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What's an Ipod Nano today? The cheapest on amazon is $142.00. Getting those at 10% off is still $127.80.

So we can give the kids laptops for only $52.20 more each? Isn't that more worth it?

But are we any happier?

Paradoxically, no. See The Progress Paradox.

Do we have more free time?

Yes! We certainly have more free time than the common man in agrarian societies. Working sunup to sundown is a thing of the past, for the most part. Some of us take two jobs to make ends meet, but on average we have far more free time than our agrarian ancestors.

Hunter gatherer societies are different, as you pointed out. But their free time came at a tremendous cost.

Is the quality of our lives any better?

It depends on what you mean by quality. We're healthy, live longer, have better diets, have greater lifestyle options, etc.

Do we have meaningful connections with the world around us?

That's a very fuzzy question, and I'm not sure what you mean. But I do routinely hold conversations with people thousands of miles away, so I would say yes. We are more connected with people around the world than ever before in history. As for the earth itself, industrialization has actually met so many of our needs, that we are looking outside of ourselves to the needs of world at large. Environmentalism as we know it did not exist before the 18th century.

Please don't misunderstand me. I am NOT arguing that the world is perfect! I am NOT arguing that we have no problems. What I am saying is that we have better lives today than our ancestors did three centuries ago, and that is due in large part to industrialization.

Dona Ana County is a relatively poor and bleak swathe of desert in southern New Mexico with fewer than 200,000 residents. But voters passed a 0.25% increase in the local sales tax to help contribute to the cost of building Spaceport America. Sir Richard Branson has signed a long-term lease with the state of New Mexico to make the new spaceport the headquarters of his Virgin Galactic space tourism business.

Ah, cue the great lie that tax incentives to draw corporations "create" jobs.

Let's think about how absurd this is: a man worth about $7.8BN (which represents about 11% of New Mexico's GDP) just got one quarter of his spaceport paid for by people who make on average $29-33k, so that people with multi-million-dollar net worths can blast themselves into space?

Let me put the numbers in proportion for you: if Branson took one third of his net worth (percentage-wise, not too out of line with what the residents of the county just did for his little corporate venture) and divided it amongst ALL the people of the county, he would effectively raise the median income by 50%.

I'm sure in such a poor county that the level of education can't be that great, but seriously- how could people so poor be so stupid as to think this was something in their favor? As The Great American Job Scam points out, corporations are routinely handed millions upon millions of dollars by state governments, with the promise of creating X number of jobs which will NEVER come even remotely close to putting that much money in wages?

How many jobs will this spaceport actually bring in that residents in the county within commuting distance will be qualified for? And don't they realize that the spaceport will bring in a lot of much higher paid people (engineers, technical staff, etc), who will drive property values through the roof as they snap up land for McMansions? Cue the trickle down economics comments.

i use this skype phone, no need for a computer http://www.amazon.com/Netgear-Dual-Cordless-Phone- Skype/dp/B000M51AYS/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2/103-8708263-86 99858?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1175894763&sr=8-2

No, try reading the original comment again. Notice how the author made a special effort to quote the new on Amazon price as '+' shipping and the used and new on Amazon prices as 'with' shipping. If you check here:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/B0006L16N8/ ref=dp_olp_2/102-5677357-7273756

you will realize that the used and new price intentionally included the shipping in the price quote.

This one really happened. A copy of the newspaper article appears as the last page in the Re/Search book "Pranks". IIRC, the date and specific street address are given.

First of all, be grateful that you have people who are willing to go to such lengths to make their voices heard in this group. It means that people are thinking and are interested enough to make their ideas heard. I assume that these people are making their time available for free. You can tell them that their help is no longer wanted, but that's about all the group can and should do if they are truly disruptive. Otherwise, appreciate the effort they are putting into trying to make the group's work better.

Second, take a hard look at the group's decision-making procedures. Decisions, which often entail compromises, are necessary for the group to come together as a team. Many decisions can be made informally. But, a lack of a good process for dealing with controversial decisions can give members the sense that they have not had a full voice---that their input is being ignored. Is "majority opinion" in this group a result of formal votes? Or are the "co-leads" simply laying down "majority opinion" by fiat? Are decisions are being driven by personality or by deliberation?

