Doesn't matter that the plaintiff didn't have a case to start with - what matters is whether the plaintiff got a fair hearing.
The grandparent is right - the judge is jeopardizing the case by screwing around like this. The plaintiff now has the point that the judge may not have been impartial.
It's not the first time where a judge's impartiality was called into question. See http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,4207 1,00.html Of course, if the judge had kept his mouth shut, he'd be taking the blame for Vista not shipping.
From Alan Krueger's paper where he quotes So You Want To Be A Rock and Roll Star
In return, we would grant Elektra the exclusive rights to our recordings. As money from the sales of records came in, we would be allotted a percentage of the proceeds, known as points. In a typical deal, the band gets thirteen or fourteen percentage points. We'd have to give a few of our own points (four perhaps) to the producer of our record (producers typically get a fee and points). Then we'd be down to ten points. Before calculating the value of those ten points, however, Electra would subtract a large percentage of the gross sales to account for free goods, records given away for promotional and other purposes. Thus, the amount on which our 10 percent was calculated would be reduced by 20 to 25 percent. So we'd be down even further, perhaps 10 percent on 75 percent of the wholesale album revenue. If our CD was sold in stores for fifteen dollars, the band's share of the revenue might be something between fifty cents and a dollar per CD. Would we get to keep it? No! Elektra would add up all of the expenses of 9 recording and promoting our album - rock videos, radio promotion, touring costs, and so on. The total of those costs, which could run into the millions, would be our recoupable debt to the record company. Our share of each CD sold would be swallowed up by that debt..... When it came time to record and release future albums, any unpaid debt from our past albums would carry forward. In fact, even if we sold millions of records (in which case the size of our share would increase), we might never recoup. As one friend of mine joked, we'd be rock-and-roll sharecroppers. (pp. 34-36)
With deals like that, it's amazing that any musician would sign a recording contract.
When I was running Casady and Greene, a now-deceased Mac software company, almost all our developers were getting 15 points. If we blew it and overpaid on the advance, it was our loss. Promo copies weren't charged against the developer - it was an advertising expense. Advertising expenses are part of the reason we took 85% of the pot. An ad ran anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000. Tradeshows cost us on the order of $100,000 and we had smallish booths.
Charging the developer for advertising, production, sales, post-sales expenses AND taking 85% would have been immoral. I guess that's why the music industry does it. When I left the company, it had grown from $15,000 in our first year to a couple of million in sales. The business model worked because we weren't greedy - we just wanted to produce something people wanted and make enough to stay in business.
Last Wednesday, the weather forecast for my area was 4 days of rain. Thursday was a beautiful, clear warm spring day.
Yeah, I know, meteorology isn't climatology. A key difference is a meteorologist's forecast horizon is considerably shorter and he's repeatedly reminded how wrong he can be. Climatologists don't have that luxury - they can be 100% wrong and not know it for decades. So they cover their bases by forecasting both very hot temperatures and freezing conditions. Their models support both outcomes which says to me their models aren't worth much. So reminiscent of Truman's wish for a one-armed economist.
It's not just Freeman, but a lot of other scientists have problems with Kyoto. Their letter includes this comment:
Observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future.
But heck, Edward Lorenz knew that back in the early 60's. He found that even simple non-linear models produce unpredictable output. Adding complexities to attempt to model the real world just aggravates the underlying modeling problem. Those of you who think computer models can see far into the future would be well served by reading his paper in which he writes:
When our results concerning the instability of nonperiodic flow are applied to the atmosphere, which is ostensibly nonperiodic, they indicate that predictions of the sufficiently distant future is impossible by any method, unless the present conditions are known exactly. In view of the incompleteness of weather observations, precise very-long range forecasting would seem to be non-existent.
It's worth noting that not one climate model that doesn't incorporate climate data from 1960 on has autonomously forecast the climate since 1960. And yet we have folks telling us what the next century is going to look like.
IIRC, the discussions at the astronomical society have come to the conclusion that most of the good roman names have been used up.
Your recollection has nothing to do why the object is sometimes being called Xena. The discoverer, Brown, named it Xena on a whim. Though he discovered it, it wasn't his perogative to name it. The fact that he issued a press release with a name has caused no end of grief to folks who want a consistent naming scheme.
