While there are disadvantages to publically funded space exploration, it might be necessary in a lot of cases if we want certain research done. There was/is no profit motive for lunar exploration or mars exploration, for example. Therefore, there would be no incentive for a private corporation to ever step foot out there. The only forseeable reason for a private company to set up base on the moon or mars would be to sell things to people already living there. If nobody is willing to land, then nobody will live there. It's a catch 22.
"Wouldn't that be cheaper than getting people from half a world away?"
No.A decent deal on a plane ticket from Seattle to India runs at approximately $1,000. Two years of classroom education (even at a public institution, and not private in-house training) average at over $2,000.
Furthermore, you can't buy experience, you have to earn it.
I think you misunderstand these articles... all they say is that when record companies pay up front expenses on the album, they recoup them before the artist sees any money. Well, yeah. If your band isn't profitable, you don't get paid.
Think of it as financing-- record companies are basically banks specialize in one kind of business: bands. It happens to be a very risky sectors, so interest/profits are high. Just because the loan is revenue backed doesn't mean it isn't a loan.
No, it is news because instead of framing the issue in terms of 'you are using our resources in an unauthorized way', they immediately came to him and asked him what illegal thing he had been doing. Do you see why people are upset? It is an example of the exercise of privacy been conflated with illegality and immorality. It is, in fact, one of the most fundamental rights.
In all fairness, the media is mostly to blame for conflating these things. If you listen to the actual press conferences that these companies hold, they say things like "Profits fell 5% this year." Reporters who don't know business or finance hear this and think that means "Profits were negative 5% this year.", because of course, falling means down and what could be more downwards than negative. And the corps definitely don't use that sort of math on their financial statements.
Say it with me: Total Cost = Fixed Cost + Variable Cost
Variable cost is your $/unit.
Fixed cost is the amount it costs to sign artists and record CDs (studio equipment, staff to run that equipment, etc). It is also worth noting that dispite what you might think, the recording industry is exposed to a big risk that they have to cover-- most artists flop, only a few are sucessful, but you can't spot this before you record and attempt to sell a CD. The result-- those large fixed costs are entirely absorbed by the record company. This has to be offset by the few rare sucess stories.
Look, the simple economics of it is that if somebody else could do what the big record companies do, and for cheaper, they would be doing it and making a fortune. It isn't that easy. Like always, the armchair executives completely discount the value that management, entrepeneurship, marketing and investment expertise have. Not everything is about physical units of product.
Blowing up US Satelites would be an incredibly stupid move. They do, after all, belong to the US. What China would really want to do is to take Taiwan as quickly as possible, while the US hesitates on the sidelines about whether it has been provoked enough to go to war. When it finally has (2-3 weeks later), the island will already be fortified under chinese control.
Not to mention that the primary launch vehicle used by DoD and NASA alike is the Plain Old Rocket. The shuttle just gets more press by being _manned_.
There have been a multitude of posts suggesting 'easy solutions' to this problem (most of which involve doing some sort of automagical signal processing on the signal received based on the audio being played out). Most of these suggestions just plain won't work. Why? Because every set of speakers is different, every room is different. Therefore, the signal will be mangled in some unknown (to the computer) way, before being received again.
The EASY solution? A voice password required before every voice command. The user sets a short phrase that they prefix voice commands with. Any commands lacking that prefix are ignored. Yes, it makes using voice slightly more inconvenient. On the up side, you can tell users they are giving their computer a name. Instead of 'open internet explorer', it is 'arglebargle, open internet explorer'.
Except that no compiler would do that. A compiler would apply a little analysis to the code, realize c depends on a, and not parallelize the code. So what good does that do, if the code is still serial? Well, in real world applications, there WILL be blocks that can be executed in parallel (even should be executed in parallel [witness threads])- it isn't all or nothing. Dependency analysis is used in compilers all the time in order to order instructions for execution in the optimal order (to keep the pipeline filled).
Board members are chosen by election by shareholders. The board members are not managers. They might happen to be (if they are managers with a sh*t ton of company stock).
Thank god somebody finally said it.
