Everything you say is true, but it's actually even -worse- than that.
It's not just that the returns are diminishing, they're -NEGATIVE-. It's not just that countries that spend 30-40% less on healthcare compared to USA have similar health and life-expectancy, several of them actually have significantly BETTER results for LESS money.
The reason is basically what you state: Giving EXTREME healthcare to those who already have GOOD healthcare provides little if any benefit, but providing the BASICS to those who are lacking them is cheap and efficient.
So, USA has very very high spendings for those who are "in", but fall quite deeply on the rankings because you fail to provide GOOD healthcare to everyone living in the USA. That's why you're not in the top 40 for any of the most used healthcare-indications despite being undisputed as number one in spendings.
Norway, for example, has similar healthcare to USA, not quite as extreme on the top mainly due to less panic about courts, but still come out way ahead, because healthcare is truly universal.
Costs less, gives more health. What is not to like ?
I've flewn a -LOT- in Scandinavia, and quite a bit elsewhere in Europe, and I don't recognize this reality.
Typical boarding is more like: First children travelling alone, then disabled, or frail people aswell as people travelling with small children. Thereafter the rest in whatever sequence they arrive at the gate.
To the contrary, one of the perks that some of the first-class people enjoy is -shorter- check-in times, special speedy lines and so on which means while a coach-passenger may have to show up an hour before take-off, a first-class passenger can show up 20 minutes before take-off and stroll rigth on.
You are claiming that a US citizen sitting in USA, doing nothing that is illegal in the USA can nevertheless be forced to pay up as the result of his activities somehow breaking Italian law ?
That is silly, the real world *don't* work like that.
Everyone of us does lots of stuff that is illegal -somewhere- regularily. Nothing happens. The part you're missing is that no country I'm aware of will enforce judgements against people for stuff that isn't also illegal in their own law.
If you're a homosexual that live in USA, there's -zero- chance that the Government will somehow decide to send you to Iran to be executed because that is illegal there.
Yes, judgements can be collected internationally -- if the courts in BOTH countries agree the conduct is illegal, and that the judging court has jurisdiction. (example: My brother got a speeding-ticket in Germany, and was forced to pay despite being Norwegian, because speeding is illegal in both countries, and everyone agrees a german court has jurisdiction when someone drives to fast in Germany)
Possibly. But the thing is, you're still going to use your ears and eyes for ultimately accessing the information. Which puts upper limits on what is needed.
Gigabit ethernet is cheap, reliable and available everywhere now. Lots of people and companies are still running a lot of stuff over 100Mbit ethernet because the improvements just aren't that important.
We're also at that point with storage. People buy laptops with 160GB storage rather than desktops with a terabyte, because it's/enough/ for their needs.
As technologies mature, eventually the breakneck pace of increases in performance will slow down. Yes, we're still growing very quickly, but large masses of people are already starting to care less. Upgrades become -less- frequent even as prices drop. Not because the brand-new isn't still 10 times more powerful than the 5-year-old, but because frankly, for many jobs 10-time-more makes no difference at all.
The single-core, 3-year-old Celeron laptop at home work just as well as the new Core 2 Duo at work for 99% of the stuff I actually do. The main exception being for those people who like to play 3D-games.
If you can observe and test that a certain process works for 1, 10, 100 and 1000 generations, then the most reasonable assumption is that it'll work the same way with a 100 thousand or a 100 million generations too. Atleast absent some reasonable explanation for why it would not.
"macro-evolution" is a cop-out from Creationists that have a hard time ignoring the fact that any high-school that cares to can run evolution as an experiment (with artificial evolutionary pressure) and see clear results inside of 5-10 generations of the choosen organism. (this need not take that long, yeast-cells divide on a time-scale of an hour/generation or thereabouts, even with something larger like mice the experiment will run inside of a single school-year)
In essence, it says: "Yeah, sure it works for a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade, but it somehow WONT work for a millenium or a million years. I refuse to give a coherent argument as to why not, but will now stick my fingers in my ears, sing lalalala and pretend I won the argument."
Because of Occams Razor: Entities should not be multiplied needlessly.
If you can explain the development from single-cell organism to homo sapiens to satisfaction without ever mentioning God, and then you add, as sort of an afterthought; this all happened because God wanted it so.
