Under the new system, Ciganer said in a telephone interview, errors that were discovered in the transition could show up multiple times in the accounting process: once as an erroneous credit in one column, then as a debit to delete the error, then as a credit in the correct column. By this reckoning, a $40 billion contract that stretched over nine years and several separate NASA centers generated $120 billion worth of entries, and these were turned over to the auditors.
Basically, it's not that they lost 500 billion, it's that the total number of accounting errors totals 500 billion...I think this is a silly way of counting errors, as it grossly inflates the size of the problem by automatically tripling the size of a problem for every mis-classified entry.
Honestly, this looks like headline-grabbing by their auditors. (Who, it should be noted, lost the NASA contract to keep doing their auditing.)
You know what? I think that's a good thing, for one reason: his sexual orientation really has nothing to do with his mathematical and scientific achievements. Honestly, I don't care that he was gay. He was a great mathematician. That's all that matters.
Woonda? c'mon. It's got to be something weirder and more junior-high-sex-joke-ish than that if she's going to be a Bond girl. How about M. Mary Bounce?
unless the record companies do what some claim they do, and attempt to recoup their initial expenditures from the royalty, rather than the gross profit from each individual sale
I don't know about the majors, but I interned for an indie label a few years ago and that is exactly what they did. It was written into their contract with the band and everything. The owner was, in fact, proud of how badly he was screwing the folks who signed with him.
Theoretically, artist's royalties come out of the record label's cut. Whether that actually happens is an exercize left for the reader.
Typically, artists get $1/CD, or about 1/16th of the selling price (after the labels recoup all sorts of insane costs). Assuming the same distribution of money, the artists *should* be getting somewhere between 99/16 and 70/16 or between 6 and 4 cents per song (depending on their contract).
Yes, folks did see the Atom Bomb coming, but only the folks who understood the Physics (there was even a patent filed for an A-Bomb in the UK in 1934). The difference between then and now is that communication is much easier, so people proclaiming "this is the next amazing thing" are actually heard, even if they are full of it.
If it's for personal use, no, you don't have to pay. But, if you make a business of buying CDs on the cheap in Russia and importing them to America to re-sell at below-market rates, then yes, you probably have to pay. (This exact scenario is causing quite a fuss in the perscription drug world, as well.)
The Russian site is effetively exporting music with their website (this is part of the reason why iTunes was restricting membership to US folks only), which is a fairly questionable area of internet/US law right now. It might be legal...or it might just be too much damn trouble to stop them in Russian court.
No, games<->movies don't work. The reason is that they are entertaining in totally different ways, and the translation doesn't work between them.
Example: most adventure/shoot-em-up games are almost all fighting, with the occasional puzzle. These are entertaining because they tax your reflexes or your strategic thinking. It's fun to do that yourself, and so they're entertaining, but it's boring to watch someone else do that for more than about 10 minutes.
Also, because there's so much time spent in fighting & puzzles, the story background and character development in games is often (yes, often, not always, but very often) weak to non-existent. A shining example: Final Fantasy. That game has more character development than most adventure games do, and it was still a boring movie.
Short answer: there's a long gap between things that are fun to *do* and things that are fun to *watch*. The only thing that clearly falls in both catagories is sex, but I'm not going to go there right now.
It's a matter or risk management. Honestly, the banks don't care if the occasional ATM gets stolen, broken into, etc. As long as the rate of theft and the cost of that theft is below the money they're making by providing the service, the banks can write off losses due to certain levels of insecurity.
Voters, on the other hand, to *not* accept that it's okay for their votes to be lost, changed, stolen, etc. The risk profile for a voting machine is very different from an ATM, in that a voting machine much be *much* more secure than an ATM. Diebold is having problems because they're used to working in situations where some loss is okay, but voting machines aren't one of those situations.
The concern is that this is no longer a "narrow segment" that's being outsourced. It's actually large parts of companies.
At this point, any job that can telecommute is a valid target for outsourcing. For example, companies are already outsourcing large sections of their HR, IT and Finance departments, hospitals are outsourcing large sections of their billing and radiology depts, and the manufacturing sector outsourced/offshored their factories years ago. This all leaves us with very little actual value-producing tasks that are performed in the US.
