. I mean really, just how many tenfold or hundredfold times over his employees should the CEO or owner of a company be making?
Can an assembly worker sell a car? That's really the question, isn't it? Because, most people do not know how to sell and it is the salesmanship that matters. A CEO is a salesperson, pure and simple. He or she walks into a room with potential customer, and comes out with millions, if not billions, of dollars in orders. Very few people can do that but if you have a good one, then by all means, your CEO is worth every penny he or she is paid.
If you could go and sell 500 Boeing 787s, or explain to bitter customers why your planes are two years late, or be the guy in charge of GM and tell your dealer network to keep buying cars from you because they really are going to be good -this time-. I mean, you be the CEO of GM or Ford, and walk into a room with a bunch of dealers of large chains complaining about how long is it going to make something smaller and more fuel efficient because the truck you got aren't selling in the more. You be the guy that has to try and explain why your engineers just told you that because of some problem those new vehicles might be late or maybe there is some other tradeoff. CEOs have to take a lot of arrows from bitter customers, go get new customers, and keep the product coming and the lights on. If you could be a good CEO, then start your own company, get out there, and sell. And if you can't sell, then what you make isn't worth crap because you can't persuade anyone otherwise.
A good CEO is worth every penny that they get. They can sell, we can't.
So tell me, since you claim to know, what do CEOs do that is worth $1 million? Stop trying to dodge the question
CEOs are salespeople, pure and simple. A CEO gets paid because they can walk into a room and convince a bunch of people that their company makes the best plane, the best car, or the best sweeper, whatever. A CEO is the ultimate go-to-sales guy for a company. I had the pleasure of working for a great CEO of medium sized company and he would literally walk into a room, charm everyone and come out with millions of dollars in orders.
That, my friend, is why a good CEOs is worth every dime they are paid. If you could walk into a room and sell a billion dollars worth of stuff, you'd be making a hundred million a year too. Those types just don't grow on trees.
I live in Delaware. If I ran as a Republican, I would:
a) Protect students from being sued out of an education for silly copyright violations. We need to protect the internet from a storm of lawsuits and so I would bar the likes of RIAA from trying to bully citizens out of their livelihoods.
b) open up everything for drilling but under a mechanism which allows the benefits of high oil prices to be spent upon the people of the United States. Basically, we'd drill ANWR and offshore but would use the money to pay for a few fiscal priorities that seem rather urgent. These include:
1. national health insurance. American manufacturers and small businesses are so screwed by health insurance that it is now sapping american competitiveness. government is rationing of course. real wages have gone up and by a lot in the USA but its all getting sucked into health care. That's crazy.
2. alternative energy. regardless of what you feel about AGW, the USA needs to have a more diversified energy portfolio for its basic national security. We cannot let the threat of terrorists in the middle east or hurricanes in the gulf continue to hold the USA hostage. The compromises the USA is currently making to get energy are beating the goodness out of our national character just as much as a crack junky makes bad decisions to feed his or her habit. We need energy independence. We need a diversied mix of vehicles to fill in around the single fuel portfolio we have - a mix of electric, biofuel, hydrogen...We need to build nuclear plants like they are going out of style, and we need massive research and engineering in all of these technologies.
3. rail everywhere. we need to switch from the overhead electric caternaries in the northeast to more modern hybrid locomotives and upgrade all the passenger rolling stock. we need to upgrade the rails themselves in some places. tearing down all the wires and switching to hybrid locomotives would be more efficient, and would add to property values in every city located on the rails. also, we should encourage superstores to be located near rail lines and have money for cities that are depopulated to tear down blighted buildings.
4. better unemployment retraining. sometimes in the global economy, your job just evaporates. we can't just have 20 weeks of unemployment for people whose job just evaporated and they need to go back to school to learn a new skill.
d. withdraw us military forces from everywhere. The perception of the USA as some sort of an empire is hurting sales of American products. this is a long term thing and we can't just pull up from iraq immediately and we can't quite leave afghanistan, but, ultimately, the USA needs to have its troops leave every base, everywhere around the world. We want to have US businesses with offices around the world, engaging in friendly trade, not US military bases.
e. be pro-free trade. free trade works and has made the world very wealthy, and it is a system that the USA imposed. For the USA to turn its back on free trade will spawn many, many wars throughout the world, as every other attempt to restrain trade has, and the only time I want to see war is on the History Channel, not CNN.
f. aggressively challenge presidential signing statements. The job of a President is to enforce the laws that Congress passes, period. Presidents do not get to pick and choose what laws they are to enforce, except in due course of fiscal priorities. If the President uses a signing statement to violate a law, regardless of political party, then undo pressure must be brought upon him or her to change their tune or face impeachment.
g. Pro 2nd amendment as a right to keep and bear arms and as ultimately a popular check against government. I would oppose all gun control legislation.
h. I'm a global warming skeptic but I would support a cap and trade system so long as it was illegal to purchase CO2 credits from outside the USA. Our republican criticism of AGW is that it is a back handed att
Of course, you may be right: rallying allies around a common platform might be a good strategy, but it hasn't worked for Microsoft since the first DOS/Windows PCs.
