I understand the whole portability issue is just terrible, but, as a technology goes, I have to say that this is really cool. Everyone else can talk about Javascript, but this technology opens up the browser to any kind of a language in it.
I think it is fascinating, and fun. Assembly language on a browser, why not?
Would this be "Super-Infiniband", or "Super-Duper-Infiband..."... kinda tough to come up with a nickname that tops infinity. Who would have thought that Intel marketing might trap itself in the child's game of saying.. "Well I have 2x infinity bandwidth..." "I have infinity infinity bandwidth"...
Maybe they should just go straight to "Stay out of my airspace. Quit touching me! I'm not touching you! You are in my airspace.... hahah, my hand is just at the edge of your airspace but its in mine..."
Sniff...I'm so proud of you, stork. But you do realize you're going to have to give up your wingnut merit badge for being rational, right?
I'll keep the wingnut merit badge. I actually wrote a letter to National Review entitled "Obama is more conservative than you are." The best tell tale proof of this is to go have a look at Reagan's 196x speech to the RNC, or even his 1980 convention speech, as compared to Obama's victory speech, and honestly, you'd find that they aren't really saying anything differently.
Conservatism is supposed to about rationality and let you liberals get all dreamy eyed about the rosy world of the future. But, my friends in the conservative movement are married to a model of enterprise and trade that has, by any reasonably -conservative- standard of assessment, have failed. How can you defend the idea of global investment and free trade when it has so obviously failed, not once, but repeatedly, over the last few decades. This bank bailout is not the first the USA has had to do... remember RTC?
I mean, the whole point of conservatism is a sort of a nationalism in disguise, but how can you be a nationalist when you favor an economic policy that leaves our cities torched so that you can drive a slightly better kind of imported car. Can't see the family values in families unemployed, can't see the patriotism in supporting the rights of foreign companies over american ones. Don't see the community in an economic policy that leaves communities devastated at the whims of investment banks.
It's like, the most ridiculous thing I saw at the NRO was something to the effect of "free trade is the american way, so therefor, I will buy a japanese car and let detroit fend for itself."... like, woah... last time I checked, and i don't mean to pick on the japanese, but, its salient, that the UAW membership is far more likely to have Americans fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan than the fraternity of MBA graduates on Wall Street. Like, I don't get how union guys get such a beating for asking for, gasp, $17/hour and health care, and that's the reason the USA is in trouble?
If you are going to wave the flag, wave it for everyone in the land. That's what I say.
There are various trolls routinely claiming to belong to the
Racism is not exclusively a right wing thing. In fact, I would argue that people who say that they are not racist in some degree, as the left does, are probably the most racist people of them all.
A real conservative would have had a real problem with paying 2.5 trillion USD for schools and broadband in Iraq much less in the US.
Agreed but only Pat Buchanan in the conservative movement consistently opposed the war before it started. After that time, conservative columnists routinely cited various statistics about American lead reconstruction efforts to show that Bush's nation building was working.
Paradoxically, the Surge has succeeded and in doing so conservatives might well make the argument that Bush has, in fact, won the war in Iraq. He's got a democracy in that survived a mass insurgency. The Iraqi standard of living has consistently been going up since the invasion, violence aside. All of those things point to the idea that federal intervention can actually work, if done properly. I mean, if Republicans could actually build a working democracy and an economy in a country that was functionally destroyed, why could it not be done in the USA?
that leaves American workers free to, you know, do the thinking that's required to make these products
The flaw in your line of reasoning is that, you assume that somehow the American worker can think better than his Chinese counterpart. It's the height of hubris to build America into this "knowledge" economy and let manufacturing go to do it, because, Chinese people are just as smart as we are.
when in fact government can only redistribute wealth from productive uses to unproductive ones
That's actually not true. The government establishes an infrastructure which allows for wealth to be created. Microsoft could not exist without copyright law as applied to software, and it is the government that created that. Nor could Microsoft exist without a knowledgeable work force to build on... public education is also something government does, and, the government has, since the 1940s, supported the university system as part of a need to beat the germans and then the russians at the tech game. Government is the arteries on which the capillaries of commerce flow.
Oh my Gosh. Here I am the most right wing guy on slashdot and I'm about to go and defend Obama's proposals for infrastructure spending in general, and national broadband and school computing in particular.
a. ubiquity creates new industries. If broadband is something nearly everyone has in the USA, then, you have a much easier time making a business case for a new kind of service. The USA has built railroads with federal help before, knowing that putting railroads would pump the economy, and it did. Then, roads did the same thing. Broadband won't be any different.
b. computers in schools works. Yes, a lot of kids play games on school computers but there will be those kids who are not as well off but interested in learning to program that will use them. I know I'm grateful to all the computer stores and schools back in the 1980s that let me learn programming in the lab and I think that there's other kids like me out there.
