He obviously is, since his company hasn't replaced him yet with three people who earn 1/4 as much as him. (The problem is a classic assymetric information Akerlof "lemon" example: unless you hire the arrogant IIT grad you don't know whether he is worth as much as he asks - so you go for a lemon priced like a lemon.)
Better be careful - you wouldn't want to goad Microsoft into turning "Clippy Bob" into a Linux
app.
Heh, I thought you said;
Closed source companies have to add useless and failed
features to public domain projects, to confuse and muddy the waters, otherwise the investors may sue the company.
No no no, we don't need Microsoft or closed source companies to do that - open source is one step ahead, as always: Vigor "has all the features of traditional Unix vi, plus the friendly and helpful Vigor paperclip assistant"...
That graph is bunk and the graph's creator admits that he lies in the graph to get media exposure... In the comments, three pages down: "As the text suggests... this is not the total out of pocket expenditures of the bailout. It represents 'monies spent, lent, consumed, borrowed, printed, guaranteed, assumed or otherwise committed' For example, the 5.5 trillion in Fannie/Freddie mortgages are likely to return at least 95% of exposure"
Yes and so does the $3tn commercial paper programme etc etc... Please don't get your information from disinformation websites, please.
ACLU considered themselves idealogically to be a "liberal" organization, and no self-respecting "liberal" was a promoter of gun rights.
If you don't support the right to bare arms you aren't really a liberal, true liberals believe in liberty and small government.
I think you would find that every liberal will support your right to bare your arms. (In all seriousness, though: If you believe in liberty and small government you are called a "liberal" in Europe; in the US you are called a "libertarian" and the big-l "Liberal" term is reserved for the big-govt types...)
Also, Germany has no constitution. Only a Grundgesetz (basic law).
Why are you spreading lies? Quote from the website of the German Bundestag: "Das Grundgesetz (GG) ist die Verfassung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland" - 'The Grundgesetz is the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany'.
This sounds too much like yet another bailout (as if $13.9 trillion tax dollars thrown into banks ^H^H^H^ black holes wasn't enough.)...$olitical influen$e...
You, Sir, are guilty of disseminating disinformation. In context of the $13.9tn, you fail to understand the concept of "maximum" "capacity" "announced", as opposed to "actual" "cost" "incurred". Don't take it personally, but please inform yourself or shut up.
This is simply a plan to reduce property supply, prop up property prices and therefore bail out banks and property developers
You might be right, but your analysis is lacking rigour and thus people will laugh at you. Again, don't take it personally.
The saying has always been that "fusion is still 50 years away", for fifty years ago and recent.
Now EU has managed to make it 100 years away
You make the mistake of believing the summaries of Slashdot editors. ITER is not an "EU" experiment, but as international as can be (the seven parties participating in the ITER program: the EU, India, Japan, PR China, Russia, South Korea, USA).
(And of course fusion is not 50 years away, it was already achieved 50 years ago in Operation Ivy... Commercially viable fusion - now that's an engineering problem;-) )
Adblock Plus & NoScript work fine in Minefield, so they almost certainly will work in the RC. I don't know about other plugins, though.
All of my plugins work now (though they still have to be enabled). Tab Mix Plus was screwy in the 3.1/3.5 nightlies and betas, but works fine now as well.
[S]omewhere around 2GB isn't unreasonable for most people's usage (I run a few websites on top of normal browsing, but the only times I think I have gone over were downloading Linux Live CDs).
2GB is enough if all people do is email and websites (but then, dial-up is enough for that...). As soon as you step into the 21st century, it is woefully underproportioned even if you don't do big downloads: 2GB per month is just enough for 1 hour/day of internet radio or skype OR 15 mins/day of low-rez Youtube. If someone actually wanted to use the BBC iPlayer that he paid for with his TV tax, his quota would be used up within an afternoon...
Point being: If you cripple the use of broadband by limiting it with small transfer quotas, you might as well save the money...
Actually, it might be worth it, if we regained control over our manufacturing chains.
$15tn more like it (not counting lost output and lost lives...). $500bn isn't even enough to take a minor hellhole like Iraq or Afghanistan (each of those invasions cost $1tn+), let alone China...
