I was surprised Mississippi even had researchers.
A recession is defined as two consecutive quarters of negative growth. Thus, the recession is technically over.
This definition is fundamentally flawed. Under this, it is technically possible for an economy to decline indefinitely which never actually entering a recession. GDP change from quarter to quarter could progress like so
-2.0%, +0.1%, -2.0%, +0.1%, -2.0%, +0.1%, -2.0%, +0.1%,
Which works out at a -3.7% decline every year, but still technically no recession. This is what we refer to in the mathematical business as "absurd".
Unfortunately, this appears to be exactly how the political class across the Eurozone appears to doing. The continent is slowly imploding, but event one 0.1% quarter of growth is taken as proof that "The recession is over". The way the modern world is going, I'm really beginning to understand exactly how the Soviet Union operated on a political level.
I've changed my mind, now I see the value in these articles.
Various replies have been particularly insightful. For example:
[...] "nerds" who read Slashdot often provide more insightful commentary than any other group of private citizen commentators, and certainly more insight than what the majority of the 24 hour news-cycle organizations. Furthermore, because Slashdot has global readership we get commentary from people outside the United States. I love reading slashdot comments for the same reasons I like listening to the BBC on the radio on my local public radio station (KQED), because I hear fresh viewpoints that originate not in this country.
I'd like to see more articles on Syria or Nigeria. [...] The mainstream media distracts us from the "stuff that matters" unless the shit is really hitting the fan somewhere. It's becoming more and more clear they're a propaganda machine that occasionally reports on world events to maintain a shred of credibility, but never without some partisan bullshit like the administration's refusal to classify this coup as a coup.
In these comments I see all kinds of points about policies and actions going back decades that have contributed to this situation. I'd never find something like that in the mainstream media, Google News included. They're too busy trying to convince me of which lizard is the wrong lizard.
I've changed my opinion. It's probably good that Slashdot posts important news items, simply because you don't get insightful commentary anywhere else - it's a side-effect of the moderation system. Other news outlets allow commentary and have smart readers, we're the only one with insightful discussion. (Can anyone point to another site where the comments are worth reading?)
In particular, I found the comment "I'd like to see more articles on Syria or Nigeria" thought provoking. I don't know anything about either place, and maybe I should.
Slashdot is in a sense community driven. If there's not a lot of push-back, we will continue to see important articles.
Usually news stories on this site have at least a faint aroma of tech relevance.
Certain select stories are of such a high importance that everyone wants to talk about them and they appear on this site despite having no relevance to the major purpose.
That's fine, really it is. But I have to ask, where is the dividing line? Will we be seeing articles on Syria? More than 100 people are killed there on a regular basis. Fourty-four were killed in a mosque in Nigeria the other day. Is that significant? A white-ish guy shot an innocent black kid who was definitely not bashing the white-guy's head into the pavement - is that relevant?
I found this very interesting Third Amendment lawsuit (yes, Third amendment) and didn't submit because it was offtopic.
I'm not saying that world events are not important, and this one is pretty high on the importance scale. It's just that I avoid regular news sites and frequent this one because it saves time. Yes, I can skip articles - but note that I can skip articles in Google News and Reddit as well.
I can't find the link, but I remember a chart of "Slashdot readership" that showed a general decline over the last several years.
This leade to a simple question: Is Slashdot better for reporting generic news items, or should it be more about "News for Nerds"?
Any Utilikilt other than the "new original" has huge pockets which hang down and to the front. I keep my (2nd-gen) Nexus 7 (the 1st-gen was a little wider, and fit in the pockets but not as easily), cell phone, and external battery in a single side/front pocket.
The problem is that they're using
/dev/urandom when they should be using /dev/random. /dev/urandom is a PRNG, and apparently (on Android, at least) not a very good one.
A Google employee who is involved with bitcoin told me, that the way the problem got fixed was by using direct reads from
Factorials were someone's attempt to make math LOOK exciting.