I'm not disagreeing with you (though I have my doubts), but I don't see how this is the relevant figure. Surely the right figure is per person, as you have in your figure. Then the question would be how to compare spending on "social programs" when they don't match up in any particularly easy way across countries.
I like your approach, however the ratio of the population reading Time on the iPad should be adjusted upwards because we can probably exclude some segments of the US population who are not likely to be either Time Magazine readers nor iPad owners (e.g. people without much disposable income). So, given that someone is an iPad owner, my intuition is that they are also more likely to read Time (when compared to the general U.S. population which was used to create the 1% ratio) because they probably share more social and demographic characteristics.
But nevertheless you're right, even if the percentage of iPad owners reading time was 2% or 5% or heck even 10% (and even if those iPad readers are more valuable from advertiser's perspective, which is not necessarily true because it depends on the advertiser), it doesn't look like an iPad is going to replace a paper copy of a magazine anytime soon. It would be cool to make some bets about this though.
It's an interesting idea, but I don't see how it would be reliable since as soon as Google updates its search results the message would become irretrievably fragmented.
I don't understand why they would even bother with making a few of these by 2010 when the appeal of the diesel hybrid Golf seems so much more apparent.
Bring out the diesel hybrids already!
Since it sounds like the application relies on your regular cell coverage in order to switch over a received call, this might mean that you won't be able to receive calls unless you've got regular AT&T cell coverage. I wonder if you could switch over from a roaming network?
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out and how it compares with T-Mobile's Hotspot@Home.
Yeah we maybe we ought to bulldoze those "useless" pyramids, too. So out-dated, and what a waste of space!! If you want ancient Egypt, just go to Vegas!
In The Netherlands they made it illegal to deny insurance based on a preexisting condition. This effectively levels the playing field for all private insurance companies to then compete with that condition. Nobody gets any advantage from denying the expensive preexisting conditions since they all have to accept them.
In the U.S. HIPPA made pregnancy an illegal preexisting condition. I think we should take it one step further and make them all illegal. Nobody should have to stay with a job to which they are poorly suited just because they have something that is considered a "preexisting condition" and would be used to deny new health insurance.
We don't have to go single payer (though I think that wouldn't be a bad thing to consider), but we can do a heck of a lot better at improving the mess of a system we have now.
I thought this story was going to be about the Franklin Institute, whose front page (www.fi.edu) is ad-free and looks like a normal museum page. But then when you see a page
like this one, you see Google AdSense across the top.
It does wonders for their credibility...
I flew Virgin America last week from DC to California and back and overall the experience was good (good ticket price, too!). The in-flight entertainment left a few things to be desired, though. Aside from crashing two or three times during flight, many features (including the "READ" feature mentioned above) were simply "not available." A friend on another flight said she was on a plane that couldn't receive a single channel the entire flight. The song playlists were not very responsive, either, with long hesitations after touching the touchscreen.
So it seems like they've still got a few things to work out. The best feature that was not yet available was a "WWW" feature granting access to the internet.
If they can work out some of these issues, VA could have a real winner on their hands. The in-flight ordering system, though expensive for non-water and non-soda items, was the best I've ever seen.
Re:The article is good, it just fails to mention
on
Origin of the iPhone
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· Score: 1
No question about it, the iPhone and iPod Touch interface are what set them apart from the competition.
However, I don't think the iPod Touch is a very good PDA at all, actually. I bought one hoping it would replace my three year old Palm Tungsten E2 which I use for basic PDA functions such as calendaring and contact management. The iPod Touch is missing so many small features that make it annoying enough to keep my Palm updated.
The calendar interface is terrible and I still haven't gotten used to it. There are no categories for different calendars - why not provide the same support that iCal does and allow different calendars with different colors? The display is also pretty lousy - I don't want to flick through my events, I want to be able to see them day-by-day or week-by-week.
There's also no search function. What happened to something like spotlight? Why does Palm do this so much better? You can sort the Address Book but can't search it? If you don't remember someone's last name you can forget finding them - and good luck searching for a contact by company if you have it sorted by last name.
