If you want an example article, instead of Evolution, try Fractal Antenna. The namesake company is working hard to keep it pure propaganda, removing all critiCism of fractals, and all mention of competing companies. Check the talk page, look at the edit history, and trace route those IP addresses... Administrators have been repeatedly notified, the vandals have patience to wait anyone out, and the money and vested interest in keeping it biased.
Ivanpah Solar Electric Generator in the Mojave. 5 1/2 square miles of mirrors. 5 1/2. guess what? the environmental crowd is suing to stop it on the grounds that those 5 1/2 square miles of sand are more important as habitat than a 60% increase in US solar generation.
Just read up on it myself. Nobody is suing to stop anything. They've asked for the environmental impact assessment to be reviewed because the initial one was likely inaccurate. Guess what, they're correct. So 2/3rds of the sites will be delayed while endangered species are relocated away from the area.
I'm not seeing the big green bogey man here... Or do you just believe we should drive over dodo birds in our hummers rather than be slowed down?
Incidentally, the sites in question aren't any random stretch of desert. They're building in the Mojave National Preserve. Conflicts with wildlife are to be expected. I bet we'd get a great deal of energy out of clear cutting yellowstone. Never mind how much it must be worth to property developers. So give it a rest if you can't even form a cohrent picture of the situation.
facebook is valued at $50 billion dollars even though it makes very little money and will wither and die just like every other hit social network when something else comes out.
10+ years ago, there was an internet company whose value was through the roof, and were the talk of the tech stock world, even though they had been in business for a few years, and yet had still never even managed to brake even. A sign of the tech bubble for sure! The name of this company? Amazon.com
To be a bit less snarky... it's true there were a couple social networking sites that were a minor hit before facebook. Hell, maybe facebook will fail... BUT they've currently got a couple orders of magnitude more customers than the likes of myspace ever did, and networking effects are not to be ignored. Maybe something else will come along and steal facebook's users, but there's also the chance facebook is the plateau, nothing else will gain any traction, and they will dominate the landscape for decades to come, only gradually fading, and eventually falling into irrelevance as new technology eliminates the intermediary role facebook.com currently plays.
If you or I knew the correct answer with any certainty, we could be making obscene amounts of money.
By conservative estimates, bin Laden cost the US at least $3 trillion over the past 15 years,
It's great the way our problems with Al Qaeda, Taliban, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. can all be lumped on Bin Laden.
By that same logic, the butterfly that set off Hurricane Katrina was one hella expensive insect. Never mind the decades of poor decisions that came before, to make it what it was...
Hell, I wanna get on that bandwagon too! If it weren't for bin Laden, the USA would still have the wonderful warm relationship with the Arab world it previously enjoyed. The bastard!
When we talked to the mortgage broker and he told us we were pre-approved for a number twice that big, I laughed and flat-out told him, "No, we can't," and that was the end of the story.
Fair enough, but you'll pay just about as much in interest as principal, so it's entirely possible to trick someone with an extremely low introductory (adjustable) interest rate, and make it look like the numbers add-up. And if you get wise, it can always been dismissed with a "Well, you can refinance in 18 months and since you've been there that long, you'll get an much better fixed rate mortgage," or similar.
Congratulations on not being an easy mark. I still say there's plenty of blame to go around, and most of it should go all the way up the chain.
I'm not sure condos count, and even if they do, shouldn't be figured out with the same formula. The HOA/association/maintenance fees put it closer to a rental, both while you're paying off the loan, and long after you've paid it off. Yeah, with a condo, I'd be much more conservative about how much I'd pay upfront.
Certainly several hundred if not thousand of severs per state, and likely spread across several major data centers, at least in the case of more populous states like Calif. Of course I'm just feeding what Sony is doing based on my experience with Second Life's racks of 1U servers as far as the eye can see...
Latency is a huge deal with gaming, so yeah, it makes perfect sense that it's per-state in some fashion.
I wised up and stopped putting all the blame on the average person long ago. When you have bankers committing fraud to get your loan through, lying to your face about how much you can afford, your only mistake is not being bright enough to comprehend everything in the hundreds of pages of legalese to spot the lies.
Then, at the very top you had the top banker in world saying everything was great, and if you can't pay off your credit cards, just take out a second mortgage on your house to make ends meet, and all will be fine.