It hasn't because Microsoft pissed away a pretty good image from the DOS / early Windows era. You can only threaten your partners so many times, before other partners learn not to trust you.
I'm assuming that with a sufficiently large asteroid, air resistance would be negligible. For a quick reality check, I think meteor crater in Arizona was made by an apothesis sized asteroid which exploded...and that's a mile wide crater.
The only problem with a do-not-track registry is that it is almost impossible to work with. I mean, you will be creating a list of what, exactly, that somehow a server will have to access, how, that will somehow have a web application to optionally not use cookies? Or somehow not use real e-mail addresses in its database? To some extent, for a lot of web stuff to work, you have to track users activities.
And if all their predictions are based on this erroneous mass, isn't this a case of "Sky is Falling" nonsense?
(I'm doing this off the top of my head, so correct me if I am wrong)...
It's more the times velocity squared side of things that screws us. Let's say our ball hits the earth at 10km/s. Energy is mv^2, returning joules if mass is in kg and velocity is in meters/sec. So, roughly... we're talking 10^4 x 10^4 x 6x10^9 to get roughly 6x10^18 joules, which is like a thousand or so hiroshima sized atomic bombs or maybe a good sized h-bomb... or, maybe a hundred h-bombs (depending on my math) It's a big boom, for sure.
If we use Windows licenses as a proxy for PCs sold, then, it stands to reason that in the year or so since Vista has been introduced, more PCs have been sold since in the last year than Playstations have been sold since inception.
Who knows how big the market for playstation could have been, had Sony opened up the platform in the same way PCs are?
How does a 320 meter iron (and indium) ball end up with 200 Billion tons of mass? 1.33*3.14*160*160*160*8 tons = 136 Million tons
Yah, I think your density of iron might be a bit off but over all, for their estimates to add up, you would have to have the density of iron be around 12,000 tons per cubic meter. Boy, that seems a bit heavy for iron.
I agreed with right up to this paragraph. Microsoft won't win this one. The iPhone will eventually lose out to Asteroid. Microsoft already had their chance in this market. The iPhone blew them out of the water
You know, I won't argue that. It could go that way. Microsoft seems to have lost its way since Ballmer took over the helm and Gates decided to be Mr. Charity.
Look at IBM and the once IBM PC. By being open with their standards and rather loose licensing with Microsft killed the IBM PC Dominate market.
Well, the truth is a bit more complicated than that. IBM's opening up of the PC caused the PC market to expand overall, and IBM clearly benefited from the expansion of PCs. However, IBM made some big missteps along the way that caused its own offerings to gradually lose market share.
1) IBM was beaten to the punch by Compaq on the 386. That's a big ouch. IBM PC ATs were running 286's, which, really were a failed part. Compaq was way ahead of the curve on 386s. IBM, you see, was trying to hold 386s for some more "advanced" offerings and trying to defend the rest of its product line, but Compaq had no such inhibitions.
2) IBM really blew it with the PCjr. PCjr wasn't a bad home computer, but IBM was famous for its keyboards and the chiclet keyboard threw that advantage out the window.
3) IBM really blew it with PS/2. First, IBM closed off PS/2, trying to correct what they saw was a mistake in the PC. In other words, they weren't going to let anyone else do Microchannel motherboards. However, there was a huge aftermarket already for PC cards, and none of that would work with PS/2, so, instead, people went back to the likes of Compaq and Dell.
4) IBM really, really blew it with OS/2. IBM's original SDK prices for OS/2 were out of this world, and furthermore, IBM was already trying to tie OS/2 to its PS/2, frightening developers away with the promise of writing for only a hardware platform that nobody wanted.
The bottom line is, had IBM said that OS/2 would be open, and had shared PS/2 hardware specs with third parties and opened the platform up, quite likely, whatever bus we would be using would be called Microchannel Express, rather than PCI Express, and we would quite likely be running OS/2, rather than Windows.
The moral of the story is, when building hardware, open-ness matters. The more your hardware is open, the more people can connect to it, having partners making clones speeds the adoption of your technology, and it places you much more firmly in the driver's seat. Sure, Apple might look good by making IPhones as closed appliances, but you can bet that when Microsoft finally gets its act together, and rallies around a dozen hardware vendors along a common platform, then Apple is going to get smoked, just as it was when, well, PCs slaughtered Apple the first time around.
I would just add that to the above that means we need to have real enforcement of anti-trust statutes and not rubber stamping as, sigh, has become the case.
One wonders, though, if there is not some structural way that we protect the little guys and thus promote the continual germination of competition to established firms from the grass roots level, so that, as soon as one firm becomes megapoly, then, other firms almost start to sprout up in it and around it.
