Perhaps it's a side topic, but in my opinion patents do more harm than good. Big expensive labs that do nothing but invent are a rarity now. Most discoveries happen in the course of making something specific and would happen anyhow. Patents just hamper the little tinkerers and make lawyers rich.
The history of science is littered with ideas considered crazy.
And quantum physics takes the cake. It's like particles interact with probabilistic ghost instances of themselves.
It has almost magical properties, but clever loopholes always prevent you from using these magical properties for anything practical, like a lawyer pointing out the fine-print exception when you go to purchase something with your magical coupon.
One of these days somebody will find a way to power an EM-drive probe using cold-fusion, and make everybody look like fools.
Seriously, though, there may be a need for "high-yield" research, which is essentially a high potential payoff but low probability of success. All research is a form of investment, and just like investments there's a market and need for such.
As long as everybody knows the general intended and expected risk profile, it shouldn't be disparaged. It's just one "kind" of research.
Some researchers may prefer the potential prospect of being really famous rather than doing hum-drum incremental research.
Would you take a say 1-in-500 chance of being as famous as Jonas Salk over being yet another ordinary and forgotten scientist over time? Maybe not, but a handful of researcher will want to take that gamble. Dreamers exist.
Citizens accept a certain degree of inequality because we know it's necessary for capitalism to work properly. However, populations won't accept HUGE inequality very long. The claim that huge inequality is necessary for "motivation" is utterly ridiculous.
It's not just about "fairness", but the very political system. The rich buy laws they want via campaign contributions and political ads, short-circuiting democracy.
Look at their attack on climate change research and solutions. They don't want to pay for greener energy, and so spend boatloads of money to discredit the idea. And it works, roughly 40% of the population fell for it.
American working class we're gonna need to get over our childish "I can make it on my own" attitudes and bring back organized labor and the power and protection it offers
That's indeed one of the most powerful propaganda gimmicks of the plutocrats: claiming unions are for unmanly wimps, and if you can't "cowboy" it out there on your own, you deserve to perish. They spend a lot of money to shove that message up the population.
Of course, the rich have their crony "buddy system" that does pretty much what a union does. Bill Gates had access to a minicomputer as a kid because his parents had money and lived in the better school district. Mitt, Trump, and the Bush bro's had daddy's money and influence.
But one problem is that one should get several years of hands-on experience in programming before becoming an analyst. But if more of it is offshored, then there are fewer chances to get such experience.
You can't just major in "systems analyst" and be good at it out of school. A lot of it is about working with people and business to learn how people communicate ideas, often indirectly, and how they interact with technology and UI's.
Office politics is often a big part of it, and if you don't navigate it well, you are toast. They usually don't teach that in school because it would be admitting humans are ego-driven Dilbertian idiots, and schools feel presenting that reality is beneath them.
Steve Jobs indeed picked somebody like him to succeed him: a selfish liar. He better hope he also has Jobs' product vision, otherwise he'll eventually join the "displaced" workers he pisses on.
Our press is largely based on capitalism, and capitalism tries to maximize customers. This means hype and marketing tricks are used to get and keep customers. Accuracy and balance is secondary.
The only solution is to get rid of capitalistic reporting. However, "socialistic" reporting has its own downsides, such as higher taxes, boring or bad writing, sluggish use of resources, and anti-capitalistic bias.
But I have to say, the BBC is probably better than most commercial news overall. Perhaps because they are balanced by the need to partially compete with commercial news. Maybe the solution is to find a good balance between too much and too little competition.
Stop going after the company and go directly after the people that chose to cut corners
Smart slimebags don't leave a trail. They may give a verbal order over the phone or in person, for example, so that there is no email or document trail.
Or ignore warnings, and then later claim that they never saw it or didn't understand it when interrogated. They won't explicitly say "no". The worse you can get them on is incompetence or "light" negligence, which is usually not a criminal offense.
The bottom line is that if the US wages war on ANY medium or large country, we should expect infrastructure outages and perhaps sabotage. That's probably the same for all countries. There are surely gaps lurking about ready to be exploited.