Upon reflecting upon the criticism that Stephenson and several other writers with similar style have received (about endings, exposition, etc) I've realized something. A lot of geeks don't want a novel, they want a mythology. They want a complete, well-fleshed out, extensive universe for a setting. As a result, they want to know what happens to every character, start to finish. Think about it-- star wars, star trek, and LoTR all have extensive backstory. It is basically posible to know what happens to every character, and every legendary sword/ship from birth to death. Tolkien, for example, had notebooks and notebooks of unpublished stories to flesh out his universe and even invented languages.
Then what happens to the capital stock that would have been allocated to the new factory/machinary/etc. Companies won't just let it sit idle. They invest it and get an RoR (quite possibly in that same country that we 'lost' to). The result is that the same RoR still ends up in America. Sure, the wages don't, but you can't simulataneously complain about increases in corporate profits and claim that corporate profits are a much less important part of the economic pie than wages. In other words, the money saved on the wages ends up in American hands anyway. The result? Higher demand for intellectual and human capital, higher demand for people to make investment decisions, more working capital availible to people who want to start small businesses. I'm sorry, but if factory workers are losing their jobs and being replaced by investment bankers and entrepeneurs, I'm all for it.
You shouldn't talk about things you know nothing about. How charitable foundations/trusts typically work is that they take a huge wad of cash and invest it. This investment makes a rate of return (essentially interest). The foundation then spends the interest. This allows foundations to exist essentially in perpetuity (witness Ford and Rockefeller). The disadvantage is that since the revenue generated by the investment is much smaller than the amount of the generating assets, the foundation can't spend as much as if it just straightforwardly spent all of its assets. This is Bill's strategy-- he wants to make a big impact sooner rather than later, at the cost of not being able to do a little bit each year forever.
"They also return absolutely nothing of value to the US for the money being sent to them. They contribute nothing to our economy in exchange for the millions of dollars they extract from US citizens."
There's nothing I hate more than a mercantilist.
Firstly, online gambling provides entertainment. Entertainment is a service. It has every bit a much value as the movie theater or a golf course.
Secondly, your argument was stricken dead in 1776, but unfortunately is still in its dead throes. No, not by the declaration. By The Wealth of Nations. Both countries prosper when they trade in goods they have an advantage in. Since online gambling is not even legal in America, there is an unsatisfied demand that online gambling takes care of. In exchange, they get dollars, which they use to buy american products or invest in american business. Any reasonable person would see this as a good thing, unless you are of the radical nationalist "OMG THE CHINESE ARE BUYING AMERICA" school.
And in a minor point, no, intellectual property does NOT take less effort to produce than physical goods. It may take less physical effort. It also requires more mental effort (over the span of years, including roughly 20 years of school). Additionally, it requires capital, just like factory production.
"They happen specifically because investment is financed thru the banks, which is financed thru the Federal reserve, which is financed by nothing. I mean, when they need money to loan out - they print it up and loan it out. That means that over time, more and more money goes into circulation driving up prices, driving up debt, and driving out private savings."
D. While student acknowledges that inflation is a monetary phenomena, he fails to understand that the federal reserve typically manipulates the money supply through open market operations, which adjust volume in the bond market. They don't print money. That's the mint, which has essentially no role on monetary policy. Additionally, student fails to recognize that money and gold, like all commodities have values regotiated by supply and demand-- gold is NOT an unshakable store of value. It has a price that goes up and down relative to other commodities, like anything else.
For me, it isn't so much the new 'stalking' potential, it is the fact that the new layout is extremely visually offensive. Seriously, it was so ugly that I logged in and immediately considered cancelling my account. It is so insane busy that I can't seem to decipher any of the information presented. Right now I'm waiting to see if they come to their senses or otherwise I'll kiss facebook goodbye.
First of all, I had no idea what the article was about from the summary. Once I clicked through however I became even more perplexed, for a different reason.
The idea behind the contest is that you build an application bundle that can be run "out of the box" inside of vmware, with no configuration or installation.
So the question is, if you are going to target your application to a virtual machine, why use vmware? Why wouldn't you use java or python, for example?
