Truly revolutionary ideas comes out of new ideas, that challenge the incumbent ideas. While scientific research has gotten much more complicated, making it harder to enter without the education required of a PhD, the PhD worship is a little twisted.
There was a time that people we're allowed to spout out ideas that the Church opposed, and only the Church could approve ideas, and only the Church chose who was in the Church. This period of time is generally considered to have been bad for human advancement and is called the Dark Ages.
We now have the Academy, and only people allowed by the Academy are allowed to question science. The Academy controls who gets the credentials.
As Climatology coalesced around global warming, how willing to fund and approve PhD research that questions it happens. It's wonderful to say that scientists want the truth, which is true in the abstract, but at the individual level, academics want to publish, because publishing gets them tenure. To publish, they do research, which requires funding, which requires grants.
The Academy has become one giant mess of group-think. Also, while current PhD students may enter the program out of a love of science, the previous generation entered out of a love of draft deferments, which is why you have a collection of leftists professors (the few conservative professors out there would be considered liberal Democrats or liberal Republicans, depending on the state) there to collect checks, ride out their time, and be embittered that there school chums outside make more money than them because they didn't waste their time chasing a tenured professor track. Read Philip Greenspun's essay on the economics of the university and how it enforces the gender divide.
Those that are doing political incorrect research are outside the Academy, often at industry jobs, and are attacked as being on the payroll of corporations. Never-mind that University professors are on the payroll of government bureaucrats or non-profits, non of which are neutral opinions. Both fields attract a combination of incompetents and do-gooders that love to spend other people's money on themselves... ask anyone good that works in non-profits, they want to pull their hair out.
Stop elevating science to a religion, with challenge-proof dogma. Scientific inquiry MUST stand on the merits of the data and strength of arguments, not the credentials of those giving it.
With the Fairness Doctrine, the party in control of the government was actually sitting there with stop watches making sure that "both sides were presented." While corporate consolidation has in theory limited voices, the reality is the explosion of media sources has eliminated that control.
What would happen is that no radio station would ever introduce a political radio show (incumbent ones with huge audiences would likely stay and be counterbalanced with unprofitable "other side"), because if I want to take a chance on a 1 hour radio program, I need to give up 2 hours, one for the program I am interested in, and one to counter-balance it. The net affect is that stations move away from talk radio, and move towards top-40 pop music, where they know that they'll make money and not need to deal with the FCC.
The way it is structured is designed to destroy political programming, because political programming is only interesting if it is one-sided to some extent. Equal time to both sides isn't entertaining.
Now, this is targeting conservative media, because conservative media uses the confrontational political format. Liberal media of that type has failed in the marketplace, because it's boring... The extreme left-wing websites are entertaining, but they don't translate into the other media spheres because of the self-perception of America's left of being intellectually elite, which requires not entering the name calling gutter that is how talk radio is fun. Compare Rush Limbaugh to Air America... his program is funny, mostly childish making fun of people, bad impressions, punning, etc., it's gutter humor applied to a political sphere. Listen to Air America programming, it's a bunch of people whining about politics. Air America launched when the country, politically, was the exact opposite of when Limbaugh's popularity exploded (1992-1994, during the Democrat "tyranny" of full control of three branches, 2004-2006 was similar with Republican "tyranny"). Rush Limbaugh ran "America Held Hostage" as his theme, mocking the whole process. Air America screamed about how evil Gitmo is. The former is funny and tongue-in-cheek, the latter is up for serious discussion that people don't want during their daily commute.
The "liberal media bias," as it exists, is much more a function of American political distribution than a fundamental approach to the market. Fox has proven that one can insert a "conservative media bias" and compete in the marketplace, albeit with less funding and inferior reporting. People don't choose the liberal media in the open market (Fox proved that by entering, people are split, shocking considering the superior journalism of CNN), they choose media and just get the bias. The bias isn't intentional, it isn't corporate strategy to push people leftward, it's a function of the fact that to run nationwide media services essentially means setting up shop in NYC or LA, and NYC and LA are liberal cities. Further, our journalism schools graduate people that are disproportionately left of center, the field attracts liberals (improve the world, expose evil, etc., etc.), so naturally, the media trends liberal. It does so not out of a conspiracy, but just the fact that the people gathering the facts are more likely to be left-of-center, and inadvertently spin things.
The fairness doctrine would not affect news programming, so liberal/conservative spin would remain there. It would affect opinion/commentary programming, which would dry up and disappear, and we would get more thoughtless brain-dead programming.
I'd love to see a viable liberal talk radio or similar program that survives on its merits, but they need a framework that is entertaining. Things like Daily Kos show that the people do exist, but they need a format that isn't cheerleading for the Democratic Party and it actually entertaining on its merits.
Air America would have been much better off if it was designed as a viable business, attempting to attract an audience, instead of a political effort
I dunno, British law may actually allow this if you start pushing... Remember, Common Law goes back to at least the Battle of Hastings IIRC. You have Common Law dealing with the entire Colonial and post-Colonial period, whatever laws were established to deal with the American War of Independence and the War of 1812, the breakup of British Empire and establishment of the Commonwealth, who knows if Britain has legal precedences dealing with former colonies that establish independence.
Regarding establish countries by claiming to exist, the PLO created Palestine that way. Say what you want about the rights of the Indigenous Arab population of the Roman/Ottoman region of Palestine, they have essentially claimed the existence of a country that never existed, and many world governments recognize.
The British Mandate for Palestine approved by the League of Nations (and supposedly binding on the United Nations, it's successors, as well as the governments of Israel and Jordan, plus the stateless lands in Gaza and on the west bank of the Jordan River) provides for Jewish Settlement in Palestine to create a Jewish homeland, and the Palestinian mandate covered both sides of the Jordan river, yet it is illegal for Jews to own property in Jordan (part of the Mandate) and the world community and ICJ claim that Jewish settlement in the disputed territories is illegal, despite the Mandate providing for it and no agreement with the successor nations repudiating that fact.
The PLO and World community have decided that there will be a nation of Palestine, on land to be determined (it is assumed Gaza, and some chunks of the disputed territories currently under Israeli occupation on the west bank of the Jordan River).
If Israel can create a state on Ottoman captured territory, administered by Britain, and Jordan and Iraq can do the same, and Syria and Lebanon with French soil, and the PLO with unowned territory occupied by Israel, why can't Sealand exist.
NOTE: for those who disagree with my view of history, find an entity under International Law other than Turkey that legally owns the west bank of the Jordan. Israel captured it fighting Jordan, whose occupation and annexation wasn't recognized, and the territory has been stateless since the Roman occupation of Judea, being provinces of the Roman Empire, Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium), Ottoman Caliphate, British Mandate, and then occupied without legal recognition by Jordan for 19 years and Israel by over 40 years. The last time the region was part of an autonomous state, the Judean Kings held sovereignty. The issue of a population there is real, and needs to be resolved, but the legal status is quite murky.
The PS3's problem is that Sony didn't make them. They have generally been selling out about as fast as Sony makes them... it's post launch and people don't camp out, but they aren't sitting on shelves for weeks.
Sony is being bailed out... they produced an overly complicated device that costs too much to make and is hard to get components for. Rather than doing the normal brain-dead console maneuver of selling at a "console price" and eating losses and sell-outs, they are selling at a premium price that is still selling out. By the time they fix their manufacturing problems, they will have sold everyone willing to pay a premium a PS3, and they will sell at a normal price. I expect the PS3 to increase in supply and drop in price $50-$100 every 3-6 months as their supplies increase and costs come down... that will happen in parallel.
There is a shortage of components, that means that the price of components goes up (even if Sony makes it in house and doesn't update their transfer pricing), but it will get fixed in time.
I'd say that Sony was pretty smart, the "normal" approach to the manufacturing disaster would have been to sell them at $299, each $500/device, and watch them sell on eBay for $1000+... The fact that the eBay price rapidly dropped to MSRP means that Sony is pricing about right.
0% unemployment means that nobody is looking for work. That's absolutely absurd.
At any given time, someone will be fired for doing a bad job. That person needs to look for work. At any given time, some positions will be eliminated, because the company doesn't do that any more, those people need to look for work. At any given time, some companies will go out of business, causing people to look for work. At any given time, someone will hate their boss, quit, and go look for work. At any given time, someone will leave the workforce, then one day decide to return (left to be a full-time caregiver, retired and changed their mind, etc., and they will look for work. At any given time, someone will graduate from school (high school, college, tradeschool, whatever) and look fro work.
You cannot have 0% unemployment, because sometimes, you will have people looking for work.
You cannot have a minimum wage, and 0% unemployment, because a free market will naturally have some jobs under that minimum wage, and you are preventing it. Some people could no doubt be employed at $2/hour immediately, that cannot be employed at $5.15, $6.50, $7.25, or whatever your local minimum wage are, at least no immediately.
You cannot have the government charge a 10% employment tax on people, and have full employment, because some jobs that would get filled by a person at $X will not get filled for 1.1X, and some people will not take 0.9X to do the job, even though the company is willing to pay X.
The middle class has had a few years that were rougher than the years before, and let the revolution begin? America has the lowest unemployment of the first world, the highest per-capita income in the world, and because of a going through a structural change wages have not grown as fast as in the past, and we're suddenly living in poverty?
Wages exploded in certain sectors during the boom. Even overhaul, wages were growing much faster than inflation during the last economic run-up... Jobless was low, demand exploded. If it wasn't for off-shoring of jobs, we'd have probably had exploding wages (the supply of labor is pretty static one you are under 5% unemployment, so you start poaching people and wages grow fast), that sounds great in the short term, but it causes run-away inflation real fast, which either eats up wealth of EVERYONE ELSE (non-IT people do exist, and they have mortgages and bills to pat as well, and 10% inflation would devastate them), or would have caused the Feds to jack rates so high that a recession was started (you need to suck the excess cash out of the system, getting it into savings accounts/treasuries would have been one solution, otherwise prices skyrocket when more cash chased the same amount of goods and services) which would have collapsed the stock market.
Why are wages not growing fast (well, they are now, and did in the second half of last year)?
I propose that it's short term thinking.
In the long term, wages grow at around inflation + 1%. If you ran the numbers from 1990 - today, I bet you'd find that wage growth was pretty much inflation + 1%. However, if you look at 1995-1999, you probably had more growth, and in 1990-1994 and 2000-2006 wages growing a bit less.
However, all people notice is that in the 90s, they were doing awesome (wages growing nicely, stock market growing nicely), and now they are suffering, because they got used to inflation + 2% raises, and are now getting inflation +/-.5% raises, so they are in trouble.
If US companies are doing well profit wise (which they are), then those profits go into: A) share-buybacks, B) expansion, C) dividends, D) salary increases, disproportionately at the top. The money HAS to go somewhere. Not seeing good investment opportunities, there have been a LOT of share buybacks, and dividends have been growing nicely (my blue chip stocks have been getting 8% - 11%/year dividend increases). The net affect is that the shares are worth more (EPS goes up as shares go down, though it is a lag factor because of weird accounting rules).
The problem people have is that in this latest run, those with capital deployed in the system have done well, while those without capital have not done well, because the wage growth hasn't been there. This absolutely sucks for lower-middle class and working class people, and it also sucks for people just starting their career. There are winners and losers, but you have seen wages inching up, and until the next recession as long as unemployment stays low, wages will keep growing.
