'mass'. What exactly is 'mass'?
If you say that mass is the stuff that makes objects solid, then what's 'solid'? If you say 'solid' means that nothing can penetrate it, then that's obviously wrong - neutrinos penetrate massive objects. Or do you think that there is some infinitesimally small little sized thing that can't be made any smaller, that nothing can penetrate, and that you'd call 'mass'?
Let me give you my take on mass. Mass is:
- a point from which gravitational forces are exerted
Mass is nothing more than a coordinate in space - a coordinate in space from which we can define gravitational effects originating. If something 'has mass' then it has a coordinate point that we can use in gravitational equations to determine how much gravitational force is being exerted from that point.
That's it. That's all mass is. It's the coordinates from which gravitational forces are exerted.
Light doesn't exert gravitational force on anything. It has no coordinates from which one would calculate the exertion of gravitational forces on other objects. Ergo, light has no mass.
Once again, if you are so hung up on this concept of 'mass' and insistent that objects must have it in order to 'push' other objects, then please define exactly what 'mass' is. If I were to build a microscope capable of magnifying to an infinite degree, what exactly would I see when I "zoomed in" on 'mass'?
My weak understanding of the nature of light might be at fault here, but isn't the mechanism of propogation of light completely different in vaccuum than in a physical medium?
In vaccuum, light is propogated by alternating magnetic/electric fields, isn't it?
And in medium, light is propogated by the absorption and re-emission of these electromagnetic waves by the atoms making up the medium, isn't it?
So these two speeds you are talking about - the speed of light in a vaccum and the speed of propogation of light in a medium - are measuring completely different things. No?
It's like talking about the difference between the top speed of a car on pavement, versus the top speed of a car when shot from a cannon. The car is moving in both cases, but it's not very meaningful to talk about the speed that a car can be shot from a cannon as relevent to the speed of the car as it drives on pavement.
So the original statement was correct: "light doesn't have its velocity increased... it starts off at the speed of light already". Even when travelling through a medium, the speed of light still remains at 'c' when travelling between the atoms. It's the absorption and re-emission of the light by the atoms that changes the apparent speed of propogation.
You are correct; I responded to you in "the wrong thread"; it was the other one where you made post after post talking about what a great target these things would be for terrorists. You only mentioned that aspect as *one* of your objections to the technology in this thread. But by the time I got to this thread and saw that you were still putting forth this argument, I felt a desire to respond.
There are good reasons for and against this technology. I don't see why different sizes of nuclear reactors with different operating characteristics is a bad thing, and this is the "small end" of the scale. I think you have NO justification for believing that these reactors represent a significant liability for terrorist attack.
Much of what you have written in the particular post I am responding to seems to hinge on the idea that there is no acceptable solution except a means for generating power that has no waste product. That is unreasonable, irrational, and unfair when couched in a debate where nuclear energy is constantly compared with the waste output of other means of power generation using misleading and false information.
I don't have the time or inclination to write the volumes necessary to respond to all of your points. You can claim that as some kind of victory if you want to.
So your whole argument is based on the concept that YOU cannot think of how to make a non-user-removable battery bigger than a user-removable battery?
On the one side of the debate, we have you, with an obvious sense of self-importance and the belief that if you can't think of a way to improve on something, then nobody can. On the other side of the debate, we have a multi-billion dollar company with a great incentive to improve their products in new and innovative ways, and with dedicated hardware and software engineering teams in the thousands.
It's not clear to me why you think anyone with a brain in their head would side with you on this one.
> Do you [have facts to back up your claim that the original post had no facts and was spouting bullshit]? Or are you just parroting Apple's marketing bullshit?
Yes, he does have facts to back up that claim. The fact is that your original post contained no factual content, merely an erroneous, poorly-thought-out opinion with no factual backing.
So his question still stands: do you have any facts to back up your stupid claim?
