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You are almost certainly right, but the estimated amount that Gates has given to charity is $28.1 billion. That list apparently only covers billionaires from the USA, so we don't really know how much Slim has donated. But I'm pretty sure it's a far cry from Gates' number, so Gates would easily come ahead.

Slim's fortune has swelled to an estimated $53.5 billion, up $18.5 billion in 12 months.

Gates, now worth $53 billion, is ranked second in the world. He is up $13 billion from a year ago

And now, the $0.5 million question: How much money does Gates give to charity?

According to the Wikipedia page on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the foundation donates $1.5 billion per year. And a BusinessWeek estimate lists Gates as having donated $28.1 billion over his whole life.

That is ridiculous, if I wanted to buy the largest company in Sweden, I'd probably pay something around that amount.

http://bwnt.businessweek.com/interactive_reports/philanthropy_individual/

Slim's fortune has swelled to an estimated $53.5 billion, up $18.5 billion in 12 months.

Gates, now worth $53 billion, is ranked second in the world. He is up $13 billion from a year ago

And now, the $0.5 million question: How much money does Gates give to charity?

According to the Wikipedia page on the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the foundation donates $1.5 billion per year. And a BusinessWeek estimate lists Gates as having donated $28.1 billion over his whole life.

Just go buy a decent diesel right now and you'll get better real-world efficiency than the claimed efficiency of this vapour-ware.

Eg. Ford fiesta econetic, vw golf bluemotion etc. All in the 65 mpg range (oh, and that's combined cycle, highway is 70mpg+). http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_37/b4099060491065.htm

The scrapped electric vehicles story is well-known and well-documented. That's what happens when fossil-fuel companies own shares in vehicle manufacturing companies.

And, the "100 million lines of code" quote never came from Toyota - it came from Any Chou at Coverity (an software and security analysis company) who got it from Robert N. Charette at IEEE Spectrum.

Yeah. But then you're talking in a certain political climate, not real prices.

You don't see the real price from the power company either. They are all subsidized. At least in the US, and I'd imagine even more in other countries. Here's where the CEO of Chevron agrees to lobby with Sierra Club to end coal subsidies. And here Rep Edward Markey crows "My Climate Bill 'Has Huge Subsidies For Clean Coal! Huge!'" He doesn't tkl just about coal subsides but subsides for nuclear and other power sources. Coal, corn based ethanol, and nuclear power get billions of dollars in subsidies. Yet if you add up all the subsidies for geothermal, solar, wind, and other alternative/renewable energy sources it doesn't add up to $1 Billion.

Quite simply coal, nuclear, and other energy sources individually get way more in subsidies than geothermal, solar, wind, and other alternative/renewable energy sources. Without subsides nuclear power plants would not be built, and power from coal would cost way more than it does.

It's the same in germany; it's profitable for a home-owner to install solar-cells on his roof. But that's only true because there's a state-guaranteed lowest-price that he gets for the electricity produced, and this price is substantially higher than the real market-value of electricity.

Wow! A quick google and I find this: Breakthrough Deal May Eliminate German Coal Subsidies :
"After months of negotiations, politicians and leaders from the coal industry reached a breakthrough Sunday night. Government subsidies -- not jobs -- are to be cut back drastically and may be history as early as 2018." Actually that was the first result googling germany coal subsidies. Now let's substitute nuclear for coal... and the first result is Subsidies and Public Support for Energy. It doesn't have much but it does say ways in which nuclear power is assisted. BusinessWeek reports a split in Chancellor Angela Merkel's government about extending the lifespan of nuclear power. Some plants there are approaching the end of their lifespan, so some want to extend the lifespan. One member of the coalition says "The nuclear power plants are designed for 40 years -- not 60, but 40 years".

It doesn't look like business determines what exists but government in Germany too.

Falcon

Since most of our oil does NOT come from the mid east, and in fact it supplies China with more oil I find it hard to swallow the 'we are there for the oil' conspiracy.

I agree the US doesn't get much oil from the Mideast, the US's biggest supplier of oil is Canada and second is Mexico. However petroleum has a world wide market and if a supplier can get more money from somewhere else, oil will go there.

Actually that's why nothing was done about the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. Sudan exports a lot of oil to China and China didn't want to risk losing the oil. I don't know if you consider "BusinessWeek" to spread conspiracy theories but here's the article Oil for China, Guns for Darfur. That's the same problem with Iran, Iran supplies China with a lot of gas and China doesn't want to risk losing it. Directly from China, China, Iran sign biggest oil & gas deal. As long as a country supplies what it's supporters want it can get away with murder.