In the long run, returns on capital investments run at 8%-10%/year, wages grow at around 1% or so (both are in real values, after inflation). However, in the beginning of an economic spurt, capital returns are higher (because they get really depressed in recessions, most of the money made in a bull market is made before people realize that there is a bull market), and at the end, wages pick up because the job market gets sucked dry.
However, wages are downward stick. Stock prices can and do drop 10%-20%, companies can't lower wages 10%-20% generally, because people can't take less, so you end up with fits. Unfortunately, wages get all their lift in the back half of the rally, then they stagnate for the recession/pull-back and early rally, and workers wonder why they are no longer doing well and everyone else is. However, the tail of the rally, when capital returns go flat and wages keep growing (wages growing, interest rates grow to stop inflation, and capital returns get sucked up by inflation plus rising interest rates), workers don't notice that they are doing better than the suppliers of capital.
Part of the reason that young people are more economically left than right is that with a shorter view of the market, they extrapolate their experiences of 3-5 years across 40 years and
My wife insists that pictures are hung 2/3 up the wall, says its the most pleasing to the eye (golden ratio or something)...
Well, my walls are the quite common 8 feet walls, so 1/3 down is 8/3 of a foot, or 2 2/3, so I grab my tape measure, go down to 2'8", and away I go. If you have 10 foot walls, it's 10/3, or 3 1/3 foor, so 3'4" and away we go.
Traditionally, floor tile was 12" (generally 11 7/8th with a 1/8" grout line), those 18" and 24" is becoming popular in high end design. Wall tile (bathrooms, kitchen backsplashes) is 4", a third of a foot. Bathroom "cove tiles" the floor boards come in 4" and 6" (1/3 and 1/2 a foot) options.
A standard doorframe is 30", or 2.5'. Our countertops are 2', our wall cabinets 1', and sometimes you get larger devices, Microvents are 16" (1 1/3 ft) deep, so you may need to get cabinets in that measurement.
Are there metric equivalents, sure. However, the 1/3 point is a useful ratio.
Metric measurements easily divide by 2 and 5. Our Imperial distances, in the fractions of a foot we use routinely, are divisable by 2, 3, and 4 (and 6, but that's less important) which is convenient for these middle realms. Basically 4" is a common use in American homes, because it is a third of a foot, not because it is just over 10 cm. A third of a meter is 1.1 feet, and is similarly useful, or a foot is around.3m, or 30 cm.
Yes, you have similar things, but the divide by 3 and divide by 4 gives us some very common and easy to use measurements. For small distances, measured in inches, the centimeter is too small, and the 5 cm at 2 inches is alright, but 10 cm at around 4 inches is okay, but you don't have anything convenient around the 3 inch point (7.5 cm just doesn't roll off the toungue).
Metric IS superior for many things... they just aren't things that most people do regularly. Yes, water boiling at 100C makes more sense than 212F, but guess what, when I boil water, I don't care about the temperature, just did I boil water and can I throw the pasta in...:)
I guess the main thing that I prefer Imperial for is the foot, which is a damned useful measurement. For volumes, mL/L is fine, wouldn't affect my life much either way. I think that Farenheit is more useful for defining temperatures because when weather is concerned, its more granular, but the foot is so damned useful.
Also, with 12" tile, I can easily estimate distances in most houses, count the tiles, and that's pretty cool.
Producing products (or services) by a firm have two basic costs, the fixed cost, and the variable costs. The fixed costs are costs that are generally fixed over the "short term" (i.e. you can sell the factory in the long term, but in the short-term, you have to pay your property taxes). Variable costs are the costs of producing the units, and we generally look at "average variable costs," i.e. if we spend 1000 on making the units, and produced 100 units, the AVC is 10. Marginal costs are the cost of producing the last unit.
We assume that marginal costs are increasing at the interesting point of the market. i.e. when I start a farm, the first plot of land that I farm is the most productive, then I start farming less valuable land. Similarly, the early oil fields produced a lot of cheap oil, modern oil exploration is expensively looking for smaller and smaller amounts of oil. While their are increasing returns to scale initially (spreading out the fixed costs over more and more units, so average fixed costs come down), we assume that as you start pushing harder and harder to produce more (paying a premium to buy parts on the spot market, paying overtime to run a second and third shift, etc.), costs come up, and eventually we get decreasing returns to scale.
Now, we can graph the "average cost per unit" as a declining curve (increasing returns to scale) until a minimum point, then an increasing curve as the increase in marginal costs over time. For non-physical products, remember the dot-com boom, less and less qualified employees were getting hired, and salaries were going up, meaning the cost/output of these people was going up...
Now, we can plot that cost curve as the "supply curve of the firm," and collectively with its competitors as the "supply curve of the market". If we plot that against the demand curve, we can see where the intersection lies. If the firm's decreasing costs area intersects the demand curve, then one single firm will have lower costs than two firms competing will. This is called a natural monopoly. If one firm can produce at 10, but two firms producing at that level makes costs 15, then in the "free market" costs should drop to 14, and one of the firms exits the market.
Now the problem is, introducing competition to this marketplace increases costs and therefore dead weight loss, but leaving the company with the monopoly will cause them to seek monopoly rents. These are markets that tend to be regulated.
The problem is, most markets that we are interested in today are not static. AT&T had a natural monopoly, but technology changes (satellites, microwaves, etc.) created the cellular phone, alternative means of long distance than stringing wires between cities, etc., making it no longer a natural monopoly.
With cable companies, there is room for competition in limited areas. The franchise agreements normally require universal wiring. If you notice cities letting competition in, they aren't wiring areas for the poor, they are poaching customers from the wealthy areas that buy premium packages and data services. This works because the incumbent monopolist has to maintain universal services, and the competitor is able to compete in isolated submarkets. If the monopolist competed with the competitor, they would lose their excess profits in the rest of the region, so they lose some market instead.
There are natural monopolies, but it is questionable that in terms of technology monopolies, should you accept them and regulate them (the generally accepted approach to older industries), or leave the monopolies, expecting monopoly profits to bring in competition. Given the pace of technology change, it may be more reasonable to accept premium pricing in the short-term to get competition in the long term.
The Telecom Act of 1996 promised to bring in a bold new era of competition by deregulating the companies, but from 1997 - 1999 people just howled at the exploding costs of cable television. However, a
It was very cool when I was a kid in school and we were learning the metric system, and the ability to convert distances to volumes, and with water, weight. These are all cool aspects of metric. They make metric the ONLY system for science, or areas of steady precision.
However, most people are not scientists. Scientists have no trouble working in metric by day, and watching a football (American) game at night on a 100 yard field.
The convenient advantages of Imperial for day to day activities combined with status quo is the reason that most of America doesn't use metric. A switch to metric would be inconvenient for the transitional generations (see UK), and give up some of the convenience of Imperial. Fields that want decimal precision and convertability between domains have switched to metric.
You are right, they are the "neat" aspects of metric that are convenient, calculating the amount of water for the pool, no question, however, in the real world, I stick the hose in, turn it on, then come back when it is done.
However, what do I do more often: need to divide a foot in half, thirds, or quarters (6 inches, 4 inches, and 3 inches), or calculate the water of the pool.
Feet and yards happen to be extremely convenient measuring sizes for many day-to-day activities. Miles are less so, and I'd have no objection to an effort being made to convert from miles to kilometers, because kilometers are more useful for estimation... When I know something is 120 miles away, that's only interesting because averaging 60 miles per hour, it's 2 hours away. Change that to 200 kilometers and 100 kph, and it's easier math.
However, the foot is an extremely convenient and natural distance. The yard is less so, but it's an infrequently used measurement. However, for a football game, the yard is pretty useful simply because it divides in 3 easily. People intuitively understand what a third of a yard is (a foot), and halves are always easy, so when it's a goal line defense, and the ball is on the 1 yard line, you see if they advance the ball "half a yard" or "one foot" or "to the one foot line" which is 2 feet in and 1 foot from the goal line.
Things in Imperial are generally designed around multiples of 2 or 3, which is convenient for day to day activities. Metric is designed around multiples of 10, which divides easily into 2 and 5... Well, if I am building a table, I need to divide by 4, guaging distances, I am dividing by 2 or 3...
I agree that the conversion is useful and the scientific fields require it, but for most of us muddling through our lives, we do conversion so infrequently it's not worth giving up our convenient ability to divide by 2, 3, and 4 easily.
Imperial Units evolved from things natural to people. When I need to guess a distance, I use the span of my hand, ~ 2/3s a foot. I can walk something off, my foot is pretty close to a foot, etc.
The ergonomic arguement is that because Imperial Units evolved from things that people used, and Metric was developed in a lab, the imperial system works more naturally for people, all things being equal.
With regards to height, you think in 1.5m - 2.0 meters. Assuming you estimate to 5 centmeters (because people round to 5 and 10), you seem to have 11 increments, but if we notch out 1.5 (people under 5' tall) and 1.95 and 2.0 (people over 6'4) as common adult heights, we have 8 increments for height. In imperial, we have 17.
Metric is correct academically, but the ergonomic aspect is part of why metric has never been voluntarily adopted in "normal" society, just areas where precision are needed. I think you'll find in time that tools will move to be more metric, not really a need for imperial there, but that's a long transition.
Hell, when measuring something, if I need more precision than a quarter inch, I usually flip the tape measure over and use milimeters. Both can stay, and live and let live.
Okay, one can dedect/feel temperatures at around 5 degrees Farenheit, 3 degrees Celsius. While I can't really feel the difference between 80 and 81, a temperature in the upper 70s (76-79), low 80s (80-84), upper 80s, etc., we do things in 5 degree increments, you're doing it in 3 degree increments.
Verbally, I find using the upper/lower + the tens digit gives me a good range to describe temperatures that I can feel. The 1 degree different is only meaninful for getting the high/lows off the news or records, where we have a higher resolution for describing things without resulting in fractions.
Thats why I had no problem using Celsius/Kelvin in the Chem lab, and Farenheit to describe the weather. Obviously, people are more comfortable with what they are familiar with, but I think dismissing Farenheit as "useless" ignores some of its convenient aspects in day-to-day life.
The Imperial system has some terribly convenient reasons that it sticks around... The Metric system is theoretically better, and its decimal based approach is useful for mathematics, although in a computer age (base 2), the imperial system is actually more "computer-friendly," as our system of halves and doubles actually makes more computer sense. As you said, it all depends what you are doing.
For liquids, they all suck. Pints, Cups, Quarts, and Gallons all give you some reasonable amounts, but are useless for converting. However, if you look at recipes, it may call for 3/4 of a cup (not 6 oz), and if you double, it's easy, 1.5 cups.
For short distances, feet is extremely useful. Most things that you eyeball are between 0 and 10 feet, which gives you 11 values without resulting to a decimal, which confuses people. Metric gives you values 0-3 for the same area. There isn't a huge advantage to miles compared with kilometers, but the conversion is kind of irrelevant. If I'm measuring something for working around the house, I don't need to know the fractions of miles, if I am measuring a long distance, who cares about feet?
Similarly, temperatures are more useful for most people in imperial. For example, when looking at the weather, a really cold, freezing day is in the -20s, down in Florida, we don't get cold, but we get hot days in the upper 90s (areas of Texas get low triple digits, and heat waves can hit the 120s), this gives us a range of temperatures of 140 degrees. The same Celsius range is -30 C - 50 C, a useful range of 80, so for gauging temperatures, the Imperial system is easier for the weather. In addition, if I want to say something is in the low 80s (80 F - 84 F), I get 27 C - 29 C, so upper 20s does the same thing, but something like upper 80s or lower 90s collides in the metric system in the low 30s.