Third, consider designs for your system that allow dissidents the freedom to introduce alternatives outside of the core project. Linux, Apache, Perl, Gimp, and Mozilla are all examples of systems that are extensible without modifying the groups official code-base. The members of your group who want to create alternatives may even go out of their way to create the appropriate hooks in the official code-base to enable this freedom outside the constraints of the group priorities.

Fourth, spend some time studying leadership as a discipline. Start small. Read The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick M. Lencioni. Ask for honest feedback from the members of your group on your own effectiveness as a co-lead. Learn how to develop the leadership skills in others. Some of these disruptive members may be leaders who have just not learned how to communicate and compromise. The most effective way of dealing with them might be to help them develop those skills, rather than trying to disciplining them.

Fifth, get some cats. I've heard that herding them makes good practice.

1) The make a larger profit, and the people who earn that profit spend it on other things.
2) They invest that saved money in more production or more production efficiency (buy technology, spend on research, build another factory)
3) They lower the price of the product, so the consumer then spends their money on something else.

The important thing here is that previously idle people in India or China are now no longer idle. They're making things. And when they make things, *WE* in the US get a cut of it.

Outsourcing turns a guy in India who wasn't doing shit into a guy in India who makes, say, $100 worth of stuff, and keeps $80 of it and we get $20 'for free'. That's good for him and good for us.

That does eliminate a job in the US that may have paid $200 for the same stuff. But that's OK, because the stuff costs $100 less, and the person who would have had that job can now work on something else.


I think I see the problem. You're relying on classical, diminishing-returns-to-scale economic theory,
originally inspired by agricultural production circa 1800. Wool, wine. Doubling the land under
cultivation can do no more than double the output. And of course, you can't slice off pieces of land
and attach them to other countries, so the issues with "outsourcing production" were assumed away, or
never thought of.


But in the end, we want to export as many jobs as we can and replace as many workers as possible with machines. If we do this to perfection, none of us will have to work anymore, because machines and people in India will be doing all our work for us, and we'll still have the same amount of stuff.

Or at least, we'll have freed up enough of our labor force to provide the universal healthcare everyone seems to want.


The "Insightful" tag is certainly going cheap on Slashdot these days.

In the presence of increasing returns to scale (essentially the definition of industrial production)
and innovation, the predictions of classical diminishing-returns economics fail completely. And that
includes classical trade theory. Rigorously. And it's a good thing, otherwise our standard of living
would have been drastically lower.

Well, refutations of classical theory are out there in abundance, they don't need to be summarized here.
Suffice it to say that it does matter very much what industries a country has.

The wonder is not that a government can be induced to craft trade policy that benefits a few at the
expense of many. The wonder is that apparently intelligent people who stand to lose can go along with
it for, I guess, some kind of intellectual satisfaction. This is the power of (obsolete) ideas!

What's truly weird is that it happens here on Slashdot. If somebody came in claiming that "RISC is
the ultimate in CPU architecture, always has been, always will be!" or something like that, everyone
would be all over him. But economic theory is eternal, unchanging dogma in Slashdot land.

1) The make a larger profit, and the people who earn that profit spend it on other things.
2) They invest that saved money in more production or more production efficiency (buy technology, spend on research, build another factory)
3) They lower the price of the product, so the consumer then spends their money on something else.

The important thing here is that previously idle people in India or China are now no longer idle. They're making things. And when they make things, *WE* in the US get a cut of it.

Outsourcing turns a guy in India who wasn't doing shit into a guy in India who makes, say, $100 worth of stuff, and keeps $80 of it and we get $20 'for free'. That's good for him and good for us.

That does eliminate a job in the US that may have paid $200 for the same stuff. But that's OK, because the stuff costs $100 less, and the person who would have had that job can now work on something else.


I think I see the problem. You're relying on classical, diminishing-returns-to-scale economic theory,
originally inspired by agricultural production circa 1800. Wool, wine. Doubling the land under
cultivation can do no more than double the output. And of course, you can't slice off pieces of land
and attach them to other countries, so the issues with "outsourcing production" were assumed away, or
never thought of.


But in the end, we want to export as many jobs as we can and replace as many workers as possible with machines. If we do this to perfection, none of us will have to work anymore, because machines and people in India will be doing all our work for us, and we'll still have the same amount of stuff.

Or at least, we'll have freed up enough of our labor force to provide the universal healthcare everyone seems to want.