Note that I wouldn't restrict this to just computers. I would like to see schools have shop classes with real presses, CNC machines, and other tools of the art so that kids can get some hands on real things prior to joining the real world.
c. My stock retort to other conservatives that would oppose this government spending would be, you had no problem spending 2.5T on building schools and broadband in Iraq, but why can't you support that in the USA?
d. Hands on experience in computing and manufacturing is a national security issue. The USA needs to know how to manufacture its own goods. I would offer as exhibit A, World War II. It's handy for national security when you have a ton of manufacturing centers that can be quickly converted to produce for wartime needs. Indeed, has the USA had a better manufacturing base, maybe we wouldn't have had to wait for five years and four thousand dead to get decent armoured vehicles into combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By extension, those who pine for the old cold war days with Russian and for a stronger NATO should also be reminded that a part of our military obligation to our alliance partners is to have an economy capable of sustaining manufacturing in the event our allied economies are destroyed. It benefits Europe if the USA is capable of manufacturing its own products as that know-how can be shared with the continent.
So yeah, I think Obama's on the right track with a big infrastructure stimulus. I think Republicans would be better suited to argue what to build, rather than not to build at all, given that they already blew several times Obama's figure on rebuilding Iraq.
I dunno, what environmental legislation did that republican congress pass?
Tax credits for biofuels, including research funding for non-corn based ethanol production - like switchgrass. Increased funding for solar and wind research and tax credits for the same. Tax credits for the purchase of hybrid cars. Also worked to open the way for new nuclear power plants.
Next, we need to convince them professional sports and country music lowers sperm count.
AS opposed to what? Sitting around and nitting with Grandma while listening to some R&B? I'll concede that the mid 1960s through the 1970s, rock was untouchable, but if you think today's slop called rock can even hold a candle to country, you are sadly not very open minded.
It's not the pollution that is the problem, its the nutcases that are out there in the green movement. The green movement has linked itself to a wide range of radical liberal issues that include an assault on christianity as one of its planks. For that, I think it reasonable for a cynical mind to question whether the environmental motives of the green movement are really just about the environment, or are part of an anti-american agenda.
Still, for all of that, you see the pattern of the Republicans (except for W), being the party that actually gets major environmental legislation passed. Let's see:
EPA - founded by Nixon Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Nixon, then, extended by Bush Sr... Bush Jr - creates largest protected eco area around the Hawaiian islands.
I've long said that the internet would turn the world upside down as much as the printing press did 500 years ago, and this is one of the ways.
People are smart enough to know that our entire ruling class - the first, second, third and fourth estates, all slant information to suit their own ends. No one trusts their leaders and the constant bickering among the different classes at the top only serves to amplify this distrust. But, before, this distrust meant that people could only be isolated, with a few prayed on by the conspiracy industry.... but now that everyone can talk to anyone, this distrust of institution has exploded. You don't have to worry that the media, government, and scientific community might call you a crackpot, when you can find an easy 10,000 people that agree with you.
How the hell does a volcanic island chain in the middle of the ocean not capable of making geothermal a primary energy source? Geothermal is simple - you need water and heat and Hawaii has plenty of both.
The real problem is that Detroit HAD no real competition because we all say buy American
Two things.
First off, the engines and transmissions in most American cars are made in the USA. Cars built in the USA from other countries still ship their engines here for the most part. The engine and tranny is the most complicated part of the car and in a sense, the soul of a car company is the engines that it makes. That is why they call it General Motors, and not General Cars.
Secondly, I'm in favor of rethinking this whole free trade concept. Free trade calls for participants to trade fairly and evenly. While there is some squabbling between the USA and the EU, by and large, trade between those countries is fair. On the other hand, the rest of the world views the West as a dumping ground for its goods. Seriously, go look at even Bush's trade representative white papers and you'll see the same complaints about Japan and Korea that have been on the books now for thirty years. China is no different and complaints against them will never be resolved.
In my mind, as soon as Bush decided to A) spend a ton of money and lives in a federal project to bring democracy to Iraq, and then B) bail out the very investment banks and firms that have been begging for more free trade and deregulation, then, he took the idea of laisez faire government off of the table for the time being. The free market f--- up. The banks were stupid, and our manufacturing lost. So there's no victory at all for the USA in any aspect of trade. Hey, we're not as good as the rest of the world. There's a thing as too much competition and we need to put up the shields, regroup, and retool society so that we can be competitive again someday. Right now, we are not.