From a licensing standpoint then, a digital publisher, with non-existent manufacturing costs, can license a professionally written textbook at a cost of $5 a student rather then $30.
They can, but will they? Hint: an e-book for the Kindle costs as much or more than the paperback edition. Why? Because they can. (Unless the California state actually employs some people to write public domain textbooks. That would be great. But don't hold your breath.)
Assuming the laptops are usable for 5 years the cost saving are INSAINE. We are talking slashing at least $200 dollars PER STUDENT PER 5 YEAR PERIOD.
So that would be $40/year/student out of budget of $10,000/year - savings of 0.4%, even in the wildly optimistic case that all of these e-book readers will need no paid personnel to maintain it and will last 5 years in the hands of 10-year-olds... Not that enticing, I'd think.
That, my good sir, is precisely the problem with the omnibus. Every time I've ridden the omnibus there is someone so offensive on board I'm about to...can't even finish this sentence I'm so angry at them still.
Yes, but every time I use a car in rush hour traffic instead of the bus or the underground, I invariably get close to road rage as always there is someone so aggressive and obnoxious on the road that I'm about to...
But ay, there's the rub: If you could clean the trash out the whole world would be down-right pleasant, you'd be lord and savior, and it's never going to happen.
Most of that cost is taxes, since only rich people and corporate fatcats have private aircraft. Tax rates on anything related to aviation is absurd.
Huh? I thought jet fuel is pretty much tax free worldwide - as opposed to the high taxes on car gasoline or heating oil I would say this is absurd in the opposite direction.
Do you have any sources for your "most of that cost is taxes" statement?
TalkTalk is testing BT's new fibre-optic super-fast broadband network in north London [...] Dunstone [of TalkTalk] reckons super-fast broadband â" offering speeds of up to 40Mb a second â" will be more expensive than current-generation broadband but less than the sort of £39.99-a-month prices being asked for basic broadband a few years ago.
Fast cheap internets, "we can't stop the pirates"...
Exchange your currency into British pounds and vote with it.
(I'm not paid to say that)
You wouldn't be all that enthusiastic if you actually had ISP service from TalkTalk... (Like I have.)
They are 40x oversubscribed and proud of it - so my 8Mbit line only gets more than 500kbit between 2am and 4am.
Their support is notoriously bad - I had to talk to them about 12 times for half an hour each to get 110 quid back that they overbilled when I moved house.
They use the Internet Watch Foundation secret censorship list (Slashdot reported).
They suck as bad as any ISP, their only redeeming feature is that they cost half as much as BT. They only push the "dumb pipe" angle as they are confident that they can outcompete anyone on price if they can keep the market extremely low-cost and low-service. (Mind you, I am not pro-netcop, but TalkTalk are not the knight in shiny armor by a long strech.)
Is your proposed solution simply not to solve the problem?
My proposed solution:
1. abolish legally binding precedent. The accepted interpretation of a law should be a consensus among the legal community, not a decision of one moron 150 years ago.
2. Hire someone competent to rewrite the laws, aiming for clarity and precision.
3. Law should be treated like software: any and all changes should be incorporated into the text, not distributed as amendments. The current legal system looks like Linux 0.01 with all the patches distributed separately up to 2.6.30, and you can win a case by confusing the judge and your opponent into forgetting a critical patch.
3. Make the up to date text of every law easily accessible and searchable by anyone.
4. If you find there is no law for something new, like, say, the internet, say so. Don't torture existing unrelated laws fo fit the new situation.
5. Arguments should be based on merit, not qualifications and the overuse of jargon.
I'm sure there's more we could do, but these should solve the big problems.
All your points pretty much described a conversion from the Common Law system as it is practiced in the UK and its former colonies (US, India, Pakistan, Oz etc) to the Civil Law system that has been introduced practically everywhere else and has been used since the times of Hammurabi and the Romans.