The fact is, the "beauty" of metric is the large number of modifiers that let you convert easily, but we don't use it, in Imperial we use inches, feet and miles, in metric you use centimeters, meters, and kilometers. The conversion factor is largely irrelevant for most non-engineering/scientific fields.
The pros to metric are the ability to easily convert down to smaller units. Converting from centimeters to millimeters is trivial, which is important when doling out medicine if you need precision, but not so important when I'm measuring holes for putting something in the wall. The imperial system is more useful for most people in their day-to-day lives, because it is based upon fractions (intuitive) instead of decimals (precise but not intuitive). If you get below an eighth of an inch for precision, you're probably doing something that requires precision that metric gives you.
I can eyeball a person and easily describe their height... the range of heights in normal conversations of adults is 5'0" - 6'4", 1.52m - 1.93m. The fact is for describing heights, the discrete inches (17 here) component is more useful than the.4m over a continuous range.
People that work in precision like metric. People that don't see know reason to switch. The scientific community grabbed metric because it solved a problem that they had. There was no compelling reason for people to switch, which is why it took government coercion to switch people in Europe. In the US, our government hasn't historically had the power to do something similar (coerce grocery stores to change, schools, etc.) so America hasn't switched.
It seems that most Americans that want to switch base it on a "the Europeans are superior" inferiority complex that many Americans strangely have, or their field switched because it is useful for them, and want everyone to switch for their convenience. Things like construction are stuck because Americans have 8 foot tall ceilings (normal) or 10 or 12 for larger ones, so sheet rock needs to come in 8 ft sheets. The 2x4 is such a useful component coming in 8 ft, 10ft, and 12ft lengths. Switch construction to metric would be useless
You reply to a post about specialized scientific software by talking about the Apple interface guidelines. The fact is that we have a couple of categories of applications, and research oriented software is a separate market, and a first version without a super Mac-centric UI is not an issue. If the Darwine crew ever gets ported to Quartz, then compiling against WineLib would sufficient as a v1.0 port.
Get it on the Mac, get it running, keep rev'ing, with each Rev becoming more Mac friendly.
No, you can't ship an IM client that breaks the UI guidelines, but if you're the only player (or one of three) in the specialized market, then you ship whatever you can and keep rev'ing. Be the first to ship a Mac version, and you'll get more sales... possibly not Mac sales though. If the CEO, CIO, or anyone in a decision making capacity happens to LIKE Macs (runs one at home, whatever), then simply supporting Macs may sell your Windows software... because they hope that when all the pieces are in place, they'll migrate to a Mac network.
People are too short sited and like straw-man arguments to avoid understanding the large chunks of the software market.
A lot of conservative views that get roped into the phrase "Imperial Presidency" get mixed up here. Some of the extensions of the Bush Administration have been roped into the "unitary executive theory," see the Wikipedia article, but they are really separate.
The Constitution set up three branches of government, the legislative branch that reigned supreme, with a strong executive and a court system for adjudication. After ratification, each branch has attempted to increase it's power. The Marshall Court decided that it had judicial review of unconstitutional laws (early Administrations implied that the veto power was to be used for unconstitutional laws, we now routinely have Presidents sign blatantly unconstitutional laws and depend on the courts to bail them out), the legislative granted the President a cabinet, but demanded approval over hiring (and at one point firing, but that failed), and post-Watergate built a bunch of agencies that report to Congress directly (CBO, etc.) ignoring the general understanding that Congress consists of just the legislatures (and later aides), and all employees of carrying out the government are part of the executive. With the creation of a real standing army and permenantly mobilization during the Cold War, there has essentially been an assertion that the President alone decides war (a HUGE power grab), given the myriad of times we have involved ourselves in foreign operations without a declaration of war since WW II... it's actually kind of pathetic that Congress has decided that its power to "declare war" is archaic, and we now engage in police actions.
The Unitary Executive Theory comes as a backlash from several attempts by Congress, post-Nixon and Watergate, to establish their supremacy by granted powers directly to federal agencies, etc. The Wikipedia example was the US DOJ ruling that the EPA could not sue the DOD, because there would only be one party to the suit, the President. Essentially, if two government agencies are fueding, REGARDLESS of ANY LAWS passed by Congress, only the President can adjudicate them, not the Courts.
The Bush Administration has pushed forth an idea that Presidential Powers granted in the Constitution are NOT subject to regulation by Congress, which is an both an EXTRODINARY claim and a reasonable one at the same time. If powers were granted to the Presidency by the Constitution, it should require an amendment to take those powers over for Congress. However, to suggest that there is no check on them is an odd claim.
The biggest area of contention here is what does "Commander in Chief" truly mean. In the context of the late 18th century, it means that the Generals and Admirals report to the President, so while Congress declares war, they don't get to micro-manage the process. However, the idea that we have a standing army all over the world and the President can deploy at will seems absurd, but that is the way things stand. Congress can pull funds (unlikely in today's politics), but no President has acknowledged the legality of the War Powers Act (that basically suggests that the President needs authorization within 30 days), which makes sense. However, I would suggest that Congress SHOULD propose a Constitutional Amendment to regulate the powers to engage in undeclared wars. Sometimes, swiftness is needed, and Congress cannot and should not regulate the rules of engagement, but the existance of multiple undeclared wars that have lasted years suggests that the situation is out of line. The country should not "go to war" without the Congress declaring it, and the dereliction of duty by Congress is simply pathetic.
Yeah, they'd have taken a hit for 6 months, especially in the laptop arena. I was still sitting on a 1 Ghz G4 Powerbook, because replacing the machine for a 1.42 Ghz G4 Powerbook seemed like a pointless upgrade. It didn't look like a low power G5 (or 2 Ghz G4) was in the works, and Apple would have had an AWFUL 1H2006. However, there was an expectation of a week 1H2006 because of the transition.
I think that the long term edge of having ALL software running on x86-64 instead of x86-32 would have given them a performance edge over Windows for 3-5 years, and should have been considered. Supporting 32 and 64 bit PPC is different, they don't. They support PPC-32, with some libraries for mathematical software in PPC-64. The core OS is PPC-32, and that will never change.
I think that making the OS, and all apps x86-64 would be nice.
This also puts Apple in a good situation, AT NO POINT do they have computers that are inferior to their competition. Before, if Motorola or IBM outmatched Intel, Apple had bragging rights, if Intel beat them, then they were at a disadvantage. Now, if there is a supply issue in x86 land, then Dell, HP, and Apple are all in the same boat. Apple now competes on its software, not on Motorola/IBM's interest in beating Intel.
At PPC was often a disadvantage and only occasionally an advantage for Apple, they get chips out of the equation all together, and now fight on software, a much better boat to be in for them. They have the same suppliers as HP and Dell, a decent size economies of scale situation (they are the 4th or 5th biggest hardware manufacturer, so while Dell and HP are bigger, they are still a HUGELY lucrative account), and have their software advantage over other PC makers. The different CPU issue just confused the matter...
They'd have had a BIG edge if they went with x86-64 off the bat, and never had any legacy x86-32 code to deal with, giving a performance edge over windows, but I just don't understand migrating to x86 when x86-32 only had 6 months of life left in it instead of waiting for x86-64 and having a performance edge for 5-10 years, but that's just me.
I WILL NOT defend the DTV initiative that created 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p and all of them at 24 frames, 30 frames, and 60 frames. However, there are some technical reasons, we watch different content. And, for extra fun, to manage legacy stuff, the 480i/p formats support BOTH a 4:3 and 16:9 version...
Film content/transfers, which has more information than the HD video (which is why you could release the film, transfer to VHS, transfer to DVD, transfer to HD for D-VHS and broastcast (in both 1080i and 720p), and transfer again for the HD formats with a 1080p version), and all look good. However, film is shot in 24 frames/second. To make DVD players cheaper, the content is converted to 480i/60 (one film frame for 2 DVD frames, one film frame for 3 DVD frames). Then, we started to get HD Ready sets that supported either 720p or 1080i, and if you are analog (and therefore 1080i), you can also do 540p, so once you support that, might as well support a 480p signal, analog is cool that way, just update the electronics and show a different image, digital sets like Plasma/LCD/DLP need to scale to their digital output), so we got progressive scan DVD players. Reading notes on the DVD (normally, or comparing and guessing), we convert those 2:3 frames with a reverse pull down, to get back to 24 frames that we show progressively... this matters because if you just show the lines you get:
Frame 1: film frame 1 Frame 2: film frame 1 Frame 3: film frame 2, but half the lines are still from film frame 1 Frame 4: film frame 2 Frame 5: film frame 2 Frame 6: film frame 3, but half the lines are still from frame 2
So you can't just add in half the lines and show it progressively, you have to figure out when the frame changes.
So, for film, IDEALLY you want to sent 24 frames/second, and let the set adapt accordingly (whether showing one frame twice, and the next three times, or even better, be able to process the image at 24 frames/second and show them each once for longer).
However, given the allocation of bandwidth for HDTV, and the realities of MPEG-2 encoding, we essentially got 4 "useful' formats, and a bunch of stupid ones, 480i/60 4:3 (for simply digitizing existing legacy content is useful), 480p/60 (kind of useful for game systems) in both 4:3 and 16x9, this was pointless, a 480p 16x9 format was sufficient to handle digitally sending DVD quality images, and 720p/60 and 1080i/60. 720p/60 is the most resolution you could get in the stream at 60 frames per second, progressively, and 1080i/60 was the most resolution you could get at 60 frames/second interlaced.
Now, should we have both progressive and interlaces, I would say maybe...
If you are shooting something fast moving like sports, you want the 60 frames/second, so 720p/60 was the ideal format for broadcasting sports events. If you are shooting something slow moving, like a nature show (which was a lot of early HD programming, and it looks great, but not sure the purpose), you don't care about as many frames, and interlaced vs. progressive matters less, but getting 1080 lines was useful, making 1080i/60 a useful format for these. However, for film transfers, which will be a large portion of HD footage for a while, 1080p/24 made a lot of sense, you are only sending 24 frames/second, so why not get the extra resolution.
Remember, the TV stations had a dream, promise HDTV, and deliver it maybe to the cable/satellite operators over a line, but not OTA. Only 10% of people got their programming OTA, so TV stations largely existed because of government decisions to keep them (as opposed to the network simply selling content to cable/satellite directly), so their idea: either broadcast 6 480i signals, requiring no new equipment other than digitizing, and all of a sudden, you have 6 channels to sell ads on. A local market with 7 stations would conceivably have 42 channels available without paying a monthly fee, that's kinda cool, and all the networks have a bunch of digital stations that the created fo
Unitary Executive is a legal theory that holds that there are 3 branches of government, executive, legislative, and the courts. It doesn't question Chief Justice Marshall's assertion that the court is a co-equal branch (clearly NOT in the constitution, it was a much smaller branch, with executive and legislative being relatively equal), it doesn't even question the Warren Court's assertion that it is the most important branch (a bizarre assertion, but suggesting the the court can decide to throw out something chosen by a majority of the legislature and agreed to by the executive without narrowly defined roles makes it EXTREMELY powerful, since overriding them requires 2/3s the legislature and 3/4s the states).
Unitary suggests that ALL the powers delegated to the executive branch belong to the President. The cabinet (not in the Constitution), the long standing government agencies (not in the Constitution) are all part of the President.