Viewed in that context, fixing Detroit and the rest of the US manufacturing system is going to take a lot more than just a bailout to GM and asking the union to accept working for the same wages as their chinese counterparts. It's going to take a serious re-investment into our school system, a cultural change that encourages geekdom... the guys that tinker with tools in the shop need to be encouraged and we need to have these people get educated with the calculus and engineering disciplines. So, there needs to be a path from vocational education to college and we need to have curricula that links the sciences to the thing of making tools.
While we are at it, we might trade exchanging physical goods for a freeer trade of ideas and invention. Why should a third world country be held back from manufacturing because of a patent in the first world? If they can make their own stuff, and the first world makes its own stuff and everyone shares in the knowledge, then you don't have a topsy turvy capital world where goods are being moved all over the planet in response to some fat-ass investor, that just received a giant federal bailout, looking to maximize a profit.
I know that there are many conservatives out there that would reject that as a heavy handed federal intervention, but, all of these things are geared towards making America more self sufficient, and I think self-sufficiency, self-reliance, inventiveness were conservative values. If the Republican Party needs to change one thing, it needs to become the party of the conservative family guy trying to make something in the shop to get ahead, more than the MBA making 250k a year bitching about his taxes. The former is actually useful, and the latter is not.
I am by no means a big union fanboy... but I've seen more people dump more shit on the auto industry in the last month, in on the unions in particular, and I'm just colorblind with rage. I mean, Detroit's asking for 35 billion dollars in bailouts and we say that's ridiculous, when our own service sector of banking and insurance just evaporated 4 trillion dollars in national wealth because our goddamned software could not adequately forecast credit correctly. GM never fucked up as bad as IT did.
Yeah, like the IT sector has room to talk about greed. We just have greedy management that is worth something. Like, we bitch about the unions having all of this work, and we get paid easily two to three times as much as a line worker on the assembly line to sit on our asses in air conditioned offices, munching on company provided food and bitch that the free coffee isn't starbucks. Yeah, there should not be a single fucking person on this board saying that the UAW is greedy for $45/hour in wages and benefits when more than a few of us have pimps that charge easily double or triple or that to companies for our hourly rates. We complain about how terrible it is that the UAW has a "jobs bank" and yet we all seem to enjoy at least some bench time in the consulting world and its the same goddamned thing.
The only thing that sets us apart from Detroit is that the present IT companies are still largely run by their founders and so are making money. But, 20 years from now, Microsoft will be sinking, Oracle will be in the tank, Apple will be the Chrysler of IT... you watch. Even Linux will wind up drowning in its own dogma over that course of time as the original generations that actually know how computers work will be replaced by a bunch of javascript drones.
IT is as doomed to be just as byzantine as the US auto-industry.... it's successful, and the greedy just descend on it like locusts... today's stupid PMs are tomorrow's CEOs.
Instead of a promise not sue, why not just take the extra step and just have a subscription service? The university ponies up like $10 a month per student, and the students can share all the files they want to. Instead of looking like trying to run a protection racket, the recording company actually looks, well enlightened, rather than like a bunch of Dons...
It's all well and good to have a bunch of people talking together, but at the end of the day, the UN is utterly useless, and ultimately, the world's going to come looking for the USA for a way out, and then the Americans will quietly ask the British what they think, the French will chime in with their opinion whether anyone likes it or not, and after that brief bit of backchannel talking, the USA will wind up doing something that Europe hailed in private and condemned in public, except for the British, and their people will bitch about the Americans do it, not because its wrong, but they will insist that the British would have done it better had they still had their empire.
This thing sounds so gay it makes my rear hurt. Whatever happened to the simple concept of a bunch of people in space and scantily clad women blowing up a bunch of fracking toasters. Give me some liberal preaching and moralizing every now and then, that's cool over a drink, but at the end, I don't want to watch a tv show about someone else's mental problems. I vote for Bush twice and I have enough of my own!
The researcher is employed to do a specific job. The results of that job belong to the employer, and nothing else. If a company pays you to write a piece of code, or engage in some kind of development, they usually have a bunch of dudes in suits and the god aweful ms-project tracking that everything you do is germain to the task at hand. If you engage in ancillary work that you might think might be helpful, but is not on the plan, you get the shaft.
