Well, at 1% penalty a week it wasn't so onerous to think that it couldn't be achieved without making a bit of profit still with overruns. We did structure in clauses about requirements shifting, but I guess we were lucky in that things got defined pretty well up front, but without going into specifics the talk was that we could reach into 9 months (i.e. 6 months of penalties) and still at least recover costs. (and not to brag, but we had a rep to uphold).
That said, our client was a semi-public entity and we're both outside the US, so I don't know what it's like working with US Gov't departments.
Patents were specifically designed from the beginning to not restrict the transfer and sharing of knowledge; there's a reason why patents granted are public and accessible to you. The person(s) applying for the patent share the details in order to claim exclusive right to exploiting their invention or innovation for a specific period of time, with the laws protecting them from someone copying their process. After the period of protection runs out, anyone can use the details posted to create & sell products.
For example, if Company A had an innovative product for which they did not apply for a patent, and Company B came along and copied their product (through reverse engineering, or stealing plans, or hiring away the inventor), Company A would have no recourse to stop them selling the same product. If Company A had a patent, they could stop Company B until such time as the patent expires - they have that time to come up with a new, more compelling product.
(and copyrights are about protecting authorship attribution and right to income from selling copies. Again, nothing about keeping the knowledge locked up.)
If there's anything wrong with the concept these days, it's that the terms are longer than is strictly necessary to encourage competition & innovation, and patents are granted too freely on spurious innovations. For copyright, terms are extending almost in inverse proportion to the ease of copying, a perverse incentive that allows the producers of the original material to rest on their laurels in a way that was never intended by the progenitors of the copyright and patent provisions (i.e. the Founding Fathers)
Seriously. Put it in the state constitution that all government contracts will be completed on time and under budget or we get our money back.
That's usually taken care of by penalty clauses - the original contract is scheduled for 12 months, say, with a 3 month grace for expected overruns. Anything beyond 3 months is penalised at a rate of 1% of project cost per week.
(at least those were approximations of the terms of a contract I worked on. Let's just say there was a fair incentive to get the product done & accepted at the 14 month mark.)
The problem is that the majority of the methane (which has approximately 20x impact on the greenhouse effect vs CO2) is actually emitted right out the butts of livestock bred for our food & clothing. Either you're going to have to put a pipe up each animal to capture that, or we're about to have the world's biggest BBQ...
Good Wiki quoting.</snark> As pedantic as you're being, you might as well point out that even John of Salisbury was giving attribution to someone else (Bernard of Chatres); naming Newton as the source of the quote isn't out of place, since he did say it, and in the form recognisable today.
GP isn't quite right, either. Supermarket prices end in.99 or.97 etc, but the majority of cash sales for individual items do settle at.x5 - a chocolate bar might be $1.65, a bottle of coke $1.95, CDs $14.95 and so on. One-penny-off pricing is pretty uncommon for stuff you're likely to buy with small change.
Not necessarily. You see... once the financial world is gone, I plan to open a currency exchange. You know... eg ox/camel exchange rate? I have huge plans... derivatives (cross-breading) and ropes-tethers-and-other-bonds. I even consider futures and high frequency trading, but I still need to think a bit more.
How you're going to set up an arbitrage market in a livestock currency is beyond me, but if you can breed a camox/oxmel even right now, you'd do pretty damn well.
Well, with camels, you can always burn their dried dung (not sure about the oxen, but may work as well). In any case, the fuel is renewable and carbon neutral.
Oxen dried dung works quite well, and is frequently used in South & South-east Asia. That said, following the collapse of society, I don't think you'll be terribly worried about being carbon neutral.
Australia's major cities are amongst the most liveable through no fault of their councils, most of whom have limited control beyond the central CBD district, and what control they do have is too easily bulldozed over by State governments with little else on their hands. A reorganisation along the lines of the Greater London Authority would do a world of good in making these "liveable" cities affordable again.
The difference is that, not that long ago, the Skype execs responded to the outcry over the new version with a reinstating of the previous version and allowing it to run without any issues. Now with the Microsoft takeover announced, the position has been reversed, hence the consternation.
So no, CO2 is not a pollutant. It is not a threat to our health. It is plant food.
Err... no, CO2 is a threat to human health, but that's not the only definition of a pollutant.
Your argument is that we would never be raising concentrations of CO2 to sufficient levels to cause human breathing difficulties, and sure that situation could never occur. However, you could say similar things for other regulated pollutants - but we don't just consider the impact on human health when considering what pollutants to regulate.
