Slashdot Mirror

According to Tevanian, Apple executive Peter Hoddie asked Microsoft officials, "'Are you asking us to kill playback? Are you asking us to knife the baby?'" He said Microsoft official Christopher Phillips responded, "'Yes, we want you to knife the baby.' It was very clear."

http://www.businessweek.com/mi...
So the baby has finally been knifed, some 18 years later.

Without zoning laws, your could have [...]

I dunno, somehow Houston copes.

From the quoted BW article:Developers employ widespread private covenants and deed restrictions, which serve a comparable role as zoning. These privately prescribed land use controls are effective because they have a legal precedence and local government has chosen to assist in enforcing them. Some investors are understandably apprehensive about the lack of clearly defined rules. Houston developers have long recognized these concerns and have responded, particularly in suburban markets, by producing planned business and industrial parks that have rigorous covenants and deed restrictions. Not surprisingly, the sites receiving the attention of institutional investors, especially in suburban markets, tend to be in planned parks.

So Houston simply replaced zoning with restricted deeds and covenants, i.e. zoning laws by any other name except they are not decided by the local government.

Without zoning laws, your could have [...]

I dunno, somehow Houston copes.

You are explaining the benefits of zoning laws. That does not change the fact, they infringe on property rights and, ultimately, freedom.

Brothels could be built next to schools.

Oh, dear, would somebody, please, think of the children?

Without permits, someone could build a well that sucks up the water from all their neighbors' wells

Let me Fix That For You:

Without permits, someone could build a solar plant that sucks up the Sun from all their neighbors' plants

Live by the permits, die by the permits.

Whether or not Toyota received R&D support from Japan is in dispute.

This research clearly shows, the comments must be regulated — to ensure, only the certified experts are allowed to express opinions, and that all different points of view are fairly represented. The current so-called "freedom" is, obviously, putting us in danger — and it is over-rated anyway.

To keep the "playing field" level, the hitherto unregulated online news-sources (which also attract the most dangerous comments) shall be subjected to the same rules as TV-broadcasters, thus shutting down the smaller and annoyingly quirky ones among them. The respected (and, incidentally, government-supporting) establishments will thus be (smartly) helped.

Dissemination of information deemed incorrect by the benevolent and omniscient regulators, or failures to represent all points of view fairly, shall lead to the withdrawals of certification and any other licenses — easy to achieve without much fuss because a license, by definition is a permission granted by the Executive, and can be withdrawn (or not-renewed) without having to convince the skeptical Judiciary. Anybody talking about the First Amendment shall be ignored (and put on a watch-list) as a fringe crazy — this is not the 60-ies, you can not protest like that .

Regulation on slashdot hasn't worked for sometime now, though. The level of group think here is astounding. Every now and then I see a 10+ year old article on "This day on Slashdot" and notice just how much better the comments use to be on Slashdot compared to all the +5 insightful one-liners we get these days. Clearly, the mod system hasn't scaled well. Something new needs to be thought up.

This research clearly shows, the comments must be regulated — to ensure, only the certified experts are allowed to express opinions, and that all different points of view are fairly represented. The current so-called "freedom" is, obviously, putting us in danger — and it is over-rated anyway.

To keep the "playing field" level, the hitherto unregulated online news-sources (which also attract the most dangerous comments) shall be subjected to the same rules as TV-broadcasters, thus shutting down the smaller and annoyingly quirky ones among them. The respected (and, incidentally, government-supporting) establishments will thus be (smartly) helped.

Dissemination of information deemed incorrect by the benevolent and omniscient regulators, or failures to represent all points of view fairly, shall lead to the withdrawals of certification and any other licenses — easy to achieve without much fuss because a license, by definition is a permission granted by the Executive, and can be withdrawn (or not-renewed) without having to convince the skeptical Judiciary. Anybody talking about the First Amendment shall be ignored (and put on a watch-list) as a fringe crazy — this is not the 60-ies, you can not protest like that .

when did we become a nation of wimps?