Then "God" in your theory is superfluos: your theory *with* god doesn't explain or predict anything that your theory *without* God doesn't do equally well, so there's no reason to include him in the theory in the first place.
Given equal explanatory powers, the simplest theory is the superior one. If you have 10 points from a data-set that happen to lie on a straigth line, there is guaranteed to be a 10th-degree equation that matches all the 10 points, but that's not the theory you should choose, given that data you should instead suggest the relationship may be linear.
(in general k1*x^0 + k2*x^1... kn*x^n-1 can always be made to fit for any 10 points)
In that case you'd sell the rock to him for a million, what's the problem ? Sure, some joker may bid much more than the normal selling-price. But the logical thing to do then is simply to let him have it for that, ridicolously inflated, price. It's his cash to waste, afterall.
You'd have more than one auction anyway: many more-or-less similar pieces of IP would also be auctioned in a similar timeframe. And the same piece of IP could be auctioned several times at different times. Both helps giving you some idea of the market-value.
Where I live they are generally zero, that wasn't the point. The point was that the argument that it's somehow unfair to tax "intellectual" property falls down when you consider that we DO tax *real* propert.
Any argument against taxing "intellectual" property is equally valid for the tangible kind.
True. This is true for any other kind of property with property-taxes too by the way, nothing special for "IP".
If your family owns a plot of land that it has had for generations, and the value of the land rises until you can no longer afford to pay the property-taxes, you are forced to sell.
That -is- rather rare though; with property-taxes generally in the neighbourhood of 0.1%, that would mean, for example, owning land worth a million, but being unable to pay $1000 in taxes, it does happen but it doesn't happen terribly often.
With IP it'd happen even more seldom: most of the valuable stuff is owned by corporations, and it is valuable PRECISELY because it can be used to generate profit. If you own the copyrigth for everything The Beatles made, that is worth a lot, but it also generates a LOT of income, so paying 0.1% of the value in taxes is unproblematic.
As to your claim that an auction does not establish the value of something, that is pure nonsense. Generally when we're talking fincance and value, what is meant with value is how much cash you could exchange it for. The fact that somebody bid a million is evidence that at that moment, you could exchange it for one million, by the simple expedient of saying "yes thank you".
It is true that the value can change over time. That is fine, and again nothing special to IP. If you buy a house at an auction for a million, there's no guarantee that you can sell it again for that price a day later.
If someone thinks their IP is worth -less- than the IRS claims there's a simple cure for that: arrange a new auction. If you bought some IP a year ago for a million, but in todays auction you're able to win it for half a million, then obviously half a million is the current value.
I'd make a sligth change: since the current owner is able to bid any amount if he choose, it makes more sense to not require that he bid at all. He can wait until the auction is over and then choose if he wants to sell for the highest-bid or not. In either case the current value is the highest bid.
You frequently -can- poison other peoples land without paying for it. The problem is known as an "externality" and is a known problem of capitalism.
If I can produce widget X for 10$ a piece, and there is a market for a million of these widgets a year sold at $15, it would appear that my factory produces 5 million worth of wealth in that the outputs from the factory are worth 5 million more than the inputs.
If, however, the factory produces noise and pollution sufficiently that there are 10000 people in the area surrounding it which would be willing to pay $500/year to have the factory closed (that is: the running of the factory produces negative value for them of $500/year or more), then infact the factory is a net COST to society.
It's just that the profits go to the owner (me!) and the losses are distributed among a lot of unlucky ones who can't do anything about it, assuming that the factory are within legal limits at its locale.
But many serious crime have extra paragraphs stating that inciting others to perform the crime, or even just failing to try to PREVENT others from doing the crime is in itself illegal.
So the answer is, it depends on the crime.
If I -know- that you're planning to commit murder, but I do nothing to prevent it, I can be punished for this.
But if I know that you're planning to drive 60mph where only 50 is allowed, and I do nothing to prevent it, I cannot be punished for this.
Even where it's illegal to -conspire- or to refrain from interfering though, it is ALWAYS allowed to argue in favor of changing the laws, which is pretty obvious. Nothing stops you from posting a well-reasons document explaining why you think we should decriminalize murder.
There are plenty of very "valid" "natural" reasons why a kid would die before the age of 5, worst case even during birth, taking your wife along for the ride. Infact that used to happen to people pretty darn regularily.