If you take the dictionary definition of pollution, that "Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into a natural environment that causes instability, disorder, harm or discomfort to the ecosystem", then CO2 is definitely going to fall under that. Given legalese is all about defining terms and assessing them against other terms, unregulated CO2 emissions causing instability, disorder or discomfort to the ecosystem has been assessed by experts in the field as being a high likelihood. You're just quibbling over the impact.
Name one other open-source browser developed by an open community process not funded by a corporation that doesn't have some sort of lag on fixing some bugs.
I'm not a FOSS evangelist, but for the resources they have it's not out of the bounds of expectations in my book.
The government doesn't have "loans on average of 3 years", they issue bonds with various terms, from 1 month to 3 months to a year to 10 years. There's even 30 year bonds issued. The interest rates are fixed at the time of sale - there's no variability of the interest rate over the period of the loan. The government pays a coupon (interest payment) every 6 months on long term bonds, paying out the principle at the end of the term.[1]
The variable rates you're thinking of apply to the loans banks give out - and those rates are determined by the market. US Treasuries are just about the most valued, so their interest rates are low because bond buyers will accept less because of a lower perceived risk - Greece is in trouble because it needs to borrow without having a source of income, and so lenders are charging a hire rate in proportion to the risk. Greece needs income - but its people don't pay tax and so there's no income. That's why Greece is in trouble - not because of profligate unnecessary spending, but because the people don't pay tax and yet still expect government to pay for services.
(1) Debt != Deficit. Carrying debt is not an issue - old loans get paid but new ones also get made, all based on the goodwill of the American Government being able to honour its debts at some point in the future.
(2) Most of Japan's creditors are in fact Japanese institutions and citizens - the government owes its own people, and they're obviously still willing to lend it money.
(3) Where do banks have an exclusive right to "create" money? Or are you attacking the principle of fractional reserve banking that's been at the core of capitalism since the Medicis of Florence?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, at 1% penalty a week it wasn't so onerous to think that it couldn't be achieved without making a bit of profit still with overruns. We did structure in clauses about requirements shifting, but I guess we were lucky in that things got defined pretty well up front, but without going into specifics the talk was that we could reach into 9 months (i.e. 6 months of penalties) and still at least recover costs. (and not to brag, but we had a rep to uphold).
That said, our client was a semi-public entity and we're both outside the US, so I don't know what it's like working with US Gov't departments.
Patents were specifically designed from the beginning to not restrict the transfer and sharing of knowledge; there's a reason why patents granted are public and accessible to you. The person(s) applying for the patent share the details in order to claim exclusive right to exploiting their invention or innovation for a specific period of time, with the laws protecting them from someone copying their process. After the period of protection runs out, anyone can use the details posted to create & sell products.
For example, if Company A had an innovative product for which they did not apply for a patent, and Company B came along and copied their product (through reverse engineering, or stealing plans, or hiring away the inventor), Company A would have no recourse to stop them selling the same product. If Company A had a patent, they could stop Company B until such time as the patent expires - they have that time to come up with a new, more compelling product.
(and copyrights are about protecting authorship attribution and right to income from selling copies. Again, nothing about keeping the knowledge locked up.)
If there's anything wrong with the concept these days, it's that the terms are longer than is strictly necessary to encourage competition & innovation, and patents are granted too freely on spurious innovations. For copyright, terms are extending almost in inverse proportion to the ease of copying, a perverse incentive that allows the producers of the original material to rest on their laurels in a way that was never intended by the progenitors of the copyright and patent provisions (i.e. the Founding Fathers)
Seriously. Put it in the state constitution that all government contracts will be completed on time and under budget or we get our money back.
That's usually taken care of by penalty clauses - the original contract is scheduled for 12 months, say, with a 3 month grace for expected overruns. Anything beyond 3 months is penalised at a rate of 1% of project cost per week.
(at least those were approximations of the terms of a contract I worked on. Let's just say there was a fair incentive to get the product done & accepted at the 14 month mark.)
"Precognition"/predicting the future is prior art on "detecting electrical signals in the brain"?
For the stupid ones? Yes.
I think GP was referring to the EMP effect of nukes zeroing out the drives.
The problem is that the majority of the methane (which has approximately 20x impact on the greenhouse effect vs CO2) is actually emitted right out the butts of livestock bred for our food & clothing. Either you're going to have to put a pipe up each animal to capture that, or we're about to have the world's biggest BBQ...
Put the research into increasing our population,
I'm happy to help with that research!
Logical or British punctuation deems otherwise.
Good Wiki quoting.</snark> As pedantic as you're being, you might as well point out that even John of Salisbury was giving attribution to someone else (Bernard of Chatres); naming Newton as the source of the quote isn't out of place, since he did say it, and in the form recognisable today.
