Companies which have a natural monopoly tend to breed internal bureaucracies:
- When growth is slow, clients have no real option and there are no real external threaths to the market position of a company, it's management turns to backstabbing as means of career progression, tries to hold on and extend whatever power they have and in general starts spending much more time in the "looking good to higher management", "butt-kissing" and "pass around the hot potato" activities.
Basically a middle-age mentality is born inside the company, every manager making their own little fortress, trying to have as big a domain as possible, trying to control as many "peasents" as possible, trying to look good for the king and trying to make the other lords (managers) look bad for the king.
Don't for a second delude yourself into thinking that in this respect IT is "special" and that "it doesn't happen to us".
There is currently a rightwing, conservative party in the government.
They've been busy making it easier for companies, harder for people (taxwise, at least); they've started cracking down on coffeeshops (that's semi-sanctioned places where you can get pot) and closing down redlight districts (legalized prostitution).
So much for the (renowned) dutch tollerance.
Did i mention that the Dutch economy was one of the hardest hit by the latest recession in Europe (and narrowly missed another recession at the end of last year).
As far as i can tell, they're unpopular and will be thrown out on the next elections, though me not being dutch, i don't care that much about dutch politics (i can't vote for parliment here).
I've worked for several years both creating programs inside the database and on a server layer outside it (and also just about every other layer).
I have to agree with grassbeetle above.
Software architecture-wise: - You can't make a scalable architecture if you put everything in one single place (in this case the database). - You will be hard-pressed to create a failure tolerant architecture if you stuff everything in a single point of failure. - Databases are NOT application servers. They are designed with data storage and retrieval in mind, not reliable execution of complex business logic. Amongst other things databases do not make available in an easy and/or reliable way some of the standard application server functionality. - All external components of the application (for example UIs) have to connect to the database. You're now stuck to using the connection protocols from the chosen database. This might cause all sort of problems with security, firewalls, use of asychronous messaging, availability of adaptors in the platform you are deploying your applications to, etc... - Spliting your application accross several servers or in a multi-tiered geographical distribution is much harder. - All coders have to have a good knowledge on how to work with the specific database you are using. - Programing inside databases is not standartized. Different databases and indeed different versions of the same database have sometimes different versions of the same language or different libraries available. The language/libraries have not been so throughly used/tested/examined by a big user comunity (while for example standard C/Java/etc libraries have been thouroughly debugged in billions of man-hours of use). This means more library bugs and a lack of third party tools for software design and development inside the database. - Facilities such as version control, source control, etc are either not available or difficult to use in a reliable manner. - Availability of compatible 3rd party libraries or application modules is very, very restricted by comparison to NOT having your server side logic all inside the database. - Forget about moving databases in the future. Also, simple migrating to a newer version of the database can be a nightmare.
Software design-wise, the design of the software will be strongly constrained by the internal structure of the database: - Information flows will mostly have to be database-like information flows - A true object oriented structure is pretty much impossible. At the most you can do weakly connected islands with an objecte oriented structure. If the database language you have to use is procedural forget about OO design. - Server-side initiated connections to outside entities, thread control, ditributed transactions and other more advanced functionalities are pretty much impossible. - Usage/integration with 3rd party libraries or application modules is very hard or even impossible.
Software programming-wise, and from my experience (mostly Oracle): - The language sucks. - The application libraries (not the DBA ones) suck big time.
Simply put, a software architect that puts all server-side logic inside the database is with this single choice removing almost all his other architecture options and creating/fortifying vendor lock-in of the application to the database itself and 3rd party tools and also of the development team itself by means of the knowledge experience they have/will gain with said database and said 3rd party tools.
Such a person should IMHO either be demoted to a place were he/she can't cause any damage or fired outright.
You use the electrical energy produced by the reactor to do electrolosys of the water, capture the hydrogen and liquidify it.
The hydrogen can be provided to planes, tractors and whatever to be either stored in liquid form or in a solid crystaline structure formed by another material. The hydrogen can then be used as fuel.
And yes, Oil would still be the best source for many chemical products, it's just that it wouldn't be simultaneously guzzled up by millions of innefficient SUVs.
Also, other types of air polution come from Coal and Gas fired power stations - why could be replaced by a viable fusion power plant.
A fine example of the power of moderation: - It's actually the Funny moderation that's the cue to the joke
Though a moderation of Interesting might have actually enhanced the joke but make it harder to spot. Come to think of it Informative would've had a similiar effect as Interesting.
Quoting from the wikipedia link you provided: - "When multiple explanations are available for a phenomenon, the simplest version is preferred"
Occam's Razor is a tool to, when faced with multiple explanations for the same situation, help one choose the best one. It is not some sort of philosophical statement on how there should be a simple explanation for everything.