It was a complete fraud from the top down. Yes, if you were smart enough, you saw the lie before jumping in too deep, but the idea that it was the all the hapless pawns fault, is idiotic.
3x your annual income? So don't ever buy a house, anywhere in California? I'm sure all my neighbors with the $2 million houses aren't raking in 600,000 every year, yet I'd call them a damn good credit risk, with next to no chance of defaulting.
You must live in an incredibly cheap area, with decent jobs. Be glad you have those easy options, but stop assuming the rest of the world looks like your back yard.
If management or engineering fails at a wind plant, it doesn't require the evacuation of entire cities, potentially for decades.
If the massive high pressure pipelines going to a natural gas plant rupture, dozens of people in the immediate vicinity will be killed. I say this, because it has happened several times. How many people were killed by the problems at Fukishima? And if you want to talk about long term health effects, i'm sure someone will be kind enough to come along and explain how we're all being slowly killed by coal power plants.
And by way of analogy, when an airplane crashes, we dont look long and hard at whether we should outlaw flight... It gets pinned on those that did a poor job in engineering, maintenance, etc.
This strikes me as a bit of marketing. Everyone knows the ultra precise atomic clocks are as good as it gets, but cheap, less precise atomic clocks have been around for quite some time. In fact, you can do better with a high end temperature regulated quartz clock than a cheap atomic. And quartz offers the full range of options in between. I don't see any data on accuracy in tfa, so I'm going to assume it's slightly more accurate than a wrist watch...
Its useful for reading email and reviewing documents and the like, but composition is really impractical,
There exist both usb and bluetooth keyboards. And with combo iPad case/stands with integrated keyboards, you'd have a hard time telling the difference between a netbook at iPad + keyboard from a distance.
As an added bonus, the Android tablets are much more open. So you can buy something like an Archos 70 for $200, and upgrade the firmware to make it a full Linux tablet with X11, KDE, etc. Hell, Archos even has a 250GB model. Frankly, tablets are probably more capable than netbooks, thanks to bluetooth allowing much more expansion options.
think about how easy it would be to build a transmitter running on the same frequencies as the wireless network and sit that just outside the company and pointed inwards -instant denial of service attack with zero traceability.
Anybody with a tiny bit of knowledge about radio wave propagation, and a portable device with a wifi signal strength meter, could track it down to within a small area in a few minutes. I can't imagine why you think broadcasting high power radio signals could ever be even remotely difficult to trace.
It's true that, in IT there is a dearth of entry level positions, and everyone wants someone with years of work experience. While that's a serious problem, it's a different discussion all together. There's a similar problem of companies always hiring outside, rather than promoting internally, which is also related, but still a seperate discussion.
Assuming you aren't hiring entry level people, it's crucially important that you base your hiring decision on something which can't be faked or spun, or else you'll just get good liars, those with no perspective, etc.
Out and out liars are one thing. Then you get big fish, little pond type problems. Or worse, previous companies with extremely low standards, or at least job title inflation, turning out "senior" engineers who can barely struggle their way through the most basic task.
And some of the most frustrating are people with considerable skill, but no standards... sure, you got that up and working quickly, and the performance is impressive, but it'll take two years of finding major bugs, and having to fundamentally redesign things over and over, before it works acceptably. And no, you're mever being given access to production so you can push out your latest junk code without anybody double checking. And no, pushing out your debugging code to production is not acceptable, even if you're having a hard time reproducing the bug...
Actually, even worse are those who can't even be convinced the bugs are unacceptable, and expect the whole world to work around them. So your code works perfectly for several days, then silently stops behaving and needs semaphores removed before it can be restarted properly? Yes, it would be possible for others to workaround these issues, but no, that's not acceptable, and if it makes it's way into production before anyone notices, and you can't be bothered to fix it, expect a late night phone call each and every time it happens.
But I digress. If you are hiring people, a previous job title, years of experience, a certification, glowing references or assertions of excellence are absolutely meaningless, yet are commonly enough to get a person hired.
This is the same reason that FreeBSD is now the most popular and predominant free operating system, powering a majority of internet servers, as well as devices ranging from mainframes to cellphones, and is increasingly popular in embedded applications of all kinds. Oh wait...
