.... a college degree is great, but, a high tech manufacturing sector isn't going to keep its machines running, much less set them up and use them, on what you learned getting your MBA or history degree. While its true, we need generic businessmen, and accountants, historians, and even telephone sanitizers; can we possibly admit that we have too many people aspiring to be on the "third ship" so to speak.
There is a common misconception that MBAs are all about accounting and finance, its not true. Unlike other master's degrees where one goes deeper into some particular field, an MBA is more of a survey of all the parts of an organization (accounting/finance, strategy, marketing, information technology, product development, project management, operations/manufacturing, law,...) plus some outside forces that will affect it (macroeconomics, human behavior - consumer, employee and leadership),... Those entering MBA programs are often scientist and engineers. Account/finance types are actually a minority.
Basically an MBA is an add-on to whatever you current role is, including science and engineering. It helps you to understand things from the perspective of other departments. This allows you to better coordinate your efforts with theirs and perhaps most importantly it helps you more effectively communicate with these other departments and makes it more likely you will be able to persuade them when necessary.
And guess what it takes to recycle steel and copper? Time and resources (i.e. money).
Nope, it doesn't cost the company a damn thing. My grandfather spent decades tearing up old natural gas pipelines and replacing them. The sweetest words he every heard from the company came when he asked what to do with the old pipes. They were told "the company does not want them, give them to whoever will take them". My grandfather, his company crew and the local subcontractors who assisted on these pipeline replacement jobs took the pipes to the scrap yard (metal recycler) and split the proceeds. Local company management was fine with this. This was 1950s - 70s and the pipelines being replaced were old cast iron lines like what is described in the summary. Stuff originally installed around 1900.
Never forget the potatoes, they can save your life in combat. Well maine potatoes, don't know about idaho, maybe they don't look enough like hand grenades.
SDI also included space based lasers (obstructed and distorted by cloud and atmospherics)...
I believe the space based lasers were supposed to hit intercontinental ballistic missiles when they left the atmosphere. The upper part of such a missile's parabolic trajectory is beyond the atmosphere.
... in a trademark framework there would be exactly one company authorised to sell Kona coffee, and any other sellers in the region would have to try to manage without drawing attention to their place of origin. Not exactly market-friendly.
I believe the general trademark for Kona coffee is owned by the State of Hawaii not a particular company.
IP in this context means WESTERN LAWYERS sucking the life out of impoverished African agriculturalists.
That is not true, IP can protect the smaller and independent coffee growers. For example IP was used to protect the small coffee growers in Kona, Hawaii. Prior to their use of IP to protect the "Kona" brand, Kona blends from some major distributors contained very little Kona sourced beans. Not only did this reduce the sales of the Kona growers, diminish their brand by associating it with an inferior experience, but it was deceptive to consumers. I learned of this by sitting next to such a grower on a flight to Hawaii. In other words I am offering the perspective of a small and independent coffee grower.
Also, a large part of the medications used today originated at publicly funded universities.
And many of these universities patent and license their work as well. Revenue from these licenses help fund medical/pharma research and the university in general.
For example the University of California is quite aggressive regarding patenting and licensing discoveries. Half of the revenue goes to the general UC budget, a quarter to the department where the discovery originated and a quarter to the employees who made the discovery.
BTW, the UC licensing program gives breaks to small local companies.
There is a problem with high speed rail. It requires good public transportation at the end nodes. It works in Europe because they have good local public transportation systems. It will not work in the US because we do not.
High speed rail is step 2, not step 1.
Step 1 is good local public transportation.
The reason we stayed with 32bit for so long was simply the fact that even on workstations 16bit limitations just weren't an issue because the prices were so damned high on memory... so while the 386 may have allowed 32bit mode frankly your average desktop just didn't have the resources to really take advantage.
The reason we stayed 32-bit for so long was simply legacy software. 32-bit had many advantages beyond addressing larger address spaces. Even on the modest systems you describe 32-bit would have been beneficial. 32-bit registers, a flat memory model and simplified code generation would improve performance. Going to a flat memory model alone would improve software reliability. In the bad old 16-bit days I swear half of my bugs were because a segment register had not been updated and the code was addressing the wrong memory.
