I read an article (sorry I am too lazy to find it again) that said AT&T actually has a higher bandwidth network than the competetors, the problem is that the iphone/iphone users suck up so much bandwidth that AT&T can't keep up - it said explicitly that if verizon was the exculusive provider of the iphone it would have an even bigger problem. Probably best in NYC to open up the iphone to all providers - then people can jump around to the network that sucks least for them - anyway, it seems kind of stupid to be trying to download youtube videos in the middle of the day in the middle of a busy city over the 3G network, people who do that probably deserve slow service.
Ah - but there is the rub, who is to stop me and my friends from getting together and depriving you of your property, food, shelter and/or life - and who is to enforce your property "rights", you may claim some land is yours and I may claim it is mine? - what about people who are born into poverty, like these pirates, who have nothing - tough shit? - it seems like these pirates are "do it yourselfers" taking their own initaiative to prey on others, and collecting capital to expand their predations, much better than many of our own pirate corporations and aristocracy, who were born into positions of priveledge and just work to maintain it...
Well it is nice to see that there is a company that is openly a pirate corporation - this might be a new trend, windows could change its icon to the jolly roger
GE laid off most of the people at powersystems but not because of the taxes - they still have as much land there as they always did - thank rising productivity - you don't need 30000 people any more to make turbines... I think they are down to 6000...
Where does the tuition money go? It sure doesn't go to professor's salaries - which are the 'producers' in the system - it goes to new buildings, team sports and administration - maybe they should cut back on building another new gym and pay the TA's and profs a little more - in an unrelated thought student loans are becoming the new mechanism for serfdom in the US - I know so many people who took out huge loans when they were young and spend the rest of their lives paying it off - financial enslavement.
You are right obviously the engineers at phillips, siemens and GE are incompetent - thanks, I will write this up to the VP today and tell him that we do it all wrong!/snark - I give up you don't get it, and you don't want to, you know better and I can't teach you anything about x-rays - like how is the machine supposed to know you are scanning the same patient over and over like you do during an intervention (yes they do that with CT machines - I have watched it) - and that when you put the machine in engineering mode (which they did here) you have explicity turned off any protections built into the software - or that there is a clinical need for high dose exams - or that if you limited the maximium dose to a theoretical amount (all x-rays absorbed by patient) many if not most exams would be of such poor image quality as to be worthless - thanks
Dose is not determined solely by the x-ray technique but by the geometry of the patient - I could x-ray a thin patient with 100mAs at 80kVp and give him/her relatively little dose - or I could x-ray a fat guy with the same technique and he would get 10x the dose. You need to understand this, dose to patient is NOT solely determined by machine settings. Why dose everyone on slashdot think they are an expert on everything?
Dude - I design CT machines, the machine needs to be able to put out that amount of dose to image some paitents - a fat patient may need 10x as much dose to image as a thin one for the same level of image quality (stay thin) - in interventional x-ray procedures patients can get enough radiation to cause skin burns - the choice is skin burns or a dead patient because you didn't unblock a critical vesel - also there is the issue of total dose to a region of a paitent vs total dose to patient - if the table stays in one spot for 10sec it is more of an issue than if the table is moving during that period distributing the same dose over a larger area. Of course if you scan the same patient over and over you will give a lot of dose to the patient too - how is the machine supposed to know that? In short x-ray deposited dose is heavily dependent on the thickness of the patient and the details of the scan protocol - in general the machine does not know the patient geometry - the doctor does - their bad, they should have been more careful in setting up their technique.
uummmm - I wish my 401K was in tax free bonds, I would have been much better off than the stock market over the past 10 years - maybe you need a better example....
I care about the rate of development of technology, I care about people and their quality of life - you don't - you care about personal profit and damn the rest - the average person will generate $2M in wealth during their lifetime, an asshole on wallstreet who blows away $200M has pissed away the lifetime's productive resources of 100 people - because of this missalocation of resources the CT scanner you may need costs more and doesn't work as well, your computer is slower, the software you buy sucks and doesn't work well with anything else, the drugs you will need will cost more, new vaccines will not be developed, cures for disease will be delayed - and oh yeah (back on topic) and we can't afford to increase the length of the school year or pay our teachers a decent salary - but hey all hail the pirate corporation! arrrg!