Actually... Considering that Apple wholesale integrated large parts of FreeBSD into OS X, then iOS, which is powering obscene numbers of iPhone's and iPads, it's actually doing pretty damn well. Or something like JunOS in Juniper hardware that is blatantly purely FreeBSD. In fact you'd have a hard time finding a Unix-like OS that hasn't taken large amounts of code from the BSD code base, Linux included. Hell, whenever FreeBSD gets some driver first, it gets ported to Linux quickly. I don't hear any GPL'ers complaining that it's an icky license so they don't want to touch the code, though they have been known to violate the copyright and claim it is their work, fully GPL'd.
So, yes, you can get popular if you strategically place yourself so that YOU can use the resources of your competition, but they can't use yours, and yet you can still claim you're the "free" option. Thanks GPL! I don't mean to sound bitter, because I'm not. I just get annoyed by idiots like this.
Frankly, if all open source was GPL'd, we'd have no open standards to speak of. It wasn't. FreSSH that caught on, it was OpenSSH. Even as crufty as NFS was looking years ago, none of the GPL'd network filesystems made ANY headway. Just list them all, and fine one that wasn't originally MITX/BSD licensed... Apache, OpenSSL, X11, FTPd, Sendmail, Bind, etc.
When government does something and GDP grows, that's because they have printed so much money, that prices doubled.
Inflation is well known and well understood, and every idiot knows how to adjust for it, and does so, yet these 2X benefits remain. Furthermore, inflation stays around 3%, so it would take several decades for inflation to undermine any increases in GDP, and that's simply far longer time scales than we're talking about.
So, you're utterly wrong, and pretty stupid to try to pose such a lame excuse.
Since 1913 the Fed printed so much money, that the value of dollar fell by 99% since then.
There are many other reasons than "printing money". You might notice oil prices skyrocket and fall, even while US currency remains stable. They don't double the amount of currency in circulation, then pull 75% of it out again. High energy prices causes food prices to perhaps double in a few short years, through no fault of the treasury. The same is true of any naturally limited commodity, where demand has grown. The sky rocketing real estate prices didn't have anything to do with "printing money" either.
they are actually increasing their manufacturing and agriculture and mining sectors, while the unproductive economies of the West only grow government and financial and service sectors.
It's not true that the only thing of value is something you can hold in your hand. That's just crazy survivalist mentality speaking.
IT revolutionized businesses, all around the world, including manufacturing, mining, and anything else you can name. While it has drastically reduced operating costs, it's a "service", and you're dismissing growth in that area completely, for no good reason. Then you should consider that these services growing means US companies are providing services to other countries, including the likes of China... I know this, because I get called at 3am on a routine bases, because some server or network issue in our data center is holding up the work of hundreds of people in China, and costing them money...
More than that, it's important to look towards the future. I'm sure you'd have been attacking the growth of industrial manufacturing, during the turn of the industrial age, because it's not real growth, like good old agriculture and skilled apprenticeships are...
Anyhow, the future of manufacturing isn't all the bright. It's a bad time to be a spot-welder, as machines pretty much exclusively do that work, now. As those worthless "service sector" IT technologies improve, expect even more people to be replaced. And what's more, it looks like truly disruptive change is just out on the horizon. 3D printers can make a lot of the same cheap crap China is making for us, and can do so in a value-added, personalized, and immensely more convenient way. Computerization of previously simple mechanical parts means less and less labor, and more high tech jobs. Major improvements in solar PV panels could put a lot of people out of work, too. And all it takes is for one company to come up with a humanoid robot with the same senses and dexterity of a human, that only costs a few million dollars, and you'd immediately see ALL simple repetitive jobs fully automated, leaving just those "service" jobs.
And it's not just IT. Those wiley scientists are pretty damn important, too. Even if China had all the manufacturing jobs in the world, but outsourced the product designs to western scientists, we'd still be in good shape.
And while I'm not a big fan of financial services, they do provide a valuable service, and can make a lot of money even without exploiting or cheating anyone. It's considered a good indicator of the health of the economy when money is getting most efficiently invested. Just think, there would be no manufacturing without the finance people to give loans, or invest in the fledgling company. You simply can't boot-strap a major indu
How much wealth is destroyed via all that government intervention?
It's not rhetorical. The answer is: About half as much as was created via all that government intervention. Which is precisely the point. The's no mystery. It's a real and verifiable figure. If you want to dispute it, you need facts.