It was all downhill since we decided (contrary to the Founding Father's advice and implorations) to make it the government's responsibility to take care of "the most vulnerable". The list of "vulnerable" has been increasing since and the number of the benevolent and caring government officials needed to take care of them has been increasing along with it. As has been the "caring" class' voting power — while you were kept focused on the "military industrial complex"...

The lost "War on Poverty", for example, has cost $22 trillion — three times more than all of America's military wars combined (inflation-adjusted). If the overhead costs (pay and other expenses of the government officials doing the wealth-redistribution) was at the idealistic 23% of that, we paid them about $5 trillion dollars over the 50 years.

If it is acceptable for 15% to remain on the dole, is it really that much of a stretch, that the 100% need to be told, when to stay home a few days (weeks, months) per year?

I wonder how lopsided the drone / antidrone equation really is.

According to this article, Western military drones cost $200K apiece (ballpark — I'm sure, the price-range is wide). Russian ones are, probably, half that. Ukrainians are making their own at $60K.

Whatever it is, the cost of a single military drone is tens of thousands.

Now, a hand-held Stinger — capable of bringing down a real aircraft with a pilot fighting for his life — is quoted on Wikipedia costing $38K (though it is unclear, which year dollars those are). That's decidedly less than a drone already.

Considering that a) the anti-drone missiles don't need to be as powerful and strong as Stingers; b) things made in Ukraine (or Russia for that matter) tend to cost a lot less, a usable missile can, probably, be produced for "only" several thousand dollars apiece.

But even if the US made them — and gave to Ukraine — it would still be good bang for the buck, achieving a valuable military objective without giving Russia too much to protest about, because this new weapon would be "non-lethal".

It sounds like your workplace is respectful, and that race and gender rightfully don't factor into your opinions of each others' work. It sounds like your workplace happens to be diverse, which helps keep everyone centered on what does matter (technical chops), as opposed to what doesn't (gender, race, age).

But what are your feelings on the rise of brogrammers? Sexual harassment at conferences? Companies with cultures that do fixate on gender / race / what-have-you? Typically these cultures arise when the population is too insular, too homogeneous.

Diversity isn't about saying "we need more vaginas in here programming." What an irrelevant strawman. Rather, it's about preventing the myopic echo chamber that can result when things are too homogeneous.

The Tesla is not a car you buy because you can't afford gas. It is a car you try to afford because it is the best car overall: http://www.businessweek.com/ne...

And then we run into the idiocy of what is happening in Washington state.
Public record, citizen requests that footage, posts it on youtube. Just because he can.

http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

If there was something genuinely better about their concrete...

A quick search shows there really was something better about their concrete:

Ancient Roman Concrete Is About to Revolutionize Modern Architecture

Discovery of 'Lost Recipe' for Ancient Concrete Provides Foundation for Future Cities

The Riddle of Ancient Roman Concrete

BTW, here's a quote that sums it up rather succinctly, emphasis mine:

“In Europe right now there’s a tremendous amount of anti-immigration sentiment,” Daniel Benjamin, a former U.S. counter-terrorism official now with the Brookings Institution in Washington, said on Bloomberg Television. “The danger here is that we see ever greater confrontations, provocations and the like, and that will drive radicalization. That is a very difficult thing for the authorities to manage.”

You are partially correct,

that the Middle East doesn't set prices, but Saudi Arabia has increased output:

http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

and many analysts believe the increase in production is to make the price of other extraction technologies unprofitable. They may become profitable again, but when fuel prices are this cheap, it makes it difficult.

Everyone knows fracking is perfectly safe.

It's on the internet so it must be true.

In fairness, security is frequently hampered by management that refuses to understand how critical infosec is. The Home Depot hack? Take a look at this:

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-09-18/home-depot-hacked-wide-open

Security staff had urged that a feature of their malware protection systems be turned on, for months.