Although i too feel unconfortable with the increasing complexity of scientificy theories (and judging from the current moderation on your post i suspect many others also yearn for simplicity), i cannot stand by and see you missuse Occam's Razor (one of the first things i learned in philosophy).
PS: At the risk of spoiling this post, i have to state a theory of mine: I suspect one of the things that turns some scientific minds to the belief on a "higher power" (aka almighty) is a yearning for simplicity and/or an inability/unwillingness to accept complex explanations to the mind-bogling complexity of the world.
... that P2P sharing networks have become the best place to get music from.
I used to buy CDs, but after being scammed once to many by the industry (i believe the CD in question had ONE good track, which got continuously played on the radio, while all others were garbage), i stopped "paying to get shafted". In the meanwhile ripping "protection" has been introduced - since nowadays i have a portable MP3 player (not an iPod, geek fashion puts me off, thank you very much), plus i don't have the time to go around separating the wheat (non-protected CDs) from the chaff (protected ones), i reckon i won't be buying CDs (or any other crippled replacement media) anytime soon.
As i see it DRM protected music is like protected CDs, only worse - it has a 0% chance of working with my MP3 player (using my analogy above, it's all chaff no wheat), does not even come with a reliable storage medium (factory made CDs will last many years, recordable ones my last 5, if ur really lucky), it's tied to one computer (if for example i add more memory, will it still be considered the same machine?) and in practice you don't really own anything since THEY define, control and enforce the rules under which u can use the music.
By comparisson, it costs all of 5 minutes to find and download a music from any of several widelly available sources and one can listen to it with anything (including MP3 players) for as long as one wants.
Funny thing is, people like me (reasonably successful working adult) are both able and willing to pay for good music which we can use the way we want...
I suspect that a lot of the productivity increases came from micropauses, such as looking out the windows for a couple of seconds. Strangelly that helps with things like problem solving by letting the brain "unwind" and making easier to "switch gears" and try a new path of approach for the problem at hand (sorry, this is the best description i can give of it)
Also there's probably some sort of greenery outside the windows - that helps enormously with productivity since it makes people feel beter.
In my experience, just natural light by itself doesn't help a lot if you're either NOT sitting next to the window or if all you see outside are buildings, people and cars.
That said, the quality and tone of the lighting are important (fluorescent lamps are the worst you can have)
When one doesn't know the questions one will never go figure out the answers even if one has access to all the answers?
Have you ever tryied to "just learn" without any targets or objectives? Great way to end up with a lot of of superficial knowledge, knowing many worthless things while NOT knowing many essential things.
Some guidance is always needed, especially for children.
The problem with the education system is not that teaching is bad. The problem is that measuring the results of teaching is: a) Done by measuring the ability to memorize instead of the ability to think. b) Continuously dumbed down so that the average TEST results of the studentsremain the same even though their average AQUIRED ABILITIES are going down.
This perversely feeds back into the system, since teachers will teach and students will learn for the tests (and not for aquiring knowledge and abilities to be used in one's future life) and for a teach, having the average tests of a class match the expected average du jour is good enough.
I know exactly how they'll be making enormous gobs of money in ten years. They'll have most of the first-world by the throat, in total depedence on Google Magic for their day-to-day needs related to the flow of information. Search, email, blogs, photos, video, mapping, satellite data, filtering, secure remote storage, etc. Just as the first-world has become entrenched in web culture and dependent on it, they will become entrenched in Google culture and come to depend on it as well. They're taking a pragmatic peicemeal approach to the age-old plan of replacing your operating system with something in a browser - what Netscape had hoped for so long ago (and fittingly, Firefox will help Google too). Eventually whatevfer your home computing device is (PC, game console, media center, or some hybrid thereof), all that will matter is that it has a fast net connection and a browser, and while the large content may come from varying places, the small content, the metadata, and the glue that links it all together will come from Google.
You say the customer can't be locked in to these free standards-based tools, and that's true. But with the minds they have employed at Google, the infrastructure and highly-prized domain-specific knowledge they've built up, and their brand name, good luck to any company that wants to overtake them at their own game. It's Google's game to lose, and it's pretty unlikely that they'll lose it in the next decade.
Please feel free to explain the details of the process by which the Google Magic will aquire and retain market share.
Step-by-step u need to:
A) Define said market(s) that Google is conquering. Just use more clear definitions than the vague flow of information, Google culture (yeah, Google culture - i see the light now) or the metadata, and the glue that links it all together
(After that maybe we can start to understand exactly what infrastructure and highly-prized domain-specific knowledge u are talking about.)
B) Show that there's money to be made in said markets.