No cut and paste is a bummer, too. When typing it also doesn't allow you to scroll up and down - if you ever fill up a text box like in an email in Safari, you have no way of getting back to the beginning of it.
I'm hoping there will be some exciting 3rd Party apps in the near future, but for the time-being I'm still keeping my Palm updated to view multiple calendars. For playing media, however, the iPod is fantastic of course! I just don't understand why the crippled the PDA aspects of it.
"...So, the UK is importing nuclear power from France. I think that's a pretty clear indicator that nuclear power is currently fairly competitively priced."
Not necessarily. People say, "let the market determine whether nuclear is cost-effective." The market in the U.S. already did decide, and it said it was not cost-effective. That's why no new plants have been built since 1974. The only reason we're building them now is because the government is heavily subsidizing it. (And, need I add, this says nothing of the cost of waste disposal which is another problem altogether...)
The biggest cost of nuclear is the up-front capital cost of construction and working with government regulation and oversight. Therefore once you have the plants built, it is in the owner's best interest to utilize them to their maximum potential. This doesn't mean that new nuclear power is competitively priced, however.
You will hear the nuclear industry (as well as the U.S. government) touting a 1.8/kWh figure as the cost of nuclear energy, but this figure only refers to the operating costs of nuclear and DOESN'T include the capital cost of building a nuclear reactor itself (which is the biggest part), nor does it include the cost of decommissioning a reactor when it is finally retired. This also says nothing of the fact that uranium prices have more than tripled in the last few years. If we're not going to include capital construction costs when describing the cost of nuclear energy, then why should we use a different standard for measuring energy costs for other technology such as windmills? Wind suddenly become extremely cheap (less than 1/kWh to maintain) if you exclude the capital construction cost.
What killed nuclear in the U.S. was regulatory cost. That changed with President Bush's 2005 Energy Policy Act included several billion dollars of incentives to the nuclear industry, for instance guaranteeing that for the first six new nuclear plants constructed, the U.S. government will pay for any cost overruns (up to $2 billion). This means it's a no-brainer for the nuclear industry - they get paid even if the same kinds of regulatory delays that killed previous plants creep up for these new plants. In addition there are huge tax credits for the first eight years of operation.
IMHO, we don't have to worry about nuclear reactor safety at all. Operationally they are very safe (even Three Mile Island basically operated as it was supposed to during a meltdown). What is less clear is whether nuclear is economically feasible, and whether we have a viable solution for storing waste. Currently the solution is to store them on-site at the reactors themselves.
The real problem with this utopian vision is that it won't work under capitalism. The problem is the workers who are displaced by those robots don't own the robots, and hence aren't entitled to any of the resulting increased productivity achieved by them. All of the productivity increases gained by employing robots instead of humans goes to the owner of the robots (usually the firm), which was already earning a profit above the wages it was paying to its workers.
So workers lose out big time while the firm owners gain even more profit. Inequality increases as increasing amounts of profit is accumulated by fewer and fewer people (usually firm owners or owners of capital).
This is of course the result of technological progress in general. The Luddites are a great case in point. I'm not at all opposed to technological progress, but without massive redistribution of wealth, it will be impossible for 80% of the population to subsist on the production of 20%. In order for the 80% to not work, the firm owners would have to keep paying the workers it laid off as a result of utilizing these robots. It's not like the workers are getting together and saying, "Hey, let's pool our savings and buy a big robot to run the warehouse. That way the robot can keep working while we stay at home and collect our paychecks." And that wouldn't last very long because what's to prevent the company from "firing" the workers' robot and replacing it with one of its own?
But if you want a PDA, why not just purchase the iPod touch, then? Sure, the iPod touch doesn't have a microphone, camera, or external speaker, but it's cheaper and slimmer.
I actually like Gmail's interface and keyboard shortcuts, but the main drawback is speed. It takes "six one-thousands" for me to open my inbox. My computer (iBook 1.42Ghz, 1GB RAM) isn't the fastest, but even on newer machines it still takes a frustratingly long "three one-thousands" to open.