"The former information security managers say that executives, including information security supervisor Jeff Mitchell, rebuffed efforts to bolster cyberdefenses. Two of the managers, who left the company in 2011 and 2012, both say Mitchell told them to settle for “C-level security” because more ambitious measures would be expensive and might disrupt critical systems. These priorities frustrated workers in the information security department, leading in the past three years to dozens of departures from a team of fewer than 50, the former managers say. Mitchell didn’t respond to requests for comment.

As it turns out, that manager was a criminal: http://arstechnica.com/security/2014/09/home-depots-former-security-architect-had-history-of-techno-sabotage/ He's also the source of the infamous "We sell hammers" quote. So management was not only deliberately hindering security measures, they had a manager who eventually got convicted for deliberately destroying equipment and data at a previous job. It doesn't appear that HD fired him when the accusations came to light.

and anyone who learns the local dialect, will always be fluent in mandarin as well.

What you say is similar to claiming that anyone who learns Italian will always be fluent in Spanish.

There are very many Chinese who can't speak Mandarin even in China: http://www.businessweek.com/ar...
http://www.businessinsider.com...

The big-planes, infrequently model doesn't really work with the hub-and-spokes model popular in the USA

Also, apparently American airlines typically use revenue management software optimized for smaller aircrafts, compared to that used by European carriers. http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

Cool, Jim! You might like this related proposal by me also for a basic income funded by a wealth tax of 6% on declared assets, with only declared assets being insured and defended by the government, explaining why millionaires should support the idea:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...

BTW, if we had a basic income, it's not clear to me there would still be any justification for copyright or patents. Suddenly anyone wanting to create could do so on their own or in collaboration with other like-minded creative people. So, given the costs of copyright and patents to society of chilling effects and other negative effects, it could be better to eliminate them entirely.

Real innovations are rarely rewarded in society. After all, for example, you invented Spasim, the first 3D networked computer game, which eventually spawned an entire industry all the way to Minecraft and Space Engineers. As the original developer of an idea, did you get royalties from the entire industry for decades? I doubt it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...

For another example, it took Ralph Baer fifteen years to even get someone to pay attention to the concept of computer games hooked to TVs:
http://games.slashdot.org/stor...

Meanwhile, someone like Bill Gates got financially obese based on starting as a millionaire at birth, dumpster diving to read other's code, and then licensing someone else's work to IBM -- work which apparently was improperly taken from the inventor (with IBM going through Gates to avoid liability).

Refs:
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...
"William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars. "

http://patch.com/california/lo...
""I would boost Bill into dumpsters and we'd get these coffee-stained texts (of computer code)" from behind the offices, grinned Allen."

http://www.businessweek.com/st...
"They Made America is certain to elicit cries of protest. That's because it attacks the reputations of some of the key players of the early PC era -- Gates, IBM, and Tim Paterson, the Seattle programmer who wrote an operating system, QDOS, based partly on CP/M that became Microsoft's DOS. Evans asserts that Paterson copied parts of CP/M and that IBM tricked Kildall. Because Gates rather than the more innovative Kildall prevailed, according to the book, the world's PC users endured "more than a decade of crashes with incalculable economic cost in lost data and lost opportunities.""

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...
"Last week, a Judge dismissed a defamation law suit brought by Tim Paterson, who sold a computer operating system to Microsoft in 1980, against journalist and author Sir Harold Evans and his publisher Little Brown. The software became the basis of Microsoft's MS-DOS monopoly, and the basis of its dominance of the PC industry. ... In a chapter devoted to Kildall in Evans' They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Centuries of Innovators, Evans related how Pater

Really? Apparently they quickly took control of almost every one one of Sony's servers and workstations. Literally took entire control, stole all of the useful data, wiped out all of their servers, and then owned all of the workstations so that they were useless but able to broadcast any message they wanted to them.

That's a *bit* more coordinated than "your average trojan worm". Unless you really think based on extremely limited information you know more than all of the security researchers and government investigators looking into it... (hint: sorry, you don't).

They had access for over a year...
http://www.businessweek.com/ne...