To bring us back to a higher level. You pay a cleaner to clean your bathroom. If you aren't paying him to clean your garage, you don't the obligation for him or her to do so. If you pay a scientist to go and cure cancer, and, on his own time and dime, that scientist cures aids, so long as the scientist is delivering research per the project plan that you have set out for the cancer, and uses his own time and resources to cure aids, then you don't get that research.
Employment pays for jobs to get done and is not indentured servitude.
At some point, people will get so pissed off at getting poked, prodded, searched, scanned, monitored and tracked to see if they are terrorists, that they will wind up deciding that it is actually easier to become terrorists themselves.
I think Vista is better than XP and by a long mile. In fact, as much as I like Linux, I think Vista is better than that but the problem Microsoft has is that they've let the.NET people paint the operating system as some unnecessary thing and while that's good for.NET, its not so good for Windows. Some people WANT an operating system to have more low level APIs and features and Vista has them - but Microsoft never markets them because they are so myopically focused on.NET at the marketing level.
It's just stupid. Ozzie's whole "the web is everything" is the cancer of Microsoft.
The way I see it, GM's big financial mistake was agreeing to a stupid pension scheme. That's at most a 25-50B mistake.
105k year for a family isn't really a lot of money.... but even then, 105k a year isn't what a union autoworker brings home. The thing is, Toyota's built in the south are paying their workers $8 an hour, and GM workers are bringing home around $17 on average.
I would hardly call $17 an hour extravagant and $8 an hour is damn near indentured servitude, and for what, so some traitors can have a better dash on their car... make some statement about how they love the assholes that have yet to apologize for invading china more than they do their neighbors that landed at okinawa? It utterly boggles the mind that we did not hang hirohito as a war criminal and ban the imperial family just like we banned the nazis.
You can moan about free trade all you want. But free trade is an idea that came and was tried and failed and all we really have is a bunch of foreigner vultures opportunistically picking at Americans and exploiting the rampant disloyalty of a ruling class that exhorts others to wars that it does not fight in, expands the spending of government but does not pay for it, and pits its citizens like animals against the rest of the planet, all so they can get richer, while driving wages down for everyone else, and, at the end of the day... when they screw up, they come asking us stiffs for a goddamned bailout, and finally, when we ask for a bailout of the fraction of that, they balk.
We can't assign someone to write down every bite that goes into every mouth. If we track grocery purchases, there's no understanding of who in a household is eating what
Yes, but, its a start and you should expect to see an increase in alzheimer's in a household that eats a certain ingredient, do you not? Participants in the study would perhaps be able to veto the things they did not eat and you could also develop metholodologies to predict their reporting compliance.
Any approach is fraught with privacy issues that would have to be taken very seriously.
There wouldn't be privacy issues. The people who participate would be volunteers and I would be willing to bet that thousands of volunteers would be able to see what they eat.
What data would be collected? The type of data we're interested in changes as we learn more. Had this program been started in the fifties, would we have known at the time to make distinctions between saturated and unsaturated, omega-3 and omega-6, HDLs and LDLs?
Well, as an open system, yes, you would think that researchers could conduct historical studies to associate chemical tags of interest to various SKUs in the system.
Would this tracking account for things we've learned recently, like the fact that organic produce generally has more nutrients than their conventional counterparts?
Why couldn't it? If you've got a unique id on each item there's no reason that it can't be annotated back with historical information, if it needs to be researched. Look, if diet causes alzheimers, then, there's only so many different kinds of food products out there that people will eat in a lifetime. And... a lot of people tend to settle down into eating the same sorts of things - get the cheerios for breakfast, some fruits, etc.
3) When can we start expecting results? Some effects are the result of decades of behavior.
It may take decades, but it is something that guarantees us the ability to find dietary links to -any- disease. I mean hell, we might find out that fruit loops increases the incidence of homosexuality and count chocola eaters tend to wind up republican. IT could make for some good stuff.
But in any case, we both know that, doing what we're doing, the mouse torturing broad won't have yielded anything. It will be the same story from now as it is today. We'll be losing the race against bacteriological illness, can't comprehend viral illness, and we won't have a real cure for cancer or any other illness.
Slashdot Mirror
I understand the whole portability issue is just terrible, but, as a technology goes, I have to say that this is really cool. Everyone else can talk about Javascript, but this technology opens up the browser to any kind of a language in it.
I think it is fascinating, and fun. Assembly language on a browser, why not?