That something is "natural" is a hell of a weak defence, its not as if nature care one way or the other if we're happy or not.
The "modern world" gives you a lot of time to sit around brooding, other than that I have a hard time seeing what is objectively so depressing about it.
Compared to any earlier epoch, you are today:
Much less likely to suffer from hunger, even less dying from it.
Much less likely to die as the result of violence of any kind.
Much less likely to die or suffer from a large range of disease.
Much more likely to live comfortably, in a reasonable dwelling.
Much more likely to see ALL your kids survive you.
Much less likely to die in childbirth (if you're a woman) (cue the tired old "there are no women on slashdot" jokes)
Likely to have a more comfortable experience say removing a bad tooth, due to the magic of painkillers.
Much more likely to live in a democracy.
Much more likely to receive (more) education.
Much less likely to have to do heavy manual labour of the type that destroys your body by the age you're 35.
Honestly, it's pretty darn hard to find even a -single- statistic where humanity did better in ANY previous century.
Possible exceptions for lack of exercise and overweight, but both of those are side-effects of giving people plenty of food, no physical labour and letting them choose. It's not as if anyone is -prevented- from exercising or doing manual labour.
Indeed. Natural doesn't say anything as to the desirability or not of something.
It is perfectly -natural- to have 20% of all children die before they turn 5, and a fair percentage of mothers too in childbirth. It's perfectly natural for a population to be limited by famine, disease, war, predation. It's not as if we're not trying to figth these things.
If we lived "all natural" we'd still be sitting around in caves, living short brutish lives and dying at 30 on the average.
This is true. That uniform signals attachment to a subculture.
I've had customers explicitly state that they feel comfortable about our competence because of the density of Coke-bottles, combat-boots, long-beards, band-shirts, hacker-attitude, incomprehensible posters with inside hacker-jokes, in our offices. These things signal attachment to a subculture, and indicate, to them, someone who lives, breathes thinks, lives code.
Which is just as silly as trusting a salesman because he has a nice suit, but there you go, nobody ever said customers can't be silly.
People fear that which they do not know and do not understand. What else is new ?
In our company we use tons of Open Source software and do development on some of it. We use Linux, Apache, Python, Java, BugZilla, MediaWiki, Subversion and many many more. It has saved us millions, even if we derived -no- value from the development we ourselves do on OSS-projects, we'd be coming out ahead. But we do, because the reason we make additions and adaptions is that customers of us need it, or we ourselves need it.
We ain't complaining, aproximately 20% of turnover is profit, and profit has been rising continously the last 5 years, along with turnover. We're a small company, only aproximately 25 developers. 22 and a half years ago though, when I started, we where -6- developers.
Hello, we're from the IRS. It has come to our attention that you own property worth ONE HUNDRED BILLION TRILLION ZOMG BBQ DOLLARS, at property tax-rates of 0.1% (no idea what property-taxes generally are in the USA) that'll be ONE MILLION TRILLION ZOMG BBQ DOLLARS, thankyouverymuch.
That is the point: the auction doesn't force you to sell, because obviously you can afford to pay yourself ANY amount. It does however establish a fair marketprice.
Actually, if the corporation had paid when requested to do so, they'd have got off cheap. Using two unlicensed pictures in publications in multiple mediums and countries with a total distribution in excess of 50.000 copies should cost you. They could've paid $1800 and been done with it.
Instead the owner invented a LIE: he claimed to have purchased the photos from a nonexistant individual (so says the Findings of Fact) Witnesses proved that he has a HISTORY of (and I quote) "telling the truth only when it benefits him" and "say one thing and do another".
CEOs like these -needs- to be bitch-slapped. As bitch-slapping for a corporation goes, $19000 is small fry.
I personally would've been ligthly/annoyed/ if someone took my pictures. Not enough to bother suing though, unless it was on a massive scale or in very large distribution in very high-profile material. But if the person started inventing one lie after another when asked to explain himself, then well, the scumsucker asked for it, no ?
True, but today it's easier than ever to go for the source. You generally recognize the bad journalists the easiest by the fact that they prefer -NOT- to explicitly tell you their sources. Mostly because if you then visted the source, you'd see for yourself that their so-called "article" is simply a misunderstanding and lots of hyperbole based on a press-release.