Security is a feature, like anything else. Pursuing absolute security is bad for both country and company because you ultimately can't have it in either place. Just as much as Bush is wrong for supporting crap like the USA PATRIOT Act and National Security Letters, so too are security people wrong for demanding that businesses become so secure at to be unable to conduct businesses. Accidents will happen, people might have their data stolen and sometimes a building might be blown up, but the flip side of the security coin is a police state nation and a company that fails.
He who trades freedom for security, deserves neither, as Ben Franklin once observed, but I think that we are learning that in this day and age, you don't actually -get- either. So yeah, somebody might ftp something in the plain, and you shouldn't do it, because "they" might get you, and by the same token, every bag on the train must be checked, because "they" might get you. But, sometimes, you have to quit worrying about "they" and focus on what "you" do.
So yeah, the guys that are strong arming security auditors, the business that refuses to invest in security, all of those people are in the right, and the original poster is being like so many security thugs at the airport trying to check my bags already. Buzz off already, dude... we have work to do!
I'm sorry I was using facts and numbers to come up with my assertions.
You weren't. You went into this long diatribe about the evil of Ronald Reagan and had no facts whatsoever, just like all of your liberal friends.
By and large people have been dropping out of the middle class. You give us Bill Gates, but thats just one guy.
I gave you more than that, and I could give you dozens, and you know it. And again, I can give you more statistics about wealth. Per capita energy consumption in the USA is UP, not down, meaning people have more energy. Per capita food consumption in the USA is UP, not down, when viewed as calories per person. Per capita habital volume (size of house + size of cars), is up, and not down.
For every Gates (I won't even get into how he made his money), theres a thousand people dropping into a lower income bracket.
No there isn't. That's just purely made up. I guarantee you this. For every person being foreclosed on because they bought at too high of a price, there are, statistically speaking, at least one hundred that are paying their mortgages on time, just fine.
You seem to be confusing it with modernization. Thats why we have more "stuff".
No, not at all, that's where you miss the point. Modernization is possible because of free trade. You get the capital to build ever more expensive CPU plants and computer plants and car plants from global equities markets because that investment capital can flow globally and be re-patrioted globally. The capital comes because a better technology can be sold world wide. You can't modernize if you do not have the money.
That is a key reason why socialist countries always fail, and incidentally, all the closed trade policies of your liberal friends will wreck the economy. People won't invest in something they don't get a return on, therefor, there will be no modernization and governments won't do it because they are too politically obligated to the workers and protect the status quo. That's why Amtrak still pays guys to be fireman on trains and there hasn't been a coal fired passenger train running in 50 fricking years.
But I'm well past the point where I identify with the Republicans who don't have my economic interests at heart. I also try to look at things objectively, not the "feel" I have in my gut
You aren't looking at anything objectively. You are caught up in wishy washy world of the doomed socialists trying to resurrect the class struggle to turn back a really rising tide of global wealth and a massive human economic success. Lenin and company have brought nothing to this planet but misery and starvation and any more, anywhere socialism has been applied, and they will bring it to the USA if they succeed.
You don't know what your economic interests are. All you want to do is be the guy that can still buy a Japanese car but force governments to "protect" your own job with some sort of regulation. It's a total fraud. Unless you are driving an American car, you are a total fraud, when it comes talking about the middle class.
The Fed thinks we might be in a mild recession. But again, look at what an economic meltdown is. Right now, are there industries where you could go and make money? Why yes, you could make money drilling for oil in North Dakota, you could sell services to coal and copper mines, you could work in energy, in general. There's money in the economy, and its not a Republicans' fault that you are too lazy to go and get it.
I'm well past the point where I identify with the Republicans who don't have my economic interests at heart. Yeah, let's talk about the bogus claim that Democrats make about America making more money for the working man. You know, this country could make billions drilling in Alaska or supporting that, but your Democratic buddies cut that off, and this country could be making billions drilling off of California or the Carolinas, but your Democratic buddies cut that off, and y
moron... obviously, you are just a shill for [republicans|democrats], completely dedicated to [closed source|open source] software to the exclusion of all facts, maniacally intolerant because of your blind devotion to [environmentalism|christianity], unable to see that your ridiculous faith in [capitalism|socialism] is the ruin of all humanity, therefor making you a [jack booted fascist nazi|klan member|islamofascist traitor].
First, it's not the job of media to filter, it's the job of media to inform, news media that is
The media's job is to definitely filter and for the most part, political considerations aside, a good reporting outfit will do exactly that. They have to be attuned to the public and their customers things that they need to know. A good media source is not just information, it is a guide to the world as to what is true and what is not. That's a good media product. Sometimes these filters contain the bias of the reporters, and that's true. The filters are only human.
If however an ISP blocks or slows down traffic from DailyKos or Fox and the person has broadband there's not much choice for switching ISPs.
Fair enough. However, if there were an equal number of viewers for Fox and Kos, then both would pay the same premium bandwidth fees to the ISP and nothing would change.