C) Show how Google will make more money in said markets than it will loose in costs/investments
D) Show how Google will gain market share in said markets
E) Show how Google will retain market share in said markets. (as in, exactly how will they avoid that competition comes in a steals market share from them)
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It's all very nice and easy to spew some vague talk about "magic", "culture", "flow of information", "domain knowledge" and "infrastructure", add a random list of electronic information related areas and then proceed to conclude that (somehow) Google will master the world in 10 years time.
It sorta reminds me the sort of "vague pap" that was being spewed during the time just before the last bubble blew...
Judging by the "+5, Insteresting" moderation i see (and Google's valuation), there's still a lot of people confusing "dream" with "business plan".
"Commons" being potentially anything that is or can be used by/affected by/affects more than one individual.
This use of the name "commons" (my idea, not standard AFIK) comes from "Tragedy of the commons" - the thing governments exist to avoid.
The bigguest difference between governments concerns both the defining which "commons" are NOT regulated by governments (for example: should the limits of public behaviour be set by social rules of conduct - "public morality" - or by laws), how do they go about regulating commons (for example, using taxes on fuel to influence air polution) and what are the limits to the rules (for example, speed limits only define borders (usually a top border) and not a "mandatory speed")
If everybody lived in their own independent and self contained world there would be no need for government.
How about if i'm just buying a new TV and want to weight in my choice the environmental track record of the manufacturer?
Or am buying clothing and want to know if the manufacturer uses child labour?
Or am buying financial services and want to know how does that company treat it's employees?
When sitting on the store one rarelly has internet access or the time to trail through the information even if said access is available.
It's self-deception to expect most people to take notebooks with mobile internet access to the electronics shop in order to make an informed decision on which TV to buy.
My sugestion is as follows: - Setup an "informed choices" service. This should serve as an intermediary between consumers and third party entities (consumer groups, NGOs, government, business groups, whatever) willing to provide information about products and companies - The service is customiseable per-person. You can log in via de internet and choose what factors do you care about and how much do u trust the information coming from each of the third party entities - The service should support a simple and easy way of letting consumers get the right info when they're out shopping. For example using a mobile phone with a bar code reader (or maybe using the phone camera for that) or an RFID reader and a mobile connection to said service allowing to simply: press a button; point mobile at product; get the info u care about; choose.
The point here is two-fold: - Give enough information to the consumers to let them do informed decisions but not so much that they need to spend lots of time just getting informed. (otherwise ppl will simply not do/use it). Hence the whole user configured filtering and trust weighting. - Give consumers access to the information when and where they need it. Consumers should not have to prepare themselfs before going out shopping by browsing some site(s) in the Net, figure out beforehand the list of brands of the things they want to buy and having to memorize the (environmental, work conditions, polution history, whatever) information for each brand just to make informed decisions. Simply put - if they have to jump through all those hoops people will just not do it. Hence the sugestion of mobile access and bar code/rfid tag reading - fast, simple, no preparation required - you just scan the product and out comes an evaluation of the brand/maker according to your chosen criteria (for example, respect for the environment)
Fossil fuel is a closed cycle in the sense that all that Carbon was stored underground in the pre-history (in the Triassic i believe) - actually a much hotter period than now - and it can end up there again, if we let the plants grow wild as then and wait a couple of million years.
Of course while we wait our climate will be back to the status it was in the triassic (or worse, since in present times other factors exist that weren't there at the time, such as we having a lot less forested areas). Hardly compatible with the continued existance of much of the modern human society, especially for all those cities close to the sea and low lying land - bye, bye Holland - which will get flooded if Earth's oceans gets back to it's levels at the time.
Saying that fossil fuels are part of a closed cycle is like saying solar panels are using a non-renewable source of energy because the sun won't be there in a couple of billions of years: - Stricty speaking it's true, but it's hardly relevant within the time frame size corresponding to how long humanity is (and maybe will be) around.
The concern is a matter of scale, and I can almost guarantee that the energy demands of the world today would outpace the renewal rate of biofuel.
Biofuel is at much a stop-gap technology - something which can be used in place of petrol for many applications without requiring too much change to existing machinery (like cars). If it wasn't for current widespread use of internal combustion engine technology nobody would even thing twice about biofuel as an energy source.
Biofuel is simply an environmentally beter source of energy than petroleum. It's an incremental step meant to replace burning of petroleum derivates with something more environmentally friendly until we have retooled our equipment and processes to something beter than combustion engine technology.
Biofuel is most definitly not THE solution for our energy problems.
Question: Do you really think that biofuel is sufficiently renewable to avoid the same problems humanity continualy faces when taking energy from nature? That we consume faster than we put back?
Sure plants capture the CO2 but as yourself why then we're worried about CO2? Because the plants can only capture so much. Now ask yourself what will happen when you not only release the CO2 that was captured by routinely and systematically reduce the number of plants capable of recovering that CO2.
