Back when I was still programming, i once got a spec sheet written on a post-it.
The programmers task is to create the concrete system which the executives are only daydreaming about. When executives give you such a document, they are giving you the freedom you to design, code, and implement the thing. Once you have created it, Code is Law, and the program gains its own authority.
The problem with pain scales is that sometimes they don't include all the numbers.
Is it the NSA and FBI engaged in evildoing? Or are they stopping evildoing?
Even if the NSA was actually stopping terrorist plots, the end would not justify the means. Given the size and scope of their operations, any plots which they might have foiled are literally negligible considerations. The NSA is now a domestic surveillance apparatus and nothing more.
There is no solution to this situation that I could think of.
Bankruptcy.
Bankruptcy will -- in a vary painful but mercifully short way -- clear the debts, crystallize the losses of those who have invested poorly, reward the prudent with decreased asset prices, and ultimately free those trapped in debt to start their lives again. It's harsh, but the slow debt/deflationary purgatory we are now living in is death by a thousand cuts by comparison.
No so. Throughout most of history, mathematicians did not have the luxury of pandering to nationalism, militarism, pacifism or other temporal concerns. The numbers of mathematicians were so low that from the very earliest days mathematics was an international scholarly activity.
While it is true that mathematics was employed by engineers and others in many applied fields, mathematics itself has never been subject to restriction or exclusion on the basis of its applications. The applications themselves perhaps, but never the mathematics. Even in the Soviet Union, mathematicians were free to research and publish as they pleased.
This, like so many things in science, has changed in the post war, "Big Science" era. We are now in a situation where ~1% of all mathematicians worldwide are employed by one organisation -- the NSA -- and the issues surrounding this organisation may yet lead to a wholly unprecedented crisis within mathematics, concerning what we should/shouldn't not work on -- or for. If we end up in a situation where certain branches of mathematics become restricted or prohibited in any way, then mathematics will have crossed a particularly dangerous Rubicon, and with it so will Western society.
As much as I don't like what the NSA is doing, the problem is with that organization, and not the tools, disciplines, or mathematics being done there. I for one am not willing to uproot millennia of mathematical traditions and precedent because one foreign power has allowed its spy organization to run out of control.
I note that the great French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck, effectively retired from mathematics in protest at, basically, the Vietnam war. Some view this as a powerful statement of principal, but I don't accept that mathematicians direct themselves according to events in the United States or any other country. Mathematics is an international, long-term and now global activity and that should not be compromised because of the likes of the NSA.
P.S.
If you are a mathematicians and you do want to do something about the NSA, please consider designing distributed secure browsing/email/DNS/messaging/hosting systems or contributing to their design. That will do far more for the world than fragmenting mathematics ever will.
The last item on the list reads
20. Inflation
Now, I do find myself personally skeptical of a lot of the theoretical physics/cosmology/multiverse terminology, theories and lingo you are likely to encounter nowadays, but including Inflation on the list is a bit of a stretch to say the the least. But then I also spotted this
13. CuGeO3
What is this I Don't Even?
They've basically been DOSing the ISPs local loops for nearly a decade, blaming the ISPs and now they have the brilliant idea that maybe they should address the insane amount of bandwidth they're eating up?
They did pay. Netflix payed Cogent for the amount of data they uploaded. You paid Comcast (or whoever) for the amount of data you downloaded. Your movie data has been paid for -- twice-- and never forget it.
Now, Comcast might have promised you an "all you can eat" unlimited Internet connection, but by God you paid for it, and Comcast can either deliver or just give you your money back. Note I'm not saying that connections should be unlimited -- in fact, I think end users paying per GB is fair -- but the nature of these contracts is determined by the ISPs making the offer. If Comcast are writing cheques their network can't cash, that's between their shareholders and their competition.
The real issue here is the Peering agreements between the very largest ISPs. They agreed back in the 1980s to not charge one another and simply switch to a user pays cash model. This would encourage ISPs to try and host as much content as they had users, promoting both the creation of servers and content as well as connections and end users. It's a system which has functioned astoundingly well for 30 years now.