So a customer of the incumbent, throttling ISP decides they're fed up and they want to move on. They hear by word of mouth that there's this littler place that supports equality, so they go to the website to check it out. The website takes 3.5 minutes to load. Will that customer switch?
That's restraint of trade and gets you, founder of tiny ISP, into anti-trust court.
The students don't know how to do research; therefore, we need to teach them.
Or, more precisely put, there is a demand for a modern encyclopedia that actually has links to credible sources for its facts. By credible sources, we mean, people with some real expertise on the subject, not just some random dude.
Actually the reason the federal government got so strong was because of the Civil War
True to a point, but also some big reforms in the 1890s and onwards also changed that. But it was really Roosevelt who created the modern USA.
Ultimately that's what the civil war was about, it wasn't about slavery.
Actually, it was all about slavery... Slavery was a topic that bedeviled the founding fathers even. Adams, Jefferson, others all admitted their deal with the devils to get through the day and that they punted the problem to future generations. The framers of the constitution blew it off in order to get the south to join the union but a civil war on the issue was more or less inevitable, especially as the north began to figure out how to use machines to be more productive than the southern slave based economy.
Thats the most ridiculous argument that I've heard in a long time. Regan reintroduced social mobility? Bush Jr. continued the trend? Thats just plain asinine. Trickle down economics never worked, and was never intended to. Conservatism was hijacked long ago and turned into some sort of brain washed cult. As is obvious..
Obvious based on what? Do all of those people that took a bunch of tiny companies and turn them into enormous enterprises not exist? I mean, if there is no social mobility, as you say, then, how did Bill Gates get 50 billion dollars from nothing?
There hasn't been "free trade" during any of the time periods you spoke of. Its just another mantra repeated on talk radio until people have decided that it must be good because they hear about it so much without ever asking any questions about how its good for them or how its to be implemented.
Of course there is free trade. Just walk into any store and see all of the thousands of different products you get can from anywhere on the planet.
The government just bailed out Baer Sterns (well, provided a sweetheart deal to JP Morgan)and violated the laws to do so. Is that free trade?
The Fed is the lender of last resort and did its job. Would you have preferred a run on the banks circa 1890s, the kind of run that DEMOCRATS introduced the Federal Reserve to prevent?
The only difference is that now government protection is reserved for large corps and the richest 1% instead of the country as a whole. The only social mobility Reagan introduced was downward social mobility and Bush Jr. is more than happy to continue the trend
So, again, if there is no upward social mobility, how are people like that kid that made FaceBook getting millions of dollars? If there is no upward social mobility, do you mean that Cmdr Taco works at the factory bolting tires onto Chevy's for $18 an hour?
Real wages for all levels of society has historically increased more under democratic presidents than republicans by a large margin.
If that is the case, why then do you always see more people with more stuff during Republican administrations - its because of free enterprise. If wages are so flat, as you say, why is it that people today have way more stuff than their parents did. In the early 1970s, there was no personal computer, and the most powerful computer was a cray. Now, today, everyone who has a decent gaming graphics card has a cray. If that is not the creation of new wealth, well, than what is? Similarly, look at radios. In the 1970s, a radio was a big thing that you carried around but most likely plugged in, and families may have had a couple of them. Now, there are so many radios in a household that people can't even count them. Wireless LANs are radios, computers have radios, wireless car keys have radios, cordless phones have radios... none of that stuff existed, and yet, somehow, you argue that free trade has made people poorer? Poverty means less stuff.
I'm an Independent personally. Republicans like you disgust me. At least you could attempt to be intellectually honest.
you aren't an independent by any stretch of the imagination. You are parrotting all of the left wing talking points about poverty and class warfare and complaining about free trade while at the same time you are sitting there part of a generation that is richer than any human generation has ever been because of it. You don't need statistics to see how well free trade has worked. You only need to look at everything you have, everything everyone else has, look at what people are building throughout the world, and just see the prosperity. It is -everywhere-. Back in the 1970s, the Chinese were dirt poor. Now look at them. That's free trade. Europe was a bankrupt and bombed out backwater. Now look at them. That's free trade.
Reality doesn't have a liberal bias. Sometimes it wishes it could be liberal because the dynamic world has its costs, but at the end of the day, rea
Yea, let's face it. I pay for my connection and Google pays for it's connection. If my ISP throttles Google they are throttling my connection too and I signed no agreement or contract saying they can do that. Providers already have reciprocal agreements to pass on data that goes over their lines.
Your agreement doesn't say that they -can't-. And besides, if you don't like what your ISP gives you, you are more than free to start your own. There's plenty of room in the market for boutique ISPs...
Slashdot Mirror
. I mean really, just how many tenfold or hundredfold times over his employees should the CEO or owner of a company be making?
Can an assembly worker sell a car? That's really the question, isn't it? Because, most people do not know how to sell and it is the salesmanship that matters. A CEO is a salesperson, pure and simple. He or she walks into a room with potential customer, and comes out with millions, if not billions, of dollars in orders. Very few people can do that but if you have a good one, then by all means, your CEO is worth every penny he or she is paid.
