Any prerequisite for voting can easily be abused for discriminatory purposes. The solution is education and free access to information. It's not going to solve things, but your solution will certainly not.
I think it's essential in a democracy, that also the voice of everyone is part of the process. It's the only way to avoid a revolution by those you'd otherwise exclude. It's those that have-not, that are most easily stirred into action, as they have nothing to lose. For that reason I also think that prisoners should be allowed to vote. At least those with access to news and current events.
And Starship Troopers was as much a criticism on society as anything. It was not a description of a possible glorious future.
I still think that in such cases democracy fares better than the other options. At least in a democracy something like a green party can exist and have their positions be heard by most voters. If they get at least some representatives, then they can also influence decision making directly. For example, in Germany the green party has been in in the government for several years up to the last elections, and Germany now has some of the most aggressive programs for more green energy in the world.
I think it's a big flaw in first-past-the-pole systems, like the US, that it's much harder for minorities to get influence. I also think that more representative systems are less rigid than the two party system, and thus less corruptible. I also think that the need for coalition governments prevent parties from becoming too extreme. The big advantage of the two-party system is that it will nearly always give someone a majority, preventing any possible hiatus in governing because of stalled coalition negotiations.
Minimise work in progress. The key is to put a limit on the things which will be actively worked on.
I think this is very good advice on multiple levels. Not just as it makes you a rare commodity in the company, but also because if your developers can focus on one thing at a time it gets done better and sooner than if they'd have to do several things in parallel.
The reason main reason why tablets are a success, is because a lot of what we do with computers nowadays is pure media consumption. A lot of people generate very little beyond a tweet, email or facebook message.
For that kind of usage a tablet is great, especially if the battery can last for 8+ hours.
The tablet isn't replacing the PC or it's cousins the laptop and smartphone. It's replacing books, magazines, newspapers, TVs, notebooks, sketchbooks, clipboards, etc.
It's a media consumption device. It has the potential to be as disruptive as the PC was. It could replace the TV and nearly all things we print to, or write on paper.
It has had this potential for a long time already. It's only that with the iPad we're starting to narrow down to a working design. It will take a decade before we'll see it become ubiquitous. By 2020 we'll know if the paperless office has finally arrived.
I think that once these things get below $50, they'll start replacing books and newspapers at an astonishing rate. Companies like Xerox could go the way of Kodak.
Yes, thanks for calling almost any programmer who started with BASIC a retard. When I was 7 years old I obviously should had went with ASM instead of something that was easily understandable and gave instant results, and hence motivated me to keep programming all the way to the current day.
I've started on BASIC as well, but it would not be my first choice to teach someone programming. Back then it was the only thing around, everything came with a BASIC interpreter.
I think nowadays I would go with Python. It's not perfect either, but as an interpreted language, it has a lot of the advantages that made BASIC such a hit back in the day. A big problem is that nowadays it's harder to do graphical stuff and there is no nice IDE to hold people's hand. With BASIC graphics were easy, if your flavour supported it.
It's one of the things that Borland had going for it with TurboPascal/Delphi: A nice language for learning and a good IDE. (TP6 and up at least). But I don't think going that route would be a good idea in 2012.
Yeah, there are still some of those high end tape systems in our basement. Used a lot in radioastronomy up until a few years ago. A single tape unit can do 500 Mbit/s, we have 16 I think. 8 Gbit/s to 2 decade old hardware is still impressive. They don't get used much any more. No new recording, only playback of some old data. But when they are running it's impressive, IIRC they do 20 m/s tape speed.
Particle physics and astronomy are some of the disciplines that have the biggest amount of numbers to crunch.
The limits of what can be done often are major design constraints for the devices being built.
Everyone knows about CERN, but I'm currently working on LOFAR, a low frequency radiotelescope in NW-europe (NL, DE, SE, UK, FR)
Our regular data flow is 200 Gbit/s, we can get up to 10 Tbit/s in burst mode. Even after heavy averaging we write about a Petabyte a week to disk. Most data only is kept for up to 4 weeks, we only archive about 5 Petabytes of end products a year.