The "Insightful" tag is certainly going cheap on Slashdot these days.

In the presence of increasing returns to scale (essentially the definition of industrial production)
and innovation, the predictions of classical diminishing-returns economics fail completely. And that
includes classical trade theory. Rigorously. And it's a good thing, otherwise our standard of living
would have been drastically lower.

Well, refutations of classical theory are out there in abundance, they don't need to be summarized here.
Suffice it to say that it does matter very much what industries a country has.

The wonder is not that a government can be induced to craft trade policy that benefits a few at the
expense of many. The wonder is that apparently intelligent people who stand to lose can go along with
it for, I guess, some kind of intellectual satisfaction. This is the power of (obsolete) ideas!

What's truly weird is that it happens here on Slashdot. If somebody came in claiming that "RISC is
the ultimate in CPU architecture, always has been, always will be!" or something like that, everyone
would be all over him. But economic theory is eternal, unchanging dogma in Slashdot land.

You should read Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence. The bottom line is that you can, today, make your lifestyle more affordable and make better choices about how you spend your money (or earn if for that matter). Even if you have made poor ones up to this point, you can make changes for the better. The goal is getting to the point where the income from your investments is more than your expenses - then you won't need to work at all.

Don't get me wrong, it's hard - and I'm not there yet either. But I too feel the same frustration you are expressing in your post, and reading this book was the first time I understood that it did not have to be that way and to some degree, I was responsible for creating the conditions in the first place. Hopefully, you will find it as comforting as I did.

A fascinating book on the subject, talking a little about the tech, but also making the point the eventually, the tech will enable you to acquire physical objects that are essentially "open source," or rather, "open design", and all you would need to buy in the future in order to have an endless stream of consumer products is a vat of plastic.

If you wanted to have a car, you probably couldn't print that out at home, you'd have to go to the 3D Kinkos. Imagine if you could just download a car off the internet, customize it for yourself (with ample help from enthusiasts, like Linux today), and print it out.

>Now how in god's name does the subjective perceptual conscious experience arise out of that? You didn't simulate that whatsoever.

Why do you assume you have to? What makes you believe that conscious experience is anything more than 'information pushing' of a certain nature?

Douglas Hofstadter has a new book out that deals exactly with this subject, I Am a Strange Loop. It covers a lot of the same ground as 'Godel, Escher, Bach' but is a lot easier to read.

ou already said that Dawkins is not a philosopher of religion, which indicates that you automatically exclude atheists from being philosophers of religion, which I'm prepared to agree with.

No, atheists are not excluded from being philosophers of religion. There have been many notable atheist philosophers of religion. For every Swinburne there's a Mackie, and for every Plantinga there's a Flew (well, before his conversion, anyway). Just look in your university library for an introductory reader in the philosophy of religion--I'm especially fond of Readings in the Philosophy of Religion ed. Baruch Brody (Prentice Hall, 1996). you'll see that atheist lines of argumentation are just as represented as theist ones.

Dawkins is not a philosopher of religion because he does not publish in journals dedicated to the subject, nor does he hold a university position as a lecturer or researcher in the philosopher of religion, nor do many actual philosophers of religion recognize Dawkins as one of their own.

Could God set a puzzle that was so difficult that even God couldn't solve it?

Richard Swinburne, the foremost living philosopher of religion, gives an interesting presentation of this problem for laymen in his book Is There a God? (Oxford University Press, 1996). His conclusion is that God is bound by logic. For example, he cannot cause something to exist and not exist at the same time. This idea, that logic in a sense precedes God, is controversial, and debate on this is one of the most lively issues in philosophy of religion at the moment.

First thing's first, I'm not overly happy I wasted the time reading Robin Cook's Abduction. I don't recommend reading it at all. Silliness, pure silliness. That said...

In Robin Cook's novel Abduction the later-generation human-ish things "upload" their consciousness into a computer, have a new body constructed (probably along the lines of cloning), then are re-downloaded into the new body, thus becomming effectively immortal. Death was a planned excercise, occurring when the body-mainframe data transfer happened. When someone was killed (which never happened, utopia, blah) before the transfer happened though, everything of that person was lost permanently (maybe Atlantis never heard of tarballs?).

Anyway, I still don't recommend you go read that, even if it does have a sub-storyline like you're talking about here.