If you could go and sell 500 Boeing 787s, or explain to bitter customers why your planes are two years late, or be the guy in charge of GM and tell your dealer network to keep buying cars from you because they really are going to be good -this time-. I mean, you be the CEO of GM or Ford, and walk into a room with a bunch of dealers of large chains complaining about how long is it going to make something smaller and more fuel efficient because the truck you got aren't selling in the more. You be the guy that has to try and explain why your engineers just told you that because of some problem those new vehicles might be late or maybe there is some other tradeoff. CEOs have to take a lot of arrows from bitter customers, go get new customers, and keep the product coming and the lights on. If you could be a good CEO, then start your own company, get out there, and sell. And if you can't sell, then what you make isn't worth crap because you can't persuade anyone otherwise.
A good CEO is worth every penny that they get. They can sell, we can't.
So tell me, since you claim to know, what do CEOs do that is worth $1 million? Stop trying to dodge the question
CEOs are salespeople, pure and simple. A CEO gets paid because they can walk into a room and convince a bunch of people that their company makes the best plane, the best car, or the best sweeper, whatever. A CEO is the ultimate go-to-sales guy for a company. I had the pleasure of working for a great CEO of medium sized company and he would literally walk into a room, charm everyone and come out with millions of dollars in orders.
That, my friend, is why a good CEOs is worth every dime they are paid. If you could walk into a room and sell a billion dollars worth of stuff, you'd be making a hundred million a year too. Those types just don't grow on trees.
I live in Delaware. If I ran as a Republican, I would:
a) Protect students from being sued out of an education for silly copyright violations. We need to protect the internet from a storm of lawsuits and so I would bar the likes of RIAA from trying to bully citizens out of their livelihoods.
b) open up everything for drilling but under a mechanism which allows the benefits of high oil prices to be spent upon the people of the United States. Basically, we'd drill ANWR and offshore but would use the money to pay for a few fiscal priorities that seem rather urgent. These include:
1. national health insurance. American manufacturers and small businesses are so screwed by health insurance that it is now sapping american competitiveness. government is rationing of course. real wages have gone up and by a lot in the USA but its all getting sucked into health care. That's crazy.
2. alternative energy. regardless of what you feel about AGW, the USA needs to have a more diversified energy portfolio for its basic national security. We cannot let the threat of terrorists in the middle east or hurricanes in the gulf continue to hold the USA hostage. The compromises the USA is currently making to get energy are beating the goodness out of our national character just as much as a crack junky makes bad decisions to feed his or her habit. We need energy independence. We need a diversied mix of vehicles to fill in around the single fuel portfolio we have - a mix of electric, biofuel, hydrogen...We need to build nuclear plants like they are going out of style, and we need massive research and engineering in all of these technologies.
3. rail everywhere. we need to switch from the overhead electric caternaries in the northeast to more modern hybrid locomotives and upgrade all the passenger rolling stock. we need to upgrade the rails themselves in some places. tearing down all the wires and switching to hybrid locomotives would be more efficient, and would add to property values in every city located on the rails. also, we should encourage superstores to be located near rail lines and have money for cities that are depopulated to tear down blighted buildings.
4. better unemployment retraining. sometimes in the global economy, your job just evaporates. we can't just have 20 weeks of unemployment for people whose job just evaporated and they need to go back to school to learn a new skill.
d. withdraw us military forces from everywhere. The perception of the USA as some sort of an empire is hurting sales of American products. this is a long term thing and we can't just pull up from iraq immediately and we can't quite leave afghanistan, but, ultimately, the USA needs to have its troops leave every base, everywhere around the world. We want to have US businesses with offices around the world, engaging in friendly trade, not US military bases.
e. be pro-free trade. free trade works and has made the world very wealthy, and it is a system that the USA imposed. For the USA to turn its back on free trade will spawn many, many wars throughout the world, as every other attempt to restrain trade has, and the only time I want to see war is on the History Channel, not CNN.
f. aggressively challenge presidential signing statements. The job of a President is to enforce the laws that Congress passes, period. Presidents do not get to pick and choose what laws they are to enforce, except in due course of fiscal priorities. If the President uses a signing statement to violate a law, regardless of political party, then undo pressure must be brought upon him or her to change their tune or face impeachment.
g. Pro 2nd amendment as a right to keep and bear arms and as ultimately a popular check against government. I would oppose all gun control legislation.
h. I'm a global warming skeptic but I would support a cap and trade system so long as it was illegal to purchase CO2 credits from outside the USA. Our republican criticism of AGW is that it is a back handed att
The ultimate form of revolution is tax cuts. The more you cut taxes, the more the government will collapse.
Of course, you may be right: rallying allies around a common platform might be a good strategy, but it hasn't worked for Microsoft since the first DOS/Windows PCs.
It hasn't because Microsoft pissed away a pretty good image from the DOS / early Windows era. You can only threaten your partners so many times, before other partners learn not to trust you.