It's not -that- hard to read the press-release yourself, even it too tends to be sligthly sensationalistic it's atleast generally less full of misunderstandings and stupidity.
The main difference is that US tests emphasize what happens to the passenger-compartment, that it does not conform too much etc, which can as you say, be achieved by making it very strong.
The European tests emphasize what would likely happen to the -passengers- and give grades based on stuff like maximum acceleration experienced by various body-parts of the test-dummys and so on.
This gives similar, but not identical, results.
In a hard crash, having the passenger-cell deform sligthly more may give lower forces on the passengers, thus a WORSE us-score (because of the added deformation) and a BETTER european score (because of the lower forces on the passengers)
I don't think it's deliberate to stop imports. It's more likely the other way around: for marketing-reasons the cars are adapted to doing well at the tests that the producers cares most about, and that tends to be those in the home-market.
Like I said, the engineering is left an exercise for the readers.
As for efficiency, I know that, but honestly, with a zillion megawatthours in your pocket, a low efficiency is acceptable, the bigger problem is as you say what to do with the energy that you cannot use. Hard gammas are unpleasant. But even if it was "only" waste-heat, 200KW of waste heat from a car that spends 20KW cruising could be a problem to handle efficiently.
If you take "mainstream media reporting" as any indication whatsoever of the quality (or lack thereof) of research being done on different fields, then that's a problem right there.
Frequently the journalist deliberately makes things that are really minor advances sound like discoveries of the century, and even more frequently the journalist fails to himself understand the article he is reporting on, infact often he won't even have read it, all he has done is reading the press-release and then he writes up an article based on his misunderstanding of the simplifications in the press-release...
DNA is *CERTAINLY* not the "sole" source-code of biological phenomena, and I don't think any serious scientific article has been claiming otherwise for a long time. For example, the mithochondria present in every single one of your cells are thougth to be "captured bacteria" or something similar, and certainly ARE NOT encoded for in your DNA. (they have their own reproduction inside your cells, independent of yours)
If human DNA was all you had there'd be no way to construct a "working" human being, because you would not know about the mithochondria at all. (there is other stuff too, but they are the most obvious)
Slashdot Mirror
Everything you say is true, but it's actually even -worse- than that.
It's not just that the returns are diminishing, they're -NEGATIVE-. It's not just that countries that spend 30-40% less on healthcare compared to USA have similar health and life-expectancy, several of them actually have significantly BETTER results for LESS money.
The reason is basically what you state: Giving EXTREME healthcare to those who already have GOOD healthcare provides little if any benefit, but providing the BASICS to those who are lacking them is cheap and efficient.
So, USA has very very high spendings for those who are "in", but fall quite deeply on the rankings because you fail to provide GOOD healthcare to everyone living in the USA. That's why you're not in the top 40 for any of the most used healthcare-indications despite being undisputed as number one in spendings.
Norway, for example, has similar healthcare to USA, not quite as extreme on the top mainly due to less panic about courts, but still come out way ahead, because healthcare is truly universal.
Costs less, gives more health. What is not to like ?
What continent ?
I've flewn a -LOT- in Scandinavia, and quite a bit elsewhere in Europe, and I don't recognize this reality.
Typical boarding is more like: First children travelling alone, then disabled, or frail people aswell as people travelling with small children. Thereafter the rest in whatever sequence they arrive at the gate.
To the contrary, one of the perks that some of the first-class people enjoy is -shorter- check-in times, special speedy lines and so on which means while a coach-passenger may have to show up an hour before take-off, a first-class passenger can show up 20 minutes before take-off and stroll rigth on.
You are claiming that a US citizen sitting in USA, doing nothing that is illegal in the USA can nevertheless be forced to pay up as the result of his activities somehow breaking Italian law ?
That is silly, the real world *don't* work like that.
Everyone of us does lots of stuff that is illegal -somewhere- regularily. Nothing happens. The part you're missing is that no country I'm aware of will enforce judgements against people for stuff that isn't also illegal in their own law.
If you're a homosexual that live in USA, there's -zero- chance that the Government will somehow decide to send you to Iran to be executed because that is illegal there.
Yes, judgements can be collected internationally -- if the courts in BOTH countries agree the conduct is illegal, and that the judging court has jurisdiction. (example: My brother got a speeding-ticket in Germany, and was forced to pay despite being Norwegian, because speeding is illegal in both countries, and everyone agrees a german court has jurisdiction when someone drives to fast in Germany)
Storing it in tanks made for propane don't work.
