If we cut pollution and other environmental damages, then we could help slow or stop global warming if its the former. If its the latter, then we still get the benefits of a cleaner environment. So why not take the steps?
If it's the latter, then our pollutants might be what is stopping another little ice age. An ice age that will seriously hurt food production.
Also, nothing is without cost. If we cut on CO2, we'll have to do something else to compensate. We could, for example, move closer and live in high rise apartment buildings instead of suburbs. Overall, pollution will drop - but since you'll have more humans close to you, the pollution you suffer from would increase.
Has long distance learning ceased to be an option?
It's not a matter of physical location, but of time and energy. Ten hours a week for education is a lot harder when you have little children who demand you play with them right now.
Re:Where do you GET the Hydrogen?
on
"H-Prize" Announced
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· Score: 4, Interesting
A well maintained, large capacity power plant, even if it uses gasoline, can be a lot more efficient than a car's engine which has to be small, light weight, and low maintainance. Hydrogen is a transfer mechanism, but a better transfer mechanism will let us use gasoline for efficiently.
Yes, if support requires people competent to understand the customer. If a Pizza delivery person from the US with two weeks of training is more likely to understand the problem than a person from India with four years of post high-school computer education, then the US employee is worth more and can charge more.
Is that really the case, or is it that you only hear the outsourcing horror stories when they use the India equivalent (Samosa delivery person with two weeks of training)?
Purchasing power parity is the correct measurement from the employee's perspective. Total cost of employment (salary, connectivity, taxes, etc.) is the correct measure from the employer's perspective.
If a US tech support worker with two weeks of training costs 1.5 times as much as the India university graduate (I'm assuming that telecommunication costs and taxes are eating part of the salary disparity), expect companies to hire the university graduate in India. It sucks if you're a US pizza delivery person. It's great it you're a university graduate in India. It's also great if you are a customer and you get support from a university graduate instead of somebody with two weeks of training.
Without the loopholes, the IRS tax guide would have exactly 3 pages: the front page, the tax formula, and the back page.
Not exactly. How do you define income? In other words, what is a business expense (I bought a widget for $15 and sold it for $25, so I made $10), and what isn't (I bought a widget for $15 and lunch for $5, then sold the widget for $25 - I still made $10)? What if I bought lunch to find widget buyers in the restaurant?
The whole concept of taxing income is flawed because income is abstract. It can be manipulated in multiple ways. It would be better to tax something tangible like property or sales - but that would lose politicians their power to play with the tax code to the benefit of their backers.
As a majority shareholder, you have a fiduciary duty to all shareholders in how you govern the company. That means you have a legal obligation to look out for their best interests.
True. However, you could argue (in court if necessary) that putting the shares of the founders in "anti-dilution" is necessary to avoid losing them. In a company the size Microsoft was at 1982, keeping theose founders is essential.
It won't work if 36% is diluted to less than one percent. It may work (= be acceptable in court) if 36% is diluted to 18% - especially if that 18% gets employees that more than double the value of the company.
It talks about how both Islamic extremism and neo-conservatism both have a lot in common, especially in the fact that both have this absolutist, idealized view of the world.
In other news, both Hitler and Churchil believed in the rightness of their causes. Both were willing to fight to the last soldier or civilian if that's what it took.
It's anecdotal evidence, but every time there was a war in the middle east, the next winter was cold. Why? Because war involves a lot of explosions, so it kicks up a lot of dust. Dust reflects back sunlight and helps cause rain, both effects lower the ground temperature.
If we truly needed to stop global warming, we'd won't be trying to cut down on gasoline and coal use - that's too difficult. Instead, we'd be blowing the !@#$%$@@# out of uninhabited deserts.
There is too many reports citing scientists on global warming doom and gloom and next to nothing being published about our progress in using hydrogen as the source of energy. It almost makes you want to say "Sceintists, stop with the global warming stuff, start working on the renewable energy already!".
Different people with different talents. The people who can predict climatic change (or think they can) are scientists, and almost have to get funding from public sources to do science.
The people who can work on hydrogen, even if they work in a university, are engineers at heart. There are a lot more jobs in the economy for them than there are for people who do research.
In the end they'll raise ticket prices to "recover the cost of the digital cinema investment" and ticket prices will go up...