Sony didn't even have rudimentary security established. Pretty much any teenager with basic skills could have taken them out.

Since then, it’s spent an additional $57 million to keep building it, according to a February 2013 report by the agency’s inspector general, Paul Martin. Testifying before the House space subcommittee in September, Martin highlighted the A-3 as an example of how lawmakers, looking to keep federal dollars flowing to their states, can block efforts to cut unnecessary spending. “The political context in which NASA operates often impedes its efforts to reduce infrastructure,” he said."

This was reported by BusinessWeek almost a year ago.

Zoning laws prevent you from doing what you want with your property... They are evil and, obviously, a magnet for graft and other corruption.

Houston, for example, is not any worse without them...

That actually answers something I was wondering about the other day. My company was looking at a facility in Houston and it's in a brand new industrial park that is literally across the street from some of multi-million dollar homes I was amazed that the homeowners didn't manage to kill the project, and now I understand why they couldn't.

FWIW, I think zoning is like any other form of government intervention: a necessary evil. Some is absolutely required, a little more is ok, and it's only when those in power have an axe to grind, or engage in mission creep that the problems start. I'd honestly hate to live somewhere without at least rudimentary zoning, lest someone come along and build a sewage treatment next door, or put in heavy industry across the street from your $5M house like the example above.

I've been to countries that don't have zoning laws and frankly I wasn't impressed with the results

What countries were those, and how do we know, those "unimpressive" results were due to, rather than in spite of (or even regardless of) lack of zoning?

I'm open to alternate solutions

Well, you must've missed my link to article about Houston, so here it is again...

Zoning laws prevent you from doing what you want with your property... They are evil and, obviously, a magnet for graft and other corruption.

Houston, for example, is not any worse without them...

...I worry that Uber spells the demise of yet another low tech job. I mean, shouldn't there be something between fast food workers and cube dwellers? So I can see both sides of this.

You're framing both sides of the question incorrectly.

Do not confuse the worker, in this case drivers, with the owner of means of production, in this case the medallions-owners.

Where medallions are artificially scarce and can cost as much as one million dollars in New York, renting a medallion is an incredible weekly expense to have for the drivers and it ensures that taxi driver's lion share of their profits goes to the owners of the medallions, instead of themselves -- the lowly drivers.

Also if anything is destroying the taxi business, it's the medallion system, not Uber. During peak hours where medallions are scarce, one can not possibly hope to get picked up by a taxi during those times (unless perhaps, they're stepping out of a 4 star Hilton). And this artificial constraint only limits the number of driving jobs available. Once you lift this limit, you would only be creating new low tech jobs, instead of artificially limiting their number.

If real fascists took over the United States tomorrow...

Considering that fascism is closely associated with dirigism, where a government exerts a strong directive influence over the means of production, we're already there in spirit if not in name.

Utilities would love you to use batteries the way you describe. In Ontario they make more money per kWh at the off peak price (12-14 cents*) than at the peak price. This is because at the peak time the utilities are paying more per kWh to the generation plants. On a hot summer afternoon the price utilities pay in Ontario can climb well over a dollar while on a windy winter night it can go negative. Texas utilities are mandated to pay up to $7000 per mWh ($7/kWh) and they did pay this price once this year.

-- Disclaimer: I work for a company that sells devices to utilities to shift consumers electric consumption away from peak usage times.

*The Ontario electric bills lie about your cost per kWh. The cost they show is what they call the "generation cost". There are three other items that add another 4 cents. A 2 cent per kWh delivery fee, a 2 cent debt retirement fee and the tax. (there is also a connection fee which monthly but varies based on the number of days in the month but they can't call it a daily fee)

Here is the brass tacks... The EU sees a big rich american company doing business in the EU and they're not paying EU taxes. So they're going to fuck around with it until they figure out how to get money from it.

Actually, seems to me Google was paying taxes in EU:
http://www.latimes.com/busines...
http://www.businessweek.com/ma...

I don't know where their taxes will be going next.