The problem is, if we're going to recover economically, we need a new technology to lead that recovery. But, we need one that won't be immediately outsourced. So, it can't be anything knowledge-related, since anything that can be digitized will just be outsourced.
The RIAA and the lot have a choice: they can enter the market and compete on fair terms. I can't...moving to India is not a valid option for me, or for most Americans. If labor were as free to move as capital were, I'd have no problem with jobs moving around. It isn't, and that's the big problem with outsourcing.
As many others have pointed out, there are two major problems with this: 1) The watchlists are horribly broken, and include many people who are not actually suspicious (there's even been a lawsuit filed by several people for interference with their free movement over this). If the watchlists actually *worked*, you might have a point. But, they don't. 2) This system actually gives attackers an advantage by allowing them to test what we're looking for. It therefore allows them to be more confident that if they don't fall under our criteria, they will have more leeway as to what they can smuggle on board a plane.
Truly random searches are the only way to go, honestly. While that will piss people off, and leads to ridiculous searches of grannies & the like, it's also the only way to be sure that attackers can't game the system.
Of course, airline security is only rarely about actually securing the flight, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Writers are *supposed* to do this. Adding character traits (or, in this case, talking about real ones for real people) makes characters more "human", and more accessible. If your characters are nothing but foils for the plot, you end up with something like "Atlas Shrugged." Whatever you may think of the politics in Atlas Shrugged, the characters are painfully two-dimensional, and a beautiful example of how *not* to do character development. The point of adding extra details (like Randy's cereal-eating habits, or Turing's homosexuality) about a character is to make them closer to a living being.
Heh. Those help, and I like them (have a pair myself) but they really only cut about 20dB, and that's only at a limited range of frequencies (about 60Hz-4kHz). They'll help a bit, but you'll still get pounded for at very low frequencies (like the engine rumble).
1k-4k aren't really "high frequencies" in the grand scheme of things. You can hear up to 15k-20k, depending on how much damage you've done to your hearing with loud concerts, etc.
But, your main point is true: the human ear has a very strong peak in its sensitivity around 1kHz. 1kHz sounds will be percieved to be much louder than ones either much higher or much lower than that.
Those aren't actually cancelling the noise you're hearing, they're just masking it. Basically, it's not that it's quieter in your office, but the noise floor is higher, burying the annoying sounds in white noise.
The same thing happens on airplanes. If you're ever flying somewhere, bring your walkman/mp3 player. Compare the volume you have it set to for normal use with what you have to crank it to when on the airplane. It's pretty disturbing how high the noise floor is on an airplane. (I wear earplugs on airplanes for just this reason.)
Unfortunately, as mentioned in the article, the FCC does not agree with you. The public airwaves are their domain, and whether it's your property or not, they rule the airwaves. You may *not* interfere with the signals that they've licensed to be there.
Now, if your interference is limited to your home only, they'll tend to ignore it, as it isn't worth the trouble, but if you start cutting service in "public" areas (subways, malls, theaters, etc), without an okay from them (which, I presume, hospitals have), you're violating Federal law. They may not hunt you down, but it's still against the law.
Actually, as a dual-national myself (UK/US), I think I can explain some of this. The US only recognizes *some* dual nationality possibilities. Being born in the US, to NZ parents would normally require you to choose between US and NZ at age 18. Same if you were born overseas to US parents.
The only reason I'm getting away with it is that my father is British, and my mom's American, which means I *inherit* both. But, as the post above mentioned, I only show the US passport to the US customs folks. (and vice versa for the UK/EU customs folks.) While I suspect they'd handle it fine, it's never a good idea to tax their brains.
Honestly, leading in innovation is not the way to win in business. You want to be *second* to market (maybe even third or fourth) with any new idea, but not first. Why? Because anyone who actually *leads* will always make mistakes, since they're trying something no one has done before. Someone following behind can take the idea, fix a few things people complain about, and make it their own. It's cheaper to develop, cheaper to market, and cheaper to train, since the users already know what you're trying to make, and will be happy to see you making something "better" than your competitors.
I hate to sound cynical, but in any market where someone follows this strategy, the real innovators will either patent everything, or get screwed.
