Posts by phil dude

exeptions prove the rule?

The general problem is that politics has obscured the social mission.

By saying that I mean, if you believe that life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is a goal worth aiming for....

In the USA the supreme court passed the completely potty rule, the corporations are like persons. This is clearly wrong.

In the USA it would appear the tools are all there, just some tweaking is required. This is my first stab having not had lunch, just got back from my 7k run....

How about banning all corporate lobbying? Entirely? Instead, all donations to political candidates must be ONLY from citizens (and permanent residents), with the maximum amount being the national median income for the previous 5 years.

Corporations can only lobby in public, by advertisements to the voting public. By that I mean what we have now, but make it the ONLY mechanism. No "fund raisers", "fact finding missions" etc...

Citizens can band together to form lobby groups (same rules, only funds from citizens etc), and they can directly represent issues to elected representatives.

Finally, term limits all the way through using the incremental principle. i.e. need majority first time, +10% second, +20% third etc..

The whole thing about taxation is simply that it is too complex. Only those that can afford to avoid it don't pay it. Everyone else has no/little choice....

OK must get some food...

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other thread...

Well I commented on the other thread that quite by chance, I will be able to see comcast vs non-comcast simultaneously.

This is scandalous, but this is the landscape that been slowly manipulated to be "too big to ignore".

I have floated this idea before, but perhaps there is an upper limit to corporation size...?

There is obviously a sweet spot when N>3...

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rare opportunity..

actually my apartment block here just moved to comcast to serve 100 residents or so via wifi. I have independent DSL, so I am in a position to test various features of both routes... more or less simulatneously (I have wifi enabled desktop).

Of course , my DSL is via AT&T wires, so who knows, eh?

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very well done...

It is public so you can all read it. Read the summary, read the bits about the dosimeters and why they needed that approach.

I think I tend to agree with the comment above, ionising radiation is the one to worry about...

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not a troll but...

A few years ago I did a side project to my DPhil which was to analyse the correlation between human genotypes and their diagnostic conditions when they presented themselves to the hospital.

I used postgres because I needed it to be open (as the NIH or whoever was paying insisted), and because I found the right modules quite quickly to spit out JSON (JS gets flack, but this is a cool feature for driving HTML5 apps).

I built a test system on a workstation for 5000 patient datasets and the entire human genome, but the next stage would have been to try "cloudification", so it is interesting to see these services appear as cost savings to spinning up a whole virt box with a server...

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automata...

The "micro automata" was one of the truly interesting things I saw at SC'13. I recommend folks interested in graph theoretic approaches to check it out...

google will find you the links...

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kryten...

I'll get my coat...

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talk of a pattern...

anyone following the meltdown on /., there could be an alternative soon....

(www.altslashdot.org).

And in that vein, F*CK Beta ;-)

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process...

I am reminded of the phrase "security is a process not a state".

I am curious to know, with the knowledge of hindsight, when the breach *could* have been detected.

The analogy I think I am developing is along the lines of "it's a bit draughty in here....?"

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oh woh is me...

yes indeed. Besides, this highlights the problem with any industry that has so few players...

The question might be, is there a better way to keep companies from becoming too big...?

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cynical...

I haven't had my coffee but part of my brain is waving at me and saying "Perhaps they are floating the balloon and have some less dire they want to push"....

But the again, it comes from politicians, so since they are spending YOUR money they can have their fantasies come true....

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shock horror colonial beer is very good....!

Imagine my surprise when I came back over here in July to find that nearly every bar was selling "craft" beer, and *strong* too. I think the weakest beer in some places is 5.5% and the harpoon brewery in Boston has a 10% that tastes very good (not sweet at all). But the median was about 7.5.

For those of you who like microbiology, you might like to know it is a commercial strain of yeast that apparently is being used by all these microbreweries.... hence the sudden rise in EtOH vol....

My only complaint is there are not enough "Cask conditioned" brews, because they taste almost *identical* to a decent UK Bitter....

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nothing to see here...

politicians "to be seen doing something".....