Comcast now wants to go back on those peering agreements essentially because it is too lazy to compete. Comcast will not a) Try to make Netflix offers so that they are hosted on Comcast's Network in the first place, b) charge end users the real costs of the GB they download or c) cut the pensioned executive fat out of their operation so that they can actually deliver what the customers paid while still making money.
If Comcast succeeds in the US with this, they will have effectively broken the Internet. We will go from the Network we have to a closed off, content delivery system like cable, possibly seeing the internet fragment into a collection of internal corporate networks -- a situation more likely each days as IPv4 addresses run out. The Internet is now in danger of regressing to the original conceptions of a world wide computer network, first imagined in the 1960s,and bearing no resemblance to the open, imaginative, uncontrolled and informative network we have today. This danger is the result of the greed of companies like comcast, and the simplistic emotional arguments that constitute the current level of discourse around this, probably the most pivotal social and economic issue of our times.
You have confused low-skill manual labours with highly skilled tradesmen. This is very easy when you, as a general IT worker, are effectively in the former category.
It all began years ago, when cable companies started offering internet service with unbalanced bandwidth: outgoing speed was (and still is) a small fraction of the incoming speed. So began the process that has led to what we have today.
Personally, I would chart the decline to the widespread adoption of "walled-garden" tablets and smart-phones. The majority of computer users are now accepting of a situation where they have essentially no power to install software on their own devices. Thus the "Personal Computer" was turned into a passive, receive only device from a content and coding perspective.
Really, my college education was a waste.
Good luck affording a house for you and your children to live in without one. 30 years of dual incomes and financialisation have placed a home firmly outside the reach of most single income households, and at this stage quite a few double income households.
Make no mistake, no mistake whatsoever. These women are not pursuing abstract "careers". They are perusing the income and job-security needed to buy and live securely in a family home. And like the rest of us, they are losing.
This happened in Japan beginning in the 1980s. The birth rate there has plummeted. If you don't produce affordable, aspirational accommodation, people will not settle down.
Your entire argument ignores the fact that the support of the Upper Middle class as a whole -- the entire top 10% -- is the most vital component of the general support for the top 0.1% and 0.01% of the population. Without the consent and indeed approval of the highest half quartile of the population, no regime will last very long. The present one retains this high support, and will do so until such time as the pension pots of the top 10% are raided wholesale, or wiped out by inflation.
The additional $41,950 is allocated towards sunk costs including
Meanwhile, the 3D prosthetic hand has only the following sunk costs to cover.
It's important to remember to keep the background details out of perspective... or in perspective, depending on whichever context you'd prefer to hock.
The brittle feel of the paper
... the tactile quality of the old covers and binding...
It also makes the magazines difficult to wet or use as toilet paper, and hence means they tend to last longer as reading material for the John.
I don't want to "weaken government", I want to weaken the federal government.
Acckhh! No true Scotsman would ever drink cherry... port...I mean... eat Walkers.... no Taytos... ; More Haggis Agatha, I'veana'other swoon kim 'pon mea.
But as long as the common livestock never catch wind of it they will happy continue to graze, chew their cud and pick on of the two "different" options presented for their approval every 4 years and things will continue as they have done for decades now.
People do not have much of a chance against a system which forces them to operate by its rules. The system is dysfunctional, a failure of process has occurred. It does not matter if people are engaged in politics, the "sheeple" you disdain, or apathetic cynics like yourself.
All efforts to change a dysfunctional system from within its own rules will fail miserably. Case in Point: Occupy, an abysmal failure of a movement, based on the absurd notion that the system can be changed from within or by asking politely. Frankly I think that's worse than being sheeple or apathetic as it legitimizes the corrupt at the reigns of power.
So lay off the general voting population. Change is really, really hard, and I don't see you proposing many solid alternatives.
Work is the crab grass in the lawn of life. -- Schulz