MrKaos, you have posted numerous times to this thread trying to convince everyone that these small reactors would be some kind of serious terrorist target. But your arguments are entirely unconvincing and your time would really be better spent elsewhere. Given all of the numerous existing facilities which could just as easily be targeted by all of the attack types that you mention, and with even more significant outcome than would result from blowing one of these small battery reactors up, what reason does anyone have to believe that these things would be targets? If you want real terror, you blow up an office building of innocent people. There would be zero, or very, very few, casualties from blowing up one of these small reactors. So why exactly are they more of a target than anything else? I won't be convinced that it's true just because the word "nuclear" is involved. You have to demonstrate the thought process that any terrorist would go through in deciding to attack one of these. Given that their goal would be to produce the maximum economic/social disruption or provoke the maximal military response, how does blowing up a small nuclear reactor, the result of which *might* be the contamination of a small area of land, further that goal? I suppose the worst thing that would happen is the destruction of several tens of millions of dollars worth of property. Big whoop.
Don't feed the troll. That guy has the lowest trolling Slashdot ID I have ever seen. I suppose he himself is like a cancer on Slashdot that continues to linger despite needing to be cut out a long time ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Wrong. Ogg is worse. It is the WORST technology name I have ever heard. Case closed.
Ogg just sounds stupid. If you don't think so, then I guess you are one of the few people who just don't get it. It sounds like something a retarded caveman would say.
Names matter. It's why significant amounts of marketing money are spent coming up with names for products. If Ford named a car the "Ogg" do you really think that having such a dumb name wouldn't prevent people from buying it?
I have heard alot of dumb technology names in my time, but Ogg is *far and away* the worst. I used to think Athlon sounded dumb, and it did, but after a while it stopped sounding that way. However, Ogg sounded terrible the first time I heard it 10 years ago or so, and it STILL sounds stupid. It is just a terrible name, plain and simple, and trust me, it's hurt the adoption of that standard, and will continue to do so.
I agrew with the O.P. Changing the name of the standard will do more good than that $100K and won't cost anything.
Well I have no idea what you are talking about, but if things really did go down as you said, I'd expect that the US "let" them steal it.
I think you'd find that most reasonable and intelligent Americans would agree with you on every point you have made (except about the French; I've never worked in France so I don't know if your characterization is accurate, but I'll take your word for it). It does suck for you to be put in such a precarious position, where losing your job would be much, MUCH more personally costly to you than it would be to a citizen or green card holder.
However, I'm betting that just about every other country in the world has similar policies. I know that here in NZ it is the same, you cannot be hired as a foreign employee unless the company can demonstrate that there is no domestic employee available for the job. H1B is an American program to make the same process easier in the USA but "balanced" wih conditions that make it harder for people who come on such a work visa to stay once the job is no longer there for them. I guess the idea is that if the only reason you let the person in is to work, and they can't work, then they can't stay.
And I'm sure that those on H1B know this ahead of time, and ought to be able to plan for it - don't even come unless you've got enough savings to tide you over and get you and your family back home if you lose your job.
Anyway, like I said, the policies in the USA on this sort of thing are probably very similar to those of other countries around the world. I can't see any country being non-protectionist about their jobs, it's just a question of how many pragmatic exceptions the country allows, and I think the USA probably does pretty well there.
Four more words: Fuck you too, asshole.
Not every U.S. citizen thinks the same way; it's a country of over 300 million people (the third most populous in the world in case you didn't know) and your over-generalization combined with your own elitism means that the USA will actually be better off if shitheads like you stay where you are. So by all means, stay out. The USA is not the only place in the world to travel, there are thousands of other beautiful countries for you to visit and shit upon, so by all means go be a prick elsewhere. Thanks.
The thing you have to realize, is that nobody will ever really accept preventable misfortunes to others as reasonable, no matter how much sense it makes. By which I mean, the populous of the USA as a whole will always want to bail out people who have made stupid mistakes (or taken stupid risks) and are now suffering for it. So it's not really possible to have a completely hands-off system in the USA where people really do pay fairly for their mistakes or misfortunes. Sure it would be great if it was entirely up to each individual to fund every aspect of their own lives, and to live (and die) with their choices, but when people start having to step over people lying on the sidewalk dying of preventable diseases, they're going to demand that the government do something about it.