Falcon

My family raises cattle on a farm in Iowa. Speaking from our experience, I'll tell you that putting a pound of meat on a steer takes in the neighborhood of ten pounds of feed -- and much more than that, if you're feeding them exclusively grasses (including hay). ...

Either way you're talking about raising the prices of basic foodstuffs. You won't inconvenience the rich: the rich will still be able to afford filet mignon and Kobe beef. After all, they're rich.

If your family raises cattle, then you should know that farmers have been culling cattle herds like crazy for the last ~5 years or so. Beef prices have gone through the floor because the recession seriously dampened demand and caused a glut in the market. At the same time, corn prices have been zooming up because of the ethanol push. This isn't just limited to cattle, as the pork and chicken industries have been cutting production too.

Just so no one things I'm pulling this out of my ass, here's the first relevant google result for "culling cattle herds"
http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-27/u-s-cattle-herd-falls-to-1958-low-as-losses-climb-survey-says.html

Here's another article, this time from April 2009, talking about 2008 herd numbers for the various industries:
http://www.avma.org/onlnews/javma/apr09/090415a.asp

Moving to grass fed beef would resolve the market price problem (grass fed commands a premium) and the cost problem (grass is free, more land is cheap, corn feed is not).

You own source shows Toyota obstructing the use of data from their own "black boxes".

I've read every line of the actual articles in both citations and nowhere does it say anything of the sort. Blogger comments don't count. Businessweek has a good article on the whole smelly affair.

Isn't that exactly what (properly qualified) consultants are for?

Government worker unions despise contractors. Better the NHTSA be incapable of actual engineering than that they misdirect money into non-union contract engineers.

Worse than that, this is really a problem of bureaucracy. The SEC missed Madoff [*] completely because it is populated by lawyers that really have no interest in rocking the boats of the wealthy and powerful. Lawyers have a great deal at stake whenever they interact with powerful people; their careers depend on their reputation among the connected. Bernie didn't work any miracles; his fraud was at least suspected if not obvious to hedge fund managers, quants, clients and media people. The lawyers at the SEC just didn't WANT to find anything dramatic because they're lawyers; they put on their blinders, do the audit and clock out happy they aren't on the front page of the NYT throwing a grenade into some rich guys setup.

What do you suppose the predominant form of life is at NHTSA? Well, right now they are looking for a Trial Attorney and a "Supervisory Equal Employment Opportunity Specialist" which is, according to the job description, a law clerk to handle civil rights complaints.

Bunch of lawyers hiring more lawyers. No surprise they can't analyze code. What happens to these lawyers after they've made their regulatory bones at the NHTSA? Same thing that happens to the SEC lawyers; they get hired by the wealthy and powerful to handle the government.

The previous NHTSA administrator was Nicole Nason, a Case Western lawyer. The new guy is David L. Strickland, a lawyer from Harvard. These people wouldn't tolerate sharing the same building with an actual engineer.


* I've read through about half of the 500+ SEC Madoff investigation transcripts; so far the only non-attorney I have encountered is a guest finance professor on loan from some Washington area university.

That statement confuses the physical notion of doing something a person think needs to be done with the social notion of a job implying a "boss", a currency system, a state with police to enforce property rights and contracts, rich/poor divides, and so on.

There is no confusion here. Those things are support infrastructure that greatly improve the outcome of human work. A "boss" directs the labor to greater result for some useful purpose. A currency system is a very effective means to simplify trade. A state with police is more infrastructure that supports various economic activities and trade that simply couldn't occur in its absence (such as maintaining a large business or borrowing money). Property rights and enforceable contracts are self-explanatory, allowing for a variety of activities and agreements that would not be possible in their absence. Rich/poor divides are one of the few things that have always been around and hasn't changed significantly either in its existence or in mechanisms for addressing the imbalance, such as cultural mores, that have the rich in part supporting the poor. Many primitive cultures have rich and poor as well along with some sort of way for the rich to support the poor (eg, gift economies).

So work that earlier would have been directed to finding or growing enough food to supply a family, now produces a lot more.

Anyway, I'm trying to talk specifics. You are talking more generalities. What specifically do you think is expensive and what do you want to use it for, and we can see how to make what you want to do abundant and cheap. Now, that does not mean you might get a ton of gold, but if you want a good conductor, there are alternatives to gold. Or if you want a way to exchange information about demand, there are alternatives to gold.