It's not Google or one of CERN's big toys, but then it has cost only a fraction of what they spent.
LOFAR is one of the first radiotelescopes to use off the shelve hardware (IBM BlueGene, GPUs, high end linux clusters). Before it, most hardware was custom designed and built DSPs and other custom electronics coupled with very high end tape systems (500+ MB/s to a single tape going at 20 m/s, these things were amazing!).
What I really like about the modern smartphones is that instead of a lot of gadgets I only need to carry one. It's all of the following rolled into one: Map, TomTom, MP3 player, phone, address book, calendar, alarm clock, compass, portable gaming device, portable email device, portable browser, music tuner, metronome, noteblock, etc.
I used to carry an iPod, PDA, mobile phone, metronome/tuner, compass, TomTom, Gameboy, and sometimes even more stuff. I used to buy coats with a lot of big pockets.
What I've seen between myself anf a lot of colleagues and friends that own smartphones is that those with an iPhone buy the applications, while those with an Android phone use illegitimate copies.
I think the main reason people buy more stuff on the iPhone, is that it's much harder to put illegal copies on an iPhone than it is to put something on an Android.
The biggest purchases I've made on my iPhone are various TomTom applications. These have been very useful during business and holiday travels. Most of my friends and colleagues with Android phones all have illegal copies of map apps and trade them a lot.
Android is the new Windows.
I think it might be good news for Google, but bad news for software developers.
When they saw their business tanking they got scared and changed their mind,
I'm surprised that apparently it had a big enough effect that it did change their mind. Can anyone guess how many domains might have left them over this? Or make a guess how many that would need to be? How big is GoDaddy?
You could also list them as a deterrent to criminal activities
No. It just means that the criminals will be carrying guns as well, and will try to shoot first.
If nobody of the regular public has guns, then a lot of the reasons for criminals to carry them go away as well. No death penalty helps here as well. The only criminals who carry a gun are those that are planning to use it, mostly against other criminals in such cases. But even there other methods like a bomb might be preferred.
In numbers: USA murders per 100,000: 5.5 (3.5 with firearms) Netherlands murders per 100,000: 1.4 (0.4 with fireams)
As I understand it, their intention is to figure out how to combat something like this when it will appear in the wild. Which it will do at some point, given how viruses work.
To figure out how to combat it, they needed something to study and test.
I understood that the research was done to better understand how these types of viruses work. I'm not an expert, so I can't explain it any better.
It is supposed to help scientists understand how to combat viruses like this. Preferably before something like this appears in the wild. (viruses tend to do that).
By publishing, they share it with others trying to do the same. And maybe with someone with a death wish who wants to use it as a weapon. But that's a risk for far more research.
And even then, maybe someone reads the research and figures out a way to combat this. That would help us both in the cases where a madman makes this and when it eventually appears in the wild naturally.
The rest of the world does not suffer CEO's who get paid 800% of what their employees do.
Yes they do. 800% isn't that much, it's only a 8x difference. Try a 200x difference (20000%) and we're getting in the area of compensation of the directors of large multinationals.
There are plenty of corporations with a few thousand employees where the CEO makes more than a million a year. Inside and outside the USA. If the average wage is 50,000, then you already have the 800% mark up.
I have colleagues of all ages. Each have their advantages.
What really makes people productive ad higher ages is continuous will to keep learning.
One of my colleagues just turned 70 yesterday and I'd take him any day over the 45-50 year olds at my first employer, as they hadn't learned a new thing in the last 20 years, while the guy who could be my father learned Python last year.
It's actually hard to make photos of a lot of stuff, like food or flowers. A lot of stuff perishes very quickly under powerful hot lighting.