In the end, it's just not practical to believe that the USA (or any society, for that matter) will accept a completely laissez-faire system. Given that, we should be working towards the most efficient and sustainable health care system that operates within the boundaries of what society deems acceptable. Also, we should be making slow changes to gradually alter the types of health care that are provided; terminal patients and people over 80 should not be using the majority of health care dollars in the USA, more money should be dedicated to preventative medicine and aggressive care for young people, who actually have a chance to live long enough to benefit from expensive care, and also have a chance to actually contribute back to the system that helped them out. Notice I said working slowly towards this. The first step would be to do away with the current medical policies of the USA that allow families to decide when to remove care for terminal patients, and put that decision back in the hands of doctors.
My wife has worked as a doctor in the USA and here in New Zealand also (we are U.S. citizens) and one thing that really struck me was when she told me that on her first day working at a NZ hospital, she was told by another doctor that she should never make a family feel like whether or not to continue care for a terminally ill relative was their choice, that she should always consider what she thinks they want, weigh it against her professional opinion, and present it as a choice that she has made so that the family would never feel guilty about ending care for a loved one. Contrast this to the USA where she is completely disallowed from deciding when to end care for terminally ill patients, and has to order 90 year olds who will never recover onto expensive life support because the family just won't accept reality.
Maybe it was your grandmother's time to go??? I don't know the specifics of your situation, obviously, but since she was your grandmother, presumably she was old, and old people die, you know.
The U.S. system spends a ridiculous amount of money keeping alive old people who should, quite frankly, be dead. My wife is a doctor and in American hospitals there are huge numbers of old people on life support and other expensive systems to keep them alive for no real benefit to anyone. Pull all those plugs, and maybe the U.S. system would be workable, who knows.
Now we live in New Zealand and my wife works for a hospital here. They have a much more balanced approach to medicine here, which is what I think allows their nationalized health care system to work. They don't give million-dollar cancer treatments to 85 year olds here. They understand that more resources should be dedicated to those who have a chance to be healthy than those who don't. You might think it is heartless, but consider how heartless it is for health care to be unaffordable to young healthy people as it is in the USA.
Oh and, taxes here aren't any higher than in the USA. I calculated my full tax burden from all sources in the USA, and it's very approximately the same (40%) as it is here. And considering how much more you get for your money in New Zealand (oh except a huge military blowing people up on your behalf), I'd say the USA could learn a thing or two from NZ.
"Researcher says Linux is better than Windows on Pedantic Asshole day."
There, is that better?
That's actually a good thing. Linux is not appropriate for 99% of the general population to use. It just isn't. I don't know why everyone wants it to be so badly, but it isn't. Linux is for a technically competent end-user who doesn't mind having to work to learn and understand their system. Any non-technical end-user who wants to use Linux is 100% REQUIRED to have a Linux-competend friend or family member on call to help them with technical support as they need it, which they will.
I think it's GOOD for average computer users to think Linux is too hard for them. BECAUSE IT IS.
A sincere thank you for taking the time to write all of that, solely for my benefit. I really do appreciate it.
And a clarification: it's not that I think Apple is the only company that is going to do well over the next 10 - 20 years. It's just that Apple is the only technology company that I can think of that I feel truly excited about. I fully admit that I have not done much market research, and your points about IBM and 3M are very well taken, and convincing. If I have more money to invest, I will definitely look into those.
What I'm trying to say is, the criteria I have for making my own decisions about what stocks are worthwhile are based on a personal subjective opinion about which companies are in a strong position to innovate and increase their market share as well as create new markets for themselves. The top of that list for me, for companies bigger than start-ups, is Apple. I don't want to get into all of the reasons that I feel this way (the biggest one is that they have successfully wed a kick-ass Unix operating system with an innovative graphical desktop, which I think is something that should have happened 15 years ago and I'm glad that Apple has finally been the one to do it), because obviously arguments about the technical value of any particular technology can go on forever. My point is that I know more about some companies and less about others, certainly not enough about any of them to feel that I am a super well informed investor, but that in the little bit that I do know, Apple is the company that I have been most impressed by and have the most faith in. So I'm putting my money there.
