Somewhere there is a best price point that balances those factors to make the most money. Notice what's NOT in that formula... the price of labor
I agreed with parts of your post but you made a big mistake here. I can assure you every single good sold has the exact labor cost calculated and built into that cost. Cost allocation is one of the most key parts in accounting, and in the case of McDonald's, I would assure you they have a *very* accurate labor cost calculated for every item on the menu. It's not rocket science either. How many minutes did it take that employee to make the burger, and what is the position wage? That and materials make the unit cost.
"We think this is benefiting businesses primarily"... "I point this out, not to take the heat off of businesses."
This is extra hilarious. Here we go again - just because we've created the construct of a corporation to make business activities easier, folks just can't seem to stop actually thinking of them as real people. They're not, and it's real people making the decisions to pay these wages, real people acting in the interest of the American consumer.
Sorry, but the entire population of the USA is at fault. Businesses are simply social creations to help us conduct activities, and the people within them act in accordance to the pressure put on them by demand of their consumers. In this case, the carrot is dangling in the direction of more stuff and lower prices.
South Park did an episode about this, in that example about the Middle East wars. It's wanting to have your cake and eat it to. Putting pressure on your own creations to constantly deliver more and newer stuff, but you want the loudest voices to make it seem like you *really* don't like the side effects caused by it.
It's the rampant consumer culture in the US, and you know what, I'm not even making a moral argument against it. Heck, in the absence of any absolute morality it's beneficial for a country to exploit others as much as it can to its own benefit. What sickens me is when any US citizen complains about this. You don't want change.
If my life is on the line, I don't have to worry about how much it costs.
I call BS. If your life is on the line, you *won't* worry about how much it costs, unless it actually happens to save your life, in which case the cost will probably leave you financially crippled for whatever life said treatment left you with. Also, aren't there a number of cases where people didn't get treatment solely because they couldn't afford it?
I'm not so sure of near-communist countries where beaurocrats are in charge of these things.
Sounds like you've been reading too much Sarah Palin propaganda. I'm not aware of any public health care systems where decisions for treatment are made by anyone but doctors. It's the US where insurance bureaucrats make life or death decisions. Keep drinking their kool-aid.
So what I notice is different about all the examples you mention is that the total number of US visitors under each case of "travel restriction in place" and "no travel restriction in place" isn't really that big - eg. next to zero. Without a restriction, not many tourists go to North Korea anyway.
Whereas Cuba is close and tropical, and thus would be a major economic impact having access to US tourism. In other words, the US customizes how it treats various countries to whatever hurts them the most. I'm sure for the other countries, they are doing things other than restricting travel that cause much more damage.
I don't agree at all, and you seem to be approaching it from a solely arts-related viewpoint which is very narrow.
Most people, the average I would say, do take somewhere in the range of 10,000 hours to "master" their craft. That's roughly five years of working at a full time job. I think of all the master project managers, developers, analysts, managers, etc., etc., I know, and I seriously doubt any of them were "masters" in their first five years. Some were naturally inclined with certain skill sets, however in the project manager's example, there's just lessons that you need to learn from actually going through approximately 10,000 hours of managing projects.
I think it's crazy to dismiss the knowledge and experience that comes from doing something for 10,000 hours. It's insanely rare to see anyone step into something and have it "mastered" within five years. If you're talking someone who can paint a nice picture his first try around, well sure..
I felt compelled to log in and comment, as I recently saw this for the first time in my life a few weeks ago. I know this is only my one small anecdotal story, however it is true, and has made me reconsider how widespread the problem actually is.
I was out drinking with a small group of friends a few weeks back. Out camping. We'd done this many times before, and were really good friends. One is a single female, and she hangs with our group because she can drink beer and shoot the shit with guys pretty damn well, although you wouldn't be able to tell looking at her. As it turns, one night she drank too much (as we all did), and started crossing the line with one of my friends, who is married. She just got drunk and couldn't control herself. She was all over my friend, kissing his neck and they ended up making out. Maybe a little nudity involved. Anyway, somewhat awkward but not a big deal to us as it was pretty tame (relatively) and hey, people do stupid things they don't normally do when drunk. However, I could tell SHE was extremely ashamed by her actions.. she remembered what she did, I could tell in her eyes. We had no problems, SHE was visibly upset by HER behaviour. Things were fine for the rest of the trip, but when we got back she threatened to press assault charges if we ever told anyone what happened. She used this tactic just to avoid the embarrassment of anyone hearing what she did (she was quite a 'conservative' girl).