Things may be more complicated than your post suggests. Also sorts of incentives, rebates, discounts, etc exists between the manufacturers and the dealers. All of which allow the dealer to negotiate with you and still maintain a healthy profit margin. However these may only apply to the standard factory configurations/exports and not apply to custom orders. So for custom orders the dealers may not have much room to negotiate.
Price controls have exactly the same effect in an emergency that they have at any other time. If you prohibit higher gas prices, you guarantee shortages.
The NY AG is a politician. He just wants to be on record, and in the news, as "doing something" about price gouging. Whether that "something" is helpful, useless or counter productive does not really matter to voters. Politicians in the US seem to be graded on their stated intentions not their actual results.
But the steel in the chassis is probably the most environmentally friendly part of a server.
Durable too. Why not just reuse the chassis? Replace power supplies, boards, drives, etc as needed.
On the PC side I purchased some nice(*) Antec cases 10+ years ago and they are still in use. For some the motherboards and hard drives have been upgraded three times. I think one power supply had to be replaced.
(*) In the sturdy and easy to work on sense, not the transparent doors and blue LEDs sense.
Perhaps more importantly is that BSD Unix was a product of the University of California, a taxpayer funded entity, and they felt that all taxpayers should have equal access to their work. That the politics of picking good users and bad, approved uses of the software and unapproved, etc was wrong.
but that seems to sound like arguing yourself in a corner. if all taxpayers should have equal access, why should some have ability to benefit from it, but restrict others from benefiting from the original release ?
No one is deprived of the original taxpayer funded release or taxpayer funded updates. It is only privately funded updates that *may* not be available. Note that in the Apple case their modifications to Mach and BSD are made available to the public.
Darwin can be left open because there is so much closed source stuff atop it before one can use darwin to make a competitor to OSX.
That seems to be a strawman. The stuff on top of Darwin is neither BSD nor GPL, its not relevant. The fact remains that modified BSD code used by Apple is given back. Other corporations do so as well.
I still think that those selling services based on improved OSS are not following the spirit of the earlier GPL, so again not a good point.
The spirit of BSD is also to give back and share, and various corporations do follow this spirit without any arm twisting.
In truth the BSD folks want the widest possible distribution of their software because they believe that will ultimately provide the computing world the greatest benefit.
Closed source is controlled source, it can't happen. Look at OSX. Tomorrow apple decides iOS is fine for macs, dumps OSX and all its improvements to bsd will be lost like ballmer's chairs in google's direction.
Sure, lets look at Mac OS X. The Mach and BSD code is part of a kernel named Darwin. Darwin is available for download from Apple's site. As is the source code to various other permissively licensed non-GPL'd projects that Apple incorporates. No improvements will be lost. Many corporations using BSD give back.
Also, GPL'd code can be closed source as well. Look at various key services offered by Google where modified GPL'd code is not distributed by rather accessed.
GPL is for people and companies that think "I wrote this software [together with X, Y and Z] and if somebody else makes it better they must share it with all the world, as I did."
That is quite misinformed. Organizations can modify and use GPL'd code internally, make a lot of money off of it, and not share with anyone. I believe Google does so.
BSD is for people and companies that think "I wrote this software [together with X, Y and Z] and I accept the loss that somebody else makes it better and keep it for themselves because I want to have the option of getting somebody's else software, make it better and keep it for me without sharing it back."
Beyond misinformed, merely a spouting of FSF spin.
In truth the BSD folks want the widest possible distribution of their software because they believe that will ultimately provide the computing world the greatest benefit. BSD Unix arguably did provide quite a benefit to both hobbyists and corporations.
Perhaps more importantly is that BSD Unix was a product of the University of California, a taxpayer funded entity, and they felt that all taxpayers should have equal access to their work. That the politics of picking good users and bad, approved uses of the software and unapproved, etc was wrong.
Was the handling charge really for handling or is it a euphemism for our markup after costs? In other words is part of the price being hidden/embedded in the handling charge? *If* so there may be some justification for including handling in the taxable portion of the bill.