There are a couple of database maintainers who hand out temporary names like 2004 VD17. If you're conducting research on that particular body, you publish all references to the body as 2004 VD17. That way, if someone wants to followup on what you're talking about, there isn't any ambiguity. Brown flipped the finger to that convention by coming up with Xena.
In the 70s, scientists were absolutely convinced that they'd mastered the complex climate change models, and confidently assured us all that an Ice Age was imminent.
No they didn't. Don't know how old you are hawkfish, but I distinctly remember that they did. The phobia of the 70's was distinctly the other way. I remember my parents arguing about climate cooling at the dinner table. My mother was convinced that an ice age was imminent. My father was very skeptical. The argument revolved around how well science could predict climate. My father was convinced that since he couldn't get accurate weather forecasts, that climate forecasts were even more suspect. Here we are, 35 years later and the same arguments are still playing out.
it makes me wonder if the poster posted in haste or doesn't have a clue that the sentence is ill formed. When I saw that the sentence was written by an Apple zealot, I recalled a study done back in the 80's at UC Berkeley. The study was attempting to categorize the difference between the early Mac users and PC users. At the time, PC users had to put up with DOS whereas the Mac users had a black and white version of Windows 95.
The study's gist was that the PC users tended to enroll in the more rigorous courses whereas the Mac users gravitated to the less demanding courses. Of course some Mac users went ballistic but they never succeeded in undermining the facts the study unearthed.
Mind you, I'm not implying a generalization about today's Mac/PC users. I'm talking about Zealots who have a difficult time understanding that computers are just an appliance, not an object of veneration. You're not a better person because you use a Mac or an Intel or an AMD machine. You're just a computer user. An inability to see that qualifies you for the less rigorous courses.
"I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation."
Taking him at his word I think that perhaps he's suffering from an early senescence. Any number of things can bring it on, stress, blood pressure, alzheimer's, fatigue.
I've seen it up close. My brother was under an incredible amount of stress and started making nonsensical statements and connections like this guy has. At the time, I began to fear my brother had succumbed to Alzheimer's. It wasn't until he retired and unwound that his old self resurfaced. Bottom line was he couldn't handle the stress anymore.
Make fun of the guy if you will, but remember, it's a fate that awaits us all.
McKitrick and MacIntyre raise an objection, demonstrate what they're talking about and you attack their credentials? They're not positing a competing theory - they're saying Mann's methodology was bogus and they demonstrate what they're talking about.
f you want a practical definition of a scientist, it is a person who publish in respected, per-reviewed scientific journals....I am sure the two so-called "researchers" you mention would be happy to publish in say Nature if their work was of any merit, but Nature does not publish quasi-science like this.
MacIntyre and McKitrick's paper was published in Nature. If you looked at McKitrick's CV perhaps you missed the 9 peer-reviewed papers he's published in the past 3 years.
Science requires openess and honesty - Mann certainly failed the former test when he refused to release his code for inspection.
You raise modeling as something I don't understand. Interesting since I was trained in modeling and forecasting and saw firsthand its shortcomings. I've seen the assumptions that go into modeling, I've personally seen models fail and watched the people I reported to jigger the model so it gave somewhat sensible forecasts - whether they were accurate or not was immaterial - they just had to look right so we could fulfill a contract.
As to chaos theory, perhaps you're familiar with Lorenz's paper on the futility of long range forecasts based on non-linear equations? His work is one of the textbook cases on how intractable climate forecasting is.
but where did scientists worried about the future of the planet exactly do wrong?
Does poor science qualify? How about Michael Mann's Hockey Stick work? From this week's New Scientist (subscription only article)
There is one sense in which Mann accepts as inarguably true. The point of his original work was to compare past and present temperatures, so he analyzed temperatures in terms of their divergence from the 20th century mean. This approach highlights differences from that period and will thus accentuate any hockey stick shape if - but only if, he insists - it is present in the data.
The charge from McIntyre and McKitrick however, is that Mann's computer program does not merely accentuate this shape, but crates it. To make the point, they did their own analysis based on looking over the past 100 years instead of from the 20th-century mean. This produced a graph showing an apparent rise in tempeartures in the 15th century as as great as the warming occurring now. The shaft of the hockey stick had a big kink in it.
Though McKitrick and MacIntyre's paper is hidden behind Nature's subscription firewall, McKitrick shows the graph on his webpage. Note that McKitrick and MacIntyre aren't saying global warming isn't happening, they're just pointing out Mann's method is suspect.