It's only $5,000 in the end anyway. My 401K is (or WAS, a year or two ago) 20x that, and that's all in very large index funds, so it's not like a significant part of my retirement is based on pretending like I know what I'm doing. I know that I'm not the most competent or well-informed investor. But I've been very happy with the performance of AAPL in any case, it's done nearly as well as Google over the same time period that I've owned the Apple stock, and I don't know how one can realistically expect to do much better.
Don't get your panties in such a bundle. I said that if an HTTP request takes longer than 10 seconds to service, it's very, very, VERY likely never going to be serviced. This is based on years and years of using a web browser every single day.
Maybe 10 seconds is too short a time, I'm not really trying to quibble about the specific timeout. I'm just saying that in general, I find that programmers are too conservative when they choose timeouts. I'd rather prematurely terminate 1% of my requests that take longer than 10 seconds but would have been serviced if I'd just waited long enough, than wait 30 seconds for the other 99% of the requests that really were never going to complete.
In my NFS case, we *never* had a failure that resolved itself in a matter of minutes. If things went down, there was no reason to sit and wait indefinitely for them to come back up. Which is my point - on a fast network with a dedicated server, if a request takes longer than 10 seconds to service, you really should immediately timeout, because in such a situation, you can be 99% sure that it's never going to be serviced. If it was going to be serviced, it would have been within 10 seconds. A similar thing happens occasionally when I configure a new Linux system and mess something up and the network doesn't work, and some service on reboot wants to do a DNS lookup or something and it totally hangs my entire boot for MINUTES while it times out. In this day and age, minutes is too long to wait to timeout.
I wonder if the same concept applies to these devices that have to be queried. What hardware cannot respond nearly instantaneously to a discovery query? Why do bus controllers wait multiple seconds for responses? They should time out after like 20 milliseconds or some really low amount. Is there any device that doesn't respond nearly instantaneously? If so, WHY?
Divest ... and buy what? A stock I had less confidence in?
Is that how you do your investing? "OK, stock A has doubled since I bought it, I'd better sell it. Hm, I think I'll buy stock B. I don't expect it to do as well as stock A going forward, but I don't want to lose my earnings on stock A. Oops, except I already think I'm more likely to lose those earnings by putting the money into stock B. Whatever shall I do?!?"
And what exactly should I have put it in? I am still confident that Apple is the best investment. You're saying I should have sold my Apple and bought something that I didn't expect to do as well? You're saying that because Apple went up 300% in that time period, that it would not do very well going forward?
I think you should only sell a stock and buy another if you think the other stock has a better chance of performing well than the one you already own. I feel that Apple is a good stock to own and I can't think of another that I have more confidence in. I will hold my Apple stock until my opinion changes.
I'm already heavily diversified. The amount I have in 401K is many times larger than the amount I have in AAPL. And AAPL has done much, much better for me over the last four years than my 401K has done. I kinda wish I'd put it all in AAPL to be honest :/
I could spend time researching and trying to figure out what would be a good stock to complement AAPL in a diversification scheme, and sell off half of my AAPL when it gets back up to $100 (which it will, I have no doubt) as you have suggested. But that just seems like too much *work* when the only company I can really say for certain that I have a sincere belief in the future of is AAPL. I'll just keep it all in AAPL. I'm still confident that when my daughter is ready to go to college in 16 years, AAPL will have done quite well for me.
Why does it take so long to discover those drives and other devices? Why does a CD-ROM drive take hundreds of milliseconds to be recognized during a POST? These things should happen basically instantly at modern hardware speeds, and yet they don't.