Think of biofuel the energy storage medium for a natural form of solar panels.
In terms of carbon cycle it goes like this:
Plants capture CO2 from the air -> Plants use solar energy to transform CO2 into building elements (such as proteins) -> Plants grow with the building elemnts -> Plants gets harvested -> Harvested plants get made into biofuel -> Bioful is burnt -> CO2 is back in the air _> Plants capture CO2 from the air....
Pretty much self-contained
As for energy, consider that the energy that allows all the CO2 to be capture from the air and transformed into the molecules with a higher energy value that are burnt in biofuel is simply solar light captured via photosyntesis into molecules in a high-energy status.
Some of that energy is then lost during harvesting and transformation into biofuel (the last part can be done with the help of some nice bacteria that just take a little bit of energy back as paymant). Most of that collected solar energy is still present in the biofuel but not all.
At that point we just release the chemically stored energy in the biofuel by transforming it into lower energy molecules (such as CO2), usually through burning it.
So: Solar energy --photosynthesis-> Chemical energy --burn-> Heat [ --power generators-> electricity ]
Plants grow everywhere, even in the sea. All they need is sunlight. As long as the sun remains burning, it's a renewable system.
The only reason why biofuels aren't made from all types of plants is that for some the harvesting/transformation cost is too high
For some, such as sugar cane, that's not a problem.
The biguest reason why most of the cars don't use alcohol as fuel is that petroleum is cheaper and NOT because the biofuel cycle for alcohol consumes more energy (beyond solar energy, i mean) than it gives back.
The point being that burning fossile fuels releases to the air Carbon that has been captured from the air and stored underground
The sources i named above (and others named by a previous poster) mostly are renewable, meaning they are part of a cycle where the sources of energy are replenished from long-duration sources (such as the sun). Also the capture and release of Carbon (if any) is part of that cycle.
For example, in the case of biofuels, the sources (plants) are renewed by the growth of new plants using solar energy (as in the sun's light). An interesting property of this cycle is that the Carbon released when burning biofuel was actually captured from the air when the plants were growing (and in a time close to the present time, not in the Jurassic).
As for the processing of biofuels consuming more energy than the biofuel will give back when burned - simply consider sugar cane alcohool (widelly used in Brasil for example) - how exactly does it consume a lot of energy making (or even purifying) alcohool????
Quote 1 Sorry, I won't do your homework for you. There are plenty of reasonable alternatives, just look at the literature;
Quote 2 Like what?
Solar Power? RANT... Wind power? RANT... Nuclear power? RANT...
Hydroelectric Tide-generation Biofuels Fusion <-- Under research, hardly overfunded
And this is just what i came up in a couple of minutes
Not to mention a lot of the CO2 being release into the atmosphere and causing global warming (question is not if CO2 causes it, it's how much is it causing vs the natural cycle) is taking the path of being pumped out of underground stores, being burned in low efficiency engines and coming out of the tail pipes of gas guzling SUVs.
If you just put a flat tax on gasoline, yes that is unfair.
A flat tax on gasoline's impact is directly proportional to the ammount of fuel used. Less fuel used, less tax payed.
It's simply an incentive burning less fuel. Whether that is achieved by smaller/lighter cars with smaller engines and/or more efficient engines is unimportant, though if you have both you save the most (in fuel taxes and fuel costs).
So yes, under a flat tax on gas scheme an ultra efficient SUV would still cost more on taxes than an equally efficient Smart. It might however cost less that a low efficency Smart.
One of the ultimate grails of maximizing profits is to segment the market to such a point that sellers get out of each individual buyer as much as he or she is willing to pay for any item.
In the case of online shops, technology allows sellers to get a good approach to maximizing acceptable price per individual buyer.
Smart buyers can also use technology to maximize the ammount of satisfaction they get per-buck spent - try comparisson sites, online user reviews and such.
Dumb buyers will continue to passivelly get reamed by smart shops. Call it natural selection.
In other news, it has just been announce that is physically impossible to go from point A to B:
One has to travel 1/2 the way from A to B, then one has to travel 1/2 the remaining way, and the 1/2 the way again, and then another 1/2 and so on and so on ad infinitum
I work as a freelancer in Holland and, due to how the dutch tax authorities have set things up, out of my rate i have to pay both the costs of the employer and of the employee (except for things such as workspace and office supplies).
You example is WAY off.
Roughly about 10-15% of my rate is taken away by the employer side costs (such as tax and mandatory sick leave insurance) while about 30-35% go away as employee side costs (mostly taxes)
Putting things another way, in Holland for every 10 EUR an employers pays in salary he will have to pay another 1 EUR (excluding office space rentals, office supplies, software licenses and such)
Slashdot Mirror
Companies which have a natural monopoly tend to breed internal bureaucracies:
- When growth is slow, clients have no real option and there are no real external threaths to the market position of a company, it's management turns to backstabbing as means of career progression, tries to hold on and extend whatever power they have and in general starts spending much more time in the "looking good to higher management", "butt-kissing" and "pass around the hot potato" activities.