I believe there is an optimal tax rate but it depends on a lot of variables, my point was the in the 50s, 60s and 70s our economy did not collapse and most people were not taxed at 90% - only the top tax bracket, that period of time had plenty of technical innovation and competetive companies - and the working class was much better off than they are today. If the purpose of finance is to accurately allocate resources they have done a piss poor job of it, effectively building McMansions in Vegas was a dumb-ass idea and they knew it but did it anyway to pay themselves a nice bonus - that is socopathic behavior. BTW I work for a major corporation, they would rather spend $1bil buying a competetor than $10m to develop a new product, that is how we allocate resources in this country. I went to business school, a case study they taught us was the "Intel inside" campaign, Intel had $300M burning a hole in their pocket - what to do, spend it on engineering staff and R&D or spend it on a marketing campaign and try to run AMD into the ground - guess what they decided to do "dum dum dum! - Intel Inside!" - wonderful productive use of resources, I am sure the boys and girls in marketing got a bonus! Cola wars anyone? GM paying to dismantle public transport? Enron? Goldman? It is like shooting fish in a barrel... I don't really give a shit if our leaders get paid a lot of money, I just want to get some value from it, instead we pay them a lot of money to impoverish the rest of us - believe what you want to believe, the fairy tale they tell you makes you feel good - rock on!
Who found that to be a mistake? reference? perhaps the heritage foundation did - You are right I am jealous, I have a PhD in physics and some shithead who got a degree in english at harvard working on wall street who only knows how to buy and sell crap he doesn't understand walks away with a 200M bonus and then when things go to crap the government ends up holding the bag. How do you know my 40% number isn't true, reference? or are do just feel it isn't true ? try looking up "distribution of wealth" in wikipedia. But I hear you, fuck those dumb shit poor kids getting a good education, nobody is going to raise my taxes even though I don't make shit compared to the fuckers on wall street - remember what Newt Gingrich said "a tax on the rich is a tax on the poor who hope to get rich some day" - hey anything to let that fucker on wall street buy another house, he might make nice to me and let me work for him...
yes the 50s,60s and 70s were a time of massive federal deficits because of low tax revenues and CEOs were being paid a paltry sums, as low as 10x the average workers salary, wealth was also more evenly distributed, leading to massive inefficiencies - things got much better in the 80s when tax rates were lowered on the rich and companies were run much better once the CEOs could be paid a living wage w/o being taxed to death! bravo! we should cut taxes further on the rich that will spur "innovation" - more yahts, swimming pools and vast missalocation of resources to support the rich! Remember the top 0.1% in net worth only hold 40% of the countries wealth.... how is that working out for us?
taxes man. taxes. our property tax system for funding schools is fucked up, causing dislocation of people from cities in order to get "good" school districts, promoting urban spraw etc.. In europe schools are federally funded - each student gets the same amount of tax dollars for education, that is real equal opprotunity, not the BS we have here. Oh and we have plenty of money to tax, the top tax rate in the 60s was 90% and our economy didn't collapse, spending the money the uber-rich have on commodities, and running up the stock market, CDOs, McMansions and swimming pools is less productive than actually paying to have a well educated populace... we don't pay teachers shit compared to Japan and Europe either - but hey each country has to have its priorities, here our priority is that the rich get as much money as they can, and fuck everyone else - it is a value thing....
They are suckers because Netflicks makes a profit from the work of all the researchers who worked on the problem yet they only pay one group - the other groups tried different things that didn't pan out but Netflicks did not have to pay for that R&D effort. The other examples you site like open source make utilities that everyone can benefit from - these open infrastructure projects are not exploitive in the same way - Netflicks owns the algorithm developed by the group. Someone who pays 10K to be in a poker tournament might be a sucker, esp. if it is telivised - in game shows you are doing something that has no economic value anyway so at least you get paid to show up....
This is a great way for a big corporation to get hundreds of researchers to work on a problem of econmic importance to it and ONLY pay the researchers who had the best result, the rest get nothing - if netflicks had to actually pay for all the researchers who went down blind alleys they would have spent millions more, or gasp... actually had to have had their own R&D department - what a scam, and yet everyone celebrates them like it is some kind of game show... all I see are suckers....