I disagree with your claim here. I've already mentioned a couple of specific things which are expensive, food and labor. The latter is increasing in cost, contrary to your claims. While wages drop a little in the developed world, it has been increasing greatly elsewhere, for example, in China and India, which each have roughly as much labor as exists in what was the old First World.

Your claim of lack of scarcity simply grates with reality. There are few goods that are given freely because the effort of pricing the good is more than the good is costs to supply or is worth. Air is one such example. Those can be considered truly abundant. But if you can hang a price tag on it, then it doesn't deserve to be called "abundant" in my view.

Also, the existence of alternatives (or what is called "substitute goods") doesn't imply that something shouldn't have value. Gold, despite its higher cost and low supply, is still desired. That's why the price is as high as it is. Sure there are alternatives for gold, but that ignores that at the current supply and price, there are still things that gold does better for the price. Why spend $1200 on say platinum, when $1000 of gold does the same job? That's why the price of gold remains as high as it does.

That statement confuses the physical notion of doing something a person think needs to be done with the social notion of a job implying a "boss", a currency system, a state with police to enforce property rights and contracts, rich/poor divides, and so on.

There is no confusion here. Those things are support infrastructure that greatly improve the outcome of human work. A "boss" directs the labor to greater result for some useful purpose. A currency system is a very effective means to simplify trade. A state with police is more infrastructure that supports various economic activities and trade that simply couldn't occur in its absence (such as maintaining a large business or borrowing money). Property rights and enforceable contracts are self-explanatory, allowing for a variety of activities and agreements that would not be possible in their absence. Rich/poor divides are one of the few things that have always been around and hasn't changed significantly either in its existence or in mechanisms for addressing the imbalance, such as cultural mores, that have the rich in part supporting the poor. Many primitive cultures have rich and poor as well along with some sort of way for the rich to support the poor (eg, gift economies).

So work that earlier would have been directed to finding or growing enough food to supply a family, now produces a lot more.

Anyway, I'm trying to talk specifics. You are talking more generalities. What specifically do you think is expensive and what do you want to use it for, and we can see how to make what you want to do abundant and cheap. Now, that does not mean you might get a ton of gold, but if you want a good conductor, there are alternatives to gold. Or if you want a way to exchange information about demand, there are alternatives to gold.

I disagree with your claim here. I've already mentioned a couple of specific things which are expensive, food and labor. The latter is increasing in cost, contrary to your claims. While wages drop a little in the developed world, it has been increasing greatly elsewhere, for example, in China and India, which each have roughly as much labor as exists in what was the old First World.

Your claim of lack of scarcity simply grates with reality. There are few goods that are given freely because the effort of pricing the good is more than the good is costs to supply or is worth. Air is one such example. Those can be considered truly abundant. But if you can hang a price tag on it, then it doesn't deserve to be called "abundant" in my view.

Also, the existence of alternatives (or what is called "substitute goods") doesn't imply that something shouldn't have value. Gold, despite its higher cost and low supply, is still desired. That's why the price is as high as it is. Sure there are alternatives for gold, but that ignores that at the current supply and price, there are still things that gold does better for the price. Why spend $1200 on say platinum, when $1000 of gold does the same job? That's why the price of gold remains as high as it does.

I do not take SONY serious these days. They were the leaders but are a shadow of their former self. SAMSUNG matters to me and the world now.

Heck, from 2005, there was a business lesson for SONY at Samsung. For SONY, they had their time and that was decades ago.

• Fail frequently. This can also be said "fail often" and simply means "accept a lot of failures."
• Fail early. Don't invest a lot of time into what you're failing at and just accept the failure and move on. Just as long as you don't get hung up failing all the time (like Wales said). Also have heard it said as "fail fast."
• Fail cheap. This might be derived from 'fail early' as time is money. But this is the third optional part you'll hear from investors and businessmen.

So the ultimate incarnation I've heard of this is "Fail often, fail fast, fail cheap."

Now for the warning: if you take this too much to heart, you see people axing everything. And from the technical point of view, it sucks. And is demoralizing. Another thing is you get really really sick of hearing it and just being the silver bullet response to "why can't I do X?"

They aren't turning off the device, they are removing your access to the iTunes store. Which is a service. Apple has a real and growing problem with people stealing the paid apps. It would be one thing if jail broken phones were just used for loading free software. But it's not.