Slashdot Mirror
Basically, it's not that they lost 500 billion, it's that the total number of accounting errors totals 500 billion...I think this is a silly way of counting errors, as it grossly inflates the size of the problem by automatically tripling the size of a problem for every mis-classified entry.
Honestly, this looks like headline-grabbing by their auditors. (Who, it should be noted, lost the NASA contract to keep doing their auditing.)
Actually, I'm waiting for the next virus/worm to change your activation key to a pirated one. That'll be interesting to watch.
No, clearly Linus -> Oppenheimer. The real question is, who maps to Teller? I can't decide between RMS and ESR.
You know what? I think that's a good thing, for one reason: his sexual orientation really has nothing to do with his mathematical and scientific achievements. Honestly, I don't care that he was gay. He was a great mathematician. That's all that matters.
Make sure the paper's black, though.
Woonda? c'mon. It's got to be something weirder and more junior-high-sex-joke-ish than that if she's going to be a Bond girl. How about M. Mary Bounce?
I don't know about the majors, but I interned for an indie label a few years ago and that is exactly what they did. It was written into their contract with the band and everything. The owner was, in fact, proud of how badly he was screwing the folks who signed with him.
Theoretically, artist's royalties come out of the record label's cut. Whether that actually happens is an exercize left for the reader.
Typically, artists get $1/CD, or about 1/16th of the selling price (after the labels recoup all sorts of insane costs). Assuming the same distribution of money, the artists *should* be getting somewhere between 99/16 and 70/16 or between 6 and 4 cents per song (depending on their contract).
You mean, like these guys?
Yes, folks did see the Atom Bomb coming, but only the folks who understood the Physics (there was even a patent filed for an A-Bomb in the UK in 1934). The difference between then and now is that communication is much easier, so people proclaiming "this is the next amazing thing" are actually heard, even if they are full of it.
Radar clocks Mini at Mach 3
If it's for personal use, no, you don't have to pay. But, if you make a business of buying CDs on the cheap in Russia and importing them to America to re-sell at below-market rates, then yes, you probably have to pay. (This exact scenario is causing quite a fuss in the perscription drug world, as well.)
The Russian site is effetively exporting music with their website (this is part of the reason why iTunes was restricting membership to US folks only), which is a fairly questionable area of internet/US law right now. It might be legal...or it might just be too much damn trouble to stop them in Russian court.
Example: most adventure/shoot-em-up games are almost all fighting, with the occasional puzzle. These are entertaining because they tax your reflexes or your strategic thinking. It's fun to do that yourself, and so they're entertaining, but it's boring to watch someone else do that for more than about 10 minutes.
Also, because there's so much time spent in fighting & puzzles, the story background and character development in games is often (yes, often, not always, but very often) weak to non-existent. A shining example: Final Fantasy. That game has more character development than most adventure games do, and it was still a boring movie.
Short answer: there's a long gap between things that are fun to *do* and things that are fun to *watch*. The only thing that clearly falls in both catagories is sex, but I'm not going to go there right now.
It's a matter or risk management. Honestly, the banks don't care if the occasional ATM gets stolen, broken into, etc. As long as the rate of theft and the cost of that theft is below the money they're making by providing the service, the banks can write off losses due to certain levels of insecurity.
Voters, on the other hand, to *not* accept that it's okay for their votes to be lost, changed, stolen, etc. The risk profile for a voting machine is very different from an ATM, in that a voting machine much be *much* more secure than an ATM. Diebold is having problems because they're used to working in situations where some loss is okay, but voting machines aren't one of those situations.
The concern is that this is no longer a "narrow segment" that's being outsourced. It's actually large parts of companies.
At this point, any job that can telecommute is a valid target for outsourcing. For example, companies are already outsourcing large sections of their HR, IT and Finance departments, hospitals are outsourcing large sections of their billing and radiology depts, and the manufacturing sector outsourced/offshored their factories years ago. This all leaves us with very little actual value-producing tasks that are performed in the US.
The problem is, if we're going to recover economically, we need a new technology to lead that recovery. But, we need one that won't be immediately outsourced. So, it can't be anything knowledge-related, since anything that can be digitized will just be outsourced.