Would this be "Super-Infiniband", or "Super-Duper-Infiband..."... kinda tough to come up with a nickname that tops infinity. Who would have thought that Intel marketing might trap itself in the child's game of saying.. "Well I have 2x infinity bandwidth..." "I have infinity infinity bandwidth"...
Maybe they should just go straight to "Stay out of my airspace. Quit touching me! I'm not touching you! You are in my airspace.... hahah, my hand is just at the edge of your airspace but its in mine..."
Sniff...I'm so proud of you, stork. But you do realize you're going to have to give up your wingnut merit badge for being rational, right?
I'll keep the wingnut merit badge. I actually wrote a letter to National Review entitled "Obama is more conservative than you are." The best tell tale proof of this is to go have a look at Reagan's 196x speech to the RNC, or even his 1980 convention speech, as compared to Obama's victory speech, and honestly, you'd find that they aren't really saying anything differently.
Conservatism is supposed to about rationality and let you liberals get all dreamy eyed about the rosy world of the future. But, my friends in the conservative movement are married to a model of enterprise and trade that has, by any reasonably -conservative- standard of assessment, have failed. How can you defend the idea of global investment and free trade when it has so obviously failed, not once, but repeatedly, over the last few decades. This bank bailout is not the first the USA has had to do... remember RTC?
I mean, the whole point of conservatism is a sort of a nationalism in disguise, but how can you be a nationalist when you favor an economic policy that leaves our cities torched so that you can drive a slightly better kind of imported car. Can't see the family values in families unemployed, can't see the patriotism in supporting the rights of foreign companies over american ones. Don't see the community in an economic policy that leaves communities devastated at the whims of investment banks.
It's like, the most ridiculous thing I saw at the NRO was something to the effect of "free trade is the american way, so therefor, I will buy a japanese car and let detroit fend for itself."... like, woah... last time I checked, and i don't mean to pick on the japanese, but, its salient, that the UAW membership is far more likely to have Americans fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan than the fraternity of MBA graduates on Wall Street. Like, I don't get how union guys get such a beating for asking for, gasp, $17/hour and health care, and that's the reason the USA is in trouble?
If you are going to wave the flag, wave it for everyone in the land. That's what I say.
There are various trolls routinely claiming to belong to the
Racism is not exclusively a right wing thing. In fact, I would argue that people who say that they are not racist in some degree, as the left does, are probably the most racist people of them all.
A real conservative would have had a real problem with paying 2.5 trillion USD for schools and broadband in Iraq much less in the US.
Agreed but only Pat Buchanan in the conservative movement consistently opposed the war before it started. After that time, conservative columnists routinely cited various statistics about American lead reconstruction efforts to show that Bush's nation building was working.
Paradoxically, the Surge has succeeded and in doing so conservatives might well make the argument that Bush has, in fact, won the war in Iraq. He's got a democracy in that survived a mass insurgency. The Iraqi standard of living has consistently been going up since the invasion, violence aside. All of those things point to the idea that federal intervention can actually work, if done properly. I mean, if Republicans could actually build a working democracy and an economy in a country that was functionally destroyed, why could it not be done in the USA?
that leaves American workers free to, you know, do the thinking that's required to make these products
The flaw in your line of reasoning is that, you assume that somehow the American worker can think better than his Chinese counterpart. It's the height of hubris to build America into this "knowledge" economy and let manufacturing go to do it, because, Chinese people are just as smart as we are.
when in fact government can only redistribute wealth from productive uses to unproductive ones
That's actually not true. The government establishes an infrastructure which allows for wealth to be created. Microsoft could not exist without copyright law as applied to software, and it is the government that created that. Nor could Microsoft exist without a knowledgeable work force to build on... public education is also something government does, and, the government has, since the 1940s, supported the university system as part of a need to beat the germans and then the russians at the tech game. Government is the arteries on which the capillaries of commerce flow.
Oh my Gosh. Here I am the most right wing guy on slashdot and I'm about to go and defend Obama's proposals for infrastructure spending in general, and national broadband and school computing in particular.
a. ubiquity creates new industries. If broadband is something nearly everyone has in the USA, then, you have a much easier time making a business case for a new kind of service. The USA has built railroads with federal help before, knowing that putting railroads would pump the economy, and it did. Then, roads did the same thing. Broadband won't be any different.
b. computers in schools works. Yes, a lot of kids play games on school computers but there will be those kids who are not as well off but interested in learning to program that will use them. I know I'm grateful to all the computer stores and schools back in the 1980s that let me learn programming in the lab and I think that there's other kids like me out there.