It reminds me of NFS timeouts. Years ago when I worked in an environment where everyone NFS mounted a shared filesystem, there would occasionally be outages on the server or in the network. My local system would lock up and hang for MINUTES while it timed out on requests to the NFS server. I could never understand why the thing didn't just time out in seconds rather than minutes. Even at that time, we were running 10 MBit or maybe 100 MBit network connections; if the remote system is going to respond, it's going to happen at MOST after a few second delay. Waiting for minutes just seems dumb.
The same sort of thing happens alot with web browsers too that wait far too long for servers to time out. If the server doesn't respond in 10 seconds, it's not going to respond. Ever. There's no reason to wait 30 seconds or longer to timeout an HTTP connection ...
I bought AAPL at $50 a few years ago, it's the only individual stock besides AMD (which I got burned on in the late 1990s) I have ever purchased. For a while there AAPL was touching $200 and my wife and I said that our stock in AAPL is going to pay for our daughter's college education someday.
With the way that AAPL has been going lately, I think she's going to have to go to a community college :/
Ah, I see you actually know something, unlike me who just makes stuff up to complete the little bit that I do know.
Do you understand the point I was trying to make though? At one point I also believed that mass was some physical concrete thing. One day I realized that there are no physical concrete things at the atomic level and below; it's not really possible to describe things at that level using terms applicable to our macro world.
I get the feeling that the O.P. wants to believe that light must have mass because he's trying to reason using concepts that make sense at the scales that we can perceive, but those concepts do not apply at the atomic and subatomic scales.
Thank you for clearing that up for me.
It's my understanding that light is a series of alternating electric and magnetic fields, propogating through space. A changing electric field produces a changing magnetic field, which produces a changing electric field, which produces a changing magnetic field, and so on, and so on, forever, until something interrupts this process. And somehow (I can't remember how) each field is created at some infinitesimally small distance away from the previous one, after an infinitesimally small time has passed. And it's the ratio of the infinitesimally small distance over the infinitesimally small time which produces the constant speed of light, c. Is this overly simplistic definition at all accurate?
If so, then what causes this propogation to occur at a different rate in a medium? Is it just a fact of physics that the rate at which electric fields cause magnetic fields and vice verse is slower in the proximity of gravitational mass? Glass is composed of atoms with large gaps in between, in what 'parts' of the medium does light travel at 'c' and in what 'parts' does it travel at less than c? Does it travel at less than c when the light is passing within the electron shell of the atom? Or just sufficiently close to it? And whatever effects the medium has on light, why does it only have these effects when light is 'inside' it? Why isn't it like gravity, where the force is exerted an arbitrary distance away from the source of gravity, just with exponentially smaller and smaller effects? Shouldn't the speed of light be affected by whatever the medium is composed of even *outside* the medium? I mean, if I have a diamond the size of Jupiter, why does its effect on the speed of light only start the moment that light crosses the 'surface' of the medium?
Perhaps you'd like to define what you mean by 'mass'. What exactly is 'mass'?
If you say that mass is the stuff that makes objects solid, then what's 'solid'? If you say 'solid' means that nothing can penetrate it, then that's obviously wrong - neutrinos penetrate massive objects. Or do you think that there is some infinitesimally small little sized thing that can't be made any smaller, that nothing can penetrate, and that you'd call 'mass'?
Let me give you my take on mass. Mass is:
- a point from which gravitational forces are exerted
Mass is nothing more than a coordinate in space - a coordinate in space from which we can define gravitational effects originating. If something 'has mass' then it has a coordinate point that we can use in gravitational equations to determine how much gravitational force is being exerted from that point.
That's it. That's all mass is. It's the coordinates from which gravitational forces are exerted.
Light doesn't exert gravitational force on anything. It has no coordinates from which one would calculate the exertion of gravitational forces on other objects. Ergo, light has no mass.
Once again, if you are so hung up on this concept of 'mass' and insistent that objects must have it in order to 'push' other objects, then please define exactly what 'mass' is. If I were to build a microscope capable of magnifying to an infinite degree, what exactly would I see when I "zoomed in" on 'mass'?