Seriously, people are exposed to all sorts of distractions when driving, self made or not.

Yet another reason I want a computer to drive mine, especially during the mundane miles...

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to widen the discussion...

it could perhaps be used to print prosthetic limbs?

Perhaps integrate cavities etc for wiring motors etc..?

I'm still and optimist that this technology could get way cooler.

The pessimist in me is imaging all the ways consumers will get milked....

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size does matter..

It depends on your point of view but it does matter how big an institution is, to gauge its influence.

From my humble and very personal opinion, it is simply not possible to have a public broadcaster with direct subscriptions. You see, the problem is , anytime there is a revenue stream that is correlated with the time-scale of government, the government will try and "affect" it.

For those of you who say you could do without the BBC, I will remind you that it keeps the cost of your non-BBC services down. It does for everyone in the UK. Just look at sport. It is only because Sky doesn't make any programs it can offer ludicrous amounts of money to effectively gain a monopoly. IF someone knows the actual numbers....

In the USA you can see where "subscription" gets you. Massive diversity but very dilute content.

Even the free-to-air networks in the US (ABC,CBS,NBC) are stopping streaming without a "subscription". See? Revenue streams cannot be ignored.

I'll wager the subscription BBC balloon is nothing more than a way for some of the grubby MPs and their "donors" to get a piece of the media pie.

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common themes...

In reality, the common theme is about a human's right to think for themselves. In the spirit of enlightened self-interest, control of ourselves is really the only thing we have. Giving it to some other authority, well, that's not natural ;-)

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sad...

am I the only one that see this as just sad?

Here's hoping we can synthesise organs soon, because theses stories only seem to make the headlines when someone does something wrong.

Not so many stories on the general fate of those in transplant queues...

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language and ...

Well part of the problem the EU has , is all the content anyone wants is in English. (Before I get loads of flack for being a language bigot , I am fluent in at least one european language, and reasonable in another.).

I was in Vienna a few years ago and browsing DVD's in a store and noticed they were selling Naked Lunch both in German, and a version in English. German 8 Euros , English 18 Euros.

You see, not happy with carving up the "so called market" by where you live, they really want to carve it up by "how ever much we can charge and get away with it".

The problem with the BBC license fee is that when you look at the competition you realise just how *cheap* it is. The reason why corporations cannot bring themselves to ever support a publicly funded Media outlet ("cause"), is that to many people paying the same price for the same thing is tantamount to communism....

Beer, because that was one good thing I got in Wein that cost the same in any language...

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politics is the pursuit of power without merit...

And this is just politics. Because we all know that the bests songs cost more than the worst, only they don't. And movies don't all cost the same, because they do.

There is more media than any person could experience in 100 lifetimes, what ever happened to supply and demand?

When copyright is the length of an average working human again, perhaps we will see some sanity. When copyright stays with people, perhaps we will see more sanity.

The reality is the fear of the loss of "theoretical" money, is never likely to produce good policy...not even theoretically...

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obligatory comment...

Everything paid for by public money should be FOSS by design. Pay companies to develop it, but all source remains in the public. No proprietary formats that cannot be exported. Contracts should be used to pay *people* to do work, not make $profits for massive corps.

Sorry I've had my coffee, I am making Hydrogen bond plots, and this stuff just seems sooo broken....

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linpack....

or it didn't happen....

I trawled high and low at SC13 trying to find AMD benchmarks,NVIDIA and Intel have been far more aggressive about this area.

This is potentially exciting area for those of us that wobble molecules, and perhaps even add more physics to games ;-)

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even more impressed....

that NASA put a man on the moon with 50's designs and 60's technologies!!

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what about taxes?

This is all well in good, but I would say that for those of us who travel a fair bit, price comparison is already quite good.

The elephant in the room is the massive taxes charged by the Govt for internation travel and every other "grubby hand in pot" between leaving and arriving some place on Earth.

London to Charleston via Dulles -Fare $282, Taxes $560. WTF?

I suspect this is another way of gaming the system by only showing "their bargains".....

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