Buy a good book to read when everything electric is out. A month supply of food and water could also come in handy. If you are in bigger city; and power, traffic signals, trains, truck ignition systems, etc. start goofin' up, it will take a while to get enough basic supplies in.
Lay off the sysadmin, the DBA, the network admin, and the developer...Hire a "full stack developer" and pay him one below-market...
It's difficult to convince many managers that prevention is worth it. They are probably lied to by vendors and past staff enough such that they only pay for clear-cut and immediate needs rather than hard-to-verify prevention.
A lot of vendors and spinner employees claim crap like, "Oh, you need to purchase/build/install a Flux capacitor to prevent the thibble-bop from overloading and crashing the dookitron." After being burned a couple of times, they don't pay even for legitimate prevention because they cannot tell the difference, and so skip ALL prevention.
It's a problem that plagues many forms of technology and infrastructure, such as building construction, plumbing, car repair, etc. The end user cannot easily verify prevention claims.
Yes, one can google around for advice, but it could take several hours to absorb it, and still require specialized experience to evaluate. Time is money for businesses.
If it's the main line of business (primary source of profit), then managers usually know what to look for. However, if it merely supports the main line of biz, such as retail and character licensing in this case, then they are typically unfamiliar with it and skeptical.
What's with the zero mod? Is this considered racist? I don't get it. Explanation desired, please.
Note that Hello Kitty is Japanese, while my joke mostly pokes fun at Chinese restaurant names. (I don't know if and how much Japanese restaurants borrow from that.) But I'm sure US restaurant names have patterns that can be poked fun of also. Mimi's, Arbie's, Charlie's, etc. for example.
The person I replied to also poked fun at Chinese naming tendencies, but they didn't get mod-slammed.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps it's a side topic, but in my opinion patents do more harm than good. Big expensive labs that do nothing but invent are a rarity now. Most discoveries happen in the course of making something specific and would happen anyhow. Patents just hamper the little tinkerers and make lawyers rich.
A big recession or mass automation-related job loss could trigger it. More:
http://www.politico.com/magazi...
My (limited) understanding is that it's about 1/3 as powerful per weight unit for the duration of typical missions because of its slower decay.
Might put an ion out.
It's happened before.
It's now the Tell toolbar.
Whale-nado is the followup to Sharknado.
And quantum physics takes the cake. It's like particles interact with probabilistic ghost instances of themselves.
It has almost magical properties, but clever loopholes always prevent you from using these magical properties for anything practical, like a lawyer pointing out the fine-print exception when you go to purchase something with your magical coupon.
One of these days somebody will find a way to power an EM-drive probe using cold-fusion, and make everybody look like fools.
Seriously, though, there may be a need for "high-yield" research, which is essentially a high potential payoff but low probability of success. All research is a form of investment, and just like investments there's a market and need for such.
As long as everybody knows the general intended and expected risk profile, it shouldn't be disparaged. It's just one "kind" of research.
Some researchers may prefer the potential prospect of being really famous rather than doing hum-drum incremental research.
Would you take a say 1-in-500 chance of being as famous as Jonas Salk over being yet another ordinary and forgotten scientist over time? Maybe not, but a handful of researcher will want to take that gamble. Dreamers exist.
Didn't they supply Apple with the GUI?
So, scientists are shaken up over the delayed seismometer mission?
See, you're doing it.
Citizens accept a certain degree of inequality because we know it's necessary for capitalism to work properly. However, populations won't accept HUGE inequality very long. The claim that huge inequality is necessary for "motivation" is utterly ridiculous.
It's not just about "fairness", but the very political system. The rich buy laws they want via campaign contributions and political ads, short-circuiting democracy.
Look at their attack on climate change research and solutions. They don't want to pay for greener energy, and so spend boatloads of money to discredit the idea. And it works, roughly 40% of the population fell for it.
That's indeed one of the most powerful propaganda gimmicks of the plutocrats: claiming unions are for unmanly wimps, and if you can't "cowboy" it out there on your own, you deserve to perish. They spend a lot of money to shove that message up the population.