Long before digital manipulation there were real-world tricks. Very few of the things you'd see in a food add are the actual thing. A lot of it is wood, plastic and such.
No. The problem with US elections is that they can be won by throwing money at the problem more easily than by talking to voters and listening to their concerns.
Things will change when the amount of funding a candidate has makes no big difference on their chances.
I do think that the winner-take-all type elections are a real part of the problem. It's like a world where your only choices are Microsoft or Apple.
While I don't think the democracy in my own country is perfect, I think it has three distinct advantages: - With proportional representation you get more choice and different voices heard. It makes it easier for a new party to grow if people are disenfranchised with existing parties. It usually also leads to coalition governments, with less extreme policies. - Strict control on election financing. Campaigns are funded by publicly disclosed private donations and public funding based on how well you did in previous elections, membership of your party. There is little to no corporate funding involved, although there still are some special interests. It does tend to favour incumbents a little bit. - No districts or states, so representatives do not have a specific region/area they represent. The constitution even explicitly states they should act and vote "free of consultation".
Established parties can go from 30% to 5% in a decade, and new parties can grow from nothing to 25% in the same time frame.
It's far from perfect, it's biggest flaw being the need for sometimes lengthy negotiations to form a coalition government. I do think that it does a much better job representing the voters and keeping corporate interests out.
Our politicians are equally clueless about technological issues though, except for a few. It still makes them quite gullible to some of the industries lies.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. Although two big scary dogs might work as well.
Any prerequisite for voting can easily be abused for discriminatory purposes. The solution is education and free access to information. It's not going to solve things, but your solution will certainly not.
I think it's essential in a democracy, that also the voice of everyone is part of the process. It's the only way to avoid a revolution by those you'd otherwise exclude. It's those that have-not, that are most easily stirred into action, as they have nothing to lose. For that reason I also think that prisoners should be allowed to vote. At least those with access to news and current events.
And Starship Troopers was as much a criticism on society as anything. It was not a description of a possible glorious future.
I still think that in such cases democracy fares better than the other options. At least in a democracy something like a green party can exist and have their positions be heard by most voters. If they get at least some representatives, then they can also influence decision making directly. For example, in Germany the green party has been in in the government for several years up to the last elections, and Germany now has some of the most aggressive programs for more green energy in the world.
I think it's a big flaw in first-past-the-pole systems, like the US, that it's much harder for minorities to get influence. I also think that more representative systems are less rigid than the two party system, and thus less corruptible. I also think that the need for coalition governments prevent parties from becoming too extreme. The big advantage of the two-party system is that it will nearly always give someone a majority, preventing any possible hiatus in governing because of stalled coalition negotiations.
Minimise work in progress. The key is to put a limit on the things which will be actively worked on.
I think this is very good advice on multiple levels. Not just as it makes you a rare commodity in the company, but also because if your developers can focus on one thing at a time it gets done better and sooner than if they'd have to do several things in parallel.
The reason main reason why tablets are a success, is because a lot of what we do with computers nowadays is pure media consumption. A lot of people generate very little beyond a tweet, email or facebook message.
For that kind of usage a tablet is great, especially if the battery can last for 8+ hours.
The tablet isn't replacing the PC or it's cousins the laptop and smartphone. It's replacing books, magazines, newspapers, TVs, notebooks, sketchbooks, clipboards, etc.
It's a media consumption device. It has the potential to be as disruptive as the PC was. It could replace the TV and nearly all things we print to, or write on paper.
It has had this potential for a long time already. It's only that with the iPad we're starting to narrow down to a working design. It will take a decade before we'll see it become ubiquitous. By 2020 we'll know if the paperless office has finally arrived.
I think that once these things get below $50, they'll start replacing books and newspapers at an astonishing rate. Companies like Xerox could go the way of Kodak.
Yes, thanks for calling almost any programmer who started with BASIC a retard. When I was 7 years old I obviously should had went with ASM instead of something that was easily understandable and gave instant results, and hence motivated me to keep programming all the way to the current day.