Allow me to quote a pretty smart guy:

Why would the big four music companies agree to let Apple and others distribute their music without using DRM systems to protect it? The simplest answer is because DRMs haven’t worked, and may never work, to halt music piracy. Though the big four music companies require that all their music sold online be protected with DRMs, these same music companies continue to sell billions of CDs a year which contain completely unprotected music. That’s right! — Steve Jobs

So, what's good enough for music isn't good enough for the App store? DRM hasn't worked, and may never work to halt piracy. How did Apple win in music? Easy: They took down all the bullshit barriers. Guess what happens when Apple starts erecting bullshit barriers around their own products? Hello Android!

http://www.businessweek.com/lifestyle/content/may2009/bw20090514_058678.htm

I've got too many friends in the auto repair field who tell me that adding ethanol to fuel has made their financial positions better. Iron and alcohol like to do things together. I thought that was pretty well known. Also, alcohol and a number of plastics get along swimmingly.... and by swimmingly, I mean little pieces breaking off, moving about in the fuel and other systems... thinks leaking and all that. Did they completely stop using iron in the parts that make up an engine?

People are accustomed to their cars breaking and needing repairs. Trouble is, general reliability in cars has improved amazingly in the past 20 years. But that all started to get reversed when ethanol was added to our fuel.

And let's not forget that alcohol as a fuel doesn't fix the problems of greenhouse emissions and decreases efficiency. Adding water to gasoline might actually be a little better for your car and the environment than alcohol.

Not sure that anyone's mentioned being afraid of TV tracking (after all, the data's been randomized! ;-), but concern/caution seems appropriate. For instance, reality shows and similar LCD programming: first off, your TiVo stats (and have a thousand friends join you) will do little to dent network affections for such genres -- they're cheaper to produce than so-called "scripted" shows, so Survivor is always going to have a leg up in the excutive suites.

Where your viewing data will have an effect, however, is in determining which shows attract viewers that stay on the couch to watch the ads. Slashdot ran another story on TiVo data collection way back in '03; the linked BW article mentions one impact of this more-granular data -- it's possible to separate total viewership (aka old-style Nielson numbers of rating and share) from "advert stickiness", the number of viewers who watch the ads. Way back in '03 this was exemplified by comparing The Practice (lawerly drama, pre-Shatner bogosity) to The Weakest Link (cheesy semi-schadenfreude game show): Practice had an 8.9% TiVo rating, but those viewers watched only 30% of the ads. OTOH, Link had only a 0.9% rating, but its viewers stuck around for 78% of the ads. These stats open up a whole new field for the network quants: how to make a show good enough to draw an above-threshold rating/share, but crappy enough to draw the kinds of folks with nothing better to do than sit through the ads.

Now add in Google's Nov. 2009 deal to buy viewer stats from TiVo for use by Google TV Ads, and set your phasers to Irony....will producers begin formulating AVO (advertisement-viewing optimization) strategies similar to SEO shenanigans on the web?

Gaming is a huge industry and the Xbox is fairly popular.

The console and PC game industry as a whole was worth $20 billion in 2007. Electronic Arts: Lost in an Alien Landscape Microsoft raked in $19 billion in revenues in its last quarter.

It's not "Goodbye Moto". It's Hello Motos.

Another story about the underlying reason for the split: Icahn vs. Motorola: The Rematch

Mr. Icahn often has good ideas: It's Up to the Shareholders, Not the Government, to Demand Change at a Company. I think, however, that the government should stop banking abuses.

http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-01-26/davos-too-big-to-fail-as-bankers-recoil-in-political-backlash.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/26/business/economy/26big.html NY Times

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124528373595925623.html WSJ 2009 before the crash

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/opinionla/la-oew-ikenson-wial4-2009jun04,0,4807351.story June '09 before the crash

Forgive the formatting, but it's Saturday AM and I went drinking with my sons yesterday.

Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.

Bill Gates was probably going to be a millionaire (his parents were very well off, he was (is?) driven, very smart and an SOB :)

This is offtopic and probably nit-picky because the SOB jab feels to be toungue-in-cheek. I will just note that Mr. Gates donates more to charity than Linus, FakeSteveJobs, and all other /. demagogues combined.

And? He has more money than all of those groups put together. It isn't hard to be extra generous when you are so rich you could buy a new luxury car ever few hours for the rest of your life without denting your fortune.