The leakage isn't nessecarily a problem short-term, as you say, it is quite slow and atleast outdoors it safely escapes upwards.
The problem is, hydrogen seeping trough a metal also tends to over time make the metal brittle.
Brittle is about the last thing you want pressurised tanks holding flamable gases to be.
Possibly. But the thing is, you're still going to use your ears and eyes for ultimately accessing the information. Which puts upper limits on what is needed.
/enough/ for their needs.
Gigabit ethernet is cheap, reliable and available everywhere now. Lots of people and companies are still running a lot of stuff over 100Mbit ethernet because the improvements just aren't that important.
We're also at that point with storage. People buy laptops with 160GB storage rather than desktops with a terabyte, because it's
As technologies mature, eventually the breakneck pace of increases in performance will slow down. Yes, we're still growing very quickly, but large masses of people are already starting to care less. Upgrades become -less- frequent even as prices drop. Not because the brand-new isn't still 10 times more powerful than the 5-year-old, but because frankly, for many jobs 10-time-more makes no difference at all.
The single-core, 3-year-old Celeron laptop at home work just as well as the new Core 2 Duo at work for 99% of the stuff I actually do. The main exception being for those people who like to play 3D-games.
The distinction is silly anyways.
If you can observe and test that a certain process works for 1, 10, 100 and 1000 generations, then the most reasonable assumption is that it'll work the same way with a 100 thousand or a 100 million generations too. Atleast absent some reasonable explanation for why it would not.
"macro-evolution" is a cop-out from Creationists that have a hard time ignoring the fact that any high-school that cares to can run evolution as an experiment (with artificial evolutionary pressure) and see clear results inside of 5-10 generations of the choosen organism. (this need not take that long, yeast-cells divide on a time-scale of an hour/generation or thereabouts, even with something larger like mice the experiment will run inside of a single school-year)
In essence, it says: "Yeah, sure it works for a day, a week, a month, a year, a decade, but it somehow WONT work for a millenium or a million years. I refuse to give a coherent argument as to why not, but will now stick my fingers in my ears, sing lalalala and pretend I won the argument."
Because of Occams Razor: Entities should not be multiplied needlessly.
... kn*x^n-1 can always be made to fit for any 10 points)
If you can explain the development from single-cell organism to homo sapiens to satisfaction without ever mentioning God, and then you add, as sort of an afterthought; this all happened because God wanted it so.
Then "God" in your theory is superfluos: your theory *with* god doesn't explain or predict anything that your theory *without* God doesn't do equally well, so there's no reason to include him in the theory in the first place.
Given equal explanatory powers, the simplest theory is the superior one. If you have 10 points from a data-set that happen to lie on a straigth line, there is guaranteed to be a 10th-degree equation that matches all the 10 points, but that's not the theory you should choose, given that data you should instead suggest the relationship may be linear.
(in general k1*x^0 + k2*x^1
I already answered this. But ok, here goes:
If you want to readjust your value downwards, all you have to do is arrange another auction. The selling-price there is the new estimate.
So, you auction a second rock. Either the price this time is more realistic, or else, you get another million. Either way you're golden.
In that case you'd sell the rock to him for a million, what's the problem ? Sure, some joker may bid much more than the normal selling-price. But the logical thing to do then is simply to let him have it for that, ridicolously inflated, price. It's his cash to waste, afterall.
You'd have more than one auction anyway: many more-or-less similar pieces of IP would also be auctioned in a similar timeframe. And the same piece of IP could be auctioned several times at different times. Both helps giving you some idea of the market-value.
Where I live they are generally zero, that wasn't the point. The point was that the argument that it's somehow unfair to tax "intellectual" property falls down when you consider that we DO tax *real* propert.
Any argument against taxing "intellectual" property is equally valid for the tangible kind.
True. This is true for any other kind of property with property-taxes too by the way, nothing special for "IP".
If your family owns a plot of land that it has had for generations, and the value of the land rises until you can no longer afford to pay the property-taxes, you are forced to sell.
That -is- rather rare though; with property-taxes generally in the neighbourhood of 0.1%, that would mean, for example, owning land worth a million, but being unable to pay $1000 in taxes, it does happen but it doesn't happen terribly often.