Long story short, I hate to say this but women will do extreme things when they feel shamed or hurt. I'm sure anyone who's had a long term relationship or especially a divorce knows this. Thinking about it, though I was a pure gentleman the entire weekend, and none of us would ever hit on this girl, she could have caused significant damage to me with the mere accusation. We are all too ready to point fingers and take sides on these issues. People ARE to quick to judge.
Don't pay it or contact them - the law requires outstanding debts to be cleared six years after the date of last account activity, but that clock resets if you pay anything.
Many people feared that the market and demand for Bitcoin could not satisfy 30,000 or ~18 million dollars worth of coins being liquidated within a single day. Instead this auction proved both liquidity, fungibility and that their are many institutional investors sitting on the sidelines waiting to invest in Bitcoin but are looking for opportunities like these in order to invest in large sums of bitcoins.
So? The same was true of stock certificates of worthless companies during the dot com boom. The same huge "institutional" investors were lining up paying exorbitant sums for pieces of paper with no intrinsic value.
I'm not saying bitcoin is worthless, but temper your enthusiasm based on where investor money is going. Remember, there aren't many bitcoins, less than 13 million total as of today. News media has brought a lot of speculation from the class of slightly more educated investors, typically upper middle class folks. Even if a tiny fraction of the world wanted just one bitcoin, it would be enough demand to drive up prices very high.
No, I think the big problem is that the only people buying them are holding them, expecting them to be worth more in the future. There is no driver for higher demand other than more profit seekers willing to pay a higher price.. it's not that good as a currency. Investments like this, by and large (we don't know what will happen), do not turn out good.
my credit is sooooo bad I destroyed it when I was 18 and got sued by banks which I never showed up or paid and since I own no assets they wasted money suing... Now I'm in my 40s
This doesn't make any sense, but I suppose it goes to show the state of financial education folks have in general.
Didn't you know nothing stays on your credit report longer than 7 years, including bankruptcies and delinquent loans? Only if you've paid part of them can it stretch longer and from the sounds of it, you did not.
You have bad credit now because you have no credit now.
Why does an open-source project need to spend thirty million dollars promoting a "brand" most people are already fully aware of?
Why does Coke spend far more than that on all sorts of TV commercials when everyone obviously is fully aware of their brand? Advertising works, and gets more people familiar with and using your products. If this is a goal of Mozilla, this is not an outrageous expenditure depending on how they calculate return.
And why does it cost $150M/year to work on a browser, email client, and some dev tools? They have 650 or so employees - assuming every single one was a developer, they're spending $230,000 on each one
Is this somehow shocking for onshore/local resources? The IT shop I managed at, I always estimated each full-time senior as costing about $250,000 a year. They didn't make nearly all of that, but once you factor in office space cost, training, pension, benefits, savings plan, bonus, etc., etc., the cost escalates over $200k very> easily, and this is nowhere near silicon valley.
You whine and moan about them trying new things, but why not? Don't they have employees that want to try new things, learn new stuff? Who says they have to remain doing the same old thing forever? That's how you become irrelevant in your market, and like it or not they are fighting for marketshare. Your arguments make no sense.
I'd just like to point out I incredulously followed this link to find out more, and it turns out the bill is actually banning rental of recalled vehicles that were illegal to sell in the first place. The article states "..current law prohibits car dealerships from selling recalled vehicles to consumers, no law bans rental companies from doing the same or renting them to unsuspecting consumers".
Bad law or not, I'm just sayin'... the actual bill was far different from the words you cherry-picked for an inflammatory response. Leave that to big media.
I'm gonna go ahead and get flamed and *defend* SharePoint here...