Note that I wouldn't restrict this to just computers. I would like to see schools have shop classes with real presses, CNC machines, and other tools of the art so that kids can get some hands on real things prior to joining the real world.
c. My stock retort to other conservatives that would oppose this government spending would be, you had no problem spending 2.5T on building schools and broadband in Iraq, but why can't you support that in the USA?
d. Hands on experience in computing and manufacturing is a national security issue. The USA needs to know how to manufacture its own goods. I would offer as exhibit A, World War II. It's handy for national security when you have a ton of manufacturing centers that can be quickly converted to produce for wartime needs. Indeed, has the USA had a better manufacturing base, maybe we wouldn't have had to wait for five years and four thousand dead to get decent armoured vehicles into combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.
By extension, those who pine for the old cold war days with Russian and for a stronger NATO should also be reminded that a part of our military obligation to our alliance partners is to have an economy capable of sustaining manufacturing in the event our allied economies are destroyed. It benefits Europe if the USA is capable of manufacturing its own products as that know-how can be shared with the continent.
So yeah, I think Obama's on the right track with a big infrastructure stimulus. I think Republicans would be better suited to argue what to build, rather than not to build at all, given that they already blew several times Obama's figure on rebuilding Iraq.
I dunno, what environmental legislation did that republican congress pass?
Tax credits for biofuels, including research funding for non-corn based ethanol production - like switchgrass. Increased funding for solar and wind research and tax credits for the same. Tax credits for the purchase of hybrid cars. Also worked to open the way for new nuclear power plants.
Next, we need to convince them professional sports and country music lowers sperm count.
AS opposed to what? Sitting around and nitting with Grandma while listening to some R&B? I'll concede that the mid 1960s through the 1970s, rock was untouchable, but if you think today's slop called rock can even hold a candle to country, you are sadly not very open minded.
It's not the pollution that is the problem, its the nutcases that are out there in the green movement. The green movement has linked itself to a wide range of radical liberal issues that include an assault on christianity as one of its planks. For that, I think it reasonable for a cynical mind to question whether the environmental motives of the green movement are really just about the environment, or are part of an anti-american agenda.
Still, for all of that, you see the pattern of the Republicans (except for W), being the party that actually gets major environmental legislation passed. Let's see:
EPA - founded by Nixon
Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, Nixon, then, extended by Bush Sr...
Bush Jr - creates largest protected eco area around the Hawaiian islands.
What environmental legislation did Clinton sign?
I've long said that the internet would turn the world upside down as much as the printing press did 500 years ago, and this is one of the ways.
People are smart enough to know that our entire ruling class - the first, second, third and fourth estates, all slant information to suit their own ends. No one trusts their leaders and the constant bickering among the different classes at the top only serves to amplify this distrust. But, before, this distrust meant that people could only be isolated, with a few prayed on by the conspiracy industry.... but now that everyone can talk to anyone, this distrust of institution has exploded. You don't have to worry that the media, government, and scientific community might call you a crackpot, when you can find an easy 10,000 people that agree with you.
How the hell does a volcanic island chain in the middle of the ocean not capable of making geothermal a primary energy source? Geothermal is simple - you need water and heat and Hawaii has plenty of both.
Just my two cents worth.
I could see that an EMP pulse couldn't do diddly to a DVD or a CD, but I would think a hard drive might be a different story.
The real problem is that Detroit HAD no real competition because we all say buy American
Two things.
First off, the engines and transmissions in most American cars are made in the USA. Cars built in the USA from other countries still ship their engines here for the most part. The engine and tranny is the most complicated part of the car and in a sense, the soul of a car company is the engines that it makes. That is why they call it General Motors, and not General Cars.
Secondly, I'm in favor of rethinking this whole free trade concept. Free trade calls for participants to trade fairly and evenly. While there is some squabbling between the USA and the EU, by and large, trade between those countries is fair. On the other hand, the rest of the world views the West as a dumping ground for its goods. Seriously, go look at even Bush's trade representative white papers and you'll see the same complaints about Japan and Korea that have been on the books now for thirty years. China is no different and complaints against them will never be resolved.
In my mind, as soon as Bush decided to A) spend a ton of money and lives in a federal project to bring democracy to Iraq, and then B) bail out the very investment banks and firms that have been begging for more free trade and deregulation, then, he took the idea of laisez faire government off of the table for the time being. The free market f--- up. The banks were stupid, and our manufacturing lost. So there's no victory at all for the USA in any aspect of trade. Hey, we're not as good as the rest of the world. There's a thing as too much competition and we need to put up the shields, regroup, and retool society so that we can be competitive again someday. Right now, we are not.