However, the problem is that such a conversion cannot happen while there is a large establishment built on it - the judges would have to re-learn, the lawyers would have to re-learn, the legislators would have a gargantuan task of creating a whole corpus of laws without bad loopholes... It would only happen after a revolution. (The German-style civil law was introduced in China, Japan and Korea in the early 20th century, but the power situation were very different from the status quo in the US today...)
for 10 billion, you can also construct 10 Gigawatts of wind power... which will eventually (within a few years) pay itself back.
Because 10GW of wind power gives you a LOT less energy than 10GW of nuclear. Typical wind power capacity factors are 20-40% (wind doesn't always blow), typical (fission) nuclear capacity factors are 90%-ish. Thus nuclear plants are cheaper than wind even if they cost 3 times as much per GW.
In addition, wind power needs additional grid investment and lots of pumped storage to even out spikes in capacity to be suitable for base load power, while nuclear power plants are suitable from the get-go.
So the Europeans and the US governments say they are firmly convinced of dangerous anthropogenic global warming but they won't spend 15 Bn over 10 years to speed this up?
Please note, that it is not 15 Bn to get fusion energy. It is 15 Bn for fusion energy research. The equations depends on the amount that such research would help. If there is only a tiny chance that the development of fusion energy would be a tiny step closer with this research, 15 Bn is suddenly quite a lot
But it is not a "tiny step", it is the last and most important step that is supposed to iron out the last big problems with the design and materials before a grid-connected multi-GW power plant can be commissioned (that would be DEMO, now not likely to come on stream before 2040).
I have a hard time seeing how the arguments convince anyone other than Americans that it is a good idea. It is a self praising article on how good the US is written by an American in an American magazine.
Just also please note, it's not just an American writing in an American magazine... it is a Rightwing Nationalistic American writing in a Rightwing Nationalistic Magazine.
Owned by that famous American, Rupert Murdoch.
Well he mostly lives on Long Island, his company is headquartered in Manhattan, his wife is American, he donates to US political parties (guess which one)... Given that he could change his legal domicile and/or citizenship purely for tax reason at the drop of a hat with the amount of money he has, his passport doesn't really matter...
Besides, the Murdoch I know wouldn't bat an eye at publishing a nationalist magazine anywhere as long as it is profitable and advocates lower taxes for the rich...
Just to point out: TFA must be erroneous or don't know what they are talking about. Two 100kW engines add up to a total of 200kW, i.e. 268hp - far short of the claimed 400hp.
Yes, a composite of plastic, resin and cotton waste, reinforced with cardboard... It doesn't rust, but that's about the best thing you can say about it. The carbon composite body of a Corvette, it ain't.
And if you look away from M-TV and ClearChannel, there are oodles of niche magazines and subculture sites which could easily push an unknown artist to 2,000 sales - previously not worth the effort, now generating a year's salary.
Correction: 2,000 sales would only generate a couple of months' wages, since the artist gets only 40% of the sales price - so at $20 per album that would be $16,000.
Artists already have the ability to self distribute digital copies. So what is the big deal ?
I think it is a big deal for marketing to have a central platform - nobody would look up an artist's site and key in credit card info etc... unless they know and like the band already. An Amazon "indie" bestseller list, and a centralized storefront gives far more exposure to artists with far less work involved. (Just think of the software equivalent: selling on the iPhone appstore vs. a trying to sell the equivalent application for an equally popular Nokia phone from your own website...)
As for the marketing bit - the RIAA sponsored artists are also _statistically_ unlikely to succeed unless they are one of the handful that get picked for payola and million-dollar ad budgets... This just makes the non-top-100 album, which was previously pretty much a loss-making proposition for RIAA artists, a viable avenue. And if you look away from M-TV and ClearChannel, there are oodles of niche magazines and subculture sites which could easily push an unknown artist to 2,000 sales - previously not worth the effort, now generating a year's salary.
Chrome will have proper extensions in the next 1-2 months. (They already work in the bleeding-edge dev version.) Adblocking extensions already exist (like AdSweep), but it'll take at least half a year to have the comfort and functionality that Adblock for Firefox has (extra blacklisting/whitelisting without editing arcane JavaScript files, easy installation, easy updates, choice of filter lists...).