I've started on BASIC as well, but it would not be my first choice to teach someone programming. Back then it was the only thing around, everything came with a BASIC interpreter.
I think nowadays I would go with Python. It's not perfect either, but as an interpreted language, it has a lot of the advantages that made BASIC such a hit back in the day. A big problem is that nowadays it's harder to do graphical stuff and there is no nice IDE to hold people's hand. With BASIC graphics were easy, if your flavour supported it.
It's one of the things that Borland had going for it with TurboPascal/Delphi: A nice language for learning and a good IDE. (TP6 and up at least). But I don't think going that route would be a good idea in 2012.
I hate spell checkers that correct-as-you-type. I'm fine with those that put a red line under a word it thinks is wrong.
My general problem is that I write a lot of Dutch and English, but spell checkers aren't smart enough yet to recognize that.
Yeah, there are still some of those high end tape systems in our basement. Used a lot in radioastronomy up until a few years ago. A single tape unit can do 500 Mbit/s, we have 16 I think. 8 Gbit/s to 2 decade old hardware is still impressive. They don't get used much any more. No new recording, only playback of some old data. But when they are running it's impressive, IIRC they do 20 m/s tape speed.
I've seen plenty of SGI and Cray and VAX iron in the early nineties at the various physics departments when I was an undergrad.
Particle physics and astronomy are some of the disciplines that have the biggest amount of numbers to crunch.
The limits of what can be done often are major design constraints for the devices being built.
Everyone knows about CERN, but I'm currently working on LOFAR, a low frequency radiotelescope in NW-europe (NL, DE, SE, UK, FR)
Our regular data flow is 200 Gbit/s, we can get up to 10 Tbit/s in burst mode. Even after heavy averaging we write about a Petabyte a week to disk. Most data only is kept for up to 4 weeks, we only archive about 5 Petabytes of end products a year.
It's not Google or one of CERN's big toys, but then it has cost only a fraction of what they spent.
LOFAR is one of the first radiotelescopes to use off the shelve hardware (IBM BlueGene, GPUs, high end linux clusters). Before it, most hardware was custom designed and built DSPs and other custom electronics coupled with very high end tape systems (500+ MB/s to a single tape going at 20 m/s, these things were amazing!).
What I really like about the modern smartphones is that instead of a lot of gadgets I only need to carry one. It's all of the following rolled into one: Map, TomTom, MP3 player, phone, address book, calendar, alarm clock, compass, portable gaming device, portable email device, portable browser, music tuner, metronome, noteblock, etc.
I used to carry an iPod, PDA, mobile phone, metronome/tuner, compass, TomTom, Gameboy, and sometimes even more stuff. I used to buy coats with a lot of big pockets.
Now I just carry a smartphone.
What I've seen between myself anf a lot of colleagues and friends that own smartphones is that those with an iPhone buy the applications, while those with an Android phone use illegitimate copies.
I think the main reason people buy more stuff on the iPhone, is that it's much harder to put illegal copies on an iPhone than it is to put something on an Android.
The biggest purchases I've made on my iPhone are various TomTom applications. These have been very useful during business and holiday travels. Most of my friends and colleagues with Android phones all have illegal copies of map apps and trade them a lot.
Android is the new Windows.
I think it might be good news for Google, but bad news for software developers.
When they saw their business tanking they got scared and changed their mind,
I'm surprised that apparently it had a big enough effect that it did change their mind. Can anyone guess how many domains might have left them over this? Or make a guess how many that would need to be? How big is GoDaddy?
You could also list them as a deterrent to criminal activities
No. It just means that the criminals will be carrying guns as well, and will try to shoot first.
If nobody of the regular public has guns, then a lot of the reasons for criminals to carry them go away as well. No death penalty helps here as well. The only criminals who carry a gun are those that are planning to use it, mostly against other criminals in such cases. But even there other methods like a bomb might be preferred.