Basically a middle-age mentality is born inside the company, every manager making their own little fortress, trying to have as big a domain as possible, trying to control as many "peasents" as possible, trying to look good for the king and trying to make the other lords (managers) look bad for the king.
Don't for a second delude yourself into thinking that in this respect IT is "special" and that "it doesn't happen to us".
... i just want to remind you that Google is a for-profit company
There is currently a rightwing, conservative party in the government.
They've been busy making it easier for companies, harder for people (taxwise, at least); they've started cracking down on coffeeshops (that's semi-sanctioned places where you can get pot) and closing down redlight districts (legalized prostitution).
So much for the (renowned) dutch tollerance.
Did i mention that the Dutch economy was one of the hardest hit by the latest recession in Europe (and narrowly missed another recession at the end of last year).
As far as i can tell, they're unpopular and will be thrown out on the next elections, though me not being dutch, i don't care that much about dutch politics (i can't vote for parliment here).
I've worked for several years both creating programs inside the database and on a server layer outside it (and also just about every other layer).
I have to agree with grassbeetle above.
Software architecture-wise:
- You can't make a scalable architecture if you put everything in one single place (in this case the database).
- You will be hard-pressed to create a failure tolerant architecture if you stuff everything in a single point of failure.
- Databases are NOT application servers. They are designed with data storage and retrieval in mind, not reliable execution of complex business logic. Amongst other things databases do not make available in an easy and/or reliable way some of the standard application server functionality.
- All external components of the application (for example UIs) have to connect to the database. You're now stuck to using the connection protocols from the chosen database. This might cause all sort of problems with security, firewalls, use of asychronous messaging, availability of adaptors in the platform you are deploying your applications to, etc...
- Spliting your application accross several servers or in a multi-tiered geographical distribution is much harder.
- All coders have to have a good knowledge on how to work with the specific database you are using.
- Programing inside databases is not standartized. Different databases and indeed different versions of the same database have sometimes different versions of the same language or different libraries available. The language/libraries have not been so throughly used/tested/examined by a big user comunity (while for example standard C/Java/etc libraries have been thouroughly debugged in billions of man-hours of use). This means more library bugs and a lack of third party tools for software design and development inside the database.
- Facilities such as version control, source control, etc are either not available or difficult to use in a reliable manner.
- Availability of compatible 3rd party libraries or application modules is very, very restricted by comparison to NOT having your server side logic all inside the database.
- Forget about moving databases in the future. Also, simple migrating to a newer version of the database can be a nightmare.
Software design-wise, the design of the software will be strongly constrained by the internal structure of the database:
- Information flows will mostly have to be database-like information flows
- A true object oriented structure is pretty much impossible. At the most you can do weakly connected islands with an objecte oriented structure. If the database language you have to use is procedural forget about OO design.
- Server-side initiated connections to outside entities, thread control, ditributed transactions and other more advanced functionalities are pretty much impossible.
- Usage/integration with 3rd party libraries or application modules is very hard or even impossible.
Software programming-wise, and from my experience (mostly Oracle):
- The language sucks.
- The application libraries (not the DBA ones) suck big time.
Simply put, a software architect that puts all server-side logic inside the database is with this single choice removing almost all his other architecture options and creating/fortifying vendor lock-in of the application to the database itself and 3rd party tools and also of the development team itself by means of the knowledge experience they have/will gain with said database and said 3rd party tools.
Such a person should IMHO either be demoted to a place were he/she can't cause any damage or fired outright.
You use the electrical energy produced by the reactor to do electrolosys of the water, capture the hydrogen and liquidify it.
The hydrogen can be provided to planes, tractors and whatever to be either stored in liquid form or in a solid crystaline structure formed by another material. The hydrogen can then be used as fuel.
And yes, Oil would still be the best source for many chemical products, it's just that it wouldn't be simultaneously guzzled up by millions of innefficient SUVs.
Also, other types of air polution come from Coal and Gas fired power stations - why could be replaced by a viable fusion power plant.
A fine example of the power of moderation:
- It's actually the Funny moderation that's the cue to the joke
Though a moderation of Interesting might have actually enhanced the joke but make it harder to spot. Come to think of it Informative would've had a similiar effect as Interesting.
They forgot to show the rank for red cards!!!
Who cares about yellow cards, i wanted to know who toped the red card ranks.
Quoting from the wikipedia link you provided:
- "When multiple explanations are available for a phenomenon, the simplest version is preferred"
Occam's Razor is a tool to, when faced with multiple explanations for the same situation, help one choose the best one.