Slashdot Mirror
He obviously is, since his company hasn't replaced him yet with three people who earn 1/4 as much as him. (The problem is a classic assymetric information Akerlof "lemon" example: unless you hire the arrogant IIT grad you don't know whether he is worth as much as he asks - so you go for a lemon priced like a lemon.)
Better be careful - you wouldn't want to goad Microsoft into turning "Clippy Bob" into a Linux app.
Heh, I thought you said;
Closed source companies have to add useless and failed features to public domain projects, to confuse and muddy the waters, otherwise the investors may sue the company.
No no no, we don't need Microsoft or closed source companies to do that - open source is one step ahead, as always: Vigor "has all the features of traditional Unix vi, plus the friendly and helpful Vigor paperclip assistant"...
would still cost much less than what we spent on banksters.
That graph is bunk and the graph's creator admits that he lies in the graph to get media exposure... In the comments, three pages down: "As the text suggests... this is not the total out of pocket expenditures of the bailout. It represents 'monies spent, lent, consumed, borrowed, printed, guaranteed, assumed or otherwise committed' For example, the 5.5 trillion in Fannie/Freddie mortgages are likely to return at least 95% of exposure"
Yes and so does the $3tn commercial paper programme etc etc... Please don't get your information from disinformation websites, please.
ACLU considered themselves idealogically to be a "liberal" organization, and no self-respecting "liberal" was a promoter of gun rights.
If you don't support the right to bare arms you aren't really a liberal, true liberals believe in liberty and small government.
I think you would find that every liberal will support your right to bare your arms. (In all seriousness, though: If you believe in liberty and small government you are called a "liberal" in Europe; in the US you are called a "libertarian" and the big-l "Liberal" term is reserved for the big-govt types...)
Also, Germany has no constitution. Only a Grundgesetz (basic law).
Why are you spreading lies? Quote from the website of the German Bundestag: "Das Grundgesetz (GG) ist die Verfassung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland" - 'The Grundgesetz is the constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany'.
This sounds too much like yet another bailout (as if $13.9 trillion tax dollars thrown into banks ^H^H^H^ black holes wasn't enough.)...$olitical influen$e...
You, Sir, are guilty of disseminating disinformation. In context of the $13.9tn, you fail to understand the concept of "maximum" "capacity" "announced", as opposed to "actual" "cost" "incurred". Don't take it personally, but please inform yourself or shut up.
This is simply a plan to reduce property supply, prop up property prices and therefore bail out banks and property developers
You might be right, but your analysis is lacking rigour and thus people will laugh at you. Again, don't take it personally.
The saying has always been that "fusion is still 50 years away", for fifty years ago and recent. Now EU has managed to make it 100 years away
You make the mistake of believing the summaries of Slashdot editors. ITER is not an "EU" experiment, but as international as can be (the seven parties participating in the ITER program: the EU, India, Japan, PR China, Russia, South Korea, USA).
(And of course fusion is not 50 years away, it was already achieved 50 years ago in Operation Ivy... Commercially viable fusion - now that's an engineering problem ;-) )
Adblock Plus & NoScript work fine in Minefield, so they almost certainly will work in the RC. I don't know about other plugins, though.
All of my plugins work now (though they still have to be enabled). Tab Mix Plus was screwy in the 3.1/3.5 nightlies and betas, but works fine now as well.
[S]omewhere around 2GB isn't unreasonable for most people's usage (I run a few websites on top of normal browsing, but the only times I think I have gone over were downloading Linux Live CDs).
2GB is enough if all people do is email and websites (but then, dial-up is enough for that...). As soon as you step into the 21st century, it is woefully underproportioned even if you don't do big downloads: 2GB per month is just enough for 1 hour/day of internet radio or skype OR 15 mins/day of low-rez Youtube. If someone actually wanted to use the BBC iPlayer that he paid for with his TV tax, his quota would be used up within an afternoon...
Point being: If you cripple the use of broadband by limiting it with small transfer quotas, you might as well save the money...
I'll take China for $500 billion dollars, Alex.
Actually, it might be worth it, if we regained control over our manufacturing chains.
$15tn more like it (not counting lost output and lost lives...). $500bn isn't even enough to take a minor hellhole like Iraq or Afghanistan (each of those invasions cost $1tn+), let alone China...