With IP it'd happen even more seldom: most of the valuable stuff is owned by corporations, and it is valuable PRECISELY because it can be used to generate profit. If you own the copyrigth for everything The Beatles made, that is worth a lot, but it also generates a LOT of income, so paying 0.1% of the value in taxes is unproblematic.
As to your claim that an auction does not establish the value of something, that is pure nonsense. Generally when we're talking fincance and value, what is meant with value is how much cash you could exchange it for. The fact that somebody bid a million is evidence that at that moment, you could exchange it for one million, by the simple expedient of saying "yes thank you".
It is true that the value can change over time. That is fine, and again nothing special to IP. If you buy a house at an auction for a million, there's no guarantee that you can sell it again for that price a day later.
If someone thinks their IP is worth -less- than the IRS claims there's a simple cure for that: arrange a new auction. If you bought some IP a year ago for a million, but in todays auction you're able to win it for half a million, then obviously half a million is the current value.
I'd make a sligth change: since the current owner is able to bid any amount if he choose, it makes more sense to not require that he bid at all. He can wait until the auction is over and then choose if he wants to sell for the highest-bid or not. In either case the current value is the highest bid.
You frequently -can- poison other peoples land without paying for it. The problem is known as an "externality" and is a known problem of capitalism.
If I can produce widget X for 10$ a piece, and there is a market for a million of these widgets a year sold at $15, it would appear that my factory produces 5 million worth of wealth in that the outputs from the factory are worth 5 million more than the inputs.
If, however, the factory produces noise and pollution sufficiently that there are 10000 people in the area surrounding it which would be willing to pay $500/year to have the factory closed (that is: the running of the factory produces negative value for them of $500/year or more), then infact the factory is a net COST to society.
It's just that the profits go to the owner (me!) and the losses are distributed among a lot of unlucky ones who can't do anything about it, assuming that the factory are within legal limits at its locale.
Indeed, I lived about 10 miles from a actively running open-pit strip-mining operation up until 2 years ago -- in Germany.
It's not in -general- forbidden no.
But many serious crime have extra paragraphs stating that inciting others to perform the crime, or even just failing to try to PREVENT others from doing the crime is in itself illegal.
So the answer is, it depends on the crime.
If I -know- that you're planning to commit murder, but I do nothing to prevent it, I can be punished for this.
But if I know that you're planning to drive 60mph where only 50 is allowed, and I do nothing to prevent it, I cannot be punished for this.
Even where it's illegal to -conspire- or to refrain from interfering though, it is ALWAYS allowed to argue in favor of changing the laws, which is pretty obvious. Nothing stops you from posting a well-reasons document explaining why you think we should decriminalize murder.
There are plenty of very "valid" "natural" reasons why a kid would die before the age of 5, worst case even during birth, taking your wife along for the ride. Infact that used to happen to people pretty darn regularily.
That something is "natural" is a hell of a weak defence, its not as if nature care one way or the other if we're happy or not.
Compared to any earlier epoch, you are today:
Honestly, it's pretty darn hard to find even a -single- statistic where humanity did better in ANY previous century.
Possible exceptions for lack of exercise and overweight, but both of those are side-effects of giving people plenty of food, no physical labour and letting them choose. It's not as if anyone is -prevented- from exercising or doing manual labour.
Indeed. Natural doesn't say anything as to the desirability or not of something.
It is perfectly -natural- to have 20% of all children die before they turn 5, and a fair percentage of mothers too in childbirth. It's perfectly natural for a population to be limited by famine, disease, war, predation. It's not as if we're not trying to figth these things.
If we lived "all natural" we'd still be sitting around in caves, living short brutish lives and dying at 30 on the average.
This is true. That uniform signals attachment to a subculture.
I've had customers explicitly state that they feel comfortable about our competence because of the density of Coke-bottles, combat-boots, long-beards, band-shirts, hacker-attitude, incomprehensible posters with inside hacker-jokes, in our offices. These things signal attachment to a subculture, and indicate, to them, someone who lives, breathes thinks, lives code.
Which is just as silly as trusting a salesman because he has a nice suit, but there you go, nobody ever said customers can't be silly.
People fear that which they do not know and do not understand. What else is new ?