It means that Congress CAN NOT delegate power to the IRS, they delegate the power to the executive. They can fund the IRS to do so, but the President holds all powers delegated to executive agencies.
It basically suggests that if Congress grants power to an executive agency to do something, they have granted it to the President, they do not get to assign powers to the civil service.
Unitary Executive suggests that the Civil Service is a PART of the Executive, and not some mythical fourth branch of government that can write administrative laws without the ability for either Congress or the President to review. The President, under Unitary Executive theory, can override ANY decision made in the executive branch. Congress can't empower random individuals. There are 3 branches of government, not 3 major ones, with minor ones everywhere.
You're right about the advantages of the CISC ISA vs. a RISC ISA, but I wanted to throw a few more points out.
Originally, going to RAM was cheap (in terms of cycles), going to disk was slow, so we loaded what we could in RAM and processed it. However, RAM was VERY expensive, until very recently, having "enough RAM" was rarely affordable. NT took so long to mass market (Win2K sort of, XP did it, almost 10 years), because when NT 3.1 shipped, it wanted 16 MB of RAM on the x86, and 32MB of RAM on the other systems, but going above 8 MB required specialized RAM because the RAM Chips (you plugged chips into sockets then, not chips on cards with standardized interfaces) were mass produced for 1 MB, 4 MB, and 8 MB, but going to 16 MB required using VERY expensive (relative to normal RAM) chips. So upgrading from 4 to 8 was normally doable (usually, they used the same chips, and you filled half the slots for 4MB, I think, it's been a long time since I had a 486 computer), but going to 16MB would often cost $2000 for the new RAM, when computers sold for $2000.
In the days of expensive RAM, the tighter ISA of x86 (more instructions per megabyte) gave them a major advantage in the real world. Sure, the ISA was crap, and the chips were crap, but when the most expensive component was RAM, the x86 used on average half the memory as the RISC competitors, which gave Intel a HUGE advantage in the cost-conscious desktop fight. It wasn't until the last 5 years, when Microsoft stagnated in their quest to use up more and more memory with each release (largely by failing to release OS updates), that the continual growth of RAM outpaced the computers. WinXP will run in 256MB, and run decently on 512MB, but 1GB or 2GB of RAM is reasonable for a decent system, and 512MB is not reasonable for a budget system. However, when we were struggling cost wise with 4MB and 8MB, the larger size of RISC programs was a problem.
Up until this point, it wasn't clear that x86 was the winner, it was the release of Windows 95 on the Pentium chips when Microsoft "won" the market, up until then, Windows was niche, OS/2 looked promising, Apple was a contender, and everyone just ran DOS/WP5.1 and NetWare 2.0. Up until 1995, it was anybody's game.
The biggest hit to the x86 was the lack of registers. In the 8088 and 8086 days, going to RAM wasn't too expensive, and the chip couldn't do much in the mean time, so we didn't care so much that it was the most register starved system. However, as chips got faster, going to RAM got expensive, and we didn't have registers, which is why the x86 GOT SMOKED in tightly run loops, because it couldn't keep enough data in there. The original cache banks (these were high tech, the chips were on a little card you plugged into your motherboard, you could even upgrade them for more) were to run faster than RAM, and created a third tier. Originally, this seemed like a hack because of the lack of registers.
However, our chips have massively increased in speed in the past 10 years (we were running at ~75-200 MHz in 1996) which meant that flooding the processor with data is the problem. The clock cycles are VERY short (we run ~ 2 Ghz, I remember the excitement at AMD making a 12 MHz 286, the 8088 started at 1 or 2 MHz), which means that carrying the signal over the wires is now an issue, so our motherboards are tighter, we keep cache ON THE CHIP, etc.
One reason that the x86 always outperformed was that once going to RAM became expensive, the smaller instruction size (and at the time, having 16-bit integers instead of 32 or 64) meant that if Intel provided 128 KB cache, then the other players needed 256 KB or even 512 KB to have the same caching advantage. This means, all things being equal, RISC was the better architecture, but IN REALITY, x86 could do the same amount of work with half or less resources. This allowed the computers to price cheaper, AND it meant that Intel could make HUGE profits.
For example, if RISC Vendor A sold a solution for $2500, assuming $2000 in parts
My point is that you should be able to reasonably track costs, some are fixed, some are a O(log n) problem, some are an O(n) problem, and some are going to be O(n^2) or higher.
Administrative overhead: Largely fixed. The cost of running a reasonable sized non-profit doesn't increase (very much) with the size of the finance base. At a maximum, it increases at an O(log n) of the amount processed. Managing 1 million dollars/year growing to 10 million dollars/year should do much more than double the administrative costs, if it increases them at all.
Legal costs: this is going to be the worst, because it grows FASTER than the rate of content added. Because adding content deepens the site, pulls in more internal links, and grows the notice of the site. Also, with more money comes a bigger target. This is the worst of the costs, because even if it isn't high now, it's the O(n^2) problem.
Hosting costs: this scales at a lower rate than the traffic. The bandwidth scales linearly with traffic, as should CPU cycles. Their is a HUGE hit when you go from shared host -> dedicated host -> server farm, with costs increasing at each step, but once you hit server farm, which Wikipedia is at, the scaling is roughly linear. Doubling your traffic may double your server needs, but won't quadruple them once the fixed portion of dealing with replication and redundancy is resolved. In addition, CPU cycles get cheaper, memory gets cheaper, and bandwidth gets cheaper. So if your traffic doubles every 18 months, your hosting costs should be relatively constant, because the equipment/bandwidth gets cheaper at the same rate as your growth.
Now lets look at the revenue side: Donations: this grows SLOWER than traffic, because the people and organizations willing to contribute are going to be disproportionately the early adopters. As you go through the adoption curve, the interest level is dropping off. This is why I believe that this is a HORRIBLE funding model.
Advertising: this scales FASTER than traffic... if you want it to. If you just stick up Google Adsense, it roughly scales linearly, but as your traffic increases, you are more likely to be able to get more lucrative options. As a major player, Google/Yahoo would no doubt compete for the contract, which would let Wikipedia grab close to 90% of the revenue, compared to the 50%-70% that appears to be standard for affiliate/advertising networks. In addition, if you are willing to put a sales force selling advertisements, as your traffic to relevant sections/pages grow, your opportunity to sell advertisement space at a premium grows. Ford Motor Company would be willing to pay a premium (through their ad agencies) to advertise on relevant pages, far more than shoot at the dark PPC campaigns indicate. HOWEVER, this style creates the appearance of conflict of interest. No matter HOW STRONG the firewall between advertising and content is, the perception is a problem, and the early adopters that are more likely to edit/volunteer seem to be the most conspiracy minded.
I believe that the best play for Wikipedia is a STRONG organizational division between finance, "sales," and content, with MASSIVE transparency into the process. The donation process will NOT scale for Wikipedia, and setting up a strong endowment while they are so popular makes sense. Similarly to a private company going public/selling the business at the top of their game, I would suggest that Wikipedia capitalize on their popularity to set themselves up for the next 15-25 years.
Will some people run away in the fear that their volunteer work is enriching others? No doubt. But the bigger risk right now is that without financial stability, Wikipedia is VERY vulnerable to systematic shocks. A financial judgement against them for $1m or more would no doubt collapse the enterprise, because donors are unlikely to contribute money to pay for a crap judgment, and then this knowledge-base is in trouble. I believe that with transparency, the fear that the site is going "commercial" can be minimized, while setting Wikipedia up for long term success.
You guys are so short-term oriented. Wikipedia is raising 1.5m to support themselves, hosting, etc. Let's assume that running the foundation with a decent endowment would cost $300k/year to run (administration, legal compliance, etc.), and the $1.5m they are raising now becomes an annualized cost (I'm sure it's not). If you assume that costs go up with inflation (which is a fault assumption, hosting costs and hardware costs come down), and we have $1.8m in annualized costs, you roughly need to raise 33x that amount so that the money would always be there... i.e. raise $100, invest in treasuries/CDs/etc paying 5% interest, take 3% of that interest and use it for operations, and take 2% to add to the principle, that covers a 2% annualized increase in costs, more than we should suffer when bandwidth+hosting in the main component).
Basically, how long would Wikipedia need to run ads to receive $60m? Set up the foundation that the money CAN ONLY be invested in treasuries, certificates of deposit, etc. (so nobody can see a foundation with $60m and try to steal it... happens all the time, non-profits attract the biggest derelicts because there is a lot of money and no profit-motive to keep people in check... you have to watch the people like hawks, but safeguards are possible). If you assume that Wikipedia could generate $1m/month in advertisement dollars (a conservative estimate), then you need to only run the ads for 5 years and you never need ads again.
If you figure that over the next 5 years, the text-ad market Google created/cornered (syndication, not PPC) will mature or even decline from "text ad blindness", that gives Wikipedia sufficient resources to build a self perpetuating base of human knowledge.
Otherwise you get annual fundraising campaigns.
OTOH, the fundraising helps make Wikipedia accountable to people that they are soliciting funds. And who knows that Wikipedia will have value 5, 10, 15, or 20 years from now... if Wikipedia disappears as a useful resource, there is a nice chunk of change sitting there for someone willing to put the time into corrupting the board and taking out "management fees".
I've seen versions at my local home depot, but here is an example of one: 2-5-10-15 Minute Switch. There are also some that are 15/30/45/60, and some that you press once for 15 minutes, twice for 30, etc., until 5 presses (or press and hold) when it is on until turning off.
I bought my builders special of bulbs a few weeks ago, normal "caveman" bulbs. Being in Florida, the extra wattage is noticable, because I experience it twice, once to light up the room, and once to pump the hot air out and replace it with cold air... In air conditioned year-round places, the CF offers terrific promise.
The downsides are: 1) inferior light, measurably, it doesn't cover the full spectrum that incandescent bulbs cover, but it's getting better over time. 2) start-up delay.
Thinking about my out of control electrical bill got me thinking about CF. The drawbacks are: 1) lack of dimming bulbs... solved recently, they now exist, and 2) start-up time, which got me thinking about how we use light in our house. The bulk of our light/heat is in the main rooms of the house, where the light is on constantly when we are home. Well, if I hit a button when I came home to tell my house "I'm home" (part of the automation system), I could turn on those lights immediately. By the time you get out of the car, unlock the door, and turn the alarm off, all the lights should be on at full light.
I also think that I might come out ahead using CF in the bathroom and having the lights be on all the time than I do using incandescent bulbs when needed, but that's a further quest. I use a lot of fixture with multiple globe lights in bathrooms, so the heat/electrical needs are large, so moving to CF when CF globes are a reality is tempting.
I also think that inside of fixtures that are 1) a pain to change, and 2) change the light anyway, the change makes sense. OTOH, light quality matters. My electrician put CF in the high hat lighting we put in a room, and the light was painful, and the buzzing was killing me. However, I think that with the newer bulbs (this was almost two years ago), this has become less of an issue.
The main thing is, if you live in an area with heat, the savings are minor. The regular bulbs generate heat at near enough to 100% efficiency that the main difference is the comparable costs of electric vs. gas/oil for the heat, so while you'll save some money, it won't be the massive savings that those of us with year-round AC see.
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Truly revolutionary ideas comes out of new ideas, that challenge the incumbent ideas. While scientific research has gotten much more complicated, making it harder to enter without the education required of a PhD, the PhD worship is a little twisted.