Apple pays taxes on profits, they just do so in the tax jurisdiction that the profit was made in. Here is a somewhat simplified possible explanation. Products are made by Apple-China and sold by Apple-USA. There is a defined transfer cost between the two entities. Should that transfer cost be near actual manufacturing cost and thereby most profits recognized in the US jurisdiction or near actual sale price and thereby most profits recognized in the Chinese jurisdiction? In general the answer depends on whether one jurisdiction has a significantly lower tax rate.
Which leads into a secondary problem, where they expand. If Apple can not return overseas profits to the US without those profits being taxed a second time then there is an incentive to do any future expansion overseas. Expanding facilities would be a better use of that money than just letting it sit in the bank. So a relatively higher tax rate ends up hurting the higher rate jurisdiction a second time.
Intentional or not, this is the system the politicians have created. Government policy often has unintended consequences, and the more complex the policy the more and greater the unintended consequences.
could be gotten by opening up my bank statement. Address, account number, past purchases, account balance (though likely a couple of days out of date)
Its not the same info if you give paypal a temporary credit card number, the sort your bank gives you through their webpage. These numbers are aliases for your real number but you get to pick the max amount to be charged and the month the card expires in. Some of these numbers even lock to the first vendor to post a charge. So if "stolen" and there is money left on the alias a 3rd party can't post a charge.
For the House of Representatives we should probably draft them, like the Army used to. Walk out to the mail box, open the letter from the gov't,... damn I have to report to Congress for two years. That way we get a broader sampling of perspectives and experiences. The type of people we want probably would not apply for the job (volunteer).:-)
Slashdot Mirror
.... a college degree is great, but, a high tech manufacturing sector isn't going to keep its machines running, much less set them up and use them, on what you learned getting your MBA or history degree. While its true, we need generic businessmen, and accountants, historians, and even telephone sanitizers; can we possibly admit that we have too many people aspiring to be on the "third ship" so to speak.
There is a common misconception that MBAs are all about accounting and finance, its not true. Unlike other master's degrees where one goes deeper into some particular field, an MBA is more of a survey of all the parts of an organization (accounting/finance, strategy, marketing, information technology, product development, project management, operations/manufacturing, law, ...) plus some outside forces that will affect it (macroeconomics, human behavior - consumer, employee and leadership), ... Those entering MBA programs are often scientist and engineers. Account/finance types are actually a minority.
Basically an MBA is an add-on to whatever you current role is, including science and engineering. It helps you to understand things from the perspective of other departments. This allows you to better coordinate your efforts with theirs and perhaps most importantly it helps you more effectively communicate with these other departments and makes it more likely you will be able to persuade them when necessary.
And guess what it takes to recycle steel and copper? Time and resources (i.e. money).
Nope, it doesn't cost the company a damn thing. My grandfather spent decades tearing up old natural gas pipelines and replacing them. The sweetest words he every heard from the company came when he asked what to do with the old pipes. They were told "the company does not want them, give them to whoever will take them". My grandfather, his company crew and the local subcontractors who assisted on these pipeline replacement jobs took the pipes to the scrap yard (metal recycler) and split the proceeds. Local company management was fine with this. This was 1950s - 70s and the pipelines being replaced were old cast iron lines like what is described in the summary. Stuff originally installed around 1900.
Oh, and Idaho potatoes I'm sure.
Never forget the potatoes, they can save your life in combat. Well maine potatoes, don't know about idaho, maybe they don't look enough like hand grenades.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_O'Bannon_(DD-450)#1943
SDI also included space based lasers (obstructed and distorted by cloud and atmospherics) ...
I believe the space based lasers were supposed to hit intercontinental ballistic missiles when they left the atmosphere. The upper part of such a missile's parabolic trajectory is beyond the atmosphere.
I do not trust the "semitic" information one iota more than the "antisemitic" kind.
You need a different adjective. Both sides in this conflict are Semitic.
From dictionary.com:
Semitic
a subfamily of Afroasiatic languages that includes Akkadian, Arabic, Aramaic, Ethiopic, hebrew, and Phoenician.