My weak understanding of the nature of light might be at fault here, but isn't the mechanism of propogation of light completely different in vaccuum than in a physical medium?
In vaccuum, light is propogated by alternating magnetic/electric fields, isn't it?
And in medium, light is propogated by the absorption and re-emission of these electromagnetic waves by the atoms making up the medium, isn't it?
So these two speeds you are talking about - the speed of light in a vaccum and the speed of propogation of light in a medium - are measuring completely different things. No?
It's like talking about the difference between the top speed of a car on pavement, versus the top speed of a car when shot from a cannon. The car is moving in both cases, but it's not very meaningful to talk about the speed that a car can be shot from a cannon as relevent to the speed of the car as it drives on pavement.
So the original statement was correct: "light doesn't have its velocity increased ... it starts off at the speed of light already". Even when travelling through a medium, the speed of light still remains at 'c' when travelling between the atoms. It's the absorption and re-emission of the light by the atoms that changes the apparent speed of propogation.
You are correct; I responded to you in "the wrong thread"; it was the other one where you made post after post talking about what a great target these things would be for terrorists. You only mentioned that aspect as *one* of your objections to the technology in this thread. But by the time I got to this thread and saw that you were still putting forth this argument, I felt a desire to respond.
There are good reasons for and against this technology. I don't see why different sizes of nuclear reactors with different operating characteristics is a bad thing, and this is the "small end" of the scale. I think you have NO justification for believing that these reactors represent a significant liability for terrorist attack.
Much of what you have written in the particular post I am responding to seems to hinge on the idea that there is no acceptable solution except a means for generating power that has no waste product. That is unreasonable, irrational, and unfair when couched in a debate where nuclear energy is constantly compared with the waste output of other means of power generation using misleading and false information.
I don't have the time or inclination to write the volumes necessary to respond to all of your points. You can claim that as some kind of victory if you want to.
So your whole argument is based on the concept that YOU cannot think of how to make a non-user-removable battery bigger than a user-removable battery?
On the one side of the debate, we have you, with an obvious sense of self-importance and the belief that if you can't think of a way to improve on something, then nobody can. On the other side of the debate, we have a multi-billion dollar company with a great incentive to improve their products in new and innovative ways, and with dedicated hardware and software engineering teams in the thousands.
It's not clear to me why you think anyone with a brain in their head would side with you on this one.
> Do you [have facts to back up your claim that the original post had no facts and was spouting bullshit]? Or are you just parroting Apple's marketing bullshit?
Yes, he does have facts to back up that claim. The fact is that your original post contained no factual content, merely an erroneous, poorly-thought-out opinion with no factual backing.
So his question still stands: do you have any facts to back up your stupid claim?
MrKaos, you have posted numerous times to this thread trying to convince everyone that these small reactors would be some kind of serious terrorist target. But your arguments are entirely unconvincing and your time would really be better spent elsewhere. Given all of the numerous existing facilities which could just as easily be targeted by all of the attack types that you mention, and with even more significant outcome than would result from blowing one of these small battery reactors up, what reason does anyone have to believe that these things would be targets? If you want real terror, you blow up an office building of innocent people. There would be zero, or very, very few, casualties from blowing up one of these small reactors. So why exactly are they more of a target than anything else? I won't be convinced that it's true just because the word "nuclear" is involved. You have to demonstrate the thought process that any terrorist would go through in deciding to attack one of these. Given that their goal would be to produce the maximum economic/social disruption or provoke the maximal military response, how does blowing up a small nuclear reactor, the result of which *might* be the contamination of a small area of land, further that goal? I suppose the worst thing that would happen is the destruction of several tens of millions of dollars worth of property. Big whoop.
Don't feed the troll. That guy has the lowest trolling Slashdot ID I have ever seen. I suppose he himself is like a cancer on Slashdot that continues to linger despite needing to be cut out a long time ago.