In numbers:
USA murders per 100,000: 5.5 (3.5 with firearms)
Netherlands murders per 100,000: 1.4 (0.4 with fireams)
http://hsx.sagepub.com/content/5/4/293.refs
http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/offenses_reported/violent_crime/murder.html
As I understand it, their intention is to figure out how to combat something like this when it will appear in the wild. Which it will do at some point, given how viruses work.
To figure out how to combat it, they needed something to study and test.
As I understood this is quite normal procedure.
That assumes the terrorist wants to live. There might be people around who want to wipe out humanity entirely if they could.
I understood that the research was done to better understand how these types of viruses work. I'm not an expert, so I can't explain it any better.
It is supposed to help scientists understand how to combat viruses like this. Preferably before something like this appears in the wild. (viruses tend to do that).
By publishing, they share it with others trying to do the same. And maybe with someone with a death wish who wants to use it as a weapon. But that's a risk for far more research.
And even then, maybe someone reads the research and figures out a way to combat this. That would help us both in the cases where a madman makes this and when it eventually appears in the wild naturally.
I would mod you up if I could.
As I understand, a large part of current US Senators and Representatives pride themselves on never having used the internet.
At all.
http://motherboard.vice.com/2011/12/16/dear-congress-it-s-no-longer-ok-to-not-know-how-the-internet-works
The rest of the world does not suffer CEO's who get paid 800% of what their employees do.
Yes they do. 800% isn't that much, it's only a 8x difference. Try a 200x difference (20000%) and we're getting in the area of compensation of the directors of large multinationals.
There are plenty of corporations with a few thousand employees where the CEO makes more than a million a year. Inside and outside the USA. If the average wage is 50,000, then you already have the 800% mark up.
I have colleagues of all ages. Each have their advantages.
What really makes people productive ad higher ages is continuous will to keep learning.
One of my colleagues just turned 70 yesterday and I'd take him any day over the 45-50 year olds at my first employer, as they hadn't learned a new thing in the last 20 years, while the guy who could be my father learned Python last year.
Keep learning!
Asimov wrote the same thing at the age of 70.
It's actually hard to make photos of a lot of stuff, like food or flowers. A lot of stuff perishes very quickly under powerful hot lighting.
Long before digital manipulation there were real-world tricks. Very few of the things you'd see in a food add are the actual thing. A lot of it is wood, plastic and such.
Engineers and scientists don't promise pink unicorns to everybody and are generally not very interested in money and power.
This is precisely why I fervently believe we should only elect people to office who don't want the job.
Ha! Socrates already said that 25 centuries ago.
No. The problem with US elections is that they can be won by throwing money at the problem more easily than by talking to voters and listening to their concerns.
Things will change when the amount of funding a candidate has makes no big difference on their chances.
I do think that the winner-take-all type elections are a real part of the problem. It's like a world where your only choices are Microsoft or Apple.
While I don't think the democracy in my own country is perfect, I think it has three distinct advantages:
- With proportional representation you get more choice and different voices heard. It makes it easier for a new party to grow if people are disenfranchised with existing parties. It usually also leads to coalition governments, with less extreme policies.
- Strict control on election financing. Campaigns are funded by publicly disclosed private donations and public funding based on how well you did in previous elections, membership of your party. There is little to no corporate funding involved, although there still are some special interests. It does tend to favour incumbents a little bit.
- No districts or states, so representatives do not have a specific region/area they represent. The constitution even explicitly states they should act and vote "free of consultation".
Established parties can go from 30% to 5% in a decade, and new parties can grow from nothing to 25% in the same time frame.
It's far from perfect, it's biggest flaw being the need for sometimes lengthy negotiations to form a coalition government. I do think that it does a much better job representing the voters and keeping corporate interests out.
Our politicians are equally clueless about technological issues though, except for a few. It still makes them quite gullible to some of the industries lies.