In atmosphere, due to air resistance
I'm assuming that with a sufficiently large asteroid, air resistance would be negligible. For a quick reality check, I think meteor crater in Arizona was made by an apothesis sized asteroid which exploded...and that's a mile wide crater.
The only problem with a do-not-track registry is that it is almost impossible to work with. I mean, you will be creating a list of what, exactly, that somehow a server will have to access, how, that will somehow have a web application to optionally not use cookies? Or somehow not use real e-mail addresses in its database? To some extent, for a lot of web stuff to work, you have to track users activities.
And if all their predictions are based on this erroneous mass, isn't this a case of "Sky is Falling" nonsense?
/sec. So, roughly... we're talking 10^4 x 10^4 x 6x10^9 to get roughly 6x10^18 joules, which is like a thousand or so hiroshima sized atomic bombs or maybe a good sized h-bomb... or, maybe a hundred h-bombs (depending on my math) It's a big boom, for sure.
(I'm doing this off the top of my head, so correct me if I am wrong)...
It's more the times velocity squared side of things that screws us. Let's say our ball hits the earth at 10km/s. Energy is mv^2, returning joules if mass is in kg and velocity is in meters
How could Sony get away with closing its PS2 where IBM could not with its PS/2?
Have they really gotten away with it though?
Vista sells 150 million copies
If we use Windows licenses as a proxy for PCs sold, then, it stands to reason that in the year or so since Vista has been introduced, more PCs have been sold since in the last year than Playstations have been sold since inception.
Who knows how big the market for playstation could have been, had Sony opened up the platform in the same way PCs are?
How does a 320 meter iron (and indium) ball end up with 200 Billion tons of mass? 1.33*3.14*160*160*160*8 tons = 136 Million tons
Yah, I think your density of iron might be a bit off but over all, for their estimates to add up, you would have to have the density of iron be around 12,000 tons per cubic meter. Boy, that seems a bit heavy for iron.
I agreed with right up to this paragraph. Microsoft won't win this one. The iPhone will eventually lose out to Asteroid. Microsoft already had their chance in this market. The iPhone blew them out of the water
You know, I won't argue that. It could go that way. Microsoft seems to have lost its way since Ballmer took over the helm and Gates decided to be Mr. Charity.
Look at IBM and the once IBM PC. By being open with their standards and rather loose licensing with Microsft killed the IBM PC Dominate market.
Well, the truth is a bit more complicated than that. IBM's opening up of the PC caused the PC market to expand overall, and IBM clearly benefited from the expansion of PCs. However, IBM made some big missteps along the way that caused its own offerings to gradually lose market share.
1) IBM was beaten to the punch by Compaq on the 386. That's a big ouch. IBM PC ATs were running 286's, which, really were a failed part. Compaq was way ahead of the curve on 386s. IBM, you see, was trying to hold 386s for some more "advanced" offerings and trying to defend the rest of its product line, but Compaq had no such inhibitions.
2) IBM really blew it with the PCjr. PCjr wasn't a bad home computer, but IBM was famous for its keyboards and the chiclet keyboard threw that advantage out the window.
3) IBM really blew it with PS/2. First, IBM closed off PS/2, trying to correct what they saw was a mistake in the PC. In other words, they weren't going to let anyone else do Microchannel motherboards. However, there was a huge aftermarket already for PC cards, and none of that would work with PS/2, so, instead, people went back to the likes of Compaq and Dell.
4) IBM really, really blew it with OS/2. IBM's original SDK prices for OS/2 were out of this world, and furthermore, IBM was already trying to tie OS/2 to its PS/2, frightening developers away with the promise of writing for only a hardware platform that nobody wanted.
The bottom line is, had IBM said that OS/2 would be open, and had shared PS/2 hardware specs with third parties and opened the platform up, quite likely, whatever bus we would be using would be called Microchannel Express, rather than PCI Express, and we would quite likely be running OS/2, rather than Windows.
The moral of the story is, when building hardware, open-ness matters. The more your hardware is open, the more people can connect to it, having partners making clones speeds the adoption of your technology, and it places you much more firmly in the driver's seat. Sure, Apple might look good by making IPhones as closed appliances, but you can bet that when Microsoft finally gets its act together, and rallies around a dozen hardware vendors along a common platform, then Apple is going to get smoked, just as it was when, well, PCs slaughtered Apple the first time around.
I would just add that to the above that means we need to have real enforcement of anti-trust statutes and not rubber stamping as, sigh, has become the case.
One wonders, though, if there is not some structural way that we protect the little guys and thus promote the continual germination of competition to established firms from the grass roots level, so that, as soon as one firm becomes megapoly, then, other firms almost start to sprout up in it and around it.
Security is a feature, like anything else. Pursuing absolute security is bad for both country and company because you ultimately can't have it in either place. Just as much as Bush is wrong for supporting crap like the USA PATRIOT Act and National Security Letters, so too are security people wrong for demanding that businesses become so secure at to be unable to conduct businesses. Accidents will happen, people might have their data stolen and sometimes a building might be blown up, but the flip side of the security coin is a police state nation and a company that fails.