GDP is meaningless if all you do is burn rubber.
You've done nothing to refute the value of GDP. Asserting your dogma is right, and bthe facts and figures are wrong, is not compelling. Try some evidence to back up your claims, and someone might listen to you. Otherewise, suck it up and admit you can't argue with those facts, even if you don't like them.
In most of those cases, it's a bunch of marketing nonsense. Yeah, Microsoft people were poo-pooing the ipod and the internet. It wasn't a bad prediction, though, it was just marketing. If you can't cash in, try hard to undermind confidence and interest in your competitors products... right up until you have something competetive to sell, then it's the next big thing, and you're the visionary bringing it to market...
Besides, it's a short, worthless article. Try this one instead;
Government can only print and tax, it cannot generate actual real demand, as in, it cannot make people want to spend their own work for something if the people don't get a real benefit from it.
That government spending (on infrastructure in particular) increases the GDP by about double the amount they spent, isn't something you can choose to "subscribe" to. It's pretty much just a simple, extensivley confirmed, undeniable fact.
in 5-10 minutes of reading Google News, I get all the stories that it would take a TV watcher 1-2 hours of sitting there getting spoon fed whatever biased info the station chooses to put on there.
This is your own fault for watching "local" news, or the morning semi-newsy entertainment shows. The real news is on CBS or ABC at 4:30am. It takes hours of reading the headlines to get the info they provide in 30 minutes (actually 20 without commercials).
And that's just the top of the heap. The nightly "world" news programs are damn respectable too. As is ABC's hours of late night news. Saying TV news is no good, based on local news is like saying tv is no good because reality tv shows suck. There's plenty of non crap, if you try to find it.
Wide format printouts are indeed one place dot matrix printers are hanging on. Have you priced a wide format laser printer? Sometimes you just can't justify spending several thousand on a wide format laser printer, and it's too much work to completely reformat the reports, so you keep the old epson crawling along, always just a bit longer.
. More than likely, broadcasters and networks will continue to increase the carry fee that they charge Comcast to carry their channel(s).
Comcast is ginormous. So ginormous they can buy up entire networks on a whim. Dish Network had a showdown with Viacom over carry fees, and won. Comcast can do the same, and even better...
Frankly, it's the cable companies that MAKE the cable networks. If the fees for X are too high, go out and FIND a competior in the same space, throw money and eyeballs at them, and once it's clear they're a good enough alternative, get rid of the pricey incumbent.
Not that I care, anymore, mind you. 3 years without cable and counting. OTA DTV rocks. Why have 200 channels rebroadcasting what was originally broadcast on a handful of OTA networks, when DVRs exist? And why tolerate the ever more intrusive advertising? Antenna + Hulu + Netflix is so vastly superior to cable that I'm amazed people aren't leaving in droves.
And don't bother complaining about sports. Yes, if you're ultra-super die-hard sports fan, you'll pay whatever anybody asks. If you're more reasonable, all major events are on the major broadcast networks, and Universal Sports fits snugly in that NBC sub-channel covering all those olympic / world cup sports, and several other off-beat options, non-stop, around the clock.
You're delusional. the schmuck doesn't have an alternative source of power. And everyone demanding green power immediately would lead to a massive environmental catastrophy, as power companies suddenly expand. Just look at biodiesel in europe causing deforestation.
Efficiency is the ultimate in being green. Computerization even with poor efficiency led to massive gains in itself. This is just politics, wanting more news stories.
Frankly, I believe the greenest way to go is to go as cheap as possible, and starve the beast. Excess packaging ceased to be an issue as price pressure was cuting into profits. Ditto for the fuel efficiency of shipping, and commercial vehicles. Buying green means buying more expensive, giving them more profits, and more money they can use to destroy the world. And besides that, money isn't green. Paying more means you have to emit more pollution to generate that extra income to pay the bills.
"Cheap" is an extremely good proxy for "green". More expensive is not green, it's a hypocritical, feel good, political statement.
Honestly, all that matters is that each region has a uniform standard, and is large enough that economies of scale will kick in.
You're unlikely to take your car to Japan with you, and what's more, since we're only really talking about SIGNALING, it's only going to take a few dollars worth of electronics to do the conversion. Sure, a $20 adapter so you can use your electric razor on another continent is inconvenient, but a $20 adapter so you can use you CAR? No problem.