There was a time that people we're allowed to spout out ideas that the Church opposed, and only the Church could approve ideas, and only the Church chose who was in the Church. This period of time is generally considered to have been bad for human advancement and is called the Dark Ages.
We now have the Academy, and only people allowed by the Academy are allowed to question science. The Academy controls who gets the credentials.
As Climatology coalesced around global warming, how willing to fund and approve PhD research that questions it happens. It's wonderful to say that scientists want the truth, which is true in the abstract, but at the individual level, academics want to publish, because publishing gets them tenure. To publish, they do research, which requires funding, which requires grants.
The Academy has become one giant mess of group-think. Also, while current PhD students may enter the program out of a love of science, the previous generation entered out of a love of draft deferments, which is why you have a collection of leftists professors (the few conservative professors out there would be considered liberal Democrats or liberal Republicans, depending on the state) there to collect checks, ride out their time, and be embittered that there school chums outside make more money than them because they didn't waste their time chasing a tenured professor track. Read Philip Greenspun's essay on the economics of the university and how it enforces the gender divide.
Those that are doing political incorrect research are outside the Academy, often at industry jobs, and are attacked as being on the payroll of corporations. Never-mind that University professors are on the payroll of government bureaucrats or non-profits, non of which are neutral opinions. Both fields attract a combination of incompetents and do-gooders that love to spend other people's money on themselves... ask anyone good that works in non-profits, they want to pull their hair out.
Stop elevating science to a religion, with challenge-proof dogma. Scientific inquiry MUST stand on the merits of the data and strength of arguments, not the credentials of those giving it.
With the Fairness Doctrine, the party in control of the government was actually sitting there with stop watches making sure that "both sides were presented." While corporate consolidation has in theory limited voices, the reality is the explosion of media sources has eliminated that control.
What would happen is that no radio station would ever introduce a political radio show (incumbent ones with huge audiences would likely stay and be counterbalanced with unprofitable "other side"), because if I want to take a chance on a 1 hour radio program, I need to give up 2 hours, one for the program I am interested in, and one to counter-balance it. The net affect is that stations move away from talk radio, and move towards top-40 pop music, where they know that they'll make money and not need to deal with the FCC.
The way it is structured is designed to destroy political programming, because political programming is only interesting if it is one-sided to some extent. Equal time to both sides isn't entertaining.
Now, this is targeting conservative media, because conservative media uses the confrontational political format. Liberal media of that type has failed in the marketplace, because it's boring... The extreme left-wing websites are entertaining, but they don't translate into the other media spheres because of the self-perception of America's left of being intellectually elite, which requires not entering the name calling gutter that is how talk radio is fun. Compare Rush Limbaugh to Air America... his program is funny, mostly childish making fun of people, bad impressions, punning, etc., it's gutter humor applied to a political sphere. Listen to Air America programming, it's a bunch of people whining about politics. Air America launched when the country, politically, was the exact opposite of when Limbaugh's popularity exploded (1992-1994, during the Democrat "tyranny" of full control of three branches, 2004-2006 was similar with Republican "tyranny"). Rush Limbaugh ran "America Held Hostage" as his theme, mocking the whole process. Air America screamed about how evil Gitmo is. The former is funny and tongue-in-cheek, the latter is up for serious discussion that people don't want during their daily commute.
The "liberal media bias," as it exists, is much more a function of American political distribution than a fundamental approach to the market. Fox has proven that one can insert a "conservative media bias" and compete in the marketplace, albeit with less funding and inferior reporting. People don't choose the liberal media in the open market (Fox proved that by entering, people are split, shocking considering the superior journalism of CNN), they choose media and just get the bias. The bias isn't intentional, it isn't corporate strategy to push people leftward, it's a function of the fact that to run nationwide media services essentially means setting up shop in NYC or LA, and NYC and LA are liberal cities. Further, our journalism schools graduate people that are disproportionately left of center, the field attracts liberals (improve the world, expose evil, etc., etc.), so naturally, the media trends liberal. It does so not out of a conspiracy, but just the fact that the people gathering the facts are more likely to be left-of-center, and inadvertently spin things.
The fairness doctrine would not affect news programming, so liberal/conservative spin would remain there. It would affect opinion/commentary programming, which would dry up and disappear, and we would get more thoughtless brain-dead programming.
I'd love to see a viable liberal talk radio or similar program that survives on its merits, but they need a framework that is entertaining. Things like Daily Kos show that the people do exist, but they need a format that isn't cheerleading for the Democratic Party and it actually entertaining on its merits.
Air America would have been much better off if it was designed as a viable business, attempting to attract an audience, instead of a political effort
I dunno, British law may actually allow this if you start pushing... Remember, Common Law goes back to at least the Battle of Hastings IIRC. You have Common Law dealing with the entire Colonial and post-Colonial period, whatever laws were established to deal with the American War of Independence and the War of 1812, the breakup of British Empire and establishment of the Commonwealth, who knows if Britain has legal precedences dealing with former colonies that establish independence.
Regarding establish countries by claiming to exist, the PLO created Palestine that way. Say what you want about the rights of the Indigenous Arab population of the Roman/Ottoman region of Palestine, they have essentially claimed the existence of a country that never existed, and many world governments recognize.
The British Mandate for Palestine approved by the League of Nations (and supposedly binding on the United Nations, it's successors, as well as the governments of Israel and Jordan, plus the stateless lands in Gaza and on the west bank of the Jordan River) provides for Jewish Settlement in Palestine to create a Jewish homeland, and the Palestinian mandate covered both sides of the Jordan river, yet it is illegal for Jews to own property in Jordan (part of the Mandate) and the world community and ICJ claim that Jewish settlement in the disputed territories is illegal, despite the Mandate providing for it and no agreement with the successor nations repudiating that fact.
The PLO and World community have decided that there will be a nation of Palestine, on land to be determined (it is assumed Gaza, and some chunks of the disputed territories currently under Israeli occupation on the west bank of the Jordan River).
If Israel can create a state on Ottoman captured territory, administered by Britain, and Jordan and Iraq can do the same, and Syria and Lebanon with French soil, and the PLO with unowned territory occupied by Israel, why can't Sealand exist.
NOTE: for those who disagree with my view of history, find an entity under International Law other than Turkey that legally owns the west bank of the Jordan. Israel captured it fighting Jordan, whose occupation and annexation wasn't recognized, and the territory has been stateless since the Roman occupation of Judea, being provinces of the Roman Empire, Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium), Ottoman Caliphate, British Mandate, and then occupied without legal recognition by Jordan for 19 years and Israel by over 40 years. The last time the region was part of an autonomous state, the Judean Kings held sovereignty. The issue of a population there is real, and needs to be resolved, but the legal status is quite murky.
The PS3's problem is that Sony didn't make them. They have generally been selling out about as fast as Sony makes them... it's post launch and people don't camp out, but they aren't sitting on shelves for weeks.
Sony is being bailed out... they produced an overly complicated device that costs too much to make and is hard to get components for. Rather than doing the normal brain-dead console maneuver of selling at a "console price" and eating losses and sell-outs, they are selling at a premium price that is still selling out. By the time they fix their manufacturing problems, they will have sold everyone willing to pay a premium a PS3, and they will sell at a normal price. I expect the PS3 to increase in supply and drop in price $50-$100 every 3-6 months as their supplies increase and costs come down... that will happen in parallel.
There is a shortage of components, that means that the price of components goes up (even if Sony makes it in house and doesn't update their transfer pricing), but it will get fixed in time.
I'd say that Sony was pretty smart, the "normal" approach to the manufacturing disaster would have been to sell them at $299, each $500/device, and watch them sell on eBay for $1000+... The fact that the eBay price rapidly dropped to MSRP means that Sony is pricing about right.
0% unemployment means that nobody is looking for work. That's absolutely absurd.
At any given time, someone will be fired for doing a bad job. That person needs to look for work.
At any given time, some positions will be eliminated, because the company doesn't do that any more, those people need to look for work.
At any given time, some companies will go out of business, causing people to look for work.
At any given time, someone will hate their boss, quit, and go look for work.
At any given time, someone will leave the workforce, then one day decide to return (left to be a full-time caregiver, retired and changed their mind, etc., and they will look for work.
At any given time, someone will graduate from school (high school, college, tradeschool, whatever) and look fro work.
You cannot have 0% unemployment, because sometimes, you will have people looking for work.
You cannot have a minimum wage, and 0% unemployment, because a free market will naturally have some jobs under that minimum wage, and you are preventing it. Some people could no doubt be employed at $2/hour immediately, that cannot be employed at $5.15, $6.50, $7.25, or whatever your local minimum wage are, at least no immediately.
You cannot have the government charge a 10% employment tax on people, and have full employment, because some jobs that would get filled by a person at $X will not get filled for 1.1X, and some people will not take 0.9X to do the job, even though the company is willing to pay X.
The middle class has had a few years that were rougher than the years before, and let the revolution begin? America has the lowest unemployment of the first world, the highest per-capita income in the world, and because of a going through a structural change wages have not grown as fast as in the past, and we're suddenly living in poverty?
Wages exploded in certain sectors during the boom. Even overhaul, wages were growing much faster than inflation during the last economic run-up... Jobless was low, demand exploded. If it wasn't for off-shoring of jobs, we'd have probably had exploding wages (the supply of labor is pretty static one you are under 5% unemployment, so you start poaching people and wages grow fast), that sounds great in the short term, but it causes run-away inflation real fast, which either eats up wealth of EVERYONE ELSE (non-IT people do exist, and they have mortgages and bills to pat as well, and 10% inflation would devastate them), or would have caused the Feds to jack rates so high that a recession was started (you need to suck the excess cash out of the system, getting it into savings accounts/treasuries would have been one solution, otherwise prices skyrocket when more cash chased the same amount of goods and services) which would have collapsed the stock market.
.5% raises, so they are in trouble.
Why are wages not growing fast (well, they are now, and did in the second half of last year)?
I propose that it's short term thinking.
In the long term, wages grow at around inflation + 1%. If you ran the numbers from 1990 - today, I bet you'd find that wage growth was pretty much inflation + 1%. However, if you look at 1995-1999, you probably had more growth, and in 1990-1994 and 2000-2006 wages growing a bit less.
However, all people notice is that in the 90s, they were doing awesome (wages growing nicely, stock market growing nicely), and now they are suffering, because they got used to inflation + 2% raises, and are now getting inflation +/-
If US companies are doing well profit wise (which they are), then those profits go into: A) share-buybacks, B) expansion, C) dividends, D) salary increases, disproportionately at the top. The money HAS to go somewhere. Not seeing good investment opportunities, there have been a LOT of share buybacks, and dividends have been growing nicely (my blue chip stocks have been getting 8% - 11%/year dividend increases). The net affect is that the shares are worth more (EPS goes up as shares go down, though it is a lag factor because of weird accounting rules).
The problem people have is that in this latest run, those with capital deployed in the system have done well, while those without capital have not done well, because the wage growth hasn't been there. This absolutely sucks for lower-middle class and working class people, and it also sucks for people just starting their career. There are winners and losers, but you have seen wages inching up, and until the next recession as long as unemployment stays low, wages will keep growing.
In the long run, returns on capital investments run at 8%-10%/year, wages grow at around 1% or so (both are in real values, after inflation). However, in the beginning of an economic spurt, capital returns are higher (because they get really depressed in recessions, most of the money made in a bull market is made before people realize that there is a bull market), and at the end, wages pick up because the job market gets sucked dry.