Or dot you think Ireland is not a EU-country ?:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

yeah, when amazon gas partial outages like last year... it makes plenty of headlines http://www.zdnet.com/amazon-we... http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

Social Security has paid out all benefits owed since its inception with an overhead of less than 3%.

The infamous loan program under which Solyndra failed is expected to profit taxpayers by $5 billion over its lifetime.

The Clean Air Act has produced far more benefits than costs. This page has some links. The Second Prospective Study 1990-2020 estimates $65 billion in costs for $2 trillion in benefits.

Medicare is well liked by most of its recipients and has very low overhead compared to private insurance.

Federally sponsored research in the ARPA lead to the basic infrastructure of of the internet. In general federal support of scientific and engineering has produced far more benefits than it has cost us.

Google didn't steal. NASA didn't sell the fuel
NASA is a government agency and doesn't have to pay taxes and levies that the private sector does.
The fuel was supplied by DLA-Energy (Defense Logistics Agency), not NASA. The fuel was purchased by H211, a company owned by the top Google people.
DLA-Energy can sell the fuel, but they should collect the tax when they do.
There was confusion because H211 was flying some missions on behalf of NASA, for which they were entitled to tax free fuel.
[The inspector general] 'Martin attributed the discount to a “misunderstanding” between personnel at the airfield and the fuel supplier “rather than intentional misconduct. DLA-Energy misunderstood that H211 was drawing fuel for both private and NASA-related missions.'

Balanced article about the situation:
http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

...how can a publicly traded company possibly justify such investments to stockholders?

Most of google voting stock is owned by company insiders. I hear 3 people basically control the voting rights to the company. Modern stock issues are a scam.

The new Class C shares have no voting rights. The Class A shares have one vote each, but collectively those votes are dwarfed by the 10-votes-per-share Class B shares. Those shares, which do not trade in the public market, are owned by Google insiders, who will also get Class C shares in the distribution ...----... The split was first proposed nearly two years ago as part of a plan to "preserve the corporate structure that has allowed Google to remain focused on the long term." ...---.... As originally proposed by the company, the move would have made it easy for Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and the chairman, Eric E. Schmidt, to cash in a large part of their holdings without giving up their voting control. But that ability has been limited after the company settled a class action suit filed by angry (Class A) shareholders, and reached agreements with the three top officials to limit their sales.

Basically they want the benefits of a public corp without the responsibilities. So yeah, they don't have to justify jack to stock holders. Remember, if you don't know who the sucker in the room is after 5 hands, the sucker is you.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/04/03/investing/google-stock-split/ http://economix.blogs.nytimes.... http://www.businessweek.com/ar... http://investorplace.com/2014/...

Your second link shows it earning money at a low but fairly consistent rate, completely defeating your assertion.

Your first link shows them losing money over one quarter and predicting more losses, which would make this year a big loss. Which is obviously not ideal, but hardly consistent when the four year trend prior was profitable:

http://investing.businessweek....

They certainly can't afford to become consistent in losses of this year's scale, but you can hardly say that they lose money consistently (yet).

Amazon has low profit *compared to its size and revenue*, but a mom and pop corner store with this kind of profit would be astounding.

Here's their past few years:

http://investing.businessweek....

2010: 1.15 billion
2011: 631 million
2012: loss of 39 million. So admittedly, Mom & Pop would be in trouble if they started in 2012.
2013: 274 million.

I would love to have a mom and pop store that made approximately 2 billion dollars profit in the past four years.

Now, this year looks like it might be another loser year, but it's hard to tell because the xmas season tends to be disproportionately profitable. They do operate right on the knife's edge, playing the long game that we so often say that companies can't bring themselves to do. But the way you write that makes it sound like they have a lifetime and yearly net loss, and no, Amazon is overall much more profitable than a mom and pop corner store.

Measures like return on assets could be another story.