Now, if the EU can't agree on a standard, that would be a problem. Wander across the border from Germany to France and you can't charge your car... Oops. And the added expense for charging stations to maintain two or more sets of chargers for different countries' vehicles wouldn't be cheap or easy to maintain.
Come to think of it... Are electric cars and hybrids coming with normal electrical outlets installed? 120/240V ? They really should. Could eliminate the "car adapter" market over-night, make traveling much easier and add a tremendous amount of utility to an electric vehicle... Even if utility power goes out, EVERYONE with an electric car could have a substantial backup. I can imagine lightning fast tire changes if you can power your impact tools on the road... But I digress.
Estonia will install approximately 250 quick-charge stations
As they say, as goes Estonia, so goes Lichtenstein! Clearly Japan is on course to dominate the world...
Slashdot Mirror
If you want an example article, instead of Evolution, try Fractal Antenna. The namesake company is working hard to keep it pure propaganda, removing all critiCism of fractals, and all mention of competing companies. Check the talk page, look at the edit history, and trace route those IP addresses... Administrators have been repeatedly notified, the vandals have patience to wait anyone out, and the money and vested interest in keeping it biased.
Just read up on it myself. Nobody is suing to stop anything. They've asked for the environmental impact assessment to be reviewed because the initial one was likely inaccurate. Guess what, they're correct. So 2/3rds of the sites will be delayed while endangered species are relocated away from the area.
I'm not seeing the big green bogey man here... Or do you just believe we should drive over dodo birds in our hummers rather than be slowed down?
Incidentally, the sites in question aren't any random stretch of desert. They're building in the Mojave National Preserve. Conflicts with wildlife are to be expected. I bet we'd get a great deal of energy out of clear cutting yellowstone. Never mind how much it must be worth to property developers. So give it a rest if you can't even form a cohrent picture of the situation.
10+ years ago, there was an internet company whose value was through the roof, and were the talk of the tech stock world, even though they had been in business for a few years, and yet had still never even managed to brake even. A sign of the tech bubble for sure! The name of this company? Amazon.com
To be a bit less snarky... it's true there were a couple social networking sites that were a minor hit before facebook. Hell, maybe facebook will fail... BUT they've currently got a couple orders of magnitude more customers than the likes of myspace ever did, and networking effects are not to be ignored. Maybe something else will come along and steal facebook's users, but there's also the chance facebook is the plateau, nothing else will gain any traction, and they will dominate the landscape for decades to come, only gradually fading, and eventually falling into irrelevance as new technology eliminates the intermediary role facebook.com currently plays.
If you or I knew the correct answer with any certainty, we could be making obscene amounts of money.
It's great the way our problems with Al Qaeda, Taliban, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, etc. can all be lumped on Bin Laden.
By that same logic, the butterfly that set off Hurricane Katrina was one hella expensive insect. Never mind the decades of poor decisions that came before, to make it what it was...
Hell, I wanna get on that bandwagon too! If it weren't for bin Laden, the USA would still have the wonderful warm relationship with the Arab world it previously enjoyed. The bastard!
Fair enough, but you'll pay just about as much in interest as principal, so it's entirely possible to trick someone with an extremely low introductory (adjustable) interest rate, and make it look like the numbers add-up. And if you get wise, it can always been dismissed with a "Well, you can refinance in 18 months and since you've been there that long, you'll get an much better fixed rate mortgage," or similar.
Congratulations on not being an easy mark. I still say there's plenty of blame to go around, and most of it should go all the way up the chain.
I'm not sure condos count, and even if they do, shouldn't be figured out with the same formula. The HOA/association/maintenance fees put it closer to a rental, both while you're paying off the loan, and long after you've paid it off. Yeah, with a condo, I'd be much more conservative about how much I'd pay upfront.
Certainly several hundred if not thousand of severs per state, and likely spread across several major data centers, at least in the case of more populous states like Calif. Of course I'm just feeding what Sony is doing based on my experience with Second Life's racks of 1U servers as far as the eye can see...
Latency is a huge deal with gaming, so yeah, it makes perfect sense that it's per-state in some fashion.