First thing's first, I'm not overly happy I wasted the time reading Robin Cook's Abduction. I don't recommend reading it at all. Silliness, pure silliness. That said...

In Robin Cook's novel Abduction the later-generation human-ish things "upload" their consciousness into a computer, have a new body constructed (probably along the lines of cloning), then are re-downloaded into the new body, thus becomming effectively immortal. Death was a planned excercise, occurring when the body-mainframe data transfer happened. When someone was killed (which never happened, utopia, blah) before the transfer happened though, everything of that person was lost permanently (maybe Atlantis never heard of tarballs?).

Anyway, I still don't recommend you go read that, even if it does have a sub-storyline like you're talking about here.

Another great reference, if you're interested, is $30 Film School by Michael Dean. I bought it a couple years ago when I was going to make a short film (I still am; it's just on the back-burner right now).

This is the best way I can think of to stick it to the MPAA, though: Go make your OWN movie! You won't make any money, but DIY stuff always makes you feel good.

If you want your project to succeed, I'd recommend applying some critical thought. The story in question is a fantasy, and I hinted at some of the reasons why. A much more likely scenario is that the utopia and dystopia would evolve towards a similar balance, with some different details, for the kinds of reasons I mentioned. Blaming humanity's ills on the system in use (e.g. capitalist, socialist) is just scapegoating that avoids the real problem, which is human nature.

Maybe read some sociobiology - for a popular intro, you could try The Red Queen by Matt Ridley. Do you think that the availability of a standard number of credits for everyone is somehow going to stop sexual competition? To put it crudely, who'll get the hot chicks in your utopia? On what basis will people compete? Are you sure that control of resources will have nothing to do with it, and if so, why?

See: The Great Mambo Chicken explores this somewhat.

At what point are you more machine than person?

The "software" of the mind isn't the sort of thing you can sit down and code any more than our genes code for basketball skill. I'm sure they could teach people with hardware brains to be all sorts of things, but that's nothing new. The brain may be suitable for Von Neumann implementation, but the mind can't be written in C++. Or LISP, for that matter.

Minds have to write themselves, or they don't work.

Prior art: see Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky for a semi-sinister example; A Fire Upon the Deep hinted at it before that.

Of course, if the patent is about how to make it a revenue-centered business process, it may be valid as a business-method patent. IAmNotALawyer, so don't ask me.

Prior art: see Vernor Vinge's A Deepness in the Sky for a semi-sinister example; A Fire Upon the Deep hinted at it before that.

Of course, if the patent is about how to make it a revenue-centered business process, it may be valid as a business-method patent. IAmNotALawyer, so don't ask me.

Robert Heinlein published a story titled "Jerry Was a Man" with much this plot (legal rights for chimps, although the tribunal I believe was Martian) in 1947. It's included in the Assignment in Eternity collection; the four stories in it are some of his weakest, but still present some interesting ideas.

"Jerry" is still one of the better pieces of SF in the discussion of non-human rights, although Roddenberry's "The Measure of A Man" from ST:TNG is probably the best; "Valentina: Soul in Sapphire" is also worth looking at. (I can think of more discussion of Machine Rights SF than Alien/Animal rights; Heinlein's "Star Beast" is the only one that comes to mind. Probably a residual of the "hard" science bias to SF.)

Not true, see here Amazon.com: Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet: Books: Katie Hafner While it was soon found that it would be useless in a nuclear attack, comments saying that it wasnt intended for use in one are revisionist history, even the budget allocations show, ARPANET was meant to be created to survive a nuclear attack.

1. Other apps haven't had a problem because of this. Both Mozilla and OpenOffice, for example, insisted on writing their very own framework and widgets, so basically they're _neither_ Gnome nor KDE. Your line of thinking seems to be that that would make them shunned by both KDE and Gnome users, yet that's not really the case. And then there's stuff like XMMS, which doesn't even try to look even remotely like the desktop, and had no problem either.

This isn't a problem? If a company^H^H^H^H^H^H^H anyone has to write all their own widgets so that their app "works" then first, that's excruciating, second it's a waste of time, third there's more code to debug and fourth the app doesn't look like it belongs. Firefox on my Mac looks like a bastard child of a forgotten age and, quite frankly, looks like shit compared to all of my other apps.