Loved the first half of your comment; the second half I have issues with. Dan Pink's talk on motivation and creativity cited research done by the federal Reserve which included experiments in a poor country which agreed with the general findings. So it is not just white middle class -- it is human. As for Bill Gates, he bought DOS from someone who had according to some sources essentially stolen it from his employer.
http://www.businessweek.com/st...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/compu...

Bill Gates was born a multimillionaire in today's dollars and could have spent his life working on free software if he wished.
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg...

Emacs is essentially a word processor, especially when coupled with tools like LaTex,

I was using a word processor (in ROM) on a Commodore PET around 1980. Many other word processors were created, along with drawing programs, and so on. PLATO preceded pretty much of of that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
"PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations)[1][2] was the first generalized computer assisted instruction system. Starting in 1960, it ran on the University of Illinois' ILLIAC I computer. By the late 1970s, it supported several thousand graphics terminals distributed worldwide, running on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. Many modern concepts in multi-user computing were developed on PLATO, including forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer games."

Or with Forth, funded in part by federal dollars:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...
"Forth was first exposed to other programmers in the early 1970s, starting with Elizabeth Rather at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory.[6] After their work at NRAO, Charles Moore and Elizabeth Rather formed FORTH, Inc. in 1973, refining and porting Forth systems to dozens of other platforms in the next decade."

And don't forget "The Mother of All Demos" by Doug Engelbart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
""The Mother of All Demos" is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, computer demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s."

The reason we use what we use may relate to "capitalism", but it has more to do with the rich getting richer and market position and advertising and (sometimes illegal as with Microsoft antitrust) wheeling and dealing with supplier contracts and press and such, funding alliances, sweat heart deals with governments, and a bunch of similar things.

Rewards, in the presence of artificial scarcity, can control people. But people don't do their most creative work in such a regime. Under such a

I agree. If only we could get these yahoos to believe it is all bunk too.

http://www.ocregister.com/arti...

http://moneymorning.com/2013/0...

http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

Oh, and maybe we should get google to forget those and all those other stories it brings up when searching for businesses that left California. Or maybe, we can close our eyes and ignore it all and nothing can happen right?

Glad that's over!

It's not over.

Which part of "Microsoft product" did Home Depot not understand?

According to an Oct. 1, 2013, report prepared for Home Depot by consultant FishNet Security, the retailer left its computers vulnerable by switching off Symantec’s Network Threat Protection (NTP) firewall in favor of one packaged with Windows.

http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

Yes. I don't wander around the streets with $100s or $1000s of dollars on me for precisely those reasons.

You're cherry-picking scenarios. Who said you have to load thousands of dollars at a time on a preloaded cash-equivalent card?

I don't really get it with cash either if the person taking my money knows who I am.

Again with the cherry-picking. Do we really want to play this game? Because an equivalent cherry picked boundary case scenario against credit cards would be where a merchant fraudulently charges your card, the credit card company decides to reject your chargeback/fraud allegation for whatever reason, and then you lost in court when you decided to sue.

What's that you say, this doesn't normally happen? Exactly. Just admit it: cash is basically anonymous, just like credit card chargebacks usually work.

... through a controversial data-mining program that is widely regarded as operating outside its legal authority... So how about we just rein them in instead of playing cat and mouse with them.

Great. I'm on board with you there. I'm sure they'll stop if we ask nicely. Or if we pass some laws. *cough* You know that wasn't the sole data collection program. Look at what the DEA has been doing with phone records... puts the NSA to shame.

So how about we just rein them in instead of playing cat and mouse with them.

Oh wait, are you talking about the violent overthrow of the US government? Because that's pretty much what it will take to get them to stop at this point.

But sure in the meantime, if you are buying something you don't want tracked arrange for an cash envelope drop in a park at night on Halloween or something.

And you're welcome to enjoy having the federal government track everything you do while paying the credit card companies for that "privilege" through interest charges and higher prices passed through to you by retailers.

Oh, look: I can misrepresent your position just as easily as you do mine.