However, wages are downward stick. Stock prices can and do drop 10%-20%, companies can't lower wages 10%-20% generally, because people can't take less, so you end up with fits. Unfortunately, wages get all their lift in the back half of the rally, then they stagnate for the recession/pull-back and early rally, and workers wonder why they are no longer doing well and everyone else is. However, the tail of the rally, when capital returns go flat and wages keep growing (wages growing, interest rates grow to stop inflation, and capital returns get sucked up by inflation plus rising interest rates), workers don't notice that they are doing better than the suppliers of capital.
Part of the reason that young people are more economically left than right is that with a shorter view of the market, they extrapolate their experiences of 3-5 years across 40 years and
One third of 7 ft is 7/3 which is 2 1/3, which is 2 ft, 4 inches.
:)
OTOH, if my wall is 7 feet high, I'm clearly in a metric-using country...
Some examples where it help...
.3m, or 30 cm.
:)
My wife insists that pictures are hung 2/3 up the wall, says its the most pleasing to the eye (golden ratio or something)...
Well, my walls are the quite common 8 feet walls, so 1/3 down is 8/3 of a foot, or 2 2/3, so I grab my tape measure, go down to 2'8", and away I go. If you have 10 foot walls, it's 10/3, or 3 1/3 foor, so 3'4" and away we go.
Traditionally, floor tile was 12" (generally 11 7/8th with a 1/8" grout line), those 18" and 24" is becoming popular in high end design. Wall tile (bathrooms, kitchen backsplashes) is 4", a third of a foot. Bathroom "cove tiles" the floor boards come in 4" and 6" (1/3 and 1/2 a foot) options.
A standard doorframe is 30", or 2.5'. Our countertops are 2', our wall cabinets 1', and sometimes you get larger devices, Microvents are 16" (1 1/3 ft) deep, so you may need to get cabinets in that measurement.
Are there metric equivalents, sure. However, the 1/3 point is a useful ratio.
Metric measurements easily divide by 2 and 5. Our Imperial distances, in the fractions of a foot we use routinely, are divisable by 2, 3, and 4 (and 6, but that's less important) which is convenient for these middle realms. Basically 4" is a common use in American homes, because it is a third of a foot, not because it is just over 10 cm. A third of a meter is 1.1 feet, and is similarly useful, or a foot is around
Yes, you have similar things, but the divide by 3 and divide by 4 gives us some very common and easy to use measurements. For small distances, measured in inches, the centimeter is too small, and the 5 cm at 2 inches is alright, but 10 cm at around 4 inches is okay, but you don't have anything convenient around the 3 inch point (7.5 cm just doesn't roll off the toungue).
Metric IS superior for many things... they just aren't things that most people do regularly. Yes, water boiling at 100C makes more sense than 212F, but guess what, when I boil water, I don't care about the temperature, just did I boil water and can I throw the pasta in...
I guess the main thing that I prefer Imperial for is the foot, which is a damned useful measurement. For volumes, mL/L is fine, wouldn't affect my life much either way. I think that Farenheit is more useful for defining temperatures because when weather is concerned, its more granular, but the foot is so damned useful.
Also, with 12" tile, I can easily estimate distances in most houses, count the tiles, and that's pretty cool.
Okay, economic theory...
Producing products (or services) by a firm have two basic costs, the fixed cost, and the variable costs. The fixed costs are costs that are generally fixed over the "short term" (i.e. you can sell the factory in the long term, but in the short-term, you have to pay your property taxes). Variable costs are the costs of producing the units, and we generally look at "average variable costs," i.e. if we spend 1000 on making the units, and produced 100 units, the AVC is 10. Marginal costs are the cost of producing the last unit.
We assume that marginal costs are increasing at the interesting point of the market. i.e. when I start a farm, the first plot of land that I farm is the most productive, then I start farming less valuable land. Similarly, the early oil fields produced a lot of cheap oil, modern oil exploration is expensively looking for smaller and smaller amounts of oil. While their are increasing returns to scale initially (spreading out the fixed costs over more and more units, so average fixed costs come down), we assume that as you start pushing harder and harder to produce more (paying a premium to buy parts on the spot market, paying overtime to run a second and third shift, etc.), costs come up, and eventually we get decreasing returns to scale.
Now, we can graph the "average cost per unit" as a declining curve (increasing returns to scale) until a minimum point, then an increasing curve as the increase in marginal costs over time. For non-physical products, remember the dot-com boom, less and less qualified employees were getting hired, and salaries were going up, meaning the cost/output of these people was going up...
Now, we can plot that cost curve as the "supply curve of the firm," and collectively with its competitors as the "supply curve of the market". If we plot that against the demand curve, we can see where the intersection lies. If the firm's decreasing costs area intersects the demand curve, then one single firm will have lower costs than two firms competing will. This is called a natural monopoly. If one firm can produce at 10, but two firms producing at that level makes costs 15, then in the "free market" costs should drop to 14, and one of the firms exits the market.
Now the problem is, introducing competition to this marketplace increases costs and therefore dead weight loss, but leaving the company with the monopoly will cause them to seek monopoly rents. These are markets that tend to be regulated.
The problem is, most markets that we are interested in today are not static. AT&T had a natural monopoly, but technology changes (satellites, microwaves, etc.) created the cellular phone, alternative means of long distance than stringing wires between cities, etc., making it no longer a natural monopoly.
With cable companies, there is room for competition in limited areas. The franchise agreements normally require universal wiring. If you notice cities letting competition in, they aren't wiring areas for the poor, they are poaching customers from the wealthy areas that buy premium packages and data services. This works because the incumbent monopolist has to maintain universal services, and the competitor is able to compete in isolated submarkets. If the monopolist competed with the competitor, they would lose their excess profits in the rest of the region, so they lose some market instead.
There are natural monopolies, but it is questionable that in terms of technology monopolies, should you accept them and regulate them (the generally accepted approach to older industries), or leave the monopolies, expecting monopoly profits to bring in competition. Given the pace of technology change, it may be more reasonable to accept premium pricing in the short-term to get competition in the long term.
The Telecom Act of 1996 promised to bring in a bold new era of competition by deregulating the companies, but from 1997 - 1999 people just howled at the exploding costs of cable television. However, a
It was very cool when I was a kid in school and we were learning the metric system, and the ability to convert distances to volumes, and with water, weight. These are all cool aspects of metric. They make metric the ONLY system for science, or areas of steady precision.
However, most people are not scientists. Scientists have no trouble working in metric by day, and watching a football (American) game at night on a 100 yard field.
The convenient advantages of Imperial for day to day activities combined with status quo is the reason that most of America doesn't use metric. A switch to metric would be inconvenient for the transitional generations (see UK), and give up some of the convenience of Imperial. Fields that want decimal precision and convertability between domains have switched to metric.
You are right, they are the "neat" aspects of metric that are convenient, calculating the amount of water for the pool, no question, however, in the real world, I stick the hose in, turn it on, then come back when it is done.
However, what do I do more often:
need to divide a foot in half, thirds, or quarters (6 inches, 4 inches, and 3 inches), or calculate the water of the pool.
Feet and yards happen to be extremely convenient measuring sizes for many day-to-day activities. Miles are less so, and I'd have no objection to an effort being made to convert from miles to kilometers, because kilometers are more useful for estimation... When I know something is 120 miles away, that's only interesting because averaging 60 miles per hour, it's 2 hours away. Change that to 200 kilometers and 100 kph, and it's easier math.
However, the foot is an extremely convenient and natural distance. The yard is less so, but it's an infrequently used measurement. However, for a football game, the yard is pretty useful simply because it divides in 3 easily. People intuitively understand what a third of a yard is (a foot), and halves are always easy, so when it's a goal line defense, and the ball is on the 1 yard line, you see if they advance the ball "half a yard" or "one foot" or "to the one foot line" which is 2 feet in and 1 foot from the goal line.
Things in Imperial are generally designed around multiples of 2 or 3, which is convenient for day to day activities. Metric is designed around multiples of 10, which divides easily into 2 and 5... Well, if I am building a table, I need to divide by 4, guaging distances, I am dividing by 2 or 3...
I agree that the conversion is useful and the scientific fields require it, but for most of us muddling through our lives, we do conversion so infrequently it's not worth giving up our convenient ability to divide by 2, 3, and 4 easily.
Imperial Units evolved from things natural to people. When I need to guess a distance, I use the span of my hand, ~ 2/3s a foot. I can walk something off, my foot is pretty close to a foot, etc.
The ergonomic arguement is that because Imperial Units evolved from things that people used, and Metric was developed in a lab, the imperial system works more naturally for people, all things being equal.
With regards to height, you think in 1.5m - 2.0 meters. Assuming you estimate to 5 centmeters (because people round to 5 and 10), you seem to have 11 increments, but if we notch out 1.5 (people under 5' tall) and 1.95 and 2.0 (people over 6'4) as common adult heights, we have 8 increments for height. In imperial, we have 17.
Metric is correct academically, but the ergonomic aspect is part of why metric has never been voluntarily adopted in "normal" society, just areas where precision are needed. I think you'll find in time that tools will move to be more metric, not really a need for imperial there, but that's a long transition.
Hell, when measuring something, if I need more precision than a quarter inch, I usually flip the tape measure over and use milimeters. Both can stay, and live and let live.
Alex
Okay, one can dedect/feel temperatures at around 5 degrees Farenheit, 3 degrees Celsius. While I can't really feel the difference between 80 and 81, a temperature in the upper 70s (76-79), low 80s (80-84), upper 80s, etc., we do things in 5 degree increments, you're doing it in 3 degree increments.
Verbally, I find using the upper/lower + the tens digit gives me a good range to describe temperatures that I can feel. The 1 degree different is only meaninful for getting the high/lows off the news or records, where we have a higher resolution for describing things without resulting in fractions.
Thats why I had no problem using Celsius/Kelvin in the Chem lab, and Farenheit to describe the weather. Obviously, people are more comfortable with what they are familiar with, but I think dismissing Farenheit as "useless" ignores some of its convenient aspects in day-to-day life.
The Imperial system has some terribly convenient reasons that it sticks around... The Metric system is theoretically better, and its decimal based approach is useful for mathematics, although in a computer age (base 2), the imperial system is actually more "computer-friendly," as our system of halves and doubles actually makes more computer sense. As you said, it all depends what you are doing.
.4m over a continuous range.
For liquids, they all suck. Pints, Cups, Quarts, and Gallons all give you some reasonable amounts, but are useless for converting. However, if you look at recipes, it may call for 3/4 of a cup (not 6 oz), and if you double, it's easy, 1.5 cups.
For short distances, feet is extremely useful. Most things that you eyeball are between 0 and 10 feet, which gives you 11 values without resulting to a decimal, which confuses people. Metric gives you values 0-3 for the same area. There isn't a huge advantage to miles compared with kilometers, but the conversion is kind of irrelevant. If I'm measuring something for working around the house, I don't need to know the fractions of miles, if I am measuring a long distance, who cares about feet?
Similarly, temperatures are more useful for most people in imperial. For example, when looking at the weather, a really cold, freezing day is in the -20s, down in Florida, we don't get cold, but we get hot days in the upper 90s (areas of Texas get low triple digits, and heat waves can hit the 120s), this gives us a range of temperatures of 140 degrees. The same Celsius range is -30 C - 50 C, a useful range of 80, so for gauging temperatures, the Imperial system is easier for the weather. In addition, if I want to say something is in the low 80s (80 F - 84 F), I get 27 C - 29 C, so upper 20s does the same thing, but something like upper 80s or lower 90s collides in the metric system in the low 30s.