Having worked in an MS-based company for a few years now, data in SharePoint is much, much better than data in Excel, most of the time. With SharePoint, at least there's a known web service interface to query the data and it's container. It can be extracted to excel in a heartbeat, or queried by reporting services. In short, it's far more accessible to my team of developers, regardless of it's other failures. Isn't that one of the most important aspects of data anyway, being able to get at it?
Moving to a full powered relational database solution (SQL) is EXPENSIVE! To do it well you need to design interfaces to the data, testing cycles, yadda yadda - it's a full software development cycle anyway. SharePoint is a reasonable first step up from Excel for those not dealing with huge amounts of data, mission criticality, or who don't have a lot of money to build an application to replace their spreadsheet. Using it where it does not make sense is like any other case of using the wrong tool for the job in IT, it will leave you frustrated to no end.
Why wouldn't the company, if it saw itself getting close to losing, simply withdraw and sell it's "assets" (patents) to some other shell company and simply start the game all over again under a different entity?
I read through the IPCC report, and here's what I got..
Not only is the anecdotal evidence pretty strong, but now we have scientific evidence: we've burned so much gas in so many combustion engines over the past century we can now measure the effect or "leftover" from that at every corner of the globe. The science tying climate change to anthropomorphic means however, is far from bulletproof and the report itself cannot say it is anything more than "likely".
I think it's obvious humanity now plays a significant role in the carbon cycle. Plant life has been robbing the atmosphere of carbon for millions of years, and for all I know humans are just another counterbalancing act of this earth intended to dig up what plants buried and start it all over again.
In terms of it's effects, I, and most of those around me, could not give a rat's ass. I live in a cold climate - we just had one of the most mild, warm, enjoyable Septembers I can remember in my life. If we're going to chalk up all the weather incidents as anecdotal evidence of climate change, I'm going to start touting the positive aspects. For those folk living on coastlines, too fucking bad. You should have known damn well that rising or lowering sea level was a risk, and you should probably be thankful you haven't had one of those instantaneous sea-rise events (aka a tsunami) wash your ass away already. The nice places to live on this planet are shifting, and the miserable long winters most places on this earth have to endure are disappearing - deal with it. The only people I hear complaining are those with the most in terms of $$$ of real estate value to lose.
I find the predictions of more severe weather events disingenuous. We've always had severe weather events, and making sure those don't kill us all is what we should be planning for. To those shouting doom and catastrophe over small rises in global temperatures, you just sound silly.
Sure, but with this article we should admit there is still a lot of climate phenomena we do not understand, and therefore cannot accurately predict what will happen in the future
You claim there is some impending or inevitable catastrophe - what is it? You don't know anything, and all we know is the global temperature is increasing.
I realized something this weekend, out enjoying a beautiful mid-September day, that ultimately even knowing global warming to be true, a large amount of people simply will not care.
We will continue to get weather disasters, but you know what, they're really no more frequent than before. People have short memories. And know what? This is where people as a community adapt. We move communities further from flood zones, or we build office towers that can withstand earthquakes. We know how bad hurricanes can get and learn immensely from each disaster. We've been adapting to catastrophe for centuries.
The other, perhaps less talked about reason, is the net effect for a large amount of people will be more positive. In my area, rarely have we had such beautiful weather into September. We have to deal with a lot of long and harsh winters, so a longer summer or more mild winters would be fully welcomed. Sure, this really sucks for people living in some areas, probably along the oceans. Oh well, you've been living a lot of nice mild days while we toughed out winters inland. Sucks to be you, as with most things on this planet. You'll move when shit happens, even if just slightly inland, as people have been doing for our entire history.
Typical Slashdot whining in this thread! Dismissive at first glance of anything that doesn't immediately fit what you know is best.
I was excited to read about this, and I'll cheer on Seagate for advancing this technology. I've owned an old 4th or 5th generation iPod for about 6 years, it has one of the 80gb small disks in it. It's been through everything and I've dropped it probably a dozen times (a couple really bad). Haven't had a single hardware issue with it (don't get me started on Apple's problematic software), and in general all "mobile" hard disks I've owned have shown exceptional resiliency. No doubt that aspect of it was improved as well by their engineers.
Maybe they found a way on this small scale to eliminate most shock damage. As we have seen, cheaply made solid states are not shock resistant either. Maybe this drive is even more resistant that average. Anyway, to be immediately dismissive is childish.