He who trades freedom for security, deserves neither, as Ben Franklin once observed, but I think that we are learning that in this day and age, you don't actually -get- either. So yeah, somebody might ftp something in the plain, and you shouldn't do it, because "they" might get you, and by the same token, every bag on the train must be checked, because "they" might get you. But, sometimes, you have to quit worrying about "they" and focus on what "you" do.
So yeah, the guys that are strong arming security auditors, the business that refuses to invest in security, all of those people are in the right, and the original poster is being like so many security thugs at the airport trying to check my bags already. Buzz off already, dude... we have work to do!
I'm sorry I was using facts and numbers to come up with my assertions.
You weren't. You went into this long diatribe about the evil of Ronald Reagan and had no facts whatsoever, just like all of your liberal friends.
By and large people have been dropping out of the middle class. You give us Bill Gates, but thats just one guy.
I gave you more than that, and I could give you dozens, and you know it. And again, I can give you more statistics about wealth. Per capita energy consumption in the USA is UP, not down, meaning people have more energy. Per capita food consumption in the USA is UP, not down, when viewed as calories per person. Per capita habital volume (size of house + size of cars), is up, and not down.
For every Gates (I won't even get into how he made his money), theres a thousand people dropping into a lower income bracket.
No there isn't. That's just purely made up. I guarantee you this. For every person being foreclosed on because they bought at too high of a price, there are, statistically speaking, at least one hundred that are paying their mortgages on time, just fine.
You seem to be confusing it with modernization. Thats why we have more "stuff".
No, not at all, that's where you miss the point. Modernization is possible because of free trade. You get the capital to build ever more expensive CPU plants and computer plants and car plants from global equities markets because that investment capital can flow globally and be re-patrioted globally. The capital comes because a better technology can be sold world wide. You can't modernize if you do not have the money.
That is a key reason why socialist countries always fail, and incidentally, all the closed trade policies of your liberal friends will wreck the economy. People won't invest in something they don't get a return on, therefor, there will be no modernization and governments won't do it because they are too politically obligated to the workers and protect the status quo. That's why Amtrak still pays guys to be fireman on trains and there hasn't been a coal fired passenger train running in 50 fricking years.
But I'm well past the point where I identify with the Republicans who don't have my economic interests at heart. I also try to look at things objectively, not the "feel" I have in my gut
You aren't looking at anything objectively. You are caught up in wishy washy world of the doomed socialists trying to resurrect the class struggle to turn back a really rising tide of global wealth and a massive human economic success. Lenin and company have brought nothing to this planet but misery and starvation and any more, anywhere socialism has been applied, and they will bring it to the USA if they succeed.
You don't know what your economic interests are. All you want to do is be the guy that can still buy a Japanese car but force governments to "protect" your own job with some sort of regulation. It's a total fraud. Unless you are driving an American car, you are a total fraud, when it comes talking about the middle class.
The Fed thinks we might be in a mild recession. But again, look at what an economic meltdown is. Right now, are there industries where you could go and make money? Why yes, you could make money drilling for oil in North Dakota, you could sell services to coal and copper mines, you could work in energy, in general. There's money in the economy, and its not a Republicans' fault that you are too lazy to go and get it.
I'm well past the point where I identify with the Republicans who don't have my economic interests at heart.
Yeah, let's talk about the bogus claim that Democrats make about America making more money for the working man. You know, this country could make billions drilling in Alaska or supporting that, but your Democratic buddies cut that off, and this country could be making billions drilling off of California or the Carolinas, but your Democratic buddies cut that off, and y
Solar thermal plants covering the equivalent of a 92-by-92-mile square grid in the Southwest could generate electricity for the entire United States
That little line there makes me ask, "well, if I keep on burning coal, just how warm would the planet really get..."
If a man can have four wives, that means the other three get to "entertain themselves," so to speak.
:-)
Speak for yourself!
You, sir, are an idiot.
;)
Can't let the people down, now can we.
moron... obviously, you are just a shill for [republicans|democrats], completely dedicated to [closed source|open source] software to the exclusion of all facts, maniacally intolerant because of your blind devotion to [environmentalism|christianity], unable to see that your ridiculous faith in [capitalism|socialism] is the ruin of all humanity, therefor making you a [jack booted fascist nazi|klan member|islamofascist traitor].
First, it's not the job of media to filter, it's the job of media to inform, news media that is
The media's job is to definitely filter and for the most part, political considerations aside, a good reporting outfit will do exactly that. They have to be attuned to the public and their customers things that they need to know. A good media source is not just information, it is a guide to the world as to what is true and what is not. That's a good media product. Sometimes these filters contain the bias of the reporters, and that's true. The filters are only human.
If however an ISP blocks or slows down traffic from DailyKos or Fox and the person has broadband there's not much choice for switching ISPs.