And yet we see no evidence for inflation, in fact, we see deflation - read Paul Krugman, he give a very nice summary of how an economy can fall into a deflationary spiral... in short people and institutions start hording money, in our case the banks started hoarding it to deal with all their bad loans, when a big player in the system starts hoarding money it makes money scarce, then everyone starts hoarding money and not spending it causing a cycle which feeds on itself - the only way out is for some big player to open up the taps and make money more plentiful - hence the economic stimulus... So in a sense you are right, giving away money does cause inflation, but inflation on top of a deflationary base, which means just less deflation... not neccesarily a bad thing....
Why do you think robots will be cheaper? people are very efficient - 2000 kcal/day in fuel and require only a clean water supply and a place to sleep. Natural selection has spent billions of years making people cheap and disposable- robots are made of difficult to recycle materials, and have an expensive production process - making people is cheap and fun... in addition robotic components such as mechanical arms and legs have nowhere near the strength to weight ratio as people....
I hate to be a troll - but I agree with the EPA, a PhD in economics is not the same as being a climate scientist - unless he has decided to dig into the climate computer models - which I doubt - I am not sure what the substance of his report would be - economic impact?
One thing to understand is that the US can only absorb so much research money - you can spend a 100 billion paving roads or building shitty McMansions in the suburbs but you can't really expect spending 100 billion on your favorite research topic is going to produce much more than spending 1 billion - this is because there is only so much skilled labor for research, once your researchers hit full employment the extra money just inflates salaries and encourages more people to become researchers (which has a very long lead time) so you can't expect any real immediate improvment in results once you hit full employment - the same is true for almost anything you can spend money on - the goverment spends 100 billion on roads, bailing out auto companies etc... because it can - the money is primarily going to low skill workers. Of course this fact does not apply to wall street, there lots of people have relatively low skilled jobs (buying and selling shit they don't understand) and yet somehow seem to be able to absorb infinite amounts of money....
It is kind of funny to hear statements like "the more-efficent public sector" as someone who works for a large corporation I think it is cute when people believe the propoganda about free markets and efficiency - the truth is the last thing any capitalist wants is competition - it sucks, competition means you either have to be smarter or work harder for less than someone else, let me tell you that nobody wants to work hard and people in corporations are not that smart - it also gives people with real skill way too much value, importance and power. Here is the capitalist playbook when dealing with competition...
1) Buy out the competition: preferably with borrowed money from your buddies on wall street... magically you have created value, the competition is gone so you can keep selling your same crap at inflated prices, Fortune magazine will declare you a genious, get on your corporate jet and go to the carribean - hookers and blow for everyone!
2) Create barriers to entry: If you can't buy them out, go to congress, create rules and regulations which favor you, the advantage here is it is much cheaper than option 1 but the nosy public might object to what you are doing... the other option is to patent every idea you can think of and hope it gets in the way of anyone who wants to make a better mousetrap... try to starve them of money too if you can swing it with your banking buddies
3) Create a cartel: if you can't beat em join em! share patents and slice up the world market to support higher prices, real competition is bad for everyone, we all understand that....
4) Finally as last resort get the government to pay for your R&D, why spend your own money when the government will pay you to do what you should have been doing anyway.... (this is really a last resort, most companies wouldn't know what R&D is if it bit them in the ass)
If none of these work milk the company for as much money as you can and then bail out - they are toast! find a new company to run into the ground!
Actually I think the anti-evolution crowd understands evoloution pretty well - a God who would choose evolution as his process would be an evil God as evolution is fueled by billions upon billions of deaths and makes humans just another animal - evolution implies death and misery on a scale that boggles the mind, to imagine it is God's process as the Catholic church implies is to ignore that fact that human beings too have evolved... I believe in evolution, but any God that devised evolution as its mechanism is a God I want nothing to do with.
Shareholders have very few rights in the american system, all they can do is vote against directors selected by the CEO and even then the vote is just advisory, they cannot recommend put their own directors on the ballot... I know of very few instances in which directors were actually kicked out - welcome to american oligarchy. That being said any capitalist knows the purpose of R&D is not innovation and the creation of new products - the purpose of R&D is to file patents which prevent your competetors from innovating and making new products which threaten your monopoly... duh... you guys need to understand how the system works....