I still jostle my electronics, and wouldn't even consider myself to take above average care of them. To me the order of magnitude more storage and lower cost is more important (in most applications) than an increase in access speed. Either way, I definitely appreciate the advance that will keep both great technologies pushing for new extremes.
For many peoples, USA was the way to go until the end of the 20 century.
It's not that surprising really. The US government holds command over a lot of wealth and power, and so over centuries it's not surprising it was slowly overtaken by a clique of people who want to hold onto that power.
The US government has now evolved into something a bit separate from the people within it or their desires. It thinks for itself, makes it's own decisions, and really is only one group of elite men wearing one of two badges. It is too big to control, too entrenched to change.
I'd wager many European countries had to learn lessons about government getting that out of control the hard way over thousands of years.
Why are we talking about artificial brains and 3D printers? The greatest breakthroughs will not simply be perfecting things we know about today, but things we are not even contemplating yet.
We're talking objects built on already advanced science knowledge, but there's still an entire realm of science with very little understanding. There's an entire fundamental force we know very, very little about. Think of the types of machines, and how magical they would look to us today, we could have if we could manipulate gravity?
Just as things from today would appear magic to those from 1863, so would things 150 years from now.
If I had to wager my guess, I would say the big breakthrough in science in the next 150 years would be mastering and manipulating the force of gravity. Once we figure that out, there will be many gadgets and machines which would appear magical skipping past 150 years of advancement in the technology.
I really couldn't give a rat's ass how many cycles the NSA wastes on trying to crack my encrypted attachments.
It has struck me as odd, that now we know how the NSA operates, no one has started using this against them. Why not have programs which send random, encrypted, suspicious content to other random points overseas?
I'm sure a few people working together could get enough servers in enough various countries and have them generate enough of what they would have found suspicious, to effectively drown out any useful data from their system?
Slashdot Mirror
Somewhere there is a best price point that balances those factors to make the most money. Notice what's NOT in that formula... the price of labor
I agreed with parts of your post but you made a big mistake here. I can assure you every single good sold has the exact labor cost calculated and built into that cost. Cost allocation is one of the most key parts in accounting, and in the case of McDonald's, I would assure you they have a *very* accurate labor cost calculated for every item on the menu. It's not rocket science either. How many minutes did it take that employee to make the burger, and what is the position wage? That and materials make the unit cost.
"We think this is benefiting businesses primarily" ... "I point this out, not to take the heat off of businesses."
This is extra hilarious. Here we go again - just because we've created the construct of a corporation to make business activities easier, folks just can't seem to stop actually thinking of them as real people. They're not, and it's real people making the decisions to pay these wages, real people acting in the interest of the American consumer.
Sorry, but the entire population of the USA is at fault. Businesses are simply social creations to help us conduct activities, and the people within them act in accordance to the pressure put on them by demand of their consumers. In this case, the carrot is dangling in the direction of more stuff and lower prices.
South Park did an episode about this, in that example about the Middle East wars. It's wanting to have your cake and eat it to. Putting pressure on your own creations to constantly deliver more and newer stuff, but you want the loudest voices to make it seem like you *really* don't like the side effects caused by it.
It's the rampant consumer culture in the US, and you know what, I'm not even making a moral argument against it. Heck, in the absence of any absolute morality it's beneficial for a country to exploit others as much as it can to its own benefit. What sickens me is when any US citizen complains about this. You don't want change.
If my life is on the line, I don't have to worry about how much it costs.
I call BS. If your life is on the line, you *won't* worry about how much it costs, unless it actually happens to save your life, in which case the cost will probably leave you financially crippled for whatever life said treatment left you with. Also, aren't there a number of cases where people didn't get treatment solely because they couldn't afford it?
I'm not so sure of near-communist countries where beaurocrats are in charge of these things.
Sounds like you've been reading too much Sarah Palin propaganda. I'm not aware of any public health care systems where decisions for treatment are made by anyone but doctors. It's the US where insurance bureaucrats make life or death decisions. Keep drinking their kool-aid.