Bill Gates was probably going to be a millionaire (his parents were very well off, he was (is?) driven, very smart and an SOB :)

This is offtopic and probably nit-picky because the SOB jab feels to be toungue-in-cheek. I will just note that Mr. Gates donates more to charity than Linus, FakeSteveJobs, and all other /. demagogues combined.

RHX was intended to be a marketplace. Software and support contracts were to be sold there. Here is an article covering its release; it's one of the wikipedia references.

Synaptic and Software Center are tools, like PackageKit and up2date are in Fedora and RHEL. RHX wasn't an tool.

How is extending WinXP life by 10 years a dirty business move.
You guys sat around here and squirmed when they said they were gonna stop it, that there was too many people reliant on it and we needed it because Vista couldn't do it.
Well Windows 7 came and shit all over that argument, also over the argument that XP was never a good OS the last 10+ years.

Way to spin the 'one laptop per child' disaster, that thing was a disaster from the beginning and mainly because it was run by that one fool guy Nepalatano and the fact it was trying to be run like an open-source project. It failed to provide practical education and would have been sold off by these kids to get money, how naive and foolish were these people in all their good intentions.
The 'One laptop per child' became successful because of XP and its massive application/education library of stuff. The original fools let their egos get ahead of them instead of actually thinking to provide children with education, they turned it into an agenda to beat MS.

It's Time To Call One Laptop Per Child A Failure
http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/NussbaumOnDesign/archives/2007/09/its_time_to_cal.html

"that übertechnology visionary Nicholas Negroponte, ex-MIT Media Lab, broke the most important design rule from the very beginning of the project. Design from the bottom up, not top down. This was, almost in every way, a traditional top down product development, that involved the rural children in India, Africa and China only in the late stages."
"Despite all the handshakes, the Indian and Chinese governments didn’t order any XOs. Again, classic design mistakes of not getting buy-in from groups needed to launch a new product."
Yes.... lets all damn MS for the incompetence and egos in the open source developers.
This entire article is filled with scapegoat comments about MS and how corrupt they are.

Meanwhile, in the USA, they bailed out the oligarchy that runs the banking system, and then gave money to a bunch of aimless projects that just put band-aids on current infrastructure. There was no national call to action (for example..."we're going to put unemployed auto workers to work building an all-new high-speed rail system to link our urban areas" or "we're going to use this opportunity to completely replace our power grid, because we lose such a high percentage of power to inefficiency of the lines") that would have solidly improved the country for the long-term, improve its ability to transact business.

High Speed Rail? Check
Smart grid? Check

This is exacly what the stimulus is going for. The stimulus is working. If anything, the stimulus isn't big enough, given the problems this country has.

The latest defect in Toyota cars is quickly developing into the scandal of the 21st century. The problem started when customers of Toyota vehicles began experiencing sudden unexplained acceleration; these incidents began appearing in 2002. Over time, Toyota management claimed that the problem is the floor mat. So, the management issued a recall to replace all the floor mats.

Then, after further studying the problem, the management claimed that the throttle's pedal sometimes becomes stuck due to weather conditions. This new claim lead to the massive global recall of many vehicles sold over the past 3 years.

However, none of these explanations for the sudden acceleration has been satisfactory. Independent investigations leading to an explosion of lawsuits have determined that the problem is the electronic throttle control (ETC) — the so-called drive-by-wire mechanism that links the pedal via some cables to the fuel controller. According to a report by "Businessweek" and another report by the "Wall Street Journal", Toyota is now the defendant in 3 separate class-action lawsuits. The plaintiffs claim that the ETC is defective.

According to a report by the "New York Times" (NYT), "a few years ago, the company sent out a technical bulletin saying some cars accelerate on their own between 38 and 42 mph, and it reprogrammed the electronics with new software codes".

The NYT notes, "John Heywood, director of the Sloan Automotive Lab at MIT, said because Toyota is the only automaker having this problem, it could be something specific to its design, such as the location and integration of the electronics relay sensor."

Further, the Toyota ETC lacks an important safety mechanism: if the customer presses both the throttle pedal and the brake pedal, then the ETC should give priority to the brake. The Toyota ETC gives priority to the throttle. How can Toyota engineers commit such a gross design mistake? Common sense tells us that the brake should receive priority.

You must have missed the story about Ford posting an annual profit for the first time since 2005, while also paying down debt and not filing bankruptcy like the other two of the Big 3.

Microsoft will cooperate as long as they have a shot at public sector revenue. This is hardly unique to China. If the nation of Venezuela wanted Microsoft products, they'd take their money.