Companies in the US with at least ten lawyers generally pay almost nothing in taxes
FTFY.
all are marred by poor flow, sentences that not quite work...
I'm sorry, I couldn't help but laugh here.
(noticing your sig...) that should be "sentences that *don't* quite work.
Here's your useful article.
GP isn't quite right, either. Supermarket prices end in .99 or .97 etc, but the majority of cash sales for individual items do settle at .x5 - a chocolate bar might be $1.65, a bottle of coke $1.95, CDs $14.95 and so on. One-penny-off pricing is pretty uncommon for stuff you're likely to buy with small change.
Not necessarily. You see... once the financial world is gone, I plan to open a currency exchange. You know... eg ox/camel exchange rate? I have huge plans... derivatives (cross-breading) and ropes-tethers-and-other-bonds. I even consider futures and high frequency trading, but I still need to think a bit more.
How you're going to set up an arbitrage market in a livestock currency is beyond me, but if you can breed a camox/oxmel even right now, you'd do pretty damn well.
Well, with camels, you can always burn their dried dung (not sure about the oxen, but may work as well). In any case, the fuel is renewable and carbon neutral.
Oxen dried dung works quite well, and is frequently used in South & South-east Asia. That said, following the collapse of society, I don't think you'll be terribly worried about being carbon neutral.
Australia's major cities are amongst the most liveable through no fault of their councils, most of whom have limited control beyond the central CBD district, and what control they do have is too easily bulldozed over by State governments with little else on their hands. A reorganisation along the lines of the Greater London Authority would do a world of good in making these "liveable" cities affordable again.
... versus the funding behind Safari, Chrome and IE?
The difference is that, not that long ago, the Skype execs responded to the outcry over the new version with a reinstating of the previous version and allowing it to run without any issues. Now with the Microsoft takeover announced, the position has been reversed, hence the consternation.
So no, CO2 is not a pollutant. It is not a threat to our health. It is plant food.
Err... no, CO2 is a threat to human health, but that's not the only definition of a pollutant.
Your argument is that we would never be raising concentrations of CO2 to sufficient levels to cause human breathing difficulties, and sure that situation could never occur. However, you could say similar things for other regulated pollutants - but we don't just consider the impact on human health when considering what pollutants to regulate.
If you take the dictionary definition of pollution, that "Pollution is the introduction of contaminants into a natural environment that causes instability, disorder, harm or discomfort to the ecosystem", then CO2 is definitely going to fall under that. Given legalese is all about defining terms and assessing them against other terms, unregulated CO2 emissions causing instability, disorder or discomfort to the ecosystem has been assessed by experts in the field as being a high likelihood. You're just quibbling over the impact.
Carbon Dioxide is not Carbon.
Sshhhh.... reinventing the wheel is what we in IT get paid for, half the time!
Name one other open-source browser developed by an open community process not funded by a corporation that doesn't have some sort of lag on fixing some bugs.
I'm not a FOSS evangelist, but for the resources they have it's not out of the bounds of expectations in my book.
So, uh, you've never noticed a .info? Or any of the other non-3-char TLDs?
Are you just talking out of your ass?
The government doesn't have "loans on average of 3 years", they issue bonds with various terms, from 1 month to 3 months to a year to 10 years. There's even 30 year bonds issued. The interest rates are fixed at the time of sale - there's no variability of the interest rate over the period of the loan. The government pays a coupon (interest payment) every 6 months on long term bonds, paying out the principle at the end of the term.[1]
The variable rates you're thinking of apply to the loans banks give out - and those rates are determined by the market. US Treasuries are just about the most valued, so their interest rates are low because bond buyers will accept less because of a lower perceived risk - Greece is in trouble because it needs to borrow without having a source of income, and so lenders are charging a hire rate in proportion to the risk. Greece needs income - but its people don't pay tax and so there's no income. That's why Greece is in trouble - not because of profligate unnecessary spending, but because the people don't pay tax and yet still expect government to pay for services.
(sound familiar?)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasury_security#Treasury_bill
(1) Debt != Deficit. Carrying debt is not an issue - old loans get paid but new ones also get made, all based on the goodwill of the American Government being able to honour its debts at some point in the future.
(2) Most of Japan's creditors are in fact Japanese institutions and citizens - the government owes its own people, and they're obviously still willing to lend it money.
(3) Where do banks have an exclusive right to "create" money? Or are you attacking the principle of fractional reserve banking that's been at the core of capitalism since the Medicis of Florence?