So what I notice is different about all the examples you mention is that the total number of US visitors under each case of "travel restriction in place" and "no travel restriction in place" isn't really that big - eg. next to zero. Without a restriction, not many tourists go to North Korea anyway.
Whereas Cuba is close and tropical, and thus would be a major economic impact having access to US tourism. In other words, the US customizes how it treats various countries to whatever hurts them the most. I'm sure for the other countries, they are doing things other than restricting travel that cause much more damage.
I don't agree at all, and you seem to be approaching it from a solely arts-related viewpoint which is very narrow.
Most people, the average I would say, do take somewhere in the range of 10,000 hours to "master" their craft. That's roughly five years of working at a full time job. I think of all the master project managers, developers, analysts, managers, etc., etc., I know, and I seriously doubt any of them were "masters" in their first five years. Some were naturally inclined with certain skill sets, however in the project manager's example, there's just lessons that you need to learn from actually going through approximately 10,000 hours of managing projects.
I think it's crazy to dismiss the knowledge and experience that comes from doing something for 10,000 hours. It's insanely rare to see anyone step into something and have it "mastered" within five years. If you're talking someone who can paint a nice picture his first try around, well sure..
I felt compelled to log in and comment, as I recently saw this for the first time in my life a few weeks ago. I know this is only my one small anecdotal story, however it is true, and has made me reconsider how widespread the problem actually is.
I was out drinking with a small group of friends a few weeks back. Out camping. We'd done this many times before, and were really good friends. One is a single female, and she hangs with our group because she can drink beer and shoot the shit with guys pretty damn well, although you wouldn't be able to tell looking at her. As it turns, one night she drank too much (as we all did), and started crossing the line with one of my friends, who is married. She just got drunk and couldn't control herself. She was all over my friend, kissing his neck and they ended up making out. Maybe a little nudity involved. Anyway, somewhat awkward but not a big deal to us as it was pretty tame (relatively) and hey, people do stupid things they don't normally do when drunk. However, I could tell SHE was extremely ashamed by her actions.. she remembered what she did, I could tell in her eyes. We had no problems, SHE was visibly upset by HER behaviour. Things were fine for the rest of the trip, but when we got back she threatened to press assault charges if we ever told anyone what happened. She used this tactic just to avoid the embarrassment of anyone hearing what she did (she was quite a 'conservative' girl).
Long story short, I hate to say this but women will do extreme things when they feel shamed or hurt. I'm sure anyone who's had a long term relationship or especially a divorce knows this. Thinking about it, though I was a pure gentleman the entire weekend, and none of us would ever hit on this girl, she could have caused significant damage to me with the mere accusation. We are all too ready to point fingers and take sides on these issues. People ARE to quick to judge.
Don't pay it or contact them - the law requires outstanding debts to be cleared six years after the date of last account activity, but that clock resets if you pay anything.
Many people feared that the market and demand for Bitcoin could not satisfy 30,000 or ~18 million dollars worth of coins being liquidated within a single day. Instead this auction proved both liquidity, fungibility and that their are many institutional investors sitting on the sidelines waiting to invest in Bitcoin but are looking for opportunities like these in order to invest in large sums of bitcoins.
So? The same was true of stock certificates of worthless companies during the dot com boom. The same huge "institutional" investors were lining up paying exorbitant sums for pieces of paper with no intrinsic value.
I'm not saying bitcoin is worthless, but temper your enthusiasm based on where investor money is going. Remember, there aren't many bitcoins, less than 13 million total as of today. News media has brought a lot of speculation from the class of slightly more educated investors, typically upper middle class folks. Even if a tiny fraction of the world wanted just one bitcoin, it would be enough demand to drive up prices very high.
No, I think the big problem is that the only people buying them are holding them, expecting them to be worth more in the future. There is no driver for higher demand other than more profit seekers willing to pay a higher price.. it's not that good as a currency. Investments like this, by and large (we don't know what will happen), do not turn out good.
my credit is sooooo bad I destroyed it when I was 18 and got sued by banks which I never showed up or paid and since I own no assets they wasted money suing... Now I'm in my 40s
This doesn't make any sense, but I suppose it goes to show the state of financial education folks have in general.