It is not some sort of philosophical statement on how there should be a simple explanation for everything.
Although i too feel unconfortable with the increasing complexity of scientificy theories (and judging from the current moderation on your post i suspect many others also yearn for simplicity), i cannot stand by and see you missuse Occam's Razor (one of the first things i learned in philosophy).
PS: At the risk of spoiling this post, i have to state a theory of mine: I suspect one of the things that turns some scientific minds to the belief on a "higher power" (aka almighty) is a yearning for simplicity and/or an inability/unwillingness to accept complex explanations to the mind-bogling complexity of the world.
... that P2P sharing networks have become the best place to get music from.
...
I used to buy CDs, but after being scammed once to many by the industry (i believe the CD in question had ONE good track, which got continuously played on the radio, while all others were garbage), i stopped "paying to get shafted".
In the meanwhile ripping "protection" has been introduced - since nowadays i have a portable MP3 player (not an iPod, geek fashion puts me off, thank you very much), plus i don't have the time to go around separating the wheat (non-protected CDs) from the chaff (protected ones), i reckon i won't be buying CDs (or any other crippled replacement media) anytime soon.
As i see it DRM protected music is like protected CDs, only worse - it has a 0% chance of working with my MP3 player (using my analogy above, it's all chaff no wheat), does not even come with a reliable storage medium (factory made CDs will last many years, recordable ones my last 5, if ur really lucky), it's tied to one computer (if for example i add more memory, will it still be considered the same machine?) and in practice you don't really own anything since THEY define, control and enforce the rules under which u can use the music.
By comparisson, it costs all of 5 minutes to find and download a music from any of several widelly available sources and one can listen to it with anything (including MP3 players) for as long as one wants.
Funny thing is, people like me (reasonably successful working adult) are both able and willing to pay for good music which we can use the way we want
I suspect that a lot of the productivity increases came from micropauses, such as looking out the windows for a couple of seconds.
Strangelly that helps with things like problem solving by letting the brain "unwind" and making easier to "switch gears" and try a new path of approach for the problem at hand (sorry, this is the best description i can give of it)
Also there's probably some sort of greenery outside the windows - that helps enormously with productivity since it makes people feel beter.
In my experience, just natural light by itself doesn't help a lot if you're either NOT sitting next to the window or if all you see outside are buildings, people and cars.
That said, the quality and tone of the lighting are important (fluorescent lamps are the worst you can have)
It's called a window.
When one doesn't know the questions one will never go figure out the answers even if one has access to all the answers?
Have you ever tryied to "just learn" without any targets or objectives?
Great way to end up with a lot of of superficial knowledge, knowing many worthless things while NOT knowing many essential things.
Some guidance is always needed, especially for children.
The problem with the education system is not that teaching is bad. The problem is that measuring the results of teaching is:
a) Done by measuring the ability to memorize instead of the ability to think.
b) Continuously dumbed down so that the average TEST results of the studentsremain the same even though their average AQUIRED ABILITIES are going down.
This perversely feeds back into the system, since teachers will teach and students will learn for the tests (and not for aquiring knowledge and abilities to be used in one's future life) and for a teach, having the average tests of a class match the expected average du jour is good enough.
You say the customer can't be locked in to these free standards-based tools, and that's true. But with the minds they have employed at Google, the infrastructure and highly-prized domain-specific knowledge they've built up, and their brand name, good luck to any company that wants to overtake them at their own game. It's Google's game to lose, and it's pretty unlikely that they'll lose it in the next decade.
Please feel free to explain the details of the process by which the Google Magic will aquire and retain market share.
Step-by-step u need to:
A) Define said market(s) that Google is conquering. Just use more clear definitions than the vague flow of information, Google culture (yeah, Google culture - i see the light now) or the metadata, and the glue that links it all together
(After that maybe we can start to understand exactly what infrastructure and highly-prized domain-specific knowledge u are talking about.)
B) Show that there's money to be made in said markets.
C) Show how Google will make more money in said markets than it will loose in costs/investments
D) Show how Google will gain market share in said markets
E) Show how Google will retain market share in said markets. (as in, exactly how will they avoid that competition comes in a steals market share from them)
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It's all very nice and easy to spew some vague talk about "magic", "culture", "flow of information", "domain knowledge" and "infrastructure", add a random list of electronic information related areas and then proceed to conclude that (somehow) Google will master the world in 10 years time.
It sorta reminds me the sort of "vague pap" that was being spewed during the time just before the last bubble blew
Judging by the "+5, Insteresting" moderation i see (and Google's valuation), there's still a lot of people confusing "dream" with "business plan".
To finish with an oldie but goodie:
Governments exist to regulate the "commons".