The New Scientist article goes on to cite poor data sources such as tree rings with known variability issues and inherent bias in data selection. When Mann was asked to divulge his source code so it could be inspected for methodology errors, he declined saying it was proprietary code. Revealing methodology is inherent in good science and Mann violated that key precept.
You should be skeptical of climatology in general given that it's even more removed from model failure than meteorolgy. Meteorologists are well acquainted with their models failing because they get feedback on a daily basis. Climatologist don't get that feedback because there's only one climate so they retrofit their models to fit past performance of the climate - a methodology that meteorologists have demonstrated doesn't work very well.
Even worse, they can't even agree on what's going to happen. One model has Europe roasting, another freezing. It can't be both but regardless of which outcome we eventually encounter, climatologists will claim they predicted it.
At it's core, the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis has relied on CO2 emissions as being causative. You have to be skeptical of a claim that an incredibly complex atmosephere which we can't fully model is being driven by variations of a single gas. A gas whose concentration is less than a tenth of one percent.
Except that the second factor will just be stored alongside the first in the company databases.
It woludn't matter if the second factor is a computed function of the transaction number and transaction value using a large encryption key that's assigned to the credit card by the bank. The credit card would be a little usb stick that stored a processor and a key. When you bought something, you'd stick the key into a usb port, the stick would show you the transaction amount, you'd push a button allowing the processor to compute a hash value which would be trasmitted to the bank for verification.
The credit card would do very little so the software is easily checked to ensure that it's correct. The credit card would be cheap would more than pay for itself in reduced fraud.
The hell with relying on vendors to be trustworthy.
Here's a link to Boing Boing that suggests Citi may indeed be the tip of the iceberg Visa Usa Notice. If Sams Club and OfficeMax are saving Citi Visa pins, they're saving other pins as well.
Hear that thumping? It's the hearts of a thousand excited product liability lawyers.
If the retailers have been storing the Pin locally why would this just be a Citi issue. Wouldn't any debit card that went through their network be at risk?
Corporate money isn't the main problem
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I was at a town meeting organized by my local Congressional rep. Listening to the people at the meeting, I realized the biggest problem our country faces is ourselves. Literally, every single person who got up and spoke wanted money for some reason or another. One guy was a postal worker who wanted social security payments because he'd worked the minimum # of quarters to qualify for social security. Another was a school teacher who wanted a bigger pension. Another was a parent with a child with some brain disease who wanted help. The entreaties for money never stopped.
What really is depressing is the realization that Social Security is going to start spewing cash like never before as my generation retires and the money isn't there to fund it. Sure, it's there on the books but the reality is the money was spent the moment it came in the door. So a lot of baby boomers are going to start asking for their share and though the books show the money is there, the "there" is some taxpayer's pocket.
It doesn't matter whether the politician is Republican or Democrat - neither of them is willing to take that problem on because whoever does knows they'll get voted out of office.
Those affected by the outsourcing won't give a shit about a new market, and only care about their lost job/income/life.
Not true. Some of us take the hit and find something else.
I've seen it from both sides. I've lost a couple of jobs to outsourcing. I also grew up in Mexico in the 50's where protectionism was absurd. American goods which were better made than Mexican counterparts, cost 2-3 times as much only because of tariffs Mexico imposed on those goods. The only people who benefited from that were the sloppy local producers.
Expecting the world to stand still so you can continue a comfortable lifestyle isn't realistic. Sure, you can vote for a pandering politician who'll swear to protect your job. But that's like voting for someone who never did any work in his life so you don't have to work either - not a formula for a better economy.
Here in the states, I pay a $180/year TV tax. In exchange, I get advertising free TV that I want to watch. The tax collector goes by the name of Netflix and is quite flexible in terms of providing interesting content.
I pay another TV tax to the Federal government. The folks in Washington think I should watch PBS so they use some of my income tax payments to chip in for public broadcasting's operating costs. Since the folks at public broadcasting can't manage to keep their politics to themselves, I don't watch or listen to their shows much.
Even though my share of Federal Taxes that underwrite public broadcasting only amounts to ten or twenty bucks a year, I get a much better deal from Netflix since I get to choose what I see.
It doesn't matter whether Brahm can do anything about people trying to work around their ISP.