I think American crossed the line into full-scale hipocracy(sp!!) by calling China out on censorship. The Chinese are more overt, but the effects are the same.

How about killing prisoners at Guantanamo? http://harpers.org/archive/2010/01/hbc-90006368 How was that story handled?? I'd argue that's a pretty serious situation and yet, somehow the mainstream media won't touch it. The title AP gave it was "Harper's questions three Guantanamo deaths." Somehow, prisoners under 24/7 observation are able to stuff rags down their throats AND THEN hang themselves? There's room for 'a question?' http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2010-01-18-guantanamo-deaths_N.htm?csp=34

How about the *massive* transfer of weath orchestrated by the Fed and Treasury? It's a 'bailout.' Maiden Lane 3 somehow generates profits in a way obvious to exactly no one. GM's debt holders got barely pennies on the dollar depending on their debt senority and yet AIG's counter parties got every single cent back. And the headline is "this is troubling" ?? http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jan2010/db2010018_994080.htm

Let's go back a few years to Sibel Edmonds story that *no* media would touch.

I missed the part where the American Republic was a bastion of Freedom.

I'm going to have to call "NPOV violation" on that one... it's a list of their losses, while their wins have gone unmentioned.

Microsoft has finally awakened to the fact that they're fighting for their life here. It's good that they've woken up in that Redmond ivory tower - it means they'll finally have to start thinking about what products we might want, how they can increase demand be delivering features and security. This is a lot better than the previous model of telling us what we should want. It's bad because it's easier to kill a sleeping giant than one that's alert and fighting.

It's bad in that once awakened, they fight hard and take no prisoners. It means they will induce more OEMs to force Bing on us - in fact word has it they're negotiating with Apple for just that. I hope that Jobs will be enough offended by the idea of a " Bing powered iPhone " to prevent that. Not only are they forcing the search engine, but they want top billing. That's hubris. I would be offended too if I engineered this device that swept the mobile phone world, only to find that someone else who did everything they could to prevent it wanted to claim they "powered" it. It would take a lot of money to assuage my ire. Office 11, crippled in the usual ways, would not cut it for me, and I don't think Steve Jobs is dumb enough to take that deal.

Regardless this represents a phase change in their strategy that we should be alert to.

Well, the cost of a daily print subscription to the New York Times is 14.80...For a week. Mind you, that's to my house, and I live a long fucking way from NYC (checked it against my old NYC zip code, and it's only 11.70 there).

The Times is not printed in NYC for those who receive delivery in remote areas. BusinessWeek pegged the number at around 20 printing plants (owned and contracted), but that was a few years ago.

In any event, it's not a straight forward proposition. If they cancelled ALL printing AND made the price $50 a year, computers and eReaders only, I suspect they'd have to let a LOT of people go.

As more and more organizations close foreign news bureaus, the remaining ones while suffering become even more important. I don't care if the investigative reporting shifts to web based publications, but right now there are newspapers with journalists covering things in-depth that a blog doesn't have the resources to do and the nightly news doesn't cover well enough (if at all) in a 30 minute broadcast.

The problem is that MY insurance company doesn't say 'no', but the government "for the people" system will be telling everyone 'no'. My costs will go up and my service will go down, which is what will happen for a majority of the people.

As it turns out, there are millions of uninsured patients--or underinsured--who are simply told "no" because they are poor. I find that unacceptable. And I don't know any elderly who are complaining about the quality of care they get with Medicare. We already have a government-run system that works. Their costs do not go up beyond the general inflation index of healthcare costs, nor their services down.

The numbers in particular that I speak of are here and they are from the OECD.

Did the CEO help broker deals that generated the $66 million, or did the coders? If the executives were able to talk Google into a deal that brings in $66mil, surely they are worth $.5mil

Welcome to reality, where paying executives and paying coders is not an either/or proposition.

What's up with people drumming up this 'fact'? Opera (while sitting all way the across in the Land of the Midnight Sun') was able to broker a deal with Google for pay-per-search. And their CEO gets paid the equivalent of 26K in 2010!

http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/people/person.asp?personId=11669499&capId=532001&previousCapId=532001&previousTitle=OPERA%20SOFTWARE%20ASA

And what did the Mozilla CEOs do in the meantime apart from inking search deals? Thunderbird is a failure, Fennec is too little, too late. There's absolutely nothing of significance fro Mozilla in 5 years apart from Firefox which the community made a success of, not as much Mozilla which just piggy backed on the popularity to sign on search deals. Bugzilla is the only success to a limited extent. They dropped the ball on LIGHTNING and SUNBIRD too which could've easily supplanted Exchange by now if the funds were properly utilized, but still the executive keep getting paid exorbitant salaries for underperforming.