The fact is, the "beauty" of metric is the large number of modifiers that let you convert easily, but we don't use it, in Imperial we use inches, feet and miles, in metric you use centimeters, meters, and kilometers. The conversion factor is largely irrelevant for most non-engineering/scientific fields.
The pros to metric are the ability to easily convert down to smaller units. Converting from centimeters to millimeters is trivial, which is important when doling out medicine if you need precision, but not so important when I'm measuring holes for putting something in the wall. The imperial system is more useful for most people in their day-to-day lives, because it is based upon fractions (intuitive) instead of decimals (precise but not intuitive). If you get below an eighth of an inch for precision, you're probably doing something that requires precision that metric gives you.
I can eyeball a person and easily describe their height... the range of heights in normal conversations of adults is 5'0" - 6'4", 1.52m - 1.93m. The fact is for describing heights, the discrete inches (17 here) component is more useful than the
People that work in precision like metric. People that don't see know reason to switch. The scientific community grabbed metric because it solved a problem that they had. There was no compelling reason for people to switch, which is why it took government coercion to switch people in Europe. In the US, our government hasn't historically had the power to do something similar (coerce grocery stores to change, schools, etc.) so America hasn't switched.
It seems that most Americans that want to switch base it on a "the Europeans are superior" inferiority complex that many Americans strangely have, or their field switched because it is useful for them, and want everyone to switch for their convenience. Things like construction are stuck because Americans have 8 foot tall ceilings (normal) or 10 or 12 for larger ones, so sheet rock needs to come in 8 ft sheets. The 2x4 is such a useful component coming in 8 ft, 10ft, and 12ft lengths. Switch construction to metric would be useless
You reply to a post about specialized scientific software by talking about the Apple interface guidelines. The fact is that we have a couple of categories of applications, and research oriented software is a separate market, and a first version without a super Mac-centric UI is not an issue. If the Darwine crew ever gets ported to Quartz, then compiling against WineLib would sufficient as a v1.0 port.
Get it on the Mac, get it running, keep rev'ing, with each Rev becoming more Mac friendly.
No, you can't ship an IM client that breaks the UI guidelines, but if you're the only player (or one of three) in the specialized market, then you ship whatever you can and keep rev'ing. Be the first to ship a Mac version, and you'll get more sales... possibly not Mac sales though. If the CEO, CIO, or anyone in a decision making capacity happens to LIKE Macs (runs one at home, whatever), then simply supporting Macs may sell your Windows software... because they hope that when all the pieces are in place, they'll migrate to a Mac network.
People are too short sited and like straw-man arguments to avoid understanding the large chunks of the software market.
A lot of conservative views that get roped into the phrase "Imperial Presidency" get mixed up here. Some of the extensions of the Bush Administration have been roped into the "unitary executive theory," see the Wikipedia article, but they are really separate.
The Constitution set up three branches of government, the legislative branch that reigned supreme, with a strong executive and a court system for adjudication. After ratification, each branch has attempted to increase it's power. The Marshall Court decided that it had judicial review of unconstitutional laws (early Administrations implied that the veto power was to be used for unconstitutional laws, we now routinely have Presidents sign blatantly unconstitutional laws and depend on the courts to bail them out), the legislative granted the President a cabinet, but demanded approval over hiring (and at one point firing, but that failed), and post-Watergate built a bunch of agencies that report to Congress directly (CBO, etc.) ignoring the general understanding that Congress consists of just the legislatures (and later aides), and all employees of carrying out the government are part of the executive. With the creation of a real standing army and permenantly mobilization during the Cold War, there has essentially been an assertion that the President alone decides war (a HUGE power grab), given the myriad of times we have involved ourselves in foreign operations without a declaration of war since WW II... it's actually kind of pathetic that Congress has decided that its power to "declare war" is archaic, and we now engage in police actions.
The Unitary Executive Theory comes as a backlash from several attempts by Congress, post-Nixon and Watergate, to establish their supremacy by granted powers directly to federal agencies, etc. The Wikipedia example was the US DOJ ruling that the EPA could not sue the DOD, because there would only be one party to the suit, the President. Essentially, if two government agencies are fueding, REGARDLESS of ANY LAWS passed by Congress, only the President can adjudicate them, not the Courts.
The Bush Administration has pushed forth an idea that Presidential Powers granted in the Constitution are NOT subject to regulation by Congress, which is an both an EXTRODINARY claim and a reasonable one at the same time. If powers were granted to the Presidency by the Constitution, it should require an amendment to take those powers over for Congress. However, to suggest that there is no check on them is an odd claim.
The biggest area of contention here is what does "Commander in Chief" truly mean. In the context of the late 18th century, it means that the Generals and Admirals report to the President, so while Congress declares war, they don't get to micro-manage the process. However, the idea that we have a standing army all over the world and the President can deploy at will seems absurd, but that is the way things stand. Congress can pull funds (unlikely in today's politics), but no President has acknowledged the legality of the War Powers Act (that basically suggests that the President needs authorization within 30 days), which makes sense. However, I would suggest that Congress SHOULD propose a Constitutional Amendment to regulate the powers to engage in undeclared wars. Sometimes, swiftness is needed, and Congress cannot and should not regulate the rules of engagement, but the existance of multiple undeclared wars that have lasted years suggests that the situation is out of line. The country should not "go to war" without the Congress declaring it, and the dereliction of duty by Congress is simply pathetic.
Yeah, they'd have taken a hit for 6 months, especially in the laptop arena. I was still sitting on a 1 Ghz G4 Powerbook, because replacing the machine for a 1.42 Ghz G4 Powerbook seemed like a pointless upgrade. It didn't look like a low power G5 (or 2 Ghz G4) was in the works, and Apple would have had an AWFUL 1H2006. However, there was an expectation of a week 1H2006 because of the transition.
I think that the long term edge of having ALL software running on x86-64 instead of x86-32 would have given them a performance edge over Windows for 3-5 years, and should have been considered. Supporting 32 and 64 bit PPC is different, they don't. They support PPC-32, with some libraries for mathematical software in PPC-64. The core OS is PPC-32, and that will never change.
I think that making the OS, and all apps x86-64 would be nice.
This also puts Apple in a good situation, AT NO POINT do they have computers that are inferior to their competition. Before, if Motorola or IBM outmatched Intel, Apple had bragging rights, if Intel beat them, then they were at a disadvantage. Now, if there is a supply issue in x86 land, then Dell, HP, and Apple are all in the same boat. Apple now competes on its software, not on Motorola/IBM's interest in beating Intel.
At PPC was often a disadvantage and only occasionally an advantage for Apple, they get chips out of the equation all together, and now fight on software, a much better boat to be in for them. They have the same suppliers as HP and Dell, a decent size economies of scale situation (they are the 4th or 5th biggest hardware manufacturer, so while Dell and HP are bigger, they are still a HUGELY lucrative account), and have their software advantage over other PC makers. The different CPU issue just confused the matter...
They'd have had a BIG edge if they went with x86-64 off the bat, and never had any legacy x86-32 code to deal with, giving a performance edge over windows, but I just don't understand migrating to x86 when x86-32 only had 6 months of life left in it instead of waiting for x86-64 and having a performance edge for 5-10 years, but that's just me.
I WILL NOT defend the DTV initiative that created 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, 1080p and all of them at 24 frames, 30 frames, and 60 frames. However, there are some technical reasons, we watch different content. And, for extra fun, to manage legacy stuff, the 480i/p formats support BOTH a 4:3 and 16:9 version...
Film content/transfers, which has more information than the HD video (which is why you could release the film, transfer to VHS, transfer to DVD, transfer to HD for D-VHS and broastcast (in both 1080i and 720p), and transfer again for the HD formats with a 1080p version), and all look good. However, film is shot in 24 frames/second. To make DVD players cheaper, the content is converted to 480i/60 (one film frame for 2 DVD frames, one film frame for 3 DVD frames). Then, we started to get HD Ready sets that supported either 720p or 1080i, and if you are analog (and therefore 1080i), you can also do 540p, so once you support that, might as well support a 480p signal, analog is cool that way, just update the electronics and show a different image, digital sets like Plasma/LCD/DLP need to scale to their digital output), so we got progressive scan DVD players. Reading notes on the DVD (normally, or comparing and guessing), we convert those 2:3 frames with a reverse pull down, to get back to 24 frames that we show progressively... this matters because if you just show the lines you get:
Frame 1: film frame 1
Frame 2: film frame 1
Frame 3: film frame 2, but half the lines are still from film frame 1
Frame 4: film frame 2
Frame 5: film frame 2
Frame 6: film frame 3, but half the lines are still from frame 2
So you can't just add in half the lines and show it progressively, you have to figure out when the frame changes.
So, for film, IDEALLY you want to sent 24 frames/second, and let the set adapt accordingly (whether showing one frame twice, and the next three times, or even better, be able to process the image at 24 frames/second and show them each once for longer).
However, given the allocation of bandwidth for HDTV, and the realities of MPEG-2 encoding, we essentially got 4 "useful' formats, and a bunch of stupid ones, 480i/60 4:3 (for simply digitizing existing legacy content is useful), 480p/60 (kind of useful for game systems) in both 4:3 and 16x9, this was pointless, a 480p 16x9 format was sufficient to handle digitally sending DVD quality images, and 720p/60 and 1080i/60. 720p/60 is the most resolution you could get in the stream at 60 frames per second, progressively, and 1080i/60 was the most resolution you could get at 60 frames/second interlaced.
Now, should we have both progressive and interlaces, I would say maybe...
If you are shooting something fast moving like sports, you want the 60 frames/second, so 720p/60 was the ideal format for broadcasting sports events. If you are shooting something slow moving, like a nature show (which was a lot of early HD programming, and it looks great, but not sure the purpose), you don't care about as many frames, and interlaced vs. progressive matters less, but getting 1080 lines was useful, making 1080i/60 a useful format for these. However, for film transfers, which will be a large portion of HD footage for a while, 1080p/24 made a lot of sense, you are only sending 24 frames/second, so why not get the extra resolution.
Remember, the TV stations had a dream, promise HDTV, and deliver it maybe to the cable/satellite operators over a line, but not OTA. Only 10% of people got their programming OTA, so TV stations largely existed because of government decisions to keep them (as opposed to the network simply selling content to cable/satellite directly), so their idea: either broadcast 6 480i signals, requiring no new equipment other than digitizing, and all of a sudden, you have 6 channels to sell ads on. A local market with 7 stations would conceivably have 42 channels available without paying a monthly fee, that's kinda cool, and all the networks have a bunch of digital stations that the created fo
Unitary Executive is a legal theory that holds that there are 3 branches of government, executive, legislative, and the courts. It doesn't question Chief Justice Marshall's assertion that the court is a co-equal branch (clearly NOT in the constitution, it was a much smaller branch, with executive and legislative being relatively equal), it doesn't even question the Warren Court's assertion that it is the most important branch (a bizarre assertion, but suggesting the the court can decide to throw out something chosen by a majority of the legislature and agreed to by the executive without narrowly defined roles makes it EXTREMELY powerful, since overriding them requires 2/3s the legislature and 3/4s the states).
Unitary suggests that ALL the powers delegated to the executive branch belong to the President. The cabinet (not in the Constitution), the long standing government agencies (not in the Constitution) are all part of the President.