I wised up and stopped putting all the blame on the average person long ago. When you have bankers committing fraud to get your loan through, lying to your face about how much you can afford, your only mistake is not being bright enough to comprehend everything in the hundreds of pages of legalese to spot the lies.
Then, at the very top you had the top banker in world saying everything was great, and if you can't pay off your credit cards, just take out a second mortgage on your house to make ends meet, and all will be fine.
It was a complete fraud from the top down. Yes, if you were smart enough, you saw the lie before jumping in too deep, but the idea that it was the all the hapless pawns fault, is idiotic.
3x your annual income? So don't ever buy a house, anywhere in California? I'm sure all my neighbors with the $2 million houses aren't raking in 600,000 every year, yet I'd call them a damn good credit risk, with next to no chance of defaulting.
You must live in an incredibly cheap area, with decent jobs. Be glad you have those easy options, but stop assuming the rest of the world looks like your back yard.
If the massive high pressure pipelines going to a natural gas plant rupture, dozens of people in the immediate vicinity will be killed. I say this, because it has happened several times. How many people were killed by the problems at Fukishima? And if you want to talk about long term health effects, i'm sure someone will be kind enough to come along and explain how we're all being slowly killed by coal power plants.
And by way of analogy, when an airplane crashes, we dont look long and hard at whether we should outlaw flight... It gets pinned on those that did a poor job in engineering, maintenance, etc.
This strikes me as a bit of marketing. Everyone knows the ultra precise atomic clocks are as good as it gets, but cheap, less precise atomic clocks have been around for quite some time. In fact, you can do better with a high end temperature regulated quartz clock than a cheap atomic. And quartz offers the full range of options in between. I don't see any data on accuracy in tfa, so I'm going to assume it's slightly more accurate than a wrist watch...
http://ieee.li/pdf/viewgraphs/precision_frequency_generation.pdf
There exist both usb and bluetooth keyboards. And with combo iPad case/stands with integrated keyboards, you'd have a hard time telling the difference between a netbook at iPad + keyboard from a distance.
As an added bonus, the Android tablets are much more open. So you can buy something like an Archos 70 for $200, and upgrade the firmware to make it a full Linux tablet with X11, KDE, etc. Hell, Archos even has a 250GB model. Frankly, tablets are probably more capable than netbooks, thanks to bluetooth allowing much more expansion options.
Anybody with a tiny bit of knowledge about radio wave propagation, and a portable device with a wifi signal strength meter, could track it down to within a small area in a few minutes. I can't imagine why you think broadcasting high power radio signals could ever be even remotely difficult to trace.
It's true that, in IT there is a dearth of entry level positions, and everyone wants someone with years of work experience. While that's a serious problem, it's a different discussion all together. There's a similar problem of companies always hiring outside, rather than promoting internally, which is also related, but still a seperate discussion.
Assuming you aren't hiring entry level people, it's crucially important that you base your hiring decision on something which can't be faked or spun, or else you'll just get good liars, those with no perspective, etc.
Out and out liars are one thing. Then you get big fish, little pond type problems. Or worse, previous companies with extremely low standards, or at least job title inflation, turning out "senior" engineers who can barely struggle their way through the most basic task.
And some of the most frustrating are people with considerable skill, but no standards... sure, you got that up and working quickly, and the performance is impressive, but it'll take two years of finding major bugs, and having to fundamentally redesign things over and over, before it works acceptably. And no, you're mever being given access to production so you can push out your latest junk code without anybody double checking. And no, pushing out your debugging code to production is not acceptable, even if you're having a hard time reproducing the bug...
Actually, even worse are those who can't even be convinced the bugs are unacceptable, and expect the whole world to work around them. So your code works perfectly for several days, then silently stops behaving and needs semaphores removed before it can be restarted properly? Yes, it would be possible for others to workaround these issues, but no, that's not acceptable, and if it makes it's way into production before anyone notices, and you can't be bothered to fix it, expect a late night phone call each and every time it happens.
But I digress. If you are hiring people, a previous job title, years of experience, a certification, glowing references or assertions of excellence are absolutely meaningless, yet are commonly enough to get a person hired.