Slashdot Mirror
I read an article (sorry I am too lazy to find it again) that said AT&T actually has a higher bandwidth network than the competetors, the problem is that the iphone/iphone users suck up so much bandwidth that AT&T can't keep up - it said explicitly that if verizon was the exculusive provider of the iphone it would have an even bigger problem. Probably best in NYC to open up the iphone to all providers - then people can jump around to the network that sucks least for them - anyway, it seems kind of stupid to be trying to download youtube videos in the middle of the day in the middle of a busy city over the 3G network, people who do that probably deserve slow service.
Ah - but there is the rub, who is to stop me and my friends from getting together and depriving you of your property, food, shelter and/or life - and who is to enforce your property "rights", you may claim some land is yours and I may claim it is mine? - what about people who are born into poverty, like these pirates, who have nothing - tough shit? - it seems like these pirates are "do it yourselfers" taking their own initaiative to prey on others, and collecting capital to expand their predations, much better than many of our own pirate corporations and aristocracy, who were born into positions of priveledge and just work to maintain it...
Well it is nice to see that there is a company that is openly a pirate corporation - this might be a new trend, windows could change its icon to the jolly roger
GE laid off most of the people at powersystems but not because of the taxes - they still have as much land there as they always did - thank rising productivity - you don't need 30000 people any more to make turbines... I think they are down to 6000...
Where does the tuition money go? It sure doesn't go to professor's salaries - which are the 'producers' in the system - it goes to new buildings, team sports and administration - maybe they should cut back on building another new gym and pay the TA's and profs a little more - in an unrelated thought student loans are becoming the new mechanism for serfdom in the US - I know so many people who took out huge loans when they were young and spend the rest of their lives paying it off - financial enslavement.
You are right obviously the engineers at phillips, siemens and GE are incompetent - thanks, I will write this up to the VP today and tell him that we do it all wrong! /snark - I give up you don't get it, and you don't want to, you know better and I can't teach you anything about x-rays - like how is the machine supposed to know you are scanning the same patient over and over like you do during an intervention (yes they do that with CT machines - I have watched it) - and that when you put the machine in engineering mode (which they did here) you have explicity turned off any protections built into the software - or that there is a clinical need for high dose exams - or that if you limited the maximium dose to a theoretical amount (all x-rays absorbed by patient) many if not most exams would be of such poor image quality as to be worthless - thanks
Dose is not determined solely by the x-ray technique but by the geometry of the patient - I could x-ray a thin patient with 100mAs at 80kVp and give him/her relatively little dose - or I could x-ray a fat guy with the same technique and he would get 10x the dose. You need to understand this, dose to patient is NOT solely determined by machine settings. Why dose everyone on slashdot think they are an expert on everything?
Dude - I design CT machines, the machine needs to be able to put out that amount of dose to image some paitents - a fat patient may need 10x as much dose to image as a thin one for the same level of image quality (stay thin) - in interventional x-ray procedures patients can get enough radiation to cause skin burns - the choice is skin burns or a dead patient because you didn't unblock a critical vesel - also there is the issue of total dose to a region of a paitent vs total dose to patient - if the table stays in one spot for 10sec it is more of an issue than if the table is moving during that period distributing the same dose over a larger area. Of course if you scan the same patient over and over you will give a lot of dose to the patient too - how is the machine supposed to know that? In short x-ray deposited dose is heavily dependent on the thickness of the patient and the details of the scan protocol - in general the machine does not know the patient geometry - the doctor does - their bad, they should have been more careful in setting up their technique.
uummmm - I wish my 401K was in tax free bonds, I would have been much better off than the stock market over the past 10 years - maybe you need a better example....
I care about the rate of development of technology, I care about people and their quality of life - you don't - you care about personal profit and damn the rest - the average person will generate $2M in wealth during their lifetime, an asshole on wallstreet who blows away $200M has pissed away the lifetime's productive resources of 100 people - because of this missalocation of resources the CT scanner you may need costs more and doesn't work as well, your computer is slower, the software you buy sucks and doesn't work well with anything else, the drugs you will need will cost more, new vaccines will not be developed, cures for disease will be delayed - and oh yeah (back on topic) and we can't afford to increase the length of the school year or pay our teachers a decent salary - but hey all hail the pirate corporation! arrrg!