"WoW has got to make more than that per year. 12 million subscribers × $13 per subscriber per month × 12 months per year = $1,872,000,000 gross per year, to a first approximation."

You're dead on: in 2007 they were making 1.1 billion a year. Two years later I have no doubt it's approaching 2 billion.

http://groups.google.com/group/soc.culture.korean/browse_thread/thread/63a135baa9ae8b87

> Average annual income: Taiwan US$16563, Korea US$19921
> PPP: Taiwan US$32041, Korea US$23331
PPP is the purchasing power.

I.e., Because many items are much cheaper in Taiwan than in the US (partially because of laws the corporations have had passed to prevent importation of substantially cheaper medicine and items-- i.e. killing what should happen in a true capitalist economy), the $16,563 annual income allows a citizen of Taiwan to live as well as a person making $32041 dollars in the US. So they live about 3/4 as well as the average income $46,000 american citizen.

http://www.worldsalaries.org/taiwan.shtml
Personal Average Income (2005)
17,138 $US.
297,862 NT$

For example:
http://www.footprintsrecruiting.com/cost-of-living-in-taiwan/cost-of-food-in-taiwan
Monthly expenses (for an expatriate english teacher)...

* Rent: NT$10,000
* Utilities: NT$1,750
* Food: NT$7,500
* Transportation: NT$700
* Entertainment: NT$2,500
* Internet: NT $500
* Cell Phone: NT $1,000
* TOTAL: NT$23,950 (NT$256,000 annually)
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China and India have the lower wage structure, not Taiwan.

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India has some advantages over the US for costs. Medical is about 20% of our cost (for nearly identical care for many procedures) and a college degree is about 10% of the cost. The college degree is going to be very intense (so like advanced placement classes here) but perhaps less creative and definitely less networking with other US people in your field.

Medical and University costs have grossly outpaced inflation for the last two decades in the US. Since I got my degree in 93, the cost of an in state degree has gone up 500%.

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These lower prices are an artifact and they will shed away quickly. I think within 8 years. Wages here will stagnate and wages their will rise.
For exmample:
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_13/b3977049.htm
"Last year salaries surged 40%, to an average of $160 a month."

"Wait a minute. Doesn't China have an inexhaustible supply of cheap labor? Not any longer. From the textile and toy factories of the south to the corporate headquarters and research labs in Beijing and Shanghai, the No. 1 challenge today is finding and keeping good workers. "

http://www.moneyweek.com/news-and-charts/economics/what-chinas-changing-labour-market-means-for-the-west.aspx
Incomes are rising at double-digit rates - even rural incomes.

http://www.forbes.com/2007/07/02/china-wage-growth-markets-econ-cx_jc_0702markets1.html
On a per-capita basis, the average Chinese worker earned an annual wage of 12,422 yuan ($1,630) in 2002, or 1,035 yuan ($136) per month. As of 2006, they were making 21,001 yuan ($2,756) a year, or 1,750 yuan ($230) a month.

Chinese workers experienced 400% wage inflation at the lowest tiers from 1995 to 2006 alone. Wages for US workers went up about 50% in the same time period (wages for executives went from 85x us workers annual pay to 531x us workers annual pay) http://www.svsu.edu/emplibrary/Whelton%20article.pdf

I

Yeah, he probably wouldn't be able to do such useful things as remembering the whole phone book or recalling which baseball player did what in each year.

Or design and implement bittorrent, and run a company around it; see http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_43/b4105046863317.htm

Or win the Nobel Prize in economics; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernon_L._Smith and http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2008/03/vernon_smith_on_1.html

(Okay, that's Asperger's Syndrome; but I think that's within the scope of this discussion)

He might be able to button his own shirt or wipe his own ass, though.

Or it might be that he is better able to communicate with other people; he might have an easier time stumbling unto the idea that if he asks someone a question and silence is the answer, it might be because of an internal struggle between not wanting to lie and not wanting to admit the truth. And that he can gain something by not putting people in that situation again.

More here...
And it turns out I was being optimistic for executive pay.

http://www.businessweek.com/1999/99_16/b3625017.htm

Only 30 made over 300,000 the equivalent of those today made 500 million or more.