Didn't you know nothing stays on your credit report longer than 7 years, including bankruptcies and delinquent loans? Only if you've paid part of them can it stretch longer and from the sounds of it, you did not.
You have bad credit now because you have no credit now.
Why does an open-source project need to spend thirty million dollars promoting a "brand" most people are already fully aware of?
Why does Coke spend far more than that on all sorts of TV commercials when everyone obviously is fully aware of their brand? Advertising works, and gets more people familiar with and using your products. If this is a goal of Mozilla, this is not an outrageous expenditure depending on how they calculate return.
And why does it cost $150M/year to work on a browser, email client, and some dev tools? They have 650 or so employees - assuming every single one was a developer, they're spending $230,000 on each one
Is this somehow shocking for onshore/local resources? The IT shop I managed at, I always estimated each full-time senior as costing about $250,000 a year. They didn't make nearly all of that, but once you factor in office space cost, training, pension, benefits, savings plan, bonus, etc., etc., the cost escalates over $200k very> easily, and this is nowhere near silicon valley.
You whine and moan about them trying new things, but why not? Don't they have employees that want to try new things, learn new stuff? Who says they have to remain doing the same old thing forever? That's how you become irrelevant in your market, and like it or not they are fighting for marketshare. Your arguments make no sense.
Now hurry up and print the rest of the dinosaur!
a bill to ban rental cars
I'd just like to point out I incredulously followed this link to find out more, and it turns out the bill is actually banning rental of recalled vehicles that were illegal to sell in the first place. The article states "..current law prohibits car dealerships from selling recalled vehicles to consumers, no law bans rental companies from doing the same or renting them to unsuspecting consumers".
Bad law or not, I'm just sayin'... the actual bill was far different from the words you cherry-picked for an inflammatory response. Leave that to big media.
I'm gonna go ahead and get flamed and *defend* SharePoint here...
Having worked in an MS-based company for a few years now, data in SharePoint is much, much better than data in Excel, most of the time. With SharePoint, at least there's a known web service interface to query the data and it's container. It can be extracted to excel in a heartbeat, or queried by reporting services. In short, it's far more accessible to my team of developers, regardless of it's other failures. Isn't that one of the most important aspects of data anyway, being able to get at it?
Moving to a full powered relational database solution (SQL) is EXPENSIVE! To do it well you need to design interfaces to the data, testing cycles, yadda yadda - it's a full software development cycle anyway. SharePoint is a reasonable first step up from Excel for those not dealing with huge amounts of data, mission criticality, or who don't have a lot of money to build an application to replace their spreadsheet. Using it where it does not make sense is like any other case of using the wrong tool for the job in IT, it will leave you frustrated to no end.
I'm not sure it will really matter in the end.
Why wouldn't the company, if it saw itself getting close to losing, simply withdraw and sell it's "assets" (patents) to some other shell company and simply start the game all over again under a different entity?
I read through the IPCC report, and here's what I got..
Not only is the anecdotal evidence pretty strong, but now we have scientific evidence: we've burned so much gas in so many combustion engines over the past century we can now measure the effect or "leftover" from that at every corner of the globe. The science tying climate change to anthropomorphic means however, is far from bulletproof and the report itself cannot say it is anything more than "likely".
I think it's obvious humanity now plays a significant role in the carbon cycle. Plant life has been robbing the atmosphere of carbon for millions of years, and for all I know humans are just another counterbalancing act of this earth intended to dig up what plants buried and start it all over again.
In terms of it's effects, I, and most of those around me, could not give a rat's ass. I live in a cold climate - we just had one of the most mild, warm, enjoyable Septembers I can remember in my life. If we're going to chalk up all the weather incidents as anecdotal evidence of climate change, I'm going to start touting the positive aspects. For those folk living on coastlines, too fucking bad. You should have known damn well that rising or lowering sea level was a risk, and you should probably be thankful you haven't had one of those instantaneous sea-rise events (aka a tsunami) wash your ass away already. The nice places to live on this planet are shifting, and the miserable long winters most places on this earth have to endure are disappearing - deal with it. The only people I hear complaining are those with the most in terms of $$$ of real estate value to lose.