... in a trademark framework there would be exactly one company authorised to sell Kona coffee, and any other sellers in the region would have to try to manage without drawing attention to their place of origin. Not exactly market-friendly.
I believe the general trademark for Kona coffee is owned by the State of Hawaii not a particular company.
IP in this context means WESTERN LAWYERS sucking the life out of impoverished African agriculturalists.
That is not true, IP can protect the smaller and independent coffee growers. For example IP was used to protect the small coffee growers in Kona, Hawaii. Prior to their use of IP to protect the "Kona" brand, Kona blends from some major distributors contained very little Kona sourced beans. Not only did this reduce the sales of the Kona growers, diminish their brand by associating it with an inferior experience, but it was deceptive to consumers. I learned of this by sitting next to such a grower on a flight to Hawaii. In other words I am offering the perspective of a small and independent coffee grower.
Also, a large part of the medications used today originated at publicly funded universities.
And many of these universities patent and license their work as well. Revenue from these licenses help fund medical/pharma research and the university in general.
For example the University of California is quite aggressive regarding patenting and licensing discoveries. Half of the revenue goes to the general UC budget, a quarter to the department where the discovery originated and a quarter to the employees who made the discovery.
BTW, the UC licensing program gives breaks to small local companies.
It requires no more or less good public transportation at the endpoints than air travel does.
High speed rail is not merely an alternative to air travel. It is also an alternative to driving.
There is a problem with high speed rail. It requires good public transportation at the end nodes. It works in Europe because they have good local public transportation systems. It will not work in the US because we do not.
High speed rail is step 2, not step 1.
Step 1 is good local public transportation.
The reason we stayed with 32bit for so long was simply the fact that even on workstations 16bit limitations just weren't an issue because the prices were so damned high on memory ... so while the 386 may have allowed 32bit mode frankly your average desktop just didn't have the resources to really take advantage.
The reason we stayed 32-bit for so long was simply legacy software. 32-bit had many advantages beyond addressing larger address spaces. Even on the modest systems you describe 32-bit would have been beneficial. 32-bit registers, a flat memory model and simplified code generation would improve performance. Going to a flat memory model alone would improve software reliability. In the bad old 16-bit days I swear half of my bugs were because a segment register had not been updated and the code was addressing the wrong memory.
Things may be more complicated than your post suggests. Also sorts of incentives, rebates, discounts, etc exists between the manufacturers and the dealers. All of which allow the dealer to negotiate with you and still maintain a healthy profit margin. However these may only apply to the standard factory configurations/exports and not apply to custom orders. So for custom orders the dealers may not have much room to negotiate.
Price controls have exactly the same effect in an emergency that they have at any other time. If you prohibit higher gas prices, you guarantee shortages.
The NY AG is a politician. He just wants to be on record, and in the news, as "doing something" about price gouging. Whether that "something" is helpful, useless or counter productive does not really matter to voters. Politicians in the US seem to be graded on their stated intentions not their actual results.
Cutting down trees is not green at all.
Trees are renewable, cut one down plant a replacement.
Wood products sequester carbon.
But the steel in the chassis is probably the most environmentally friendly part of a server.
Durable too. Why not just reuse the chassis? Replace power supplies, boards, drives, etc as needed.
On the PC side I purchased some nice(*) Antec cases 10+ years ago and they are still in use. For some the motherboards and hard drives have been upgraded three times. I think one power supply had to be replaced.
(*) In the sturdy and easy to work on sense, not the transparent doors and blue LEDs sense.
Perhaps more importantly is that BSD Unix was a product of the University of California, a taxpayer funded entity, and they felt that all taxpayers should have equal access to their work. That the politics of picking good users and bad, approved uses of the software and unapproved, etc was wrong.
but that seems to sound like arguing yourself in a corner. if all taxpayers should have equal access, why should some have ability to benefit from it, but restrict others from benefiting from the original release ?
No one is deprived of the original taxpayer funded release or taxpayer funded updates. It is only privately funded updates that *may* not be available. Note that in the Apple case their modifications to Mach and BSD are made available to the public.
Darwin can be left open because there is so much closed source stuff atop it before one can use darwin to make a competitor to OSX.