I'm sorry, but I've written apps for Linux that use a GUI and it's positively brutal. Ever since I started programming for the Mac, I've wondered why I was wasting my time before. Try reading Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X and do some programming on OS X with Cocoa. If you don't immediately change your opinion, I'd be extremely surprised.

Basically, get as much money from the customer while providing the minimum possible, often less than you lead the customer to expect. As long as you can hold it up in the court of law.

You might also like "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465026850/

Dennett strikes again!

Hmm, maybe the selection of immigrants by lottery will make American an increasingly lucky country, just like Larry Niven's tongue-in-cheek hypothesis in Ringworld that through a birthright lottery evolution would select for luck and eventually human beings wouldn't have to fear any accident.

Souls in the Great Machine by Sean McMullen

http://www.amazon.com/Souls-Great-Machine-Greatwin ter-Trilogy/dp/0312872569

You should add a field for Mass and calculate the Joules to accelerate that mass for the accel time. Granted you could convert some of that back into reusable energy with regenerative braking at the slowdown. Actually, I guess with maglevs, vacuum tubes and superconducting transmission lines you could get pretty high efficiency, and perhaps store the energy in a capacitor network or superconducting ring which could theoretically store energy infinitly (See "Danny Dunn and the Swamp Monster"

There's a simple solution to the H-1B visa problem: Open offices in Canada, where a skilled worker who can speak English and has a job offer is practically guaranteed a visa. Vancouver in the same time zone as Silicon Valley, only a 2 hour flight away, and has a lower cost of living than any large city on the US west coast. Add to that two great universities, a moderate climate, and some of the best skiing in the world, in addition to all the usual amenities of a large city, and it's no surprise that Vancouver is routinely rated as one of the best places to live in the world. What are all you guys waiting for?

(This post brought to you by I-want-a-job-and-don't-want-to-move-to-California. )

"Souls in the Great Machine by McCullen" is a sci-fi novel set in 4000 AD Australia in a post-apocalyptic medieval-type future. A city state secretly builds a gigantic mechanical computer whose elementary operations are assigned to (often unjustly) imprisoned human beings. The computer gives the city a huge advantage in planning, war, etc. The novel has many points of brilliance mixed in with a some cheesiness due to basing characters/cultures on present/historical stereotypes. It is a fun read. The Amazon reviews:

http://www.amazon.com/Souls-Great-Machine-Greatwin ter-Trilogy/dp/0765344572

Amazon has already deployed such a system under the name of Mechanical Turk. The idea is that humans assist computers, providing what is cutely named artificial artifical intelligence. You can read more about the concept in an article that ACM Queue run on May 2006.
--
Code Quality: The Open Source Perspective

Puzzle Quest is everything it was hyped to be and then some. It's currently my favorite game on the PSP, and I don't see it getting dethroned any time soon.

But wasn't it released for the Nintendo DS, too? Is the PSP version *that* much better?

I'm about half way through On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins and what he proposes in the book fits right in line with this research. It's an interesting read if you're in to that sort of thing.

The human brain is pretty plastic. It can adapt to a lot of new conditions. In patients who are recently blind, or even in people who have been blindfolded for a while, the sense of touch and sound is amplified. Areas of the brain that were used for vision, are now used to interpret sound and touch. PET shows which parts of the brain are active. Check out Phantoms in the Brain and .

The human brain is pretty plastic. It can adapt to a lot of new conditions. In patients who are recently blind, or even in people who have been blindfolded for a while, the sense of touch and sound is amplified. Areas of the brain that were used for vision, are now used to interpret sound and touch. PET shows which parts of the brain are active. Check out Phantoms in the Brain and .

I'm not sure if you're trolling or serious, but I'll take you at face value. It was a very good movie based off of a fantastic series that FOX killed prematurely. Watch the series, then the movie.

Firefly
http://www.amazon.com/Firefly-Complete-Ron-Glass/d p/B0000AQS0F/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0949221-2757660?i e=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1175610337&sr=1-1

Serenity
http://www.amazon.com/Serenity-Widescreen-Morena-B accarin/dp/B000BW7QWW/ref=pd_bxgy_d_text_b/002-094 9221-2757660?ie=UTF8&qid=1175610337&sr=1-1

I'm not sure if you're trolling or serious, but I'll take you at face value. It was a very good movie based off of a fantastic series that FOX killed prematurely. Watch the series, then the movie.