It's like how there are 'conveinence fees' for paying bills online, it saves the company $$$ by having me pay for something online (1 less person opening mail), but they twist it around to make me pay >${cost_of_stamp}.
It won't necessarily work. In the US, these things work because enough people pay for them. We are a rich society, and therefore a lazy one. We are a lot more willing to pay for convenience.
I suspect that in India if they raised the price of a luxury item like film tickets, they'll sell less of them.
I see downsides to dividing control, but I can also conceive of the problems if america would ever be reduced to a police state in the future. Our (US) government is not perpetual, and any system can fall. If it did, the rest of the world wouldn't want the internet governed by whatever restriction could come about in such a case.
The rest of the world can always split at that point. An Internet controlled by a police state will be easier to compete with.
Obviously there is much to be lost by publishers who, like the RIAA, act as gatekeepers on published works. If the Author's Guild really likes the current system, then why do so few works circulate more than 5,000 copies? Wouldn't their members be better served with wider distribution?
Depends on who their members are, especially the more influential ones. If they are mostly authors whose books get published at 50,000 copies, then they have every reason to prefer the current system with gate keepers. It prevents competition.
For $38,400 + the cost of some network hardware and software to manage it, and a little time you can get comparable page rates at laser quality.
The problem with the 64 laser printers is not managing them. It is managing the paper. You'll need a full time person just to load blanks and unload printed pages.
Really though, if I needed to print that much, I'd send stuff off to someone with an offset press and have them run the job.
If you needed that many identical copies, yes. I think this is for when you have a large number of slightly different pages (for example, bills for different people).
Disclaimer: I am an IBM employee, but I am in no way involved in printers. This is my personal opinion, and should in no way be construed as IBM's official opinion.
what with the licensing issues and the like in the u.s., if they don't have a solid distribution company state-side, as the article mentions, the artists may not want to be bothered by it since they don't want to be bogged down by the business side of things
These business issues can be outsourced to a business person. They don't have to be done by the artist.
By now most Americans won't even notice because they receive their television through cable or satellite, but the people who would be effected (still receive analog television) are more likely to be lower class and the overhead of upgrading (however small it might seem) might actually mean a great deal to these people/families.
In other words, they are people who are less likely to buy based on advertising, since they have less money. The only way that viewers bring value to on the air TV stations is by buying based on advertising.
It's not at the "why bother" doing this point yet, but in a few years I can see it being there.
But knowing that there's some money-person at the top of the chain rubbing his/her hands together in soulless glee makes me want to puke. It sullies the fun when money is the prime target. Good stories don't flow from love of money. They flow from love of Story.
The director and the actors and the script writers may work from love of Story, but they wouldn't work on this full time if they had to make a living to feed themselves. The spiffy special effects would certainly not be there without the money.
Because wasting money is so easy, the only people who control the kind of money it takes to make a movie like this are the people who like money, the ones who get excited over ROI.
So, they have their own requirements from a group project. Big deal. So do the actors, script writers, and everybody else. As long as they don't ruin it (= StarTrek), they have their spot. If it's ruined, just ignore the franchise and watch something else.
When this fails to get enough recruits can the draft be far behind?
Given the kind of trouble they'd have with keeping draftees motivated, and the kind of skills they need, I doubt the military would want a draft.
It's easy to train somebody to be a WWII-level grunt. But most jobs in a modern military require a lot of intelligence, and it would be very easy for somebody to feign incompetence.
It's very easy to make a Web page and just display advertising. However, this makes for useless advertising that people will naturally want to block. Given the flexibility of general purpose computers, somebody will figure out a way to do it.
If you want advertising that people won't block, you need to use one of two options:
1. Make it unobtrusive. I really don't mind that above the comment posting form I'm currently using I see the icons for Google and Intel. It's part of the editorial content, but it could have been an ad - as long as it wasn't animated and annoying. Of course, I consciously tune this content out, but it probably helps reinforce the relevant brands.
2. Integrate the advertising into the content. If it's part of the useful content I'm reading, then it won't be a problem for me - as long as it doesn't render the content useless. Of course, we come to the problem of editorial integrity here - but that's always a problem, because writers always have agendas.
Of course, doing #2 is genuinely hard and would make DoubleClick's business a lot less profitable. Tough for them.