From a licensing standpoint then, a digital publisher, with non-existent manufacturing costs, can license a professionally written textbook at a cost of $5 a student rather then $30.
They can, but will they? Hint: an e-book for the Kindle costs as much or more than the paperback edition. Why? Because they can. (Unless the California state actually employs some people to write public domain textbooks. That would be great. But don't hold your breath.)
Assuming the laptops are usable for 5 years the cost saving are INSAINE. We are talking slashing at least $200 dollars PER STUDENT PER 5 YEAR PERIOD.
So that would be $40/year/student out of budget of $10,000/year - savings of 0.4%, even in the wildly optimistic case that all of these e-book readers will need no paid personnel to maintain it and will last 5 years in the hands of 10-year-olds... Not that enticing, I'd think.
That, my good sir, is precisely the problem with the omnibus. Every time I've ridden the omnibus there is someone so offensive on board I'm about to...can't even finish this sentence I'm so angry at them still.
Yes, but every time I use a car in rush hour traffic instead of the bus or the underground, I invariably get close to road rage as always there is someone so aggressive and obnoxious on the road that I'm about to...
But ay, there's the rub: If you could clean the trash out the whole world would be down-right pleasant, you'd be lord and savior, and it's never going to happen.
Indeed.
Most of that cost is taxes, since only rich people and corporate fatcats have private aircraft. Tax rates on anything related to aviation is absurd.
Huh? I thought jet fuel is pretty much tax free worldwide - as opposed to the high taxes on car gasoline or heating oil I would say this is absurd in the opposite direction. Do you have any sources for your "most of that cost is taxes" statement?
TalkTalk is testing BT's new fibre-optic super-fast broadband network in north London [...] Dunstone [of TalkTalk] reckons super-fast broadband â" offering speeds of up to 40Mb a second â" will be more expensive than current-generation broadband but less than the sort of £39.99-a-month prices being asked for basic broadband a few years ago.
Fast cheap internets, "we can't stop the pirates"...
Exchange your currency into British pounds and vote with it.
(I'm not paid to say that)
You wouldn't be all that enthusiastic if you actually had ISP service from TalkTalk... (Like I have.)
They are 40x oversubscribed and proud of it - so my 8Mbit line only gets more than 500kbit between 2am and 4am.
Their support is notoriously bad - I had to talk to them about 12 times for half an hour each to get 110 quid back that they overbilled when I moved house.
They use the Internet Watch Foundation secret censorship list (Slashdot reported).
They suck as bad as any ISP, their only redeeming feature is that they cost half as much as BT. They only push the "dumb pipe" angle as they are confident that they can outcompete anyone on price if they can keep the market extremely low-cost and low-service. (Mind you, I am not pro-netcop, but TalkTalk are not the knight in shiny armor by a long strech.)
Is your proposed solution simply not to solve the problem?
My proposed solution:
1. abolish legally binding precedent. The accepted interpretation of a law should be a consensus among the legal community, not a decision of one moron 150 years ago. 2. Hire someone competent to rewrite the laws, aiming for clarity and precision. 3. Law should be treated like software: any and all changes should be incorporated into the text, not distributed as amendments. The current legal system looks like Linux 0.01 with all the patches distributed separately up to 2.6.30, and you can win a case by confusing the judge and your opponent into forgetting a critical patch. 3. Make the up to date text of every law easily accessible and searchable by anyone. 4. If you find there is no law for something new, like, say, the internet, say so. Don't torture existing unrelated laws fo fit the new situation. 5. Arguments should be based on merit, not qualifications and the overuse of jargon.
I'm sure there's more we could do, but these should solve the big problems.
All your points pretty much described a conversion from the Common Law system as it is practiced in the UK and its former colonies (US, India, Pakistan, Oz etc) to the Civil Law system that has been introduced practically everywhere else and has been used since the times of Hammurabi and the Romans.