What matters is, is he right in that, at best, it won't make any difference, and at worst, it'll harm torrents overall? From the article:
..the ISP traffic shaping tools are already quite sophisticated, and a wire protocol which transfers a lot of data bidirectionally and consistently looks like line noise with no header is only marginally more difficult to identify than one which uses fixed ports. Obfuscating the protocol doesn't even claim to make it difficult to find out who's downloading a particular file.
His third point is that it'll screw ISP's that cache bittorrent packets to boost overall performance.
I don't take much truck with his 4th point but his other points sound like sensible objections.
Or look at Clinton. Or FDR. Or Reagan. It doesn't matter which president you pick, they've all stretched the law.
If the courts find Bush violated the law, then yep, he should be punished. But until the courts so find, some folks seem to have forgotten you have to presume he's innoncent.
You're probably trolling but I'll bite. To call CO2 a pollutant requires that you demonstrate that it is one. You go spewing HSO4 or CO and people will have good reason to object - those are real pollutants. Blaming CO2 that went from.028 percent to.037 percent of the atmosphere as the principal cause of global warming stretches credulity just a tad. Especially when there's plenty of evidence that the earth has heated up in the past before we were even around.
20,000 years ago, a good chunk of the midwest was under a mile of ice. So yeah, times are warmer now. Then again, 130,000 years ago, it was warmer than now. If you look at the graph, you can see that from about 700,000 years ago, there's been a slight peak-to-peak warming trend. The dispute is over the causes of the variation.
The fact is, no one knows.
Claims that CO2 fluctuation is the culprit are unsubstantiated. Show me a climate model that can model clouds accurately. You can't do it because no one has solved that problem. How about solar luminosity? Forget it, it's treated as a constant, or at best, a simple approximation of past solar output. 99.9% of the solar system's mass and we haven't a clue as to how hot the sun will be a year from now. All we can do is guess. And yet, climatologists are confident that their models which can't accurately model major components of the earth's climate can accurately forecast 50 years out. It's bull, pure and simple.
I have a keystroke that I've programmed to go to Google's web page. It wasn't any trouble to change the program to take me to Altavista instead. Sure, it's a bit odd to type alt-shift-G and get Altavista now but I'll adjust.
Google can choose to be evil and I can choose to go elsewhere for my search needs. Altavista may or may not have already sold out to China but then again, they didn't pretend to do no evil.
Seems to me a bit coincidental that the founders sold $160 million worth of shares just before this announcement was made. Maybe I'm overly cynical but selling just at that particular moment seems like insider trading to me. Looks to me like they didn't know if the market would reject or approve the move and so hedged and sold some of their stock. If the stock dives, I wouldn't be surprised to see the SEC, and a few lawyers, knocking on their door.
There was a video floating around where Jobs is showing the Macbook to Andy Grove and Paul Otellini. They're at the Apple booth in Macworld. In that video, Jobs doesn't hem and haw when Grove asks "how long does the battery last?" Jobs says "about the same" which I assume he means "about the same as the G4."
An irony about the video is Otellini looks ghastly ill while Jobs and Grove, who have both survived cancer, look the picture of health. Perhaps it was the lighting or perhaps Otellini needs to hit the gym.
there don't seem to be any obtacles other than...the necessary ironing out of practical problems...
Pesky practical problems always seem to get in the way don't they? Damn, if it weren't for those pesky pratical problems, we'd have flying cars. All the theoretical work has been done. Just a few bits and pieces to work out.
If Cisco outsources the manufacture of the hardware how can it possibly believe that the manufacturer won't run an extra X copies off the line after they've run Cisco's? Sure, your contracts may prohibit that but when the cost vs what Cisco charges the end user is so great, the temptation for someone at the manufacturing line is going to be pretty high. Especially if they figure they'll sell the goods in a market where Cisco isn't.
There are reasons on-shore companies used to do the manufacturing themselves. This is one of them.
Outsourcing may be cheaper in the short run but Cisco is beginning to learn what the long-run costs are.
Once light crosses the event horizon, it cannot escape.
I realize that's the current gospel but I've often wondered if the event horizon isn't dynamic.
Consider the earth/moon gravity wells. There's an imaginary line that divides the two wells. A dust mote on one side of the line falls towards the earth while a mote on the other side falls towards the moon. The line that divides the two gravity wells is dynamic. As the moon orbits the earth, dust motes that were falling towards the earth can find themselves falling towards the moon as the moon approaches them on its orbit around the earth. As the moon moves away, the dust mote can again start falling towards the earth.