(b) just the Jews (and not even all of them...just one segment of the Jewish population?) have this apparent "improvement" over everyone else? Jew jokes notwithstanding, but they have been far from the only persecuted race in human history, and comparing hundreds to thousands of years should not be sufficient to justify increased intelligence.
It's not sufficient to be persecuted. You need to be persecuted in such a way that intelligence increases your number of children. If the persecution is to steal away most of your food (as in medieval serfs who paid half their crops to their lords), then intelligence might not be nearly as important as the ability to survive on less food.
There is another factor. Jews could stop being persecuted by converting to Christianity. The case for staying Jewish is, to an extent, intellectual (Talmudic arguments as a sacrament, etc).
Why is it that the people in the best position to know about the security or insecurity of our networks are so calm and circumspect and the remainder of the industry seems hell bent of FUD?
Because real security experts don't need to get people to panic to sell their security expertise. Marketing people who sell security products, OTOH, need to sell as much as possible.
I agree. I may disagree with a lot of what he said (he was a staunch Catholic, I'm not even Christian), but he was one sharp writer. For people who don't want to spend money before having a chance to review his work, click here.
Europe has enough economic problems... this is just adding insult to injury.
Quite the reverse. It's because Europe has economic problems, probably, that IBM isn't selling enough in Europe to justify those 13,000 jobs.
The kind of services IGS provides typically requires physical proximity to the customer. If the customers aren't there then the service jobs aren't there either.
It sucks to lose your job. At the same time, I'm sure it sucked for K-Mart when people started going to WalMart because it was cheaper. You can't have guaranteed jobs without guaranteed customers.
Notice how the big IP companies always bitch and moan about the GPL? Love it!
I'd say IBM is a pretty big IP company, and it seems to be OK with the GPL. Sure, some IBM products may not use GPLed code because of legal restrictions, but that's different from bitching about it.
CEOs who bitch about external factors are not doing their real job, which is adapting to those factors and/or changing them. CEOs who bitch about not being able to use the fruits of a volunteer effort for their company's gain should be working on finding a way to MAKE money instead.
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If we cut pollution and other environmental damages, then we could help slow or stop global warming if its the former. If its the latter, then we still get the benefits of a cleaner environment. So why not take the steps?
If it's the latter, then our pollutants might be what is stopping another little ice age. An ice age that will seriously hurt food production.
Also, nothing is without cost. If we cut on CO2, we'll have to do something else to compensate. We could, for example, move closer and live in high rise apartment buildings instead of suburbs. Overall, pollution will drop - but since you'll have more humans close to you, the pollution you suffer from would increase.
Has long distance learning ceased to be an option?
It's not a matter of physical location, but of time and energy. Ten hours a week for education is a lot harder when you have little children who demand you play with them right now.
A well maintained, large capacity power plant, even if it uses gasoline, can be a lot more efficient than a car's engine which has to be small, light weight, and low maintainance. Hydrogen is a transfer mechanism, but a better transfer mechanism will let us use gasoline for efficiently.
Yes, if support requires people competent to understand the customer. If a Pizza delivery person from the US with two weeks of training is more likely to understand the problem than a person from India with four years of post high-school computer education, then the US employee is worth more and can charge more.
Is that really the case, or is it that you only hear the outsourcing horror stories when they use the India equivalent (Samosa delivery person with two weeks of training)?
Purchasing power parity is the correct measurement from the employee's perspective. Total cost of employment (salary, connectivity, taxes, etc.) is the correct measure from the employer's perspective.
If a US tech support worker with two weeks of training costs 1.5 times as much as the India university graduate (I'm assuming that telecommunication costs and taxes are eating part of the salary disparity), expect companies to hire the university graduate in India. It sucks if you're a US pizza delivery person. It's great it you're a university graduate in India. It's also great if you are a customer and you get support from a university graduate instead of somebody with two weeks of training.
Without the loopholes, the IRS tax guide would have exactly 3 pages: the front page, the tax formula, and the back page.
Not exactly. How do you define income? In other words, what is a business expense (I bought a widget for $15 and sold it for $25, so I made $10), and what isn't (I bought a widget for $15 and lunch for $5, then sold the widget for $25 - I still made $10)? What if I bought lunch to find widget buyers in the restaurant?