Viewed in that context, fixing Detroit and the rest of the US manufacturing system is going to take a lot more than just a bailout to GM and asking the union to accept working for the same wages as their chinese counterparts. It's going to take a serious re-investment into our school system, a cultural change that encourages geekdom... the guys that tinker with tools in the shop need to be encouraged and we need to have these people get educated with the calculus and engineering disciplines. So, there needs to be a path from vocational education to college and we need to have curricula that links the sciences to the thing of making tools.
While we are at it, we might trade exchanging physical goods for a freeer trade of ideas and invention. Why should a third world country be held back from manufacturing because of a patent in the first world? If they can make their own stuff, and the first world makes its own stuff and everyone shares in the knowledge, then you don't have a topsy turvy capital world where goods are being moved all over the planet in response to some fat-ass investor, that just received a giant federal bailout, looking to maximize a profit.
I know that there are many conservatives out there that would reject that as a heavy handed federal intervention, but, all of these things are geared towards making America more self sufficient, and I think self-sufficiency, self-reliance, inventiveness were conservative values. If the Republican Party needs to change one thing, it needs to become the party of the conservative family guy trying to make something in the shop to get ahead, more than the MBA making 250k a year bitching about his taxes. The former is actually useful, and the latter is not.
All have had greedy management that is worthless.
I am by no means a big union fanboy... but I've seen more people dump more shit on the auto industry in the last month, in on the unions in particular, and I'm just colorblind with rage. I mean, Detroit's asking for 35 billion dollars in bailouts and we say that's ridiculous, when our own service sector of banking and insurance just evaporated 4 trillion dollars in national wealth because our goddamned software could not adequately forecast credit correctly. GM never fucked up as bad as IT did.
Yeah, like the IT sector has room to talk about greed. We just have greedy management that is worth something. Like, we bitch about the unions having all of this work, and we get paid easily two to three times as much as a line worker on the assembly line to sit on our asses in air conditioned offices, munching on company provided food and bitch that the free coffee isn't starbucks. Yeah, there should not be a single fucking person on this board saying that the UAW is greedy for $45/hour in wages and benefits when more than a few of us have pimps that charge easily double or triple or that to companies for our hourly rates. We complain about how terrible it is that the UAW has a "jobs bank" and yet we all seem to enjoy at least some bench time in the consulting world and its the same goddamned thing.
The only thing that sets us apart from Detroit is that the present IT companies are still largely run by their founders and so are making money. But, 20 years from now, Microsoft will be sinking, Oracle will be in the tank, Apple will be the Chrysler of IT... you watch. Even Linux will wind up drowning in its own dogma over that course of time as the original generations that actually know how computers work will be replaced by a bunch of javascript drones.
IT is as doomed to be just as byzantine as the US auto-industry.... it's successful, and the greedy just descend on it like locusts... today's stupid PMs are tomorrow's CEOs.
Instead of a promise not sue, why not just take the extra step and just have a subscription service? The university ponies up like $10 a month per student, and the students can share all the files they want to. Instead of looking like trying to run a protection racket, the recording company actually looks, well enlightened, rather than like a bunch of Dons...
It's all well and good to have a bunch of people talking together, but at the end of the day, the UN is utterly useless, and ultimately, the world's going to come looking for the USA for a way out, and then the Americans will quietly ask the British what they think, the French will chime in with their opinion whether anyone likes it or not, and after that brief bit of backchannel talking, the USA will wind up doing something that Europe hailed in private and condemned in public, except for the British, and their people will bitch about the Americans do it, not because its wrong, but they will insist that the British would have done it better had they still had their empire.
This thing sounds so gay it makes my rear hurt. Whatever happened to the simple concept of a bunch of people in space and scantily clad women blowing up a bunch of fracking toasters. Give me some liberal preaching and moralizing every now and then, that's cool over a drink, but at the end, I don't want to watch a tv show about someone else's mental problems. I vote for Bush twice and I have enough of my own!
The researcher is employed to do a specific job. The results of that job belong to the employer, and nothing else. If a company pays you to write a piece of code, or engage in some kind of development, they usually have a bunch of dudes in suits and the god aweful ms-project tracking that everything you do is germain to the task at hand. If you engage in ancillary work that you might think might be helpful, but is not on the plan, you get the shaft.