I believe there is an optimal tax rate but it depends on a lot of variables, my point was the in the 50s, 60s and 70s our economy did not collapse and most people were not taxed at 90% - only the top tax bracket, that period of time had plenty of technical innovation and competetive companies - and the working class was much better off than they are today. If the purpose of finance is to accurately allocate resources they have done a piss poor job of it, effectively building McMansions in Vegas was a dumb-ass idea and they knew it but did it anyway to pay themselves a nice bonus - that is socopathic behavior. BTW I work for a major corporation, they would rather spend $1bil buying a competetor than $10m to develop a new product, that is how we allocate resources in this country. I went to business school, a case study they taught us was the "Intel inside" campaign, Intel had $300M burning a hole in their pocket - what to do, spend it on engineering staff and R&D or spend it on a marketing campaign and try to run AMD into the ground - guess what they decided to do "dum dum dum! - Intel Inside!" - wonderful productive use of resources, I am sure the boys and girls in marketing got a bonus! Cola wars anyone? GM paying to dismantle public transport? Enron? Goldman? It is like shooting fish in a barrel... I don't really give a shit if our leaders get paid a lot of money, I just want to get some value from it, instead we pay them a lot of money to impoverish the rest of us - believe what you want to believe, the fairy tale they tell you makes you feel good - rock on!
Who found that to be a mistake? reference? perhaps the heritage foundation did - You are right I am jealous, I have a PhD in physics and some shithead who got a degree in english at harvard working on wall street who only knows how to buy and sell crap he doesn't understand walks away with a 200M bonus and then when things go to crap the government ends up holding the bag. How do you know my 40% number isn't true, reference? or are do just feel it isn't true ? try looking up "distribution of wealth" in wikipedia. But I hear you, fuck those dumb shit poor kids getting a good education, nobody is going to raise my taxes even though I don't make shit compared to the fuckers on wall street - remember what Newt Gingrich said "a tax on the rich is a tax on the poor who hope to get rich some day" - hey anything to let that fucker on wall street buy another house, he might make nice to me and let me work for him...
yes the 50s,60s and 70s were a time of massive federal deficits because of low tax revenues and CEOs were being paid a paltry sums, as low as 10x the average workers salary, wealth was also more evenly distributed, leading to massive inefficiencies - things got much better in the 80s when tax rates were lowered on the rich and companies were run much better once the CEOs could be paid a living wage w/o being taxed to death! bravo! we should cut taxes further on the rich that will spur "innovation" - more yahts, swimming pools and vast missalocation of resources to support the rich! Remember the top 0.1% in net worth only hold 40% of the countries wealth.... how is that working out for us?
taxes man. taxes. our property tax system for funding schools is fucked up, causing dislocation of people from cities in order to get "good" school districts, promoting urban spraw etc.. In europe schools are federally funded - each student gets the same amount of tax dollars for education, that is real equal opprotunity, not the BS we have here. Oh and we have plenty of money to tax, the top tax rate in the 60s was 90% and our economy didn't collapse, spending the money the uber-rich have on commodities, and running up the stock market, CDOs, McMansions and swimming pools is less productive than actually paying to have a well educated populace... we don't pay teachers shit compared to Japan and Europe either - but hey each country has to have its priorities, here our priority is that the rich get as much money as they can, and fuck everyone else - it is a value thing....
They are suckers because Netflicks makes a profit from the work of all the researchers who worked on the problem yet they only pay one group - the other groups tried different things that didn't pan out but Netflicks did not have to pay for that R&D effort. The other examples you site like open source make utilities that everyone can benefit from - these open infrastructure projects are not exploitive in the same way - Netflicks owns the algorithm developed by the group. Someone who pays 10K to be in a poker tournament might be a sucker, esp. if it is telivised - in game shows you are doing something that has no economic value anyway so at least you get paid to show up....
This is a great way for a big corporation to get hundreds of researchers to work on a problem of econmic importance to it and ONLY pay the researchers who had the best result, the rest get nothing - if netflicks had to actually pay for all the researchers who went down blind alleys they would have spent millions more, or gasp... actually had to have had their own R&D department - what a scam, and yet everyone celebrates them like it is some kind of game show... all I see are suckers....