Since these delays occur even on fast university networks, my guess is either the server-side is slow or the interface with the browser takes a long time to load. Does anyone know why Gmail is so slow?
Slashdot Mirror
sorry - meant to say "as you have in your signature". Even with preview I still missed it.
I'm not disagreeing with you (though I have my doubts), but I don't see how this is the relevant figure. Surely the right figure is per person, as you have in your figure. Then the question would be how to compare spending on "social programs" when they don't match up in any particularly easy way across countries.
I like your approach, however the ratio of the population reading Time on the iPad should be adjusted upwards because we can probably exclude some segments of the US population who are not likely to be either Time Magazine readers nor iPad owners (e.g. people without much disposable income). So, given that someone is an iPad owner, my intuition is that they are also more likely to read Time (when compared to the general U.S. population which was used to create the 1% ratio) because they probably share more social and demographic characteristics.
But nevertheless you're right, even if the percentage of iPad owners reading time was 2% or 5% or heck even 10% (and even if those iPad readers are more valuable from advertiser's perspective, which is not necessarily true because it depends on the advertiser), it doesn't look like an iPad is going to replace a paper copy of a magazine anytime soon. It would be cool to make some bets about this though.
It's an interesting idea, but I don't see how it would be reliable since as soon as Google updates its search results the message would become irretrievably fragmented.
I don't understand why they would even bother with making a few of these by 2010 when the appeal of the diesel hybrid Golf seems so much more apparent. Bring out the diesel hybrids already!
Since it sounds like the application relies on your regular cell coverage in order to switch over a received call, this might mean that you won't be able to receive calls unless you've got regular AT&T cell coverage. I wonder if you could switch over from a roaming network?
It'll be interesting to see how this plays out and how it compares with T-Mobile's Hotspot@Home.
Yeah we maybe we ought to bulldoze those "useless" pyramids, too. So out-dated, and what a waste of space!! If you want ancient Egypt, just go to Vegas!
Same goes for Venice.
Am I right?
In the U.S. HIPPA made pregnancy an illegal preexisting condition. I think we should take it one step further and make them all illegal. Nobody should have to stay with a job to which they are poorly suited just because they have something that is considered a "preexisting condition" and would be used to deny new health insurance.
We don't have to go single payer (though I think that wouldn't be a bad thing to consider), but we can do a heck of a lot better at improving the mess of a system we have now.
I thought this story was going to be about the Franklin Institute, whose front page (www.fi.edu) is ad-free and looks like a normal museum page. But then when you see a page like this one, you see Google AdSense across the top. It does wonders for their credibility...
I flew Virgin America last week from DC to California and back and overall the experience was good (good ticket price, too!). The in-flight entertainment left a few things to be desired, though. Aside from crashing two or three times during flight, many features (including the "READ" feature mentioned above) were simply "not available." A friend on another flight said she was on a plane that couldn't receive a single channel the entire flight. The song playlists were not very responsive, either, with long hesitations after touching the touchscreen.
So it seems like they've still got a few things to work out. The best feature that was not yet available was a "WWW" feature granting access to the internet.
If they can work out some of these issues, VA could have a real winner on their hands. The in-flight ordering system, though expensive for non-water and non-soda items, was the best I've ever seen.
No question about it, the iPhone and iPod Touch interface are what set them apart from the competition.
However, I don't think the iPod Touch is a very good PDA at all, actually. I bought one hoping it would replace my three year old Palm Tungsten E2 which I use for basic PDA functions such as calendaring and contact management. The iPod Touch is missing so many small features that make it annoying enough to keep my Palm updated.
The calendar interface is terrible and I still haven't gotten used to it. There are no categories for different calendars - why not provide the same support that iCal does and allow different calendars with different colors? The display is also pretty lousy - I don't want to flick through my events, I want to be able to see them day-by-day or week-by-week.
There's also no search function. What happened to something like spotlight? Why does Palm do this so much better? You can sort the Address Book but can't search it? If you don't remember someone's last name you can forget finding them - and good luck searching for a contact by company if you have it sorted by last name.