That seems to be a strawman. The stuff on top of Darwin is neither BSD nor GPL, its not relevant. The fact remains that modified BSD code used by Apple is given back. Other corporations do so as well.
I still think that those selling services based on improved OSS are not following the spirit of the earlier GPL, so again not a good point.
The spirit of BSD is also to give back and share, and various corporations do follow this spirit without any arm twisting.
Closed source is controlled source, it can't happen. Look at OSX. Tomorrow apple decides iOS is fine for macs, dumps OSX and all its improvements to bsd will be lost like ballmer's chairs in google's direction.
Sure, lets look at Mac OS X. The Mach and BSD code is part of a kernel named Darwin. Darwin is available for download from Apple's site. As is the source code to various other permissively licensed non-GPL'd projects that Apple incorporates. No improvements will be lost. Many corporations using BSD give back.
Also, GPL'd code can be closed source as well. Look at various key services offered by Google where modified GPL'd code is not distributed by rather accessed.
GPL is for people and companies that think "I wrote this software [together with X, Y and Z] and if somebody else makes it better they must share it with all the world, as I did."
That is quite misinformed. Organizations can modify and use GPL'd code internally, make a lot of money off of it, and not share with anyone. I believe Google does so.
BSD is for people and companies that think "I wrote this software [together with X, Y and Z] and I accept the loss that somebody else makes it better and keep it for themselves because I want to have the option of getting somebody's else software, make it better and keep it for me without sharing it back."
Beyond misinformed, merely a spouting of FSF spin.
In truth the BSD folks want the widest possible distribution of their software because they believe that will ultimately provide the computing world the greatest benefit. BSD Unix arguably did provide quite a benefit to both hobbyists and corporations.
Perhaps more importantly is that BSD Unix was a product of the University of California, a taxpayer funded entity, and they felt that all taxpayers should have equal access to their work. That the politics of picking good users and bad, approved uses of the software and unapproved, etc was wrong.
Wouldn't be a problem if they'd chosen a licence that didn't explicitly permit Apple to do what it did.
What problem? The BSD based code that Apple uses is available on Apple's website. Its called the Darwin kernel.
Was the handling charge really for handling or is it a euphemism for our markup after costs? In other words is part of the price being hidden/embedded in the handling charge? *If* so there may be some justification for including handling in the taxable portion of the bill.
Apple pays taxes on profits, they just do so in the tax jurisdiction that the profit was made in. Here is a somewhat simplified possible explanation. Products are made by Apple-China and sold by Apple-USA. There is a defined transfer cost between the two entities. Should that transfer cost be near actual manufacturing cost and thereby most profits recognized in the US jurisdiction or near actual sale price and thereby most profits recognized in the Chinese jurisdiction? In general the answer depends on whether one jurisdiction has a significantly lower tax rate.
Which leads into a secondary problem, where they expand. If Apple can not return overseas profits to the US without those profits being taxed a second time then there is an incentive to do any future expansion overseas. Expanding facilities would be a better use of that money than just letting it sit in the bank. So a relatively higher tax rate ends up hurting the higher rate jurisdiction a second time.
Intentional or not, this is the system the politicians have created. Government policy often has unintended consequences, and the more complex the policy the more and greater the unintended consequences.
could be gotten by opening up my bank statement. Address, account number, past purchases, account balance (though likely a couple of days out of date)
Its not the same info if you give paypal a temporary credit card number, the sort your bank gives you through their webpage. These numbers are aliases for your real number but you get to pick the max amount to be charged and the month the card expires in. Some of these numbers even lock to the first vendor to post a charge. So if "stolen" and there is money left on the alias a 3rd party can't post a charge.
The PRI in Mexico rigged elections for 80 years using nothing but paper ballots.
OK, but as we all know automating/digitizing a process will often make it faster and more efficient. In this case the process of election rigging. :-)
For the House of Representatives we should probably draft them, like the Army used to. Walk out to the mail box, open the letter from the gov't, ... damn I have to report to Congress for two years. That way we get a broader sampling of perspectives and experiences. The type of people we want probably would not apply for the job (volunteer). :-)