T. Boone Pickens demonstrated someone getting in too far over their head too fast in this market. I really wish he would explain to everyone what went wrong with his plans. Who knows? The cement for the bases could get too expensive?

He tried to change Texas law so that the water supply corporation he owned in the Texas panhandle would be able to use eminent domain to take land on a corridor to Dallas/Fort Worth, so as to convey the wind power. Oh, and he could use the same corridor to convey water from the panhandle to DFW as well.

In all those wind power ads and interviews you saw, he never did mention the fact that he owned significant water rights in the Texas panhandle, and just needed a route to pipe that water to major cities to sell it. Do you recall that part?

When Texas balked about letting him pump the panhandle dry and flood (literally) the DFW market with his water, he stopped his ruse of caring about the environment.

http://www.lubbockonline.com/stories/071008/loc_302185743.shtml

http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/earth/4275059.html

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/TimothyCarney/T_Boone_Pickens_wants_your_water.html

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_25/b4089040017753.htm

Nokia has no compelling smart phone offering, and that's where the market is headed. Their current market share -- yes, the largest of any single manufacturer -- is somewhat immaterial on that basis alone.

The page linked to is an ad laden (carefully selected related items, yeah right) mess that has this third or fourth hand.

True. The source is a badly written Bloomberg story which says the new battery has a capacity of "3.4 amperes per hour". I wrote to the reporter pointing out the meaninglessness of that number. The useful numbers for battery technologies are $/KwH and Kg/KwH, and they don't have those. The only useful piece of information in the story is that Panasonic will make a real announcement tomorrow.

They already tried that. Apparently it did not work out too well.

They settle for nothing less than compliance.

That's what enforcing a license means, yes.

In all seriousness, how can you assert that someone only "resorts to a suit" after they have made "serious efforts to resolve the conflict some other way", when there is only ONE SINGLE way they have sought to resolve it, which is to force the company to comply with the license as they have written it

By the time it gets to court, they're going to be asking for more than just compliance with the original license!

Isn't that solely based on a value judgement of the license as 'good', while simply having a different license would have made the SFLC methodology and approach to violaters of it 'evil'?

No. All paths lead to compliance with the license, but not all paths are the same: chances are they started out with private negotiation rather than a suit (or a raid).

"Paypal has never been anything but a processing center. "

Actually it's a bank located in Luxembourg since a couple of years.

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2007/tc20070614_606853.htm?chan=technology_technology+index+page_top+stories

My laser printer, an HP LaserJet 6P, was pulled out of a dumpster at some point in the distant past, and is still running strong after all of these years. I print a relatively light workload on it, but it's survived several moves and a lot of accidental nudging over its life. (It's currently eleven years old.) Would that all of my consumer goods performed so admirably.

Uh, how about this: Business Week from this: /. from 2005. That's the actual existing problem that spawned the push to legally codify the way the Internet currently (mostly) works. The problem is the Internet currently works neutrally, and works very well, and the mouthpiece of an extremely powerful corporate entity says they want to change it in order to skim more money off of both us and other companies, without providing anything at all in return.

It's a problem.

Why give space to this Microsoft astroturfer on slashdot ?

RWW's Sarah Perez: Microsoft Hitwoman?

Apple is/has become/always was an arrogant company with regard to customer service

Apple has always had a good customer service rating. Year after year Apple was ranked near if not at the top surveys on customer service. After using Windows PC, and dealing with the hassles thereof, for about 10 years I switched to Linux and Mac. In the more than 2 years I've had my Mac I only had one problem with Apple service, which I was expecting. I tried to use Eclipse for programming when I got an error. I knew they probably wouldn't but I was hoping an Apple tech would help me with it, instead I was told to try to get help in the Apple developer forums online.

Falcon

I don't think it will hold up, but I can understand their reasons to give it a shot.

I think it's the opposite actually. Despite what nay sayers say Apple has a pretty good reputation but by doing this that reputation is damaged. Here's an article from "Business Week" on that, A Bruise or Two on Apple's Reputation.

Falcon

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/03_42/b3854093_mz063.htm

It has a subscription option, and you can download content, but the problem is that the subscribed content is "streaming" and not automatically downloaded to the client computer. I'll be following this story as this patent would invalidate my Miro player.

I wish just one of these frivilous "process patents," which the high courts have ruled acceptable because they modify the physical components of a computer (ie. hard drive), would go to the Supreme Court, as the recent comments from its members signal they think the patents are ridiculous as well and would probably invalidate them.