The whole concept of taxing income is flawed because income is abstract. It can be manipulated in multiple ways. It would be better to tax something tangible like property or sales - but that would lose politicians their power to play with the tax code to the benefit of their backers.
As a majority shareholder, you have a fiduciary duty to all shareholders in how you govern the company. That means you have a legal obligation to look out for their best interests.
True. However, you could argue (in court if necessary) that putting the shares of the founders in "anti-dilution" is necessary to avoid losing them. In a company the size Microsoft was at 1982, keeping theose founders is essential.
It won't work if 36% is diluted to less than one percent. It may work (= be acceptable in court) if 36% is diluted to 18% - especially if that 18% gets employees that more than double the value of the company.
It talks about how both Islamic extremism and neo-conservatism both have a lot in common, especially in the fact that both have this absolutist, idealized view of the world.
In other news, both Hitler and Churchil believed in the rightness of their causes. Both were willing to fight to the last soldier or civilian if that's what it took.
It's anecdotal evidence, but every time there was a war in the middle east, the next winter was cold. Why? Because war involves a lot of explosions, so it kicks up a lot of dust. Dust reflects back sunlight and helps cause rain, both effects lower the ground temperature.
If we truly needed to stop global warming, we'd won't be trying to cut down on gasoline and coal use - that's too difficult. Instead, we'd be blowing the !@#$%$@@# out of uninhabited deserts.
There is too many reports citing scientists on global warming doom and gloom and next to nothing being published about our progress in using hydrogen as the source of energy. It almost makes you want to say "Sceintists, stop with the global warming stuff, start working on the renewable energy already!".
Different people with different talents. The people who can predict climatic change (or think they can) are scientists, and almost have to get funding from public sources to do science.
The people who can work on hydrogen, even if they work in a university, are engineers at heart. There are a lot more jobs in the economy for them than there are for people who do research.
In the end they'll raise ticket prices to "recover the cost of the digital cinema investment" and ticket prices will go up...
It's like how there are 'conveinence fees' for paying bills online, it saves the company $$$ by having me pay for something online (1 less person opening mail), but they twist it around to make me pay >${cost_of_stamp}.
It won't necessarily work. In the US, these things work because enough people pay for them. We are a rich society, and therefore a lazy one. We are a lot more willing to pay for convenience.
I suspect that in India if they raised the price of a luxury item like film tickets, they'll sell less of them.
I see downsides to dividing control, but I can also conceive of the problems if america would ever be reduced to a police state in the future. Our (US) government is not perpetual, and any system can fall. If it did, the rest of the world wouldn't want the internet governed by whatever restriction could come about in such a case.
The rest of the world can always split at that point. An Internet controlled by a police state will be easier to compete with.
Obviously there is much to be lost by publishers who, like the RIAA, act as gatekeepers on published works. If the Author's Guild really likes the current system, then why do so few works circulate more than 5,000 copies? Wouldn't their members be better served with wider distribution?
Depends on who their members are, especially the more influential ones. If they are mostly authors whose books get published at 50,000 copies, then they have every reason to prefer the current system with gate keepers. It prevents competition.
If the US economy is tanking, why are they laying off their employees in France? Maybe the French economy has something to do with it?
For $38,400 + the cost of some network hardware and software to manage it, and a little time you can get comparable page rates at laser quality.
The problem with the 64 laser printers is not managing them. It is managing the paper. You'll need a full time person just to load blanks and unload printed pages.
Really though, if I needed to print that much, I'd send stuff off to someone with an offset press and have them run the job.
If you needed that many identical copies, yes. I think this is for when you have a large number of slightly different pages (for example, bills for different people).
Disclaimer: I am an IBM employee, but I am in no way involved in printers. This is my personal opinion, and should in no way be construed as IBM's official opinion.
what with the licensing issues and the like in the u.s., if they don't have a solid distribution company state-side, as the article mentions, the artists may not want to be bothered by it since they don't want to be bogged down by the business side of things
These business issues can be outsourced to a business person. They don't have to be done by the artist.
By now most Americans won't even notice because they receive their television through cable or satellite, but the people who would be effected (still receive analog television) are more likely to be lower class and the overhead of upgrading (however small it might seem) might actually mean a great deal to these people/families.
