Follow Slashdot blog updates by subscribing to our blog RSS feed

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Org-Mode in Emacs (Score 3, Informative) 133

It's really a "geek only" tool but emacs org-mode is great for me for organizing my work. The big plus is that the format is plain text so you can use version control to manage it. I use drop box and leave the files on there. I usually use one per project and then a master file.

Here's a specific guide to using it with GTD: http://orgmode.org/worg/org-gtd-etc.html

Comment The killer feature are the online exercises! (Score 1) 134

The online exercises for this course are great! They change every time so one can practice until one has mastered the concept. This was the real missing component in these online math courses. Most textbooks I've looked at don't have answers to exercises which makes it difficult to check that one has truly mastered the material without a teacher to act as a gatekeeper to the right answers.

Comment Re:I'd be sorry (Score 5, Interesting) 496

Actually, it's more like Nikolai Bukharin's hysterical personal letter to Stalin on the eve of his execution:

For example:

...
5) My heart boils over when I think that you might believe that I am guilty of these crimes and that in your heart of hearts you think that I am really guilty of all of these horrors. My head is giddy with confusion, and I feel like yelling at the top of my voice. I feel like pounding my head against the wall. What am I to do? What am I to do? ...

Comment Google Wins! (Score 3, Interesting) 158

So Microsoft and Apple both wanted to screw up web video by only supporting the heavily patented H.264 standard instead of Google's open Web-M standard. So Google went and bought Motorola Mobility and is now throwing their own patent strategy back at them. If they claim H.264 isn't patentable than they lose that way otherwise Google can charge huge royalties and make them pay for being so greedy.

Brilliant chess moves as usual by the Google team.

Comment Not a true currency. (Score 4, Informative) 232

The mark of a true currency is that it can be used to pay U.S tax liabilities. For Americans at least, anything else is just, at best, a commodity subject to capital gains taxes. For example, if you buy gold coins, or facebook credits, and then sell them after their value has doubled you'll have to pay capital gains tax on the amount they appreciated against the dollar. if you barter the gold coins, or facebook credits, for services or goods you will have to pay taxes on that barter transaction in dollars. If the dollar appreciates in value against other currencies though, there is no capital gains tax to pay, even though your dollar might buy more.

Comment Your 80 and you look 40! How do you look so young? (Score 3, Interesting) 368

So what's your secret to looking so young? You made an appearance in the documentary, "Transcendent Man". For those of you who haven't seen it, it is a documentary about Ray Kurzweil's continuing quest to take enough supplements and pursue enough radical life-extension techniques to survive long enough to see the technological singularity and thus live forever. Are you pursuing similar supplement regimes and/or life extension techniques to keep you looking young? If so, what works and what doesn't?

Comment I think I know where this is going (Score 2) 98

They use a pagerank like algorithm to analyze the person's social network (links in an out) and the person's actions (page content) and then compute a "TerrorScore" much like a google "Page Rank". They then knock these guys off one by one with UAVs. The whole thing runs unattended. Nobody knows exactly why people get killed, that's just the algorithm. They can't turn it off either unfortunately, because then the terrorists would win! Quick, somebody write a screenplay :).

Comment The flaw is central planning is NP hard! (Score 5, Insightful) 1271

The flaws in Marxism were all figured out in the 1920s. Here, let me explain:

If you have goods that are directly consumable like bread or cheese you can divide them up among people evenly. That works. What doesn't work and is essentially an NP hard problem without money is how goods that are used to make other goods are used. Let's take an example of a freight railroad. What do you ship on the railroad? Shoes, fuel, tiny sub-assemblies of combine harvesters? If you have a piece of construction equipment, what do you build with it? A school, a factory, a playground, a road? In a modern economy all this creates an astonishing amount of complexity that is intractable from a central planning point of view.

How does this work in a capitalist system? Simple : Prices. The price of everything determines what the railroad ships, what the construction equipment builds, etc. In a complex investment decision, such as where to build a factory and what to produce in it, the managers use estimations based on prices of the factors of production and how much they can get for the goods produced to determine whether to build a factory, and where to build it. Prices are a distributed highly multi-threaded information system that tells people what is scarce and what is plentiful from moment to moment and thus directs production.

Prices are somewhat distorted by bank credit money creation and the associated credit cycles, which is what causes the booms and busts in capitalism. That can be fixed, but that's a topic for another day.

The history of the Soviet Union is full of massive planning errors. They built many towns in the middle of Siberia that they abandoned once the Soviet Union fell because the production output was minimal, they cost an enormous amount to heat and deliver supplies to and nobody wanted to live there. They didn't know this until they knew the real prices for running these cities. No communist government, except for the psychopathic regieme of Pol Pot ever dared to completely get rid of money, and even he admitted it was his biggest mistake!

If you want to dig into the theory of the planning problem in capitalism, I'd recommend Mises "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth"

http://mises.org/resources.aspx?Id=71e20725-ee72-4adb-ade2-34dfdabf7755

Comment Re:All it takes (Score 1) 165

The key here is to firewall off different parts of the organization from other parts. The HR department does not need access to the development network, etc. They should be on different domain controllers with different domain admins entirely. Attempts to probe the network from the inside should be monitored and investigated by IT. This is very difficult on a publicly accessible internet server as there are 10s of thousands of bot attacks in a day, but should be doable inside the network. This takes a lot of IT time and is often viewed as frustrating and completely unnecessary if the organization's executives don't understand the importance of protecting against internal threats.

Comment Rain is a big emergency in North Chile! (Score 1) 195

They had rain a few years ago in Iquique, another town in North Chile that hardly ever gets rain. It caused quite a disruption because many poorer people have cardboard roofs on their houses, which ,obviously, do not work particularly well when it rains.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/21/tiny-drizzle-wreaks-havoc_n_242057.html

Slashdot Top Deals

He has not acquired a fortune; the fortune has acquired him. -- Bion

Working...