Similarly, as the star approaches the BH, it seems to me that the star's gravity would shift the event horizon towards the BH. If a photon was right next to the event horizon on the BH side and the event horizon shifted underneath it due to the approaching star, the photon would be freed.
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Doesn't matter that the plaintiff didn't have a case to start with - what matters is whether the plaintiff got a fair hearing.
7 1,00.html Of course, if the judge had kept his mouth shut, he'd be taking the blame for Vista not shipping.
The grandparent is right - the judge is jeopardizing the case by screwing around like this. The plaintiff now has the point that the judge may not have been impartial.
It's not the first time where a judge's impartiality was called into question. See http://www.wirednews.com/news/politics/0,1283,420
When I was running Casady and Greene, a now-deceased Mac software company, almost all our developers were getting 15 points. If we blew it and overpaid on the advance, it was our loss. Promo copies weren't charged against the developer - it was an advertising expense. Advertising expenses are part of the reason we took 85% of the pot. An ad ran anywhere from $5,000 to $20,000. Tradeshows cost us on the order of $100,000 and we had smallish booths.
Charging the developer for advertising, production, sales, post-sales expenses AND taking 85% would have been immoral. I guess that's why the music industry does it. When I left the company, it had grown from $15,000 in our first year to a couple of million in sales. The business model worked because we weren't greedy - we just wanted to produce something people wanted and make enough to stay in business.
Yeah, I know, meteorology isn't climatology. A key difference is a meteorologist's forecast horizon is considerably shorter and he's repeatedly reminded how wrong he can be. Climatologists don't have that luxury - they can be 100% wrong and not know it for decades. So they cover their bases by forecasting both very hot temperatures and freezing conditions. Their models support both outcomes which says to me their models aren't worth much. So reminiscent of Truman's wish for a one-armed economist.
Your recollection has nothing to do why the object is sometimes being called Xena. The discoverer, Brown, named it Xena on a whim. Though he discovered it, it wasn't his perogative to name it. The fact that he issued a press release with a name has caused no end of grief to folks who want a consistent naming scheme.
There are a couple of database maintainers who hand out temporary names like 2004 VD17. If you're conducting research on that particular body, you publish all references to the body as 2004 VD17. That way, if someone wants to followup on what you're talking about, there isn't any ambiguity. Brown flipped the finger to that convention by coming up with Xena.
In the 70s, scientists were absolutely convinced that they'd mastered the complex climate change models, and confidently assured us all that an Ice Age was imminent.
No they didn't.
Don't know how old you are hawkfish, but I distinctly remember that they did. The phobia of the 70's was distinctly the other way. I remember my parents arguing about climate cooling at the dinner table. My mother was convinced that an ice age was imminent. My father was very skeptical. The argument revolved around how well science could predict climate. My father was convinced that since he couldn't get accurate weather forecasts, that climate forecasts were even more suspect. Here we are, 35 years later and the same arguments are still playing out.
The study's gist was that the PC users tended to enroll in the more rigorous courses whereas the Mac users gravitated to the less demanding courses. Of course some Mac users went ballistic but they never succeeded in undermining the facts the study unearthed.
Mind you, I'm not implying a generalization about today's Mac/PC users. I'm talking about Zealots who have a difficult time understanding that computers are just an appliance, not an object of veneration. You're not a better person because you use a Mac or an Intel or an AMD machine. You're just a computer user. An inability to see that qualifies you for the less rigorous courses.
Taking him at his word I think that perhaps he's suffering from an early senescence. Any number of things can bring it on, stress, blood pressure, alzheimer's, fatigue.
I've seen it up close. My brother was under an incredible amount of stress and started making nonsensical statements and connections like this guy has. At the time, I began to fear my brother had succumbed to Alzheimer's. It wasn't until he retired and unwound that his old self resurfaced. Bottom line was he couldn't handle the stress anymore.
Make fun of the guy if you will, but remember, it's a fate that awaits us all.
f you want a practical definition of a scientist, it is a person who publish in respected, per-reviewed scientific journals....I am sure the two so-called "researchers" you mention would be happy to publish in say Nature if their work was of any merit, but Nature does not publish quasi-science like this.
MacIntyre and McKitrick's paper was published in Nature. If you looked at McKitrick's CV perhaps you missed the 9 peer-reviewed papers he's published in the past 3 years.