Fair enough. However, if there were an equal number of viewers for Fox and Kos, then both would pay the same premium bandwidth fees to the ISP and nothing would change.
So a customer of the incumbent, throttling ISP decides they're fed up and they want to move on. They hear by word of mouth that there's this littler place that supports equality, so they go to the website to check it out. The website takes 3.5 minutes to load. Will that customer switch?
That's restraint of trade and gets you, founder of tiny ISP, into anti-trust court.
The students don't know how to do research; therefore, we need to teach them.
Or, more precisely put, there is a demand for a modern encyclopedia that actually has links to credible sources for its facts. By credible sources, we mean, people with some real expertise on the subject, not just some random dude.
Actually the reason the federal government got so strong was because of the Civil War
True to a point, but also some big reforms in the 1890s and onwards also changed that. But it was really Roosevelt who created the modern USA.
Ultimately that's what the civil war was about, it wasn't about slavery.
Actually, it was all about slavery... Slavery was a topic that bedeviled the founding fathers even. Adams, Jefferson, others all admitted their deal with the devils to get through the day and that they punted the problem to future generations. The framers of the constitution blew it off in order to get the south to join the union but a civil war on the issue was more or less inevitable, especially as the north began to figure out how to use machines to be more productive than the southern slave based economy.
Thats the most ridiculous argument that I've heard in a long time. Regan reintroduced social mobility? Bush Jr. continued the trend? Thats just plain asinine. Trickle down economics never worked, and was never intended to. Conservatism was hijacked long ago and turned into some sort of brain washed cult. As is obvious..
Obvious based on what? Do all of those people that took a bunch of tiny companies and turn them into enormous enterprises not exist? I mean, if there is no social mobility, as you say, then, how did Bill Gates get 50 billion dollars from nothing?
There hasn't been "free trade" during any of the time periods you spoke of. Its just another mantra repeated on talk radio until people have decided that it must be good because they hear about it so much without ever asking any questions about how its good for them or how its to be implemented.
Of course there is free trade. Just walk into any store and see all of the thousands of different products you get can from anywhere on the planet.
The government just bailed out Baer Sterns (well, provided a sweetheart deal to JP Morgan)and violated the laws to do so. Is that free trade?
The Fed is the lender of last resort and did its job. Would you have preferred a run on the banks circa 1890s, the kind of run that DEMOCRATS introduced the Federal Reserve to prevent?
The only difference is that now government protection is reserved for large corps and the richest 1% instead of the country as a whole. The only social mobility Reagan introduced was downward social mobility and Bush Jr. is more than happy to continue the trend
So, again, if there is no upward social mobility, how are people like that kid that made FaceBook getting millions of dollars? If there is no upward social mobility, do you mean that Cmdr Taco works at the factory bolting tires onto Chevy's for $18 an hour?
Real wages for all levels of society has historically increased more under democratic presidents than republicans by a large margin.
If that is the case, why then do you always see more people with more stuff during Republican administrations - its because of free enterprise. If wages are so flat, as you say, why is it that people today have way more stuff than their parents did. In the early 1970s, there was no personal computer, and the most powerful computer was a cray. Now, today, everyone who has a decent gaming graphics card has a cray. If that is not the creation of new wealth, well, than what is? Similarly, look at radios. In the 1970s, a radio was a big thing that you carried around but most likely plugged in, and families may have had a couple of them. Now, there are so many radios in a household that people can't even count them. Wireless LANs are radios, computers have radios, wireless car keys have radios, cordless phones have radios... none of that stuff existed, and yet, somehow, you argue that free trade has made people poorer? Poverty means less stuff.
I'm an Independent personally. Republicans like you disgust me. At least you could attempt to be intellectually honest.
you aren't an independent by any stretch of the imagination. You are parrotting all of the left wing talking points about poverty and class warfare and complaining about free trade while at the same time you are sitting there part of a generation that is richer than any human generation has ever been because of it. You don't need statistics to see how well free trade has worked. You only need to look at everything you have, everything everyone else has, look at what people are building throughout the world, and just see the prosperity. It is -everywhere-. Back in the 1970s, the Chinese were dirt poor. Now look at them. That's free trade. Europe was a bankrupt and bombed out backwater. Now look at them. That's free trade.
Reality doesn't have a liberal bias. Sometimes it wishes it could be liberal because the dynamic world has its costs, but at the end of the day, rea
It also stands to reason they are limiting choice. If they don't like what you say they block you.
Ah yes, but filtering has always been the job of the media. I mean, is it censorship that DailyKos blocks right wing posts?
Yea, let's face it. I pay for my connection and Google pays for it's connection. If my ISP throttles Google they are throttling my connection too and I signed no agreement or contract saying they can do that. Providers already have reciprocal agreements to pass on data that goes over their lines.
Your agreement doesn't say that they -can't-. And besides, if you don't like what your ISP gives you, you are more than free to start your own. There's plenty of room in the market for boutique ISPs...