The RIAA and the lot have a choice: they can enter the market and compete on fair terms. I can't...moving to India is not a valid option for me, or for most Americans. If labor were as free to move as capital were, I'd have no problem with jobs moving around. It isn't, and that's the big problem with outsourcing.
heh. It's from the Princess Bride.
Vizzinni: He didn't fall? Inconcievable!
Inigo: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
<Inigo Montoya>You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it means.</Inigo Montoya>
As many others have pointed out, there are two major problems with this:
1) The watchlists are horribly broken, and include many people who are not actually suspicious (there's even been a lawsuit filed by several people for interference with their free movement over this). If the watchlists actually *worked*, you might have a point. But, they don't.
2) This system actually gives attackers an advantage by allowing them to test what we're looking for. It therefore allows them to be more confident that if they don't fall under our criteria, they will have more leeway as to what they can smuggle on board a plane.
Truly random searches are the only way to go, honestly. While that will piss people off, and leads to ridiculous searches of grannies & the like, it's also the only way to be sure that attackers can't game the system.
Of course, airline security is only rarely about actually securing the flight, so I guess I shouldn't be surprised.
Writers are *supposed* to do this. Adding character traits (or, in this case, talking about real ones for real people) makes characters more "human", and more accessible. If your characters are nothing but foils for the plot, you end up with something like "Atlas Shrugged." Whatever you may think of the politics in Atlas Shrugged, the characters are painfully two-dimensional, and a beautiful example of how *not* to do character development. The point of adding extra details (like Randy's cereal-eating habits, or Turing's homosexuality) about a character is to make them closer to a living being.
Heh. Those help, and I like them (have a pair myself) but they really only cut about 20dB, and that's only at a limited range of frequencies (about 60Hz-4kHz). They'll help a bit, but you'll still get pounded for at very low frequencies (like the engine rumble).
1k-4k aren't really "high frequencies" in the grand scheme of things. You can hear up to 15k-20k, depending on how much damage you've done to your hearing with loud concerts, etc.
But, your main point is true: the human ear has a very strong peak in its sensitivity around 1kHz. 1kHz sounds will be percieved to be much louder than ones either much higher or much lower than that.
Those aren't actually cancelling the noise you're hearing, they're just masking it. Basically, it's not that it's quieter in your office, but the noise floor is higher, burying the annoying sounds in white noise.
The same thing happens on airplanes. If you're ever flying somewhere, bring your walkman/mp3 player. Compare the volume you have it set to for normal use with what you have to crank it to when on the airplane. It's pretty disturbing how high the noise floor is on an airplane. (I wear earplugs on airplanes for just this reason.)
Unfortunately, as mentioned in the article, the FCC does not agree with you. The public airwaves are their domain, and whether it's your property or not, they rule the airwaves. You may *not* interfere with the signals that they've licensed to be there.
Now, if your interference is limited to your home only, they'll tend to ignore it, as it isn't worth the trouble, but if you start cutting service in "public" areas (subways, malls, theaters, etc), without an okay from them (which, I presume, hospitals have), you're violating Federal law. They may not hunt you down, but it's still against the law.
Actually, as a dual-national myself (UK/US), I think I can explain some of this. The US only recognizes *some* dual nationality possibilities. Being born in the US, to NZ parents would normally require you to choose between US and NZ at age 18. Same if you were born overseas to US parents.
The only reason I'm getting away with it is that my father is British, and my mom's American, which means I *inherit* both. But, as the post above mentioned, I only show the US passport to the US customs folks. (and vice versa for the UK/EU customs folks.) While I suspect they'd handle it fine, it's never a good idea to tax their brains.
Honestly, leading in innovation is not the way to win in business. You want to be *second* to market (maybe even third or fourth) with any new idea, but not first. Why? Because anyone who actually *leads* will always make mistakes, since they're trying something no one has done before. Someone following behind can take the idea, fix a few things people complain about, and make it their own. It's cheaper to develop, cheaper to market, and cheaper to train, since the users already know what you're trying to make, and will be happy to see you making something "better" than your competitors.
I hate to sound cynical, but in any market where someone follows this strategy, the real innovators will either patent everything, or get screwed.