Science requires openess and honesty - Mann certainly failed the former test when he refused to release his code for inspection.
You raise modeling as something I don't understand. Interesting since I was trained in modeling and forecasting and saw firsthand its shortcomings. I've seen the assumptions that go into modeling, I've personally seen models fail and watched the people I reported to jigger the model so it gave somewhat sensible forecasts - whether they were accurate or not was immaterial - they just had to look right so we could fulfill a contract.
As to chaos theory, perhaps you're familiar with Lorenz's paper on the futility of long range forecasts based on non-linear equations? His work is one of the textbook cases on how intractable climate forecasting is.
Does poor science qualify? How about Michael Mann's Hockey Stick work? From this week's New Scientist (subscription only article)
Though McKitrick and MacIntyre's paper is hidden behind Nature's subscription firewall, McKitrick shows the graph on his webpage. Note that McKitrick and MacIntyre aren't saying global warming isn't happening, they're just pointing out Mann's method is suspect.The New Scientist article goes on to cite poor data sources such as tree rings with known variability issues and inherent bias in data selection. When Mann was asked to divulge his source code so it could be inspected for methodology errors, he declined saying it was proprietary code. Revealing methodology is inherent in good science and Mann violated that key precept.
You should be skeptical of climatology in general given that it's even more removed from model failure than meteorolgy. Meteorologists are well acquainted with their models failing because they get feedback on a daily basis. Climatologist don't get that feedback because there's only one climate so they retrofit their models to fit past performance of the climate - a methodology that meteorologists have demonstrated doesn't work very well.
Even worse, they can't even agree on what's going to happen. One model has Europe roasting, another freezing. It can't be both but regardless of which outcome we eventually encounter, climatologists will claim they predicted it.
At it's core, the anthropogenic climate change hypothesis has relied on CO2 emissions as being causative. You have to be skeptical of a claim that an incredibly complex atmosephere which we can't fully model is being driven by variations of a single gas. A gas whose concentration is less than a tenth of one percent.
Except that the second factor will just be stored alongside the first in the company databases.
It woludn't matter if the second factor is a computed function of the transaction number and transaction value using a large encryption key that's assigned to the credit card by the bank. The credit card would be a little usb stick that stored a processor and a key. When you bought something, you'd stick the key into a usb port, the stick would show you the transaction amount, you'd push a button allowing the processor to compute a hash value which would be trasmitted to the bank for verification.
The credit card would do very little so the software is easily checked to ensure that it's correct. The credit card would be cheap would more than pay for itself in reduced fraud.
The hell with relying on vendors to be trustworthy.
Visa Usa Notice. If Sams Club and OfficeMax are saving Citi Visa pins, they're saving other pins as well.
Hear that thumping? It's the hearts of a thousand excited product liability lawyers.
If the retailers have been storing the Pin locally why would this just be a Citi issue. Wouldn't any debit card that went through their network be at risk?
I was at a town meeting organized by my local Congressional rep. Listening to the people at the meeting, I realized the biggest problem our country faces is ourselves. Literally, every single person who got up and spoke wanted money for some reason or another. One guy was a postal worker who wanted social security payments because he'd worked the minimum # of quarters to qualify for social security. Another was a school teacher who wanted a bigger pension. Another was a parent with a child with some brain disease who wanted help. The entreaties for money never stopped.
What really is depressing is the realization that Social Security is going to start spewing cash like never before as my generation retires and the money isn't there to fund it. Sure, it's there on the books but the reality is the money was spent the moment it came in the door. So a lot of baby boomers are going to start asking for their share and though the books show the money is there, the "there" is some taxpayer's pocket.
It doesn't matter whether the politician is Republican or Democrat - neither of them is willing to take that problem on because whoever does knows they'll get voted out of office.
Not true. Some of us take the hit and find something else.
I've seen it from both sides. I've lost a couple of jobs to outsourcing. I also grew up in Mexico in the 50's where protectionism was absurd. American goods which were better made than Mexican counterparts, cost 2-3 times as much only because of tariffs Mexico imposed on those goods. The only people who benefited from that were the sloppy local producers.
Expecting the world to stand still so you can continue a comfortable lifestyle isn't realistic. Sure, you can vote for a pandering politician who'll swear to protect your job. But that's like voting for someone who never did any work in his life so you don't have to work either - not a formula for a better economy.