It means that Congress CAN NOT delegate power to the IRS, they delegate the power to the executive. They can fund the IRS to do so, but the President holds all powers delegated to executive agencies.
It basically suggests that if Congress grants power to an executive agency to do something, they have granted it to the President, they do not get to assign powers to the civil service.
Unitary Executive suggests that the Civil Service is a PART of the Executive, and not some mythical fourth branch of government that can write administrative laws without the ability for either Congress or the President to review. The President, under Unitary Executive theory, can override ANY decision made in the executive branch. Congress can't empower random individuals. There are 3 branches of government, not 3 major ones, with minor ones everywhere.
You're right about the advantages of the CISC ISA vs. a RISC ISA, but I wanted to throw a few more points out.
Originally, going to RAM was cheap (in terms of cycles), going to disk was slow, so we loaded what we could in RAM and processed it. However, RAM was VERY expensive, until very recently, having "enough RAM" was rarely affordable. NT took so long to mass market (Win2K sort of, XP did it, almost 10 years), because when NT 3.1 shipped, it wanted 16 MB of RAM on the x86, and 32MB of RAM on the other systems, but going above 8 MB required specialized RAM because the RAM Chips (you plugged chips into sockets then, not chips on cards with standardized interfaces) were mass produced for 1 MB, 4 MB, and 8 MB, but going to 16 MB required using VERY expensive (relative to normal RAM) chips. So upgrading from 4 to 8 was normally doable (usually, they used the same chips, and you filled half the slots for 4MB, I think, it's been a long time since I had a 486 computer), but going to 16MB would often cost $2000 for the new RAM, when computers sold for $2000.
In the days of expensive RAM, the tighter ISA of x86 (more instructions per megabyte) gave them a major advantage in the real world. Sure, the ISA was crap, and the chips were crap, but when the most expensive component was RAM, the x86 used on average half the memory as the RISC competitors, which gave Intel a HUGE advantage in the cost-conscious desktop fight. It wasn't until the last 5 years, when Microsoft stagnated in their quest to use up more and more memory with each release (largely by failing to release OS updates), that the continual growth of RAM outpaced the computers. WinXP will run in 256MB, and run decently on 512MB, but 1GB or 2GB of RAM is reasonable for a decent system, and 512MB is not reasonable for a budget system. However, when we were struggling cost wise with 4MB and 8MB, the larger size of RISC programs was a problem.
Up until this point, it wasn't clear that x86 was the winner, it was the release of Windows 95 on the Pentium chips when Microsoft "won" the market, up until then, Windows was niche, OS/2 looked promising, Apple was a contender, and everyone just ran DOS/WP5.1 and NetWare 2.0. Up until 1995, it was anybody's game.
The biggest hit to the x86 was the lack of registers. In the 8088 and 8086 days, going to RAM wasn't too expensive, and the chip couldn't do much in the mean time, so we didn't care so much that it was the most register starved system. However, as chips got faster, going to RAM got expensive, and we didn't have registers, which is why the x86 GOT SMOKED in tightly run loops, because it couldn't keep enough data in there. The original cache banks (these were high tech, the chips were on a little card you plugged into your motherboard, you could even upgrade them for more) were to run faster than RAM, and created a third tier. Originally, this seemed like a hack because of the lack of registers.
However, our chips have massively increased in speed in the past 10 years (we were running at ~75-200 MHz in 1996) which meant that flooding the processor with data is the problem. The clock cycles are VERY short (we run ~ 2 Ghz, I remember the excitement at AMD making a 12 MHz 286, the 8088 started at 1 or 2 MHz), which means that carrying the signal over the wires is now an issue, so our motherboards are tighter, we keep cache ON THE CHIP, etc.
One reason that the x86 always outperformed was that once going to RAM became expensive, the smaller instruction size (and at the time, having 16-bit integers instead of 32 or 64) meant that if Intel provided 128 KB cache, then the other players needed 256 KB or even 512 KB to have the same caching advantage. This means, all things being equal, RISC was the better architecture, but IN REALITY, x86 could do the same amount of work with half or less resources. This allowed the computers to price cheaper, AND it meant that Intel could make HUGE profits.
For example, if RISC Vendor A sold a solution for $2500, assuming $2000 in parts
My point is that you should be able to reasonably track costs, some are fixed, some are a O(log n) problem, some are an O(n) problem, and some are going to be O(n^2) or higher.
Administrative overhead: Largely fixed. The cost of running a reasonable sized non-profit doesn't increase (very much) with the size of the finance base. At a maximum, it increases at an O(log n) of the amount processed. Managing 1 million dollars/year growing to 10 million dollars/year should do much more than double the administrative costs, if it increases them at all.
Legal costs: this is going to be the worst, because it grows FASTER than the rate of content added. Because adding content deepens the site, pulls in more internal links, and grows the notice of the site. Also, with more money comes a bigger target. This is the worst of the costs, because even if it isn't high now, it's the O(n^2) problem.
Hosting costs: this scales at a lower rate than the traffic. The bandwidth scales linearly with traffic, as should CPU cycles. Their is a HUGE hit when you go from shared host -> dedicated host -> server farm, with costs increasing at each step, but once you hit server farm, which Wikipedia is at, the scaling is roughly linear. Doubling your traffic may double your server needs, but won't quadruple them once the fixed portion of dealing with replication and redundancy is resolved. In addition, CPU cycles get cheaper, memory gets cheaper, and bandwidth gets cheaper. So if your traffic doubles every 18 months, your hosting costs should be relatively constant, because the equipment/bandwidth gets cheaper at the same rate as your growth.
Now lets look at the revenue side:
Donations: this grows SLOWER than traffic, because the people and organizations willing to contribute are going to be disproportionately the early adopters. As you go through the adoption curve, the interest level is dropping off. This is why I believe that this is a HORRIBLE funding model.
Advertising: this scales FASTER than traffic... if you want it to. If you just stick up Google Adsense, it roughly scales linearly, but as your traffic increases, you are more likely to be able to get more lucrative options. As a major player, Google/Yahoo would no doubt compete for the contract, which would let Wikipedia grab close to 90% of the revenue, compared to the 50%-70% that appears to be standard for affiliate/advertising networks. In addition, if you are willing to put a sales force selling advertisements, as your traffic to relevant sections/pages grow, your opportunity to sell advertisement space at a premium grows. Ford Motor Company would be willing to pay a premium (through their ad agencies) to advertise on relevant pages, far more than shoot at the dark PPC campaigns indicate. HOWEVER, this style creates the appearance of conflict of interest. No matter HOW STRONG the firewall between advertising and content is, the perception is a problem, and the early adopters that are more likely to edit/volunteer seem to be the most conspiracy minded.
I believe that the best play for Wikipedia is a STRONG organizational division between finance, "sales," and content, with MASSIVE transparency into the process. The donation process will NOT scale for Wikipedia, and setting up a strong endowment while they are so popular makes sense. Similarly to a private company going public/selling the business at the top of their game, I would suggest that Wikipedia capitalize on their popularity to set themselves up for the next 15-25 years.
Will some people run away in the fear that their volunteer work is enriching others? No doubt. But the bigger risk right now is that without financial stability, Wikipedia is VERY vulnerable to systematic shocks. A financial judgement against them for $1m or more would no doubt collapse the enterprise, because donors are unlikely to contribute money to pay for a crap judgment, and then this knowledge-base is in trouble. I believe that with transparency, the fear that the site is going "commercial" can be minimized, while setting Wikipedia up for long term success.
You guys are so short-term oriented. Wikipedia is raising 1.5m to support themselves, hosting, etc. Let's assume that running the foundation with a decent endowment would cost $300k/year to run (administration, legal compliance, etc.), and the $1.5m they are raising now becomes an annualized cost (I'm sure it's not). If you assume that costs go up with inflation (which is a fault assumption, hosting costs and hardware costs come down), and we have $1.8m in annualized costs, you roughly need to raise 33x that amount so that the money would always be there... i.e. raise $100, invest in treasuries/CDs/etc paying 5% interest, take 3% of that interest and use it for operations, and take 2% to add to the principle, that covers a 2% annualized increase in costs, more than we should suffer when bandwidth+hosting in the main component).
Basically, how long would Wikipedia need to run ads to receive $60m? Set up the foundation that the money CAN ONLY be invested in treasuries, certificates of deposit, etc. (so nobody can see a foundation with $60m and try to steal it... happens all the time, non-profits attract the biggest derelicts because there is a lot of money and no profit-motive to keep people in check... you have to watch the people like hawks, but safeguards are possible). If you assume that Wikipedia could generate $1m/month in advertisement dollars (a conservative estimate), then you need to only run the ads for 5 years and you never need ads again.
If you figure that over the next 5 years, the text-ad market Google created/cornered (syndication, not PPC) will mature or even decline from "text ad blindness", that gives Wikipedia sufficient resources to build a self perpetuating base of human knowledge.
Otherwise you get annual fundraising campaigns.
OTOH, the fundraising helps make Wikipedia accountable to people that they are soliciting funds. And who knows that Wikipedia will have value 5, 10, 15, or 20 years from now... if Wikipedia disappears as a useful resource, there is a nice chunk of change sitting there for someone willing to put the time into corrupting the board and taking out "management fees".
Alex
I've seen versions at my local home depot, but here is an example of one: 2-5-10-15 Minute Switch. There are also some that are 15/30/45/60, and some that you press once for 15 minutes, twice for 30, etc., until 5 presses (or press and hold) when it is on until turning off.
Alex
We're slowly getting CFL in all shapes and sizes...:
I am guessing that the twist-shaped bulbs will be short lived, because they are "weird" and slow adoption, we'll see.
Alex
I bought my builders special of bulbs a few weeks ago, normal "caveman" bulbs. Being in Florida, the extra wattage is noticable, because I experience it twice, once to light up the room, and once to pump the hot air out and replace it with cold air... In air conditioned year-round places, the CF offers terrific promise.
The downsides are: 1) inferior light, measurably, it doesn't cover the full spectrum that incandescent bulbs cover, but it's getting better over time. 2) start-up delay.
Thinking about my out of control electrical bill got me thinking about CF. The drawbacks are: 1) lack of dimming bulbs... solved recently, they now exist, and 2) start-up time, which got me thinking about how we use light in our house. The bulk of our light/heat is in the main rooms of the house, where the light is on constantly when we are home. Well, if I hit a button when I came home to tell my house "I'm home" (part of the automation system), I could turn on those lights immediately. By the time you get out of the car, unlock the door, and turn the alarm off, all the lights should be on at full light.
I also think that I might come out ahead using CF in the bathroom and having the lights be on all the time than I do using incandescent bulbs when needed, but that's a further quest. I use a lot of fixture with multiple globe lights in bathrooms, so the heat/electrical needs are large, so moving to CF when CF globes are a reality is tempting.
I also think that inside of fixtures that are 1) a pain to change, and 2) change the light anyway, the change makes sense. OTOH, light quality matters. My electrician put CF in the high hat lighting we put in a room, and the light was painful, and the buzzing was killing me. However, I think that with the newer bulbs (this was almost two years ago), this has become less of an issue.
The main thing is, if you live in an area with heat, the savings are minor. The regular bulbs generate heat at near enough to 100% efficiency that the main difference is the comparable costs of electric vs. gas/oil for the heat, so while you'll save some money, it won't be the massive savings that those of us with year-round AC see.
Alex