Of course, the rich have their crony "buddy system" that does pretty much what a union does. Bill Gates had access to a minicomputer as a kid because his parents had money and lived in the better school district. Mitt, Trump, and the Bush bro's had daddy's money and influence.
I suspect that also.
But one problem is that one should get several years of hands-on experience in programming before becoming an analyst. But if more of it is offshored, then there are fewer chances to get such experience.
You can't just major in "systems analyst" and be good at it out of school. A lot of it is about working with people and business to learn how people communicate ideas, often indirectly, and how they interact with technology and UI's.
Office politics is often a big part of it, and if you don't navigate it well, you are toast. They usually don't teach that in school because it would be admitting humans are ego-driven Dilbertian idiots, and schools feel presenting that reality is beneath them.
And I'm changing my title from "troll" to "agitation engineer".
Steve Jobs indeed picked somebody like him to succeed him: a selfish liar. He better hope he also has Jobs' product vision, otherwise he'll eventually join the "displaced" workers he pisses on.
Both: It will be Trek-like for the 1% inside the gated communities, and Mad-Max-like for the 99% on the outside.
Sturgeon's Law also applies to reporting in general.
Our press is largely based on capitalism, and capitalism tries to maximize customers. This means hype and marketing tricks are used to get and keep customers. Accuracy and balance is secondary.
The only solution is to get rid of capitalistic reporting. However, "socialistic" reporting has its own downsides, such as higher taxes, boring or bad writing, sluggish use of resources, and anti-capitalistic bias.
But I have to say, the BBC is probably better than most commercial news overall. Perhaps because they are balanced by the need to partially compete with commercial news. Maybe the solution is to find a good balance between too much and too little competition.
Smart slimebags don't leave a trail. They may give a verbal order over the phone or in person, for example, so that there is no email or document trail.
Or ignore warnings, and then later claim that they never saw it or didn't understand it when interrogated. They won't explicitly say "no". The worse you can get them on is incompetence or "light" negligence, which is usually not a criminal offense.
The bottom line is that if the US wages war on ANY medium or large country, we should expect infrastructure outages and perhaps sabotage. That's probably the same for all countries. There are surely gaps lurking about ready to be exploited.
Buy a good book to read when everything electric is out. A month supply of food and water could also come in handy. If you are in bigger city; and power, traffic signals, trains, truck ignition systems, etc. start goofin' up, it will take a while to get enough basic supplies in.
If they attacked Comcast, nobody would know the difference.
Spartacus can kick your anonymous ass
It's difficult to convince many managers that prevention is worth it. They are probably lied to by vendors and past staff enough such that they only pay for clear-cut and immediate needs rather than hard-to-verify prevention.
A lot of vendors and spinner employees claim crap like, "Oh, you need to purchase/build/install a Flux capacitor to prevent the thibble-bop from overloading and crashing the dookitron." After being burned a couple of times, they don't pay even for legitimate prevention because they cannot tell the difference, and so skip ALL prevention.
It's a problem that plagues many forms of technology and infrastructure, such as building construction, plumbing, car repair, etc. The end user cannot easily verify prevention claims.
Yes, one can google around for advice, but it could take several hours to absorb it, and still require specialized experience to evaluate. Time is money for businesses.
If it's the main line of business (primary source of profit), then managers usually know what to look for. However, if it merely supports the main line of biz, such as retail and character licensing in this case, then they are typically unfamiliar with it and skeptical.
What's with the zero mod? Is this considered racist? I don't get it. Explanation desired, please.
Note that Hello Kitty is Japanese, while my joke mostly pokes fun at Chinese restaurant names. (I don't know if and how much Japanese restaurants borrow from that.) But I'm sure US restaurant names have patterns that can be poked fun of also. Mimi's, Arbie's, Charlie's, etc. for example.
The person I replied to also poked fun at Chinese naming tendencies, but they didn't get mod-slammed.
Oh, that's Donald Trump.