Oh good grief. 15 years after the DotCon implosion, when industry leaders and Congress responded to the collapse in tech employment by ramping up H-1b guest worker visas, we're supposed to believe this is news?
There's not only too much javascript, it looks like you've got some sort of movie trying to load. (I didn't wait for it to time out, but I think it would have.)
I can easily handle most stores, but not that one.
It will be interesting to see whether this research on the phenomenon in the large scale produces insights useful at the smaller scale of fusion plasma confinement.
In case it's not clear, magnetic reconnection is a phenomenon of magnetic field/plasma interaction. (Without the plasma and its currents (or extreme accelerations like those around black holes) the magnetic field wouldn't be simultaneously twisted up and bent around so it can reconnect differently.
I see two ways this might apply to plasma confinement in fusion systems:
* It may give insight into the details of plasma instabilities and lead to ways to suppress them - enough for a practical reactor.
* It might lead to a way to use the phenomenon deliberately, to produce a (probably pulsed) past-breakeven plasma confinement, along the lines of Dense Plasma Focus.
The hit is taken by the store owners and their landlords. [Insurance usually has escape clauses for riots.]
Just heard on the news that more than half of the stores destroyed last night in Fergusun were minority owned, too. (I think it was actually "black owned" but I'm not sure.)
IMHO the main point of the burning is so that, once the stores have been looted, the evidence of who did it is largely destroyed. Video survelience tapes, fingerprints, serial number records,
To heck with the local charges - why the hell hasn't Holder's Justice Department filed federal civil rights charges against the officer?
They're working on it.
They generally hold off on those until the state's criminal justice aparatus has had a chance to product the verdict they want. They'll file once the state system has "failed". Like maybe this week or next.
Black Friday starts tonight. Insurance companies to take the hit.
No. The hit is taken by the store owners and their landlords. Insurance policies generally exclude damage during riots, along with other civil insurrections and wars.
The net result of rioting that involves looting and/or store trashing is stores that move out or go out of business. Lots of little family businesses are bankrupted, while the big box store chains look at all the red ink and don't reopen. (That's why the Koreans were on the roofs of their stores with guns during the Rodney King post-verdict activities in Los Angeles.)
Think there's a shortage of decent-paying (or paying at all) jobs in Ferguson? Just wait... (This is what happened to Oakland, California, which is mopping up the last holdouts tonight "in sympathy with Ferguson".)
Lenovo's stupid touchpad destroys the posting, just as it's being posted, once again:
They're not interested in any kind of justice. They're only interested in revenge.
And loot.
Christmas is coming up, after all. Time to do a little shopping. You can afford a lot more stuff when you apply the five-finger discount.
Assuming you don't get captured or shot, of course. But so far the cops are just standing back and letting the looters go at it. The hundred forty plus shots reported (at last count) are all attributed to the "protestors". (No word on whether any are from those defending themselves their families, or their property from looters and vandals.)
They're not interested in any kind of justice. They're only interested in revenge.
And loot.
Christmas is coming up, after all. Time to do a little shopping. You can afford a lot more stuff when you apply the five-finger discount.
attributed to the "protestors". (No word on whether any are from those defending themselves their families, or their property from looters and vandals.)
I also subscribe to the "great filter" theory. About 25 years after the radio was invented, we were busy gassing each other in trenches, followed closely by a global pandemic, then mass genocide, then teetering on the edge of nuclear war. That's not a very wide window for aliens to notice our presence, if they rely on artificial radio waves to detect intelligent life.
My take is that technological improvements make radio sound like noise after a few decades. Early radios systems are very simple things which have signals (CW, AM, FM,
Modern radios (such as spread spectrum systems, especially OFDM) squeeze nearly the Shannon Limit out of precious bandwidth (and also be frugal with transmit power) by using nearly all of it to carry information. This makes them virtually indistinguishable from a celestial object with a little extra heat (buried among things like stars, which have a LOT of heat).
It was only about 120 years from when Hertz and Tesla started making easily detectable radio waves to the Analog Television Shutdown, a significant milepost in the decommissioning of easily detectable radio signatures. I expect that, within anther few decades, the Earth will be emitting very little that might be recognizable as a radio signature of intelligent life, unless we expend a bunch of energy sending such a signature deliberately.
So my solution to the mystery expressed in the Drake Equation is that L (the length of time for which such civilizations release detectable signals into space) is short, not due to the falls of civilizations, but to economic incentives to use the aether only in ways that are no longer noticeable at a distance.