BTW, before your jerking knee hits your chin, note that I never said I don't use credit cards. My point is that there are tradeoffs, and that you are misrepresenting stored value cards by only discussing cherry-picked boundary cases. When was the last time you were mugged/robbed, had your house burgled, lost a non-trivial amount of cash, or had cash destroyed in a fire? Yes, these things can all happen, but for most of us they are extremely rare occurrences.

BULLSHIT

http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

What? Target's CEO resigned earlier this year after the breach severely impacted the company's already struggling bottom dollar.

Per the Board of Directors, "Today we are announcing that, after extensive discussions, the board and Gregg Steinhafel have decided that now is the right time for new leadership at Target. Effective immediately, Gregg will step down from his positions as Chairman of the Target board of directors, president and CEO." That is press release speech for "you're fired".

Anyone who graduated from an NCAA member University should demand their tuition be refunded. http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

Maybe this guy was distraught because he couldn't find any maple syrup? You KNOW how Canadians can become if they don't have their maple syrup...

Hmm. Good point. Syrup d'erable is a national treasure.

But more likely a shortage of Tim Bits.

Maybe this guy was distraught because he couldn't find any maple syrup? You KNOW how Canadians can become if they don't have their maple syrup...

No really. Before you mod this flamebait, check the studies. It's 100% true. Statistically speaking (well, at least according to several large surveys), most women actually do prefer male authority in the work-place.

http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

And there are thousands of nightmare tales about all female workplaces...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/fem...

Of course such statistics and stories will forever be dismissed by social justice warriors... And there are many here on Slashdot.

Nonsense. 20% is generous as an average for this group.

http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

All I know is that if I had a tech company, I would hire nothing BUT women, since I'd be able to pay them $.70 on the dollar compared to men. I wonder why nobody else does this?

What do you mean nobody?

You know that's not how it works, right?

http://www.prairiebizmag.com/e...

http://www.businessweek.com/ar...

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

http://www.chron.com/jobs/arti...

http://www.impactstaffing.com/...

The timing of this BusinessWeek story is quite amusing. It tells about a startup founder who is hiring mostly women because they're cheaper.

So there you go.

http://www.businessweek.com/ne...

RWE AG said Aug. 12 it will halt an extra 1,005 megawatts of coal and lignite capacity by the first quarter of 2017, taking the total planned capacity cuts to 8,940 megawatts. Old lignite plants are candidates for closing, according to New York-based Pira, whose clients include oil companies, utilities and governments. A thousand megawatts is enough to power 2 million European homes.

They are shutting down the old coal plants, replacing them with new, more efficient and cleaner ones... and now they have to shut down and reduce production of those too.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/...

Wind and solarâ(TM)s share of installed German power capacity will rise to 42 percent by next year from 30 percent in 2010, according to European Union data compiled by Citigroup Inc. The share of hard coal and lignite plant capacity will drop to 28 percent from 32 percent, the data show.

German utilities plan to start new hard-coal plants with 5,606 megawatts of capacity this year and next, data from Bonn-based national grid regulator Bundesnetzagentur show. That compares with a target of at least 10,000 megawatts from new solar and wind installations in 2014 and 2015 under Germanyâ(TM)s renewable energy act, which takes effect Aug. 1. Solar output reached a record 24,244 megawatts on June 6, according to EEX.

Because... They are getting more out of all the solar and wind than expected. They are getting negative electricity prices in January and May.
http://www.reuters.com/article...
http://www.businessinsider.com...

Theres no one source for the information, but below are a few links to some of it. They have apparently made about $6 Billion in revenue since their inception and in 2010 at least they made $700 Million in licensing fees. I did include their "investments" along with what I could call "licensing fees" because they seem to be effectively the same thing. A good chunk of their revenue is via "Patent Funds" where they offer companies a chance to join in to buy a block of patents, apparently with a thinly veiled threat that if they don't buy in IV will sue them if any of the patents in the block apply to prospective investors.

http://www.businessinsider.com...
http://www.businessweek.com/ar...
http://www.cnet.com/news/insid...
https://news.yahoo.com/exclusi...