I find the predictions of more severe weather events disingenuous. We've always had severe weather events, and making sure those don't kill us all is what we should be planning for. To those shouting doom and catastrophe over small rises in global temperatures, you just sound silly.
But didn't you know, crotches kill?
One of them is more commonly referred to as a "pharmacist".
This will be ready to go far sooner than 2030.
There are already carbon sequestration projects underway in Alberta that expect results within the next two years.
Sure, but with this article we should admit there is still a lot of climate phenomena we do not understand, and therefore cannot accurately predict what will happen in the future
BS!
You claim there is some impending or inevitable catastrophe - what is it? You don't know anything, and all we know is the global temperature is increasing.
I realized something this weekend, out enjoying a beautiful mid-September day, that ultimately even knowing global warming to be true, a large amount of people simply will not care.
We will continue to get weather disasters, but you know what, they're really no more frequent than before. People have short memories. And know what? This is where people as a community adapt. We move communities further from flood zones, or we build office towers that can withstand earthquakes. We know how bad hurricanes can get and learn immensely from each disaster. We've been adapting to catastrophe for centuries.
The other, perhaps less talked about reason, is the net effect for a large amount of people will be more positive. In my area, rarely have we had such beautiful weather into September. We have to deal with a lot of long and harsh winters, so a longer summer or more mild winters would be fully welcomed. Sure, this really sucks for people living in some areas, probably along the oceans. Oh well, you've been living a lot of nice mild days while we toughed out winters inland. Sucks to be you, as with most things on this planet. You'll move when shit happens, even if just slightly inland, as people have been doing for our entire history.
Typical Slashdot whining in this thread! Dismissive at first glance of anything that doesn't immediately fit what you know is best.
I was excited to read about this, and I'll cheer on Seagate for advancing this technology. I've owned an old 4th or 5th generation iPod for about 6 years, it has one of the 80gb small disks in it. It's been through everything and I've dropped it probably a dozen times (a couple really bad). Haven't had a single hardware issue with it (don't get me started on Apple's problematic software), and in general all "mobile" hard disks I've owned have shown exceptional resiliency. No doubt that aspect of it was improved as well by their engineers.
Maybe they found a way on this small scale to eliminate most shock damage. As we have seen, cheaply made solid states are not shock resistant either. Maybe this drive is even more resistant that average. Anyway, to be immediately dismissive is childish.
I still jostle my electronics, and wouldn't even consider myself to take above average care of them. To me the order of magnitude more storage and lower cost is more important (in most applications) than an increase in access speed. Either way, I definitely appreciate the advance that will keep both great technologies pushing for new extremes.
For many peoples, USA was the way to go until the end of the 20 century.
It's not that surprising really. The US government holds command over a lot of wealth and power, and so over centuries it's not surprising it was slowly overtaken by a clique of people who want to hold onto that power.
The US government has now evolved into something a bit separate from the people within it or their desires. It thinks for itself, makes it's own decisions, and really is only one group of elite men wearing one of two badges. It is too big to control, too entrenched to change.
I'd wager many European countries had to learn lessons about government getting that out of control the hard way over thousands of years.
Why are we talking about artificial brains and 3D printers? The greatest breakthroughs will not simply be perfecting things we know about today, but things we are not even contemplating yet.
We're talking objects built on already advanced science knowledge, but there's still an entire realm of science with very little understanding. There's an entire fundamental force we know very, very little about. Think of the types of machines, and how magical they would look to us today, we could have if we could manipulate gravity?
Just as things from today would appear magic to those from 1863, so would things 150 years from now.
If I had to wager my guess, I would say the big breakthrough in science in the next 150 years would be mastering and manipulating the force of gravity. Once we figure that out, there will be many gadgets and machines which would appear magical skipping past 150 years of advancement in the technology.
I really couldn't give a rat's ass how many cycles the NSA wastes on trying to crack my encrypted attachments.
It has struck me as odd, that now we know how the NSA operates, no one has started using this against them. Why not have programs which send random, encrypted, suspicious content to other random points overseas?
I'm sure a few people working together could get enough servers in enough various countries and have them generate enough of what they would have found suspicious, to effectively drown out any useful data from their system?