No cut and paste is a bummer, too. When typing it also doesn't allow you to scroll up and down - if you ever fill up a text box like in an email in Safari, you have no way of getting back to the beginning of it.
I'm hoping there will be some exciting 3rd Party apps in the near future, but for the time-being I'm still keeping my Palm updated to view multiple calendars. For playing media, however, the iPod is fantastic of course! I just don't understand why the crippled the PDA aspects of it.
"...So, the UK is importing nuclear power from France. I think that's a pretty clear indicator that nuclear power is currently fairly competitively priced."
Not necessarily. People say, "let the market determine whether nuclear is cost-effective." The market in the U.S. already did decide, and it said it was not cost-effective. That's why no new plants have been built since 1974. The only reason we're building them now is because the government is heavily subsidizing it. (And, need I add, this says nothing of the cost of waste disposal which is another problem altogether...)
The biggest cost of nuclear is the up-front capital cost of construction and working with government regulation and oversight. Therefore once you have the plants built, it is in the owner's best interest to utilize them to their maximum potential. This doesn't mean that new nuclear power is competitively priced, however.
You will hear the nuclear industry (as well as the U.S. government) touting a 1.8/kWh figure as the cost of nuclear energy, but this figure only refers to the operating costs of nuclear and DOESN'T include the capital cost of building a nuclear reactor itself (which is the biggest part), nor does it include the cost of decommissioning a reactor when it is finally retired. This also says nothing of the fact that uranium prices have more than tripled in the last few years. If we're not going to include capital construction costs when describing the cost of nuclear energy, then why should we use a different standard for measuring energy costs for other technology such as windmills? Wind suddenly become extremely cheap (less than 1/kWh to maintain) if you exclude the capital construction cost.
What killed nuclear in the U.S. was regulatory cost. That changed with President Bush's 2005 Energy Policy Act included several billion dollars of incentives to the nuclear industry, for instance guaranteeing that for the first six new nuclear plants constructed, the U.S. government will pay for any cost overruns (up to $2 billion). This means it's a no-brainer for the nuclear industry - they get paid even if the same kinds of regulatory delays that killed previous plants creep up for these new plants. In addition there are huge tax credits for the first eight years of operation.
IMHO, we don't have to worry about nuclear reactor safety at all. Operationally they are very safe (even Three Mile Island basically operated as it was supposed to during a meltdown). What is less clear is whether nuclear is economically feasible, and whether we have a viable solution for storing waste. Currently the solution is to store them on-site at the reactors themselves.
So workers lose out big time while the firm owners gain even more profit. Inequality increases as increasing amounts of profit is accumulated by fewer and fewer people (usually firm owners or owners of capital).
This is of course the result of technological progress in general. The Luddites are a great case in point. I'm not at all opposed to technological progress, but without massive redistribution of wealth, it will be impossible for 80% of the population to subsist on the production of 20%. In order for the 80% to not work, the firm owners would have to keep paying the workers it laid off as a result of utilizing these robots. It's not like the workers are getting together and saying, "Hey, let's pool our savings and buy a big robot to run the warehouse. That way the robot can keep working while we stay at home and collect our paychecks." And that wouldn't last very long because what's to prevent the company from "firing" the workers' robot and replacing it with one of its own?
But if you want a PDA, why not just purchase the iPod touch, then? Sure, the iPod touch doesn't have a microphone, camera, or external speaker, but it's cheaper and slimmer.
It's amazing that the screen actually stayed lit for several propeller-like passes! Those iPhones must be durable!
I actually like Gmail's interface and keyboard shortcuts, but the main drawback is speed. It takes "six one-thousands" for me to open my inbox. My computer (iBook 1.42Ghz, 1GB RAM) isn't the fastest, but even on newer machines it still takes a frustratingly long "three one-thousands" to open. Since these delays occur even on fast university networks, my guess is either the server-side is slow or the interface with the browser takes a long time to load. Does anyone know why Gmail is so slow?