Actually... Considering that Apple wholesale integrated large parts of FreeBSD into OS X, then iOS, which is powering obscene numbers of iPhone's and iPads, it's actually doing pretty damn well. Or something like JunOS in Juniper hardware that is blatantly purely FreeBSD. In fact you'd have a hard time finding a Unix-like OS that hasn't taken large amounts of code from the BSD code base, Linux included. Hell, whenever FreeBSD gets some driver first, it gets ported to Linux quickly. I don't hear any GPL'ers complaining that it's an icky license so they don't want to touch the code, though they have been known to violate the copyright and claim it is their work, fully GPL'd.
So, yes, you can get popular if you strategically place yourself so that YOU can use the resources of your competition, but they can't use yours, and yet you can still claim you're the "free" option. Thanks GPL! I don't mean to sound bitter, because I'm not. I just get annoyed by idiots like this.
Frankly, if all open source was GPL'd, we'd have no open standards to speak of. It wasn't. FreSSH that caught on, it was OpenSSH. Even as crufty as NFS was looking years ago, none of the GPL'd network filesystems made ANY headway. Just list them all, and fine one that wasn't originally MITX/BSD licensed... Apache, OpenSSL, X11, FTPd, Sendmail, Bind, etc.
Inflation is well known and well understood, and every idiot knows how to adjust for it, and does so, yet these 2X benefits remain. Furthermore, inflation stays around 3%, so it would take several decades for inflation to undermine any increases in GDP, and that's simply far longer time scales than we're talking about.
So, you're utterly wrong, and pretty stupid to try to pose such a lame excuse.
There are many other reasons than "printing money". You might notice oil prices skyrocket and fall, even while US currency remains stable. They don't double the amount of currency in circulation, then pull 75% of it out again. High energy prices causes food prices to perhaps double in a few short years, through no fault of the treasury. The same is true of any naturally limited commodity, where demand has grown. The sky rocketing real estate prices didn't have anything to do with "printing money" either.
It's not true that the only thing of value is something you can hold in your hand. That's just crazy survivalist mentality speaking.
IT revolutionized businesses, all around the world, including manufacturing, mining, and anything else you can name. While it has drastically reduced operating costs, it's a "service", and you're dismissing growth in that area completely, for no good reason. Then you should consider that these services growing means US companies are providing services to other countries, including the likes of China... I know this, because I get called at 3am on a routine bases, because some server or network issue in our data center is holding up the work of hundreds of people in China, and costing them money...
More than that, it's important to look towards the future. I'm sure you'd have been attacking the growth of industrial manufacturing, during the turn of the industrial age, because it's not real growth, like good old agriculture and skilled apprenticeships are...
Anyhow, the future of manufacturing isn't all the bright. It's a bad time to be a spot-welder, as machines pretty much exclusively do that work, now. As those worthless "service sector" IT technologies improve, expect even more people to be replaced. And what's more, it looks like truly disruptive change is just out on the horizon. 3D printers can make a lot of the same cheap crap China is making for us, and can do so in a value-added, personalized, and immensely more convenient way. Computerization of previously simple mechanical parts means less and less labor, and more high tech jobs. Major improvements in solar PV panels could put a lot of people out of work, too. And all it takes is for one company to come up with a humanoid robot with the same senses and dexterity of a human, that only costs a few million dollars, and you'd immediately see ALL simple repetitive jobs fully automated, leaving just those "service" jobs.
And it's not just IT. Those wiley scientists are pretty damn important, too. Even if China had all the manufacturing jobs in the world, but outsourced the product designs to western scientists, we'd still be in good shape.
And while I'm not a big fan of financial services, they do provide a valuable service, and can make a lot of money even without exploiting or cheating anyone. It's considered a good indicator of the health of the economy when money is getting most efficiently invested. Just think, there would be no manufacturing without the finance people to give loans, or invest in the fledgling company. You simply can't boot-strap a major indu
It's not rhetorical. The answer is: About half as much as was created via all that government intervention. Which is precisely the point. The's no mystery. It's a real and verifiable figure. If you want to dispute it, you need facts.
You've done nothing to refute the value of GDP. Asserting your dogma is right, and bthe facts and figures are wrong, is not compelling. Try some evidence to back up your claims, and someone might listen to you. Otherewise, suck it up and admit you can't argue with those facts, even if you don't like them.
In most of those cases, it's a bunch of marketing nonsense. Yeah, Microsoft people were poo-pooing the ipod and the internet. It wasn't a bad prediction, though, it was just marketing. If you can't cash in, try hard to undermind confidence and interest in your competitors products... right up until you have something competetive to sell, then it's the next big thing, and you're the visionary bringing it to market...