To bring us back to a higher level. You pay a cleaner to clean your bathroom. If you aren't paying him to clean your garage, you don't the obligation for him or her to do so. If you pay a scientist to go and cure cancer, and, on his own time and dime, that scientist cures aids, so long as the scientist is delivering research per the project plan that you have set out for the cancer, and uses his own time and resources to cure aids, then you don't get that research.
Employment pays for jobs to get done and is not indentured servitude.
18th century bliss ?
Live on your little farm, eat some turkey that you shot yourself, not too shabby... if you are an American.
try to suggest ways to improve it, instead of scuttling it. what would happen if they scuttled scientific method when it erred a few times ?
There would be no global warming, mass exterminations, nuclear wars, overpopulation... we would all be living in 18th century agrarian bliss.
At some point, people will get so pissed off at getting poked, prodded, searched, scanned, monitored and tracked to see if they are terrorists, that they will wind up deciding that it is actually easier to become terrorists themselves.
I think Vista is better than XP and by a long mile. In fact, as much as I like Linux, I think Vista is better than that but the problem Microsoft has is that they've let the .NET people paint the operating system as some unnecessary thing and while that's good for .NET, its not so good for Windows. Some people WANT an operating system to have more low level APIs and features and Vista has them - but Microsoft never markets them because they are so myopically focused on .NET at the marketing level.
It's just stupid. Ozzie's whole "the web is everything" is the cancer of Microsoft.
Everyone in the Linux camp is trying to paint Vista as a failure but every time I look, really stupid commercials aside, Vista keeps right on selling.
The way I see it, GM's big financial mistake was agreeing to a stupid pension scheme. That's at most a 25-50B mistake.
105k year for a family isn't really a lot of money.... but even then, 105k a year isn't what a union autoworker brings home. The thing is, Toyota's built in the south are paying their workers $8 an hour, and GM workers are bringing home around $17 on average.
I would hardly call $17 an hour extravagant and $8 an hour is damn near indentured servitude, and for what, so some traitors can have a better dash on their car... make some statement about how they love the assholes that have yet to apologize for invading china more than they do their neighbors that landed at okinawa? It utterly boggles the mind that we did not hang hirohito as a war criminal and ban the imperial family just like we banned the nazis.
You can moan about free trade all you want. But free trade is an idea that came and was tried and failed and all we really have is a bunch of foreigner vultures opportunistically picking at Americans and exploiting the rampant disloyalty of a ruling class that exhorts others to wars that it does not fight in, expands the spending of government but does not pay for it, and pits its citizens like animals against the rest of the planet, all so they can get richer, while driving wages down for everyone else, and, at the end of the day... when they screw up, they come asking us stiffs for a goddamned bailout, and finally, when we ask for a bailout of the fraction of that, they balk.
We can't assign someone to write down every bite that goes into every mouth. If we track grocery purchases, there's no understanding of who in a household is eating what
Yes, but, its a start and you should expect to see an increase in alzheimer's in a household that eats a certain ingredient, do you not? Participants in the study would perhaps be able to veto the things they did not eat and you could also develop metholodologies to predict their reporting compliance.
Any approach is fraught with privacy issues that would have to be taken very seriously.
There wouldn't be privacy issues. The people who participate would be volunteers and I would be willing to bet that thousands of volunteers would be able to see what they eat.
What data would be collected? The type of data we're interested in changes as we learn more. Had this program been started in the fifties, would we have known at the time to make distinctions between saturated and unsaturated, omega-3 and omega-6, HDLs and LDLs?
Well, as an open system, yes, you would think that researchers could conduct historical studies to associate chemical tags of interest to various SKUs in the system.
Would this tracking account for things we've learned recently, like the fact that organic produce generally has more nutrients than their conventional counterparts?
Why couldn't it? If you've got a unique id on each item there's no reason that it can't be annotated back with historical information, if it needs to be researched. Look, if diet causes alzheimers, then, there's only so many different kinds of food products out there that people will eat in a lifetime. And... a lot of people tend to settle down into eating the same sorts of things - get the cheerios for breakfast, some fruits, etc.
3) When can we start expecting results? Some effects are the result of decades of behavior.
It may take decades, but it is something that guarantees us the ability to find dietary links to -any- disease. I mean hell, we might find out that fruit loops increases the incidence of homosexuality and count chocola eaters tend to wind up republican. IT could make for some good stuff.
But in any case, we both know that, doing what we're doing, the mouse torturing broad won't have yielded anything. It will be the same story from now as it is today. We'll be losing the race against bacteriological illness, can't comprehend viral illness, and we won't have a real cure for cancer or any other illness.