"Commons" being potentially anything that is or can be used by/affected by/affects more than one individual.
This use of the name "commons" (my idea, not standard AFIK) comes from "Tragedy of the commons" - the thing governments exist to avoid.
The bigguest difference between governments concerns both the defining which "commons" are NOT regulated by governments (for example: should the limits of public behaviour be set by social rules of conduct - "public morality" - or by laws), how do they go about regulating commons (for example, using taxes on fuel to influence air polution) and what are the limits to the rules (for example, speed limits only define borders (usually a top border) and not a "mandatory speed")
If everybody lived in their own independent and self contained world there would be no need for government.
How about if i'm just buying a new TV and want to weight in my choice the environmental track record of the manufacturer?
Or am buying clothing and want to know if the manufacturer uses child labour?
Or am buying financial services and want to know how does that company treat it's employees?
When sitting on the store one rarelly has internet access or the time to trail through the information even if said access is available.
It's self-deception to expect most people to take notebooks with mobile internet access to the electronics shop in order to make an informed decision on which TV to buy.
My sugestion is as follows:
- Setup an "informed choices" service. This should serve as an intermediary between consumers and third party entities (consumer groups, NGOs, government, business groups, whatever) willing to provide information about products and companies
- The service is customiseable per-person. You can log in via de internet and choose what factors do you care about and how much do u trust the information coming from each of the third party entities
- The service should support a simple and easy way of letting consumers get the right info when they're out shopping. For example using a mobile phone with a bar code reader (or maybe using the phone camera for that) or an RFID reader and a mobile connection to said service allowing to simply: press a button; point mobile at product; get the info u care about; choose.
The point here is two-fold:
- Give enough information to the consumers to let them do informed decisions but not so much that they need to spend lots of time just getting informed. (otherwise ppl will simply not do/use it). Hence the whole user configured filtering and trust weighting.
- Give consumers access to the information when and where they need it. Consumers should not have to prepare themselfs before going out shopping by browsing some site(s) in the Net, figure out beforehand the list of brands of the things they want to buy and having to memorize the (environmental, work conditions, polution history, whatever) information for each brand just to make informed decisions. Simply put - if they have to jump through all those hoops people will just not do it.
Hence the sugestion of mobile access and bar code/rfid tag reading - fast, simple, no preparation required - you just scan the product and out comes an evaluation of the brand/maker according to your chosen criteria (for example, respect for the environment)
If you have a firewall such as Zone Alarm on your computer there is a simpler way to get shocked:
- Clear the logs and look at them filling up again
Fossil fuel is a closed cycle too.
Fossil fuel is a closed cycle in the sense that all that Carbon was stored underground in the pre-history (in the Triassic i believe) - actually a much hotter period than now - and it can end up there again, if we let the plants grow wild as then and wait a couple of million years.
Of course while we wait our climate will be back to the status it was in the triassic (or worse, since in present times other factors exist that weren't there at the time, such as we having a lot less forested areas).
Hardly compatible with the continued existance of much of the modern human society, especially for all those cities close to the sea and low lying land - bye, bye Holland - which will get flooded if Earth's oceans gets back to it's levels at the time.
Saying that fossil fuels are part of a closed cycle is like saying solar panels are using a non-renewable source of energy because the sun won't be there in a couple of billions of years:
- Stricty speaking it's true, but it's hardly relevant within the time frame size corresponding to how long humanity is (and maybe will be) around.
The concern is a matter of scale, and I can almost guarantee that the energy demands of the world today would outpace the renewal rate of biofuel.
Biofuel is at much a stop-gap technology - something which can be used in place of petrol for many applications without requiring too much change to existing machinery (like cars). If it wasn't for current widespread use of internal combustion engine technology nobody would even thing twice about biofuel as an energy source.
Biofuel is simply an environmentally beter source of energy than petroleum.
It's an incremental step meant to replace burning of petroleum derivates with something more environmentally friendly until we have retooled our equipment and processes to something beter than combustion engine technology.
Biofuel is most definitly not THE solution for our energy problems.
It's a step in a long walk.
Question: Do you really think that biofuel is sufficiently renewable to avoid the same problems humanity continualy faces when taking energy from nature? That we consume faster than we put back?
Sure plants capture the CO2 but as yourself why then we're worried about CO2? Because the plants can only capture so much. Now ask yourself what will happen when you not only release the CO2 that was captured by routinely and systematically reduce the number of plants capable of recovering that CO2.
Think of biofuel the energy storage medium for a natural form of solar panels.