In our company we use tons of Open Source software and do development on some of it. We use Linux, Apache, Python, Java, BugZilla, MediaWiki, Subversion and many many more. It has saved us millions, even if we derived -no- value from the development we ourselves do on OSS-projects, we'd be coming out ahead. But we do, because the reason we make additions and adaptions is that customers of us need it, or we ourselves need it.
We ain't complaining, aproximately 20% of turnover is profit, and profit has been rising continously the last 5 years, along with turnover. We're a small company, only aproximately 25 developers. 22 and a half years ago though, when I started, we where -6- developers.
Nothing. But the next morning you get a call:
Hello, we're from the IRS. It has come to our attention that you own property worth ONE HUNDRED BILLION TRILLION ZOMG BBQ DOLLARS, at property tax-rates of 0.1% (no idea what property-taxes generally are in the USA) that'll be ONE MILLION TRILLION ZOMG BBQ DOLLARS, thankyouverymuch.
That is the point: the auction doesn't force you to sell, because obviously you can afford to pay yourself ANY amount. It does however establish a fair marketprice.
Actually, if the corporation had paid when requested to do so, they'd have got off cheap. Using two unlicensed pictures in publications in multiple mediums and countries with a total distribution in excess of 50.000 copies should cost you. They could've paid $1800 and been done with it.
/annoyed/ if someone took my pictures. Not enough to bother suing though, unless it was on a massive scale or in very large distribution in very high-profile material. But if the person started inventing one lie after another when asked to explain himself, then well, the scumsucker asked for it, no ?
Instead the owner invented a LIE: he claimed to have purchased the photos from a nonexistant individual (so says the Findings of Fact) Witnesses proved that he has a HISTORY of (and I quote) "telling the truth only when it benefits him" and "say one thing and do another".
CEOs like these -needs- to be bitch-slapped. As bitch-slapping for a corporation goes, $19000 is small fry.
I personally would've been ligthly
True, but today it's easier than ever to go for the source. You generally recognize the bad journalists the easiest by the fact that they prefer -NOT- to explicitly tell you their sources. Mostly because if you then visted the source, you'd see for yourself that their so-called "article" is simply a misunderstanding and lots of hyperbole based on a press-release.
It's not -that- hard to read the press-release yourself, even it too tends to be sligthly sensationalistic it's atleast generally less full of misunderstandings and stupidity.
The main difference is that US tests emphasize what happens to the passenger-compartment, that it does not conform too much etc, which can as you say, be achieved by making it very strong.
The European tests emphasize what would likely happen to the -passengers- and give grades based on stuff like maximum acceleration experienced by various body-parts of the test-dummys and so on.
This gives similar, but not identical, results.
In a hard crash, having the passenger-cell deform sligthly more may give lower forces on the passengers, thus a WORSE us-score (because of the added deformation) and a BETTER european score (because of the lower forces on the passengers)
I don't think it's deliberate to stop imports. It's more likely the other way around: for marketing-reasons the cars are adapted to doing well at the tests that the producers cares most about, and that tends to be those in the home-market.
Mere details !
Like I said, the engineering is left an exercise for the readers.
As for efficiency, I know that, but honestly, with a zillion megawatthours in your pocket, a low efficiency is acceptable, the bigger problem is as you say what to do with the energy that you cannot use. Hard gammas are unpleasant. But even if it was "only" waste-heat, 200KW of waste heat from a car that spends 20KW cruising could be a problem to handle efficiently.
If you take "mainstream media reporting" as any indication whatsoever of the quality (or lack thereof) of research being done on different fields, then that's a problem right there.
Frequently the journalist deliberately makes things that are really minor advances sound like discoveries of the century, and even more frequently the journalist fails to himself understand the article he is reporting on, infact often he won't even have read it, all he has done is reading the press-release and then he writes up an article based on his misunderstanding of the simplifications in the press-release...
DNA is *CERTAINLY* not the "sole" source-code of biological phenomena, and I don't think any serious scientific article has been claiming otherwise for a long time. For example, the mithochondria present in every single one of your cells are thougth to be "captured bacteria" or something similar, and certainly ARE NOT encoded for in your DNA. (they have their own reproduction inside your cells, independent of yours)
If human DNA was all you had there'd be no way to construct a "working" human being, because you would not know about the mithochondria at all. (there is other stuff too, but they are the most obvious)