Besides, it's a short, worthless article. Try this one instead;
http://listverse.com/2007/10/28/top-30-failed-technology-predictions/
That government spending (on infrastructure in particular) increases the GDP by about double the amount they spent, isn't something you can choose to "subscribe" to. It's pretty much just a simple, extensivley confirmed, undeniable fact.
This is your own fault for watching "local" news, or the morning semi-newsy entertainment shows. The real news is on CBS or ABC at 4:30am. It takes hours of reading the headlines to get the info they provide in 30 minutes (actually 20 without commercials).
And that's just the top of the heap. The nightly "world" news programs are damn respectable too. As is ABC's hours of late night news. Saying TV news is no good, based on local news is like saying tv is no good because reality tv shows suck. There's plenty of non crap, if you try to find it.
Horror of horrors! That's obviously FAR too many, and this MUST BE STOPPED!
Wide format printouts are indeed one place dot matrix printers are hanging on. Have you priced a wide format laser printer? Sometimes you just can't justify spending several thousand on a wide format laser printer, and it's too much work to completely reformat the reports, so you keep the old epson crawling along, always just a bit longer.
Comcast is ginormous. So ginormous they can buy up entire networks on a whim. Dish Network had a showdown with Viacom over carry fees, and won. Comcast can do the same, and even better...
Frankly, it's the cable companies that MAKE the cable networks. If the fees for X are too high, go out and FIND a competior in the same space, throw money and eyeballs at them, and once it's clear they're a good enough alternative, get rid of the pricey incumbent.
Not that I care, anymore, mind you. 3 years without cable and counting. OTA DTV rocks. Why have 200 channels rebroadcasting what was originally broadcast on a handful of OTA networks, when DVRs exist? And why tolerate the ever more intrusive advertising? Antenna + Hulu + Netflix is so vastly superior to cable that I'm amazed people aren't leaving in droves.
And don't bother complaining about sports. Yes, if you're ultra-super die-hard sports fan, you'll pay whatever anybody asks. If you're more reasonable, all major events are on the major broadcast networks, and Universal Sports fits snugly in that NBC sub-channel covering all those olympic / world cup sports, and several other off-beat options, non-stop, around the clock.
You're delusional. the schmuck doesn't have an alternative source of power. And everyone demanding green power immediately would lead to a massive environmental catastrophy, as power companies suddenly expand. Just look at biodiesel in europe causing deforestation.
Efficiency is the ultimate in being green. Computerization even with poor efficiency led to massive gains in itself. This is just politics, wanting more news stories.
Frankly, I believe the greenest way to go is to go as cheap as possible, and starve the beast. Excess packaging ceased to be an issue as price pressure was cuting into profits. Ditto for the fuel efficiency of shipping, and commercial vehicles. Buying green means buying more expensive, giving them more profits, and more money they can use to destroy the world. And besides that, money isn't green. Paying more means you have to emit more pollution to generate that extra income to pay the bills.
"Cheap" is an extremely good proxy for "green". More expensive is not green, it's a hypocritical, feel good, political statement.
Honestly, all that matters is that each region has a uniform standard, and is large enough that economies of scale will kick in.
You're unlikely to take your car to Japan with you, and what's more, since we're only really talking about SIGNALING, it's only going to take a few dollars worth of electronics to do the conversion. Sure, a $20 adapter so you can use your electric razor on another continent is inconvenient, but a $20 adapter so you can use you CAR? No problem.
Now, if the EU can't agree on a standard, that would be a problem. Wander across the border from Germany to France and you can't charge your car... Oops. And the added expense for charging stations to maintain two or more sets of chargers for different countries' vehicles wouldn't be cheap or easy to maintain.
Come to think of it... Are electric cars and hybrids coming with normal electrical outlets installed? 120/240V ? They really should. Could eliminate the "car adapter" market over-night, make traveling much easier and add a tremendous amount of utility to an electric vehicle... Even if utility power goes out, EVERYONE with an electric car could have a substantial backup. I can imagine lightning fast tire changes if you can power your impact tools on the road... But I digress.
As they say, as goes Estonia, so goes Lichtenstein! Clearly Japan is on course to dominate the world...