Firefly
http://www.amazon.com/Firefly-Complete-Ron-Glass/d p/B0000AQS0F/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-0949221-2757660?i e=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1175610337&sr=1-1

Serenity
http://www.amazon.com/Serenity-Widescreen-Morena-B accarin/dp/B000BW7QWW/ref=pd_bxgy_d_text_b/002-094 9221-2757660?ie=UTF8&qid=1175610337&sr=1-1

According to Keith Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.

http://www.amazon.com/High-Mighty-SUVs-Dangerous-V ehicles/dp/1586481231

We recently had a speaker here to introduced us to the new methods of DNA sequencing that are so brilliant you might think we stole the tech from aliens. If you're interested, check out the 454 Life Sciences Corporation or THIS ARTICLE for a scoop on one such new method that'll knock your socks off if you're an old-school biologist. Their process (click through and read the slides) is light-years beyond where we were only 5 years ago. The speaker we had reported that their lab was able to sequence massive pools of DNA from bacteria that lives in our intestines (well, monkey intestines, but close enough) and were able to determine that we have upwards of 1000 different species of bacteria living in us, mostly likely helping our system.

To summarize the sequencing method very briefly and un-technically (if you want the tech, read the site above): it manages to sequence thousands of little pieces of DNA at once... something we had to do one at a time or with the best machines, 96 at a time with a good bit of manual labor. Now we're talking thousands at once, on one machine, in one reaction, on one array. Holy smokes. A single lab worker could potentially sequence more in a day than 10 people working for a month.

With new technology such as this, the thought of sequencing a person's entire Genome in an hour is far closer than we could have ever dreamed. We're talking a couple years here. A decade ago that thought was unimaginable and downright crazy talk. And as the article said, it can also give us glimpses into genetic interactions between organisms in populations from a perspective we could never see before. See "Lateral DNA Transfer: Mechanisms and Consequences".

I suspect you asked her for $130 bucks so you could get her a copy, right. After all, this was her home computer, not work computer.

"DNA + "survival of the fittest" = evolution. It's not a theory - it's just a plain consequence of the the tautology "survival of the fittest" and the fact that we're based on a naturally varying chemical hereditory mechanism (DNA). If you don't understand that people who have more children leave more descendents, or that we're based on DNA, then, YES, you are stupid."

I suggest you read "1,000 common delusions and the real facts behind them. Page 177 before you start namecalling.

>> it's unix
> OS X is not UNIX [google.com]

That's your evidence? A bunch of Google hits (most of which contain good arguments disagreeing with you)?

If that's your standard of proof, then a Googlefight should settle the issue:

http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&wo rd1=os+x+is+unix&word2=os+x+is+not+unix

Or how about this book: http://www.amazon.com/Design-Implementation-UNIX-O perating-System/dp/0201061961

Notice it doesn't say "The Design and Implementation of the 4.3 BSD UNIX-like Operating System"

Wouldn't strong magnetic fields, like one powerful enough to affect objects miles away, have an effect on organisms? In Larry Niven's Known Space universe (I'm thinking especially of "The Ethics of Madness" in Neutron Star ) Bussard ramjets take a long time to get off the ground since the magnetic field involved would kill the pilot. But Niven never points to any real research into this, so I never knew if it was true or just a convenient plot point. Can any particle accelerators on Earth generate a magnetic field high enough to kill people?

I think she would be very happy if she received this http://www.amazon.com/Vibratex-HV-250R-Hitachi-Mag ic-Massager/dp/B00005M1WE

Go buy On Intelligence for a great perspective on what "understanding" is and how the neocortex works.

Circuit City was identified as the best performing company in Jim Collins' book, Good to Great. Over about 15 years, Circuit City transitioned from a mediocre retailer to a phenomenally performing company, beating the market over 18-fold over 15 years (1982 - 1997)! (p7 of the book).

So what happened?

I no longer shop at the local CC if I can avoid it. Black Friday last year they were a complete mess. It took several minutes to process a customer. Rebates were filled out by clerks, keeping the line waiting. Lines were randomly woven throughout the shopping aisles: you didn't know what aisle you were in and customers were kept from shopping by the congestion. Presently, during normal shopping, their checkout system is quite slow and cumbersome.

In contrast, Best Buy was very well organized and the checkout lines as fast as possible.

Where did the "great" Circuit City go?

Even during