In other words, they are people who are less likely to buy based on advertising, since they have less money. The only way that viewers bring value to on the air TV stations is by buying based on advertising.
It's not at the "why bother" doing this point yet, but in a few years I can see it being there.
But knowing that there's some money-person at the top of the chain rubbing his/her hands together in soulless glee makes me want to puke. It sullies the fun when money is the prime target. Good stories don't flow from love of money. They flow from love of Story.
The director and the actors and the script writers may work from love of Story, but they wouldn't work on this full time if they had to make a living to feed themselves. The spiffy special effects would certainly not be there without the money.
Because wasting money is so easy, the only people who control the kind of money it takes to make a movie like this are the people who like money, the ones who get excited over ROI.
So, they have their own requirements from a group project. Big deal. So do the actors, script writers, and everybody else. As long as they don't ruin it (= StarTrek), they have their spot. If it's ruined, just ignore the franchise and watch something else.
When this fails to get enough recruits can the draft be far behind?
Given the kind of trouble they'd have with keeping draftees motivated, and the kind of skills they need, I doubt the military would want a draft.
It's easy to train somebody to be a WWII-level grunt. But most jobs in a modern military require a lot of intelligence, and it would be very easy for somebody to feign incompetence.
It's very easy to make a Web page and just display advertising. However, this makes for useless advertising that people will naturally want to block. Given the flexibility of general purpose computers, somebody will figure out a way to do it.
If you want advertising that people won't block, you need to use one of two options:
1. Make it unobtrusive. I really don't mind that above the comment posting form I'm currently using I see the icons for Google and Intel. It's part of the editorial content, but it could have been an ad - as long as it wasn't animated and annoying. Of course, I consciously tune this content out, but it probably helps reinforce the relevant brands.
2. Integrate the advertising into the content. If it's part of the useful content I'm reading, then it won't be a problem for me - as long as it doesn't render the content useless. Of course, we come to the problem of editorial integrity here - but that's always a problem, because writers always have agendas.
Of course, doing #2 is genuinely hard and would make DoubleClick's business a lot less profitable. Tough for them.
(b) just the Jews (and not even all of them...just one segment of the Jewish population?) have this apparent "improvement" over everyone else? Jew jokes notwithstanding, but they have been far from the only persecuted race in human history, and comparing hundreds to thousands of years should not be sufficient to justify increased intelligence.
It's not sufficient to be persecuted. You need to be persecuted in such a way that intelligence increases your number of children. If the persecution is to steal away most of your food (as in medieval serfs who paid half their crops to their lords), then intelligence might not be nearly as important as the ability to survive on less food.
There is another factor. Jews could stop being persecuted by converting to Christianity. The case for staying Jewish is, to an extent, intellectual (Talmudic arguments as a sacrament, etc).
Why is it that the people in the best position to know about the security or insecurity of our networks are so calm and circumspect and the remainder of the industry seems hell bent of FUD?
Because real security experts don't need to get people to panic to sell their security expertise. Marketing people who sell security products, OTOH, need to sell as much as possible.
Hi,
My favorite is G.K. Chesterton,
I agree. I may disagree with a lot of what he said (he was a staunch Catholic, I'm not even Christian), but he was one sharp writer. For people who don't want to spend money before having a chance to review his work, click here.
Bye,
Ori
Europe has enough economic problems... this is just adding insult to injury.
Quite the reverse. It's because Europe has economic problems, probably, that IBM isn't selling enough in Europe to justify those 13,000 jobs.
The kind of services IGS provides typically requires physical proximity to the customer. If the customers aren't there then the service jobs aren't there either.
It sucks to lose your job. At the same time, I'm sure it sucked for K-Mart when people started going to WalMart because it was cheaper. You can't have guaranteed jobs without guaranteed customers.
Hi,
Notice how the big IP companies always bitch and moan about the GPL? Love it!
I'd say IBM is a pretty big IP company, and it seems to be OK with the GPL. Sure, some IBM products may not use GPLed code because of legal restrictions, but that's different from bitching about it.
CEOs who bitch about external factors are not doing their real job, which is adapting to those factors and/or changing them. CEOs who bitch about not being able to use the fruits of a volunteer effort for their company's gain should be working on finding a way to MAKE money instead.
Bye,
Ori