In terms of carbon cycle it goes like this:
Plants capture CO2 from the air -> Plants use solar energy to transform CO2 into building elements (such as proteins) -> Plants grow with the building elemnts -> Plants gets harvested -> Harvested plants get made into biofuel -> Bioful is burnt -> CO2 is back in the air _> Plants capture CO2 from the air
Pretty much self-contained
As for energy, consider that the energy that allows all the CO2 to be capture from the air and transformed into the molecules with a higher energy value that are burnt in biofuel is simply solar light captured via photosyntesis into molecules in a high-energy status.
Some of that energy is then lost during harvesting and transformation into biofuel (the last part can be done with the help of some nice bacteria that just take a little bit of energy back as paymant). Most of that collected solar energy is still present in the biofuel but not all.
At that point we just release the chemically stored energy in the biofuel by transforming it into lower energy molecules (such as CO2), usually through burning it.
So:
Solar energy --photosynthesis-> Chemical energy --burn-> Heat [ --power generators-> electricity ]
Plants grow everywhere, even in the sea. All they need is sunlight. As long as the sun remains burning, it's a renewable system.
The only reason why biofuels aren't made from all types of plants is that for some the harvesting/transformation cost is too high
For some, such as sugar cane, that's not a problem.
The biguest reason why most of the cars don't use alcohol as fuel is that petroleum is cheaper and NOT because the biofuel cycle for alcohol consumes more energy (beyond solar energy, i mean) than it gives back.
Part of the reason is that even in more "progressive" European nations oil and dirty engergy is very heavily subsidized.
I live in Holland. Last time i checked 1L (0.26 gallons) of 95 octanes gas was 2,3 euros (about $2.8) at the pomp.
That's $10.5 per gallon
How exactly is that subsidising fuel????
The point being that burning fossile fuels releases to the air Carbon that has been captured from the air and stored underground
The sources i named above (and others named by a previous poster) mostly are renewable, meaning they are part of a cycle where the sources of energy are replenished from long-duration sources (such as the sun). Also the capture and release of Carbon (if any) is part of that cycle.
For example, in the case of biofuels, the sources (plants) are renewed by the growth of new plants using solar energy (as in the sun's light). An interesting property of this cycle is that the Carbon released when burning biofuel was actually captured from the air when the plants were growing (and in a time close to the present time, not in the Jurassic).
As for the processing of biofuels consuming more energy than the biofuel will give back when burned - simply consider sugar cane alcohool (widelly used in Brasil for example) - how exactly does it consume a lot of energy making (or even purifying) alcohool????
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n <-- Under research, hardly overfunded
Sorry, I won't do your homework for you. There are plenty of reasonable alternatives, just look at the literature;
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Like what?
Solar Power? RANT
Wind power? RANT
Nuclear power? RANT
Hydroelectric
Tide-generation
Biofuels
Fusio
And this is just what i came up in a couple of minutes
Not to mention a lot of the CO2 being release into the atmosphere and causing global warming (question is not if CO2 causes it, it's how much is it causing vs the natural cycle) is taking the path of being pumped out of underground stores, being burned in low efficiency engines and coming out of the tail pipes of gas guzling SUVs.
If you just put a flat tax on gasoline, yes that is unfair.
A flat tax on gasoline's impact is directly proportional to the ammount of fuel used. Less fuel used, less tax payed.
It's simply an incentive burning less fuel. Whether that is achieved by smaller/lighter cars with smaller engines and/or more efficient engines is unimportant, though if you have both you save the most (in fuel taxes and fuel costs).
So yes, under a flat tax on gas scheme an ultra efficient SUV would still cost more on taxes than an equally efficient Smart. It might however cost less that a low efficency Smart.
I fail to see how this would be unfair.
... is here
One of the ultimate grails of maximizing profits is to segment the market to such a point that sellers get out of each individual buyer as much as he or she is willing to pay for any item.
In the case of online shops, technology allows sellers to get a good approach to maximizing acceptable price per individual buyer.
Smart buyers can also use technology to maximize the ammount of satisfaction they get per-buck spent - try comparisson sites, online user reviews and such.
Dumb buyers will continue to passivelly get reamed by smart shops. Call it natural selection.
In other news, it has just been announce that is physically impossible to go from point A to B:
One has to travel 1/2 the way from A to B, then one has to travel 1/2 the remaining way, and the 1/2 the way again, and then another 1/2 and so on and so on ad infinitum
This it's not possible to go from A to B
I work as a freelancer in Holland and, due to how the dutch tax authorities have set things up, out of my rate i have to pay both the costs of the employer and of the employee (except for things such as workspace and office supplies).
You example is WAY off.
Roughly about 10-15% of my rate is taken away by the employer side costs (such as tax and mandatory sick leave insurance) while about 30-35% go away as employee side costs (mostly taxes)
Putting things another way, in Holland for every 10 EUR an employers pays in salary he will have to pay another 1 EUR (excluding office space rentals, office supplies, software licenses and such)