However, the problem is that such a conversion cannot happen while there is a large establishment built on it - the judges would have to re-learn, the lawyers would have to re-learn, the legislators would have a gargantuan task of creating a whole corpus of laws without bad loopholes... It would only happen after a revolution. (The German-style civil law was introduced in China, Japan and Korea in the early 20th century, but the power situation were very different from the status quo in the US today...)
for 10 billion, you can also construct 10 Gigawatts of wind power... which will eventually (within a few years) pay itself back.
Because 10GW of wind power gives you a LOT less energy than 10GW of nuclear. Typical wind power capacity factors are 20-40% (wind doesn't always blow), typical (fission) nuclear capacity factors are 90%-ish. Thus nuclear plants are cheaper than wind even if they cost 3 times as much per GW.
In addition, wind power needs additional grid investment and lots of pumped storage to even out spikes in capacity to be suitable for base load power, while nuclear power plants are suitable from the get-go.
So the Europeans and the US governments say they are firmly convinced of dangerous anthropogenic global warming but they won't spend 15 Bn over 10 years to speed this up?
Please note, that it is not 15 Bn to get fusion energy. It is 15 Bn for fusion energy research. The equations depends on the amount that such research would help. If there is only a tiny chance that the development of fusion energy would be a tiny step closer with this research, 15 Bn is suddenly quite a lot
But it is not a "tiny step", it is the last and most important step that is supposed to iron out the last big problems with the design and materials before a grid-connected multi-GW power plant can be commissioned (that would be DEMO, now not likely to come on stream before 2040).
Just also please note, it's not just an American writing in an American magazine... it is a Rightwing Nationalistic American writing in a Rightwing Nationalistic Magazine.
Owned by that famous American, Rupert Murdoch.
Well he mostly lives on Long Island, his company is headquartered in Manhattan, his wife is American, he donates to US political parties (guess which one)... Given that he could change his legal domicile and/or citizenship purely for tax reason at the drop of a hat with the amount of money he has, his passport doesn't really matter... Besides, the Murdoch I know wouldn't bat an eye at publishing a nationalist magazine anywhere as long as it is profitable and advocates lower taxes for the rich...
Yes, there is. Both are standardized measures of power. Read .
hp = ft * lbs / min
W = N * m / sec
All of these units convert directly. I call your Wolfram and raise you a Google.
Just to point out: TFA must be erroneous or don't know what they are talking about. Two 100kW engines add up to a total of 200kW, i.e. 268hp - far short of the claimed 400hp.
The Trabant had a composite body shell
Yes, a composite of plastic, resin and cotton waste, reinforced with cardboard... It doesn't rust, but that's about the best thing you can say about it. The carbon composite body of a Corvette, it ain't.
And if you look away from M-TV and ClearChannel, there are oodles of niche magazines and subculture sites which could easily push an unknown artist to 2,000 sales - previously not worth the effort, now generating a year's salary.
Correction: 2,000 sales would only generate a couple of months' wages, since the artist gets only 40% of the sales price - so at $20 per album that would be $16,000.
Artists already have the ability to self distribute digital copies. So what is the big deal ?
I think it is a big deal for marketing to have a central platform - nobody would look up an artist's site and key in credit card info etc... unless they know and like the band already. An Amazon "indie" bestseller list, and a centralized storefront gives far more exposure to artists with far less work involved. (Just think of the software equivalent: selling on the iPhone appstore vs. a trying to sell the equivalent application for an equally popular Nokia phone from your own website...)
As for the marketing bit - the RIAA sponsored artists are also _statistically_ unlikely to succeed unless they are one of the handful that get picked for payola and million-dollar ad budgets... This just makes the non-top-100 album, which was previously pretty much a loss-making proposition for RIAA artists, a viable avenue. And if you look away from M-TV and ClearChannel, there are oodles of niche magazines and subculture sites which could easily push an unknown artist to 2,000 sales - previously not worth the effort, now generating a year's salary.
Chrome will have proper extensions in the next 1-2 months. (They already work in the bleeding-edge dev version.) Adblocking extensions already exist (like AdSweep), but it'll take at least half a year to have the comfort and functionality that Adblock for Firefox has (extra blacklisting/whitelisting without editing arcane JavaScript files, easy installation, easy updates, choice of filter lists...).