And yet we see no evidence for inflation, in fact, we see deflation - read Paul Krugman, he give a very nice summary of how an economy can fall into a deflationary spiral... in short people and institutions start hording money, in our case the banks started hoarding it to deal with all their bad loans, when a big player in the system starts hoarding money it makes money scarce, then everyone starts hoarding money and not spending it causing a cycle which feeds on itself - the only way out is for some big player to open up the taps and make money more plentiful - hence the economic stimulus... So in a sense you are right, giving away money does cause inflation, but inflation on top of a deflationary base, which means just less deflation... not neccesarily a bad thing....
Why do you think robots will be cheaper? people are very efficient - 2000 kcal/day in fuel and require only a clean water supply and a place to sleep. Natural selection has spent billions of years making people cheap and disposable- robots are made of difficult to recycle materials, and have an expensive production process - making people is cheap and fun... in addition robotic components such as mechanical arms and legs have nowhere near the strength to weight ratio as people....
I hate to be a troll - but I agree with the EPA, a PhD in economics is not the same as being a climate scientist - unless he has decided to dig into the climate computer models - which I doubt - I am not sure what the substance of his report would be - economic impact?
we already have nanotechnology - it is called molecular biology
One thing to understand is that the US can only absorb so much research money - you can spend a 100 billion paving roads or building shitty McMansions in the suburbs but you can't really expect spending 100 billion on your favorite research topic is going to produce much more than spending 1 billion - this is because there is only so much skilled labor for research, once your researchers hit full employment the extra money just inflates salaries and encourages more people to become researchers (which has a very long lead time) so you can't expect any real immediate improvment in results once you hit full employment - the same is true for almost anything you can spend money on - the goverment spends 100 billion on roads, bailing out auto companies etc... because it can - the money is primarily going to low skill workers. Of course this fact does not apply to wall street, there lots of people have relatively low skilled jobs (buying and selling shit they don't understand) and yet somehow seem to be able to absorb infinite amounts of money....
you can write FORTRAN in any computer language...
It is kind of funny to hear statements like "the more-efficent public sector" as someone who works for a large corporation I think it is cute when people believe the propoganda about free markets and efficiency - the truth is the last thing any capitalist wants is competition - it sucks, competition means you either have to be smarter or work harder for less than someone else, let me tell you that nobody wants to work hard and people in corporations are not that smart - it also gives people with real skill way too much value, importance and power. Here is the capitalist playbook when dealing with competition... 1) Buy out the competition: preferably with borrowed money from your buddies on wall street... magically you have created value, the competition is gone so you can keep selling your same crap at inflated prices, Fortune magazine will declare you a genious, get on your corporate jet and go to the carribean - hookers and blow for everyone! 2) Create barriers to entry: If you can't buy them out, go to congress, create rules and regulations which favor you, the advantage here is it is much cheaper than option 1 but the nosy public might object to what you are doing... the other option is to patent every idea you can think of and hope it gets in the way of anyone who wants to make a better mousetrap... try to starve them of money too if you can swing it with your banking buddies 3) Create a cartel: if you can't beat em join em! share patents and slice up the world market to support higher prices, real competition is bad for everyone, we all understand that.... 4) Finally as last resort get the government to pay for your R&D, why spend your own money when the government will pay you to do what you should have been doing anyway.... (this is really a last resort, most companies wouldn't know what R&D is if it bit them in the ass) If none of these work milk the company for as much money as you can and then bail out - they are toast! find a new company to run into the ground!
Actually I think the anti-evolution crowd understands evoloution pretty well - a God who would choose evolution as his process would be an evil God as evolution is fueled by billions upon billions of deaths and makes humans just another animal - evolution implies death and misery on a scale that boggles the mind, to imagine it is God's process as the Catholic church implies is to ignore that fact that human beings too have evolved... I believe in evolution, but any God that devised evolution as its mechanism is a God I want nothing to do with.
Shareholders have very few rights in the american system, all they can do is vote against directors selected by the CEO and even then the vote is just advisory, they cannot recommend put their own directors on the ballot... I know of very few instances in which directors were actually kicked out - welcome to american oligarchy. That being said any capitalist knows the purpose of R&D is not innovation and the creation of new products - the purpose of R&D is to file patents which prevent your competetors from innovating and making new products which threaten your monopoly... duh... you guys need to understand how the system works....