Here in the states, I pay a $180/year TV tax. In exchange, I get advertising free TV that I want to watch. The tax collector goes by the name of Netflix and is quite flexible in terms of providing interesting content.
I pay another TV tax to the Federal government. The folks in Washington think I should watch PBS so they use some of my income tax payments to chip in for public broadcasting's operating costs. Since the folks at public broadcasting can't manage to keep their politics to themselves, I don't watch or listen to their shows much.
Even though my share of Federal Taxes that underwrite public broadcasting only amounts to ten or twenty bucks a year, I get a much better deal from Netflix since I get to choose what I see.
What matters is, is he right in that, at best, it won't make any difference, and at worst, it'll harm torrents overall? From the article:
His third point is that it'll screw ISP's that cache bittorrent packets to boost overall performance.
I don't take much truck with his 4th point but his other points sound like sensible objections.
Or look at Clinton. Or FDR. Or Reagan. It doesn't matter which president you pick, they've all stretched the law.
If the courts find Bush violated the law, then yep, he should be punished. But until the courts so find, some folks seem to have forgotten you have to presume he's innoncent.
You're probably trolling but I'll bite. To call CO2 a pollutant requires that you demonstrate that it is one. You go spewing HSO4 or CO and people will have good reason to object - those are real pollutants. Blaming CO2 that went from .028 percent to .037 percent of the atmosphere as the principal cause of global warming stretches credulity just a tad. Especially when there's plenty of evidence that the earth has heated up in the past before we were even around.
The fact is, no one knows.
Claims that CO2 fluctuation is the culprit are unsubstantiated. Show me a climate model that can model clouds accurately. You can't do it because no one has solved that problem. How about solar luminosity? Forget it, it's treated as a constant, or at best, a simple approximation of past solar output. 99.9% of the solar system's mass and we haven't a clue as to how hot the sun will be a year from now. All we can do is guess. And yet, climatologists are confident that their models which can't accurately model major components of the earth's climate can accurately forecast 50 years out. It's bull, pure and simple.
Google can choose to be evil and I can choose to go elsewhere for my search needs. Altavista may or may not have already sold out to China but then again, they didn't pretend to do no evil.
Seems to me a bit coincidental that the founders sold $160 million worth of shares just before this announcement was made. Maybe I'm overly cynical but selling just at that particular moment seems like insider trading to me. Looks to me like they didn't know if the market would reject or approve the move and so hedged and sold some of their stock. If the stock dives, I wouldn't be surprised to see the SEC, and a few lawyers, knocking on their door.
There was a video floating around where Jobs is showing the Macbook to Andy Grove and Paul Otellini. They're at the Apple booth in Macworld. In that video, Jobs doesn't hem and haw when Grove asks "how long does the battery last?" Jobs says "about the same" which I assume he means "about the same as the G4."
An irony about the video is Otellini looks ghastly ill while Jobs and Grove, who have both survived cancer, look the picture of health. Perhaps it was the lighting or perhaps Otellini needs to hit the gym.
Pesky practical problems always seem to get in the way don't they? Damn, if it weren't for those pesky pratical problems, we'd have flying cars. All the theoretical work has been done. Just a few bits and pieces to work out.
If Cisco outsources the manufacture of the hardware how can it possibly believe that the manufacturer won't run an extra X copies off the line after they've run Cisco's? Sure, your contracts may prohibit that but when the cost vs what Cisco charges the end user is so great, the temptation for someone at the manufacturing line is going to be pretty high. Especially if they figure they'll sell the goods in a market where Cisco isn't.
There are reasons on-shore companies used to do the manufacturing themselves. This is one of them.
Outsourcing may be cheaper in the short run but Cisco is beginning to learn what the long-run costs are.
I realize that's the current gospel but I've often wondered if the event horizon isn't dynamic.
Consider the earth/moon gravity wells. There's an imaginary line that divides the two wells. A dust mote on one side of the line falls towards the earth while a mote on the other side falls towards the moon. The line that divides the two gravity wells is dynamic. As the moon orbits the earth, dust motes that were falling towards the earth can find themselves falling towards the moon as the moon approaches them on its orbit around the earth. As the moon moves away, the dust mote can again start falling towards the earth.
Similarly, as the star approaches the BH, it seems to me that the star's gravity would shift the event horizon towards the BH. If a photon was right next to the event horizon on the BH side and the event horizon shifted underneath it due to the approaching star, the photon would be freed.