Assume for a second, that you have a pond. And a new type of algae has been introduced into the pond. Algae grows quickly, so let's assume a doubling time of a day. 24 hours. The concern is that this new algae is gross and smells bad and nobody wants to have a pond full of this disgusting algae. Unfortunately, treating the algae is expensive and nobody wants to treat the entire pond.
The question is: One week before the pond is entirely covered in algae, would enough have appeared that you would even notice? At a "gut instinct" level, we'd guess that perhaps a quarter or a third or at least a tenth of the pond would be covered in algae, but that gut level instinct would be completely wrong. Just 1.56% of the pond would be covered - right about the point where it becomes noticeable at all.
The point is this: information processing capabilities, globally, aren't just growing exponentially: the rate of growth is itself also growing exponentially. Just about exactly at the time where we notice actual, verifiable intelligence of any kind is just about exactly the time where we have to assume it's ubiquity.
Previous discussions talk about the number of cross connects and how far away we are from the mark without commenting that the Internet itself allows for an infinite number of cross connects - my laptop can connect directly to billions of resources immediately with an average 10-25ms delay. Now, it's very likely that what is meant by "cross connects" in the context of AI is substantially different than the "cross connect" capability that global networking enables, but it's equally true that people generally fail at understanding exponential growth. It's why 401ks are so universally underutilized, why credit cards are such big business, and why the concept of the "singularity" seems like such hocus pocus at the gut level.
Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. At 1:35 A.M. Eastern time it runs out of disk space and crashes horribly
Why limit it to nations? Major corporations are as capable as most countries, and only a little bit more endangered if caught.
Despite the "only security through obscurity" meme, you need to understand it, not just say it.
There are only two types of security:
1) security through obscurity,
and,
2) security through inaccessibility.
They can, however, be intelligently combined.
Please note that private key encryption is security through obscurity. Cutting the phone line is security through inaccessibility. Saying that "it's secure because they can't get the prime factors of that key" is security through obscurity.
Despite the meme, security through obscurity is widely and properly used. What's wrong if false obscurity, which is common. If you don't properly assess just how obscure your secret is, then you have a security failure.
So having a monoculture is reduced security, because that means that there are a much larger number of entities seeking to discover the secret...and any breach in security cannot be easily contained. If you don't have a monoculture, then a single breach cannot be as widely damaging, and is thus also less valuable to find. This is a sort of network effect.
OTOH, a diverse community means that more effort needs to be devoted to security, because each branch is a separate thing to be maintained. So it's not all benefit or all loss, it's a mixture.
FWIW, I choose not to have flash installed on my system, despite the fact that it would have some utility, because I consider that the weakness that it presents is not worth the benefit. The ability of refuse to have such a service installed allows increased security...at a cost. For some people the cost is higher than they are willing to pay. This reduction of the attack surface is a form of security through obscurity mixed with security through inaccessibility, i.e., I have become inaccessible to some forms of attact, and I have reduced my visibility to many attackers.
Most of the answers to your questions are "it depends" I don't understand what you mean by a "software shop" - is this a consulting company, a company that produces a large scale product, a company that produces a small product, an online service or what?
Your ratio of junior to senior developers depends on the kind of product you're producing. If you have an application that has a big, overarching architecture and then lots of relatively simple modules for specific cases, you want many junior developers to pound out those simple modules (e.g. different types of data entry screens).
Coding standards and standardization are always good. For a small shop you're best off looking around for one that you like and adopting it rather than trying to make your own from scratch because it is not a revenue producer and you can burn endless hours in meetings arguing about spacing, comment style, etc. Make an executive decision and move forward.
Tools and languages, again, it depends. Use the right tool for the job.
Since you don't know any of these things or how to make the tradeoffs, what you need is to hire a director of engineering who does because if you try to hire some developers and apply the vast depth of wisdom that you've acquired from this thread on Slashdot you're probably going to fail miserably.
Actually, my company has been seeing a particular airport having a lot of power outages that has seen at one field workstation be lost per outage (not hardware dead, but the PC has to be re-imaged). Considering how long the UPSs I have will last (and I got the UPS for my PC for like $80 and my network equipment for like $90), its worth it considering the thousands of dollars they are protecting and the headaches they are saving. Data loss is my bigger concern, especially since I am in an area prone to brown outs. Before I got mine, I lost things several times because of a random ass power outage.
With your bare hands?!?