So, if they don't pay taxes or for insurance, what is the best solution? Send them back to wherever they are from so they seize to be part of american industry, further weakening our competitiveness in international trade? Or give them citizenship so they WILL pay taxes and WILL have to get insurance? Then they will be paying for public education and subsidized healthcare, just like everyone else. Problem solved.
Ruining the public schools? There are plenty of dumb American kids to do that, and that HAVE been doing that for years.
Furthermore, I would like to point out that your kids have no right to employment, and if they price themselves out of the market that's their own damn fault. If someone else is willing to work harder for less money, how exactly _is it_ that you expect a market economy to act?
It also depends heavily on language. In many languages, repeated negatives are explicitly used to emphasize the negative nature of the phrase. Negatives were even used this way in english until its modernization.
Slashdot Mirror
While there are disadvantages to publically funded space exploration, it might be necessary in a lot of cases if we want certain research done. There was/is no profit motive for lunar exploration or mars exploration, for example. Therefore, there would be no incentive for a private corporation to ever step foot out there. The only forseeable reason for a private company to set up base on the moon or mars would be to sell things to people already living there. If nobody is willing to land, then nobody will live there. It's a catch 22.
It would have to be from corn? Umm... except for the cane grown in Florida, Louisiana, Texas, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico...
"Wouldn't that be cheaper than getting people from half a world away?"
No.A decent deal on a plane ticket from Seattle to India runs at approximately $1,000. Two years of classroom education (even at a public institution, and not private in-house training) average at over $2,000.
Furthermore, you can't buy experience, you have to earn it.
I think you misunderstand these articles... all they say is that when record companies pay up front expenses on the album, they recoup them before the artist sees any money. Well, yeah. If your band isn't profitable, you don't get paid.
Think of it as financing-- record companies are basically banks specialize in one kind of business: bands. It happens to be a very risky sectors, so interest/profits are high. Just because the loan is revenue backed doesn't mean it isn't a loan.
No, it is news because instead of framing the issue in terms of 'you are using our resources in an unauthorized way', they immediately came to him and asked him what illegal thing he had been doing. Do you see why people are upset? It is an example of the exercise of privacy been conflated with illegality and immorality. It is, in fact, one of the most fundamental rights.
In all fairness, the media is mostly to blame for conflating these things. If you listen to the actual press conferences that these companies hold, they say things like "Profits fell 5% this year." Reporters who don't know business or finance hear this and think that means "Profits were negative 5% this year.", because of course, falling means down and what could be more downwards than negative. And the corps definitely don't use that sort of math on their financial statements.
High fixed costs?
Say it with me: Total Cost = Fixed Cost + Variable Cost
Variable cost is your $/unit.
Fixed cost is the amount it costs to sign artists and record CDs (studio equipment, staff to run that equipment, etc). It is also worth noting that dispite what you might think, the recording industry is exposed to a big risk that they have to cover-- most artists flop, only a few are sucessful, but you can't spot this before you record and attempt to sell a CD. The result-- those large fixed costs are entirely absorbed by the record company. This has to be offset by the few rare sucess stories.
Look, the simple economics of it is that if somebody else could do what the big record companies do, and for cheaper, they would be doing it and making a fortune. It isn't that easy. Like always, the armchair executives completely discount the value that management, entrepeneurship, marketing and investment expertise have. Not everything is about physical units of product.
Are you kidding?
Blowing up US Satelites would be an incredibly stupid move. They do, after all, belong to the US. What China would really want to do is to take Taiwan as quickly as possible, while the US hesitates on the sidelines about whether it has been provoked enough to go to war. When it finally has (2-3 weeks later), the island will already be fortified under chinese control.
Not to mention that the primary launch vehicle used by DoD and NASA alike is the Plain Old Rocket. The shuttle just gets more press by being _manned_.
There have been a multitude of posts suggesting 'easy solutions' to this problem (most of which involve doing some sort of automagical signal processing on the signal received based on the audio being played out). Most of these suggestions just plain won't work. Why? Because every set of speakers is different, every room is different. Therefore, the signal will be mangled in some unknown (to the computer) way, before being received again.
The EASY solution? A voice password required before every voice command. The user sets a short phrase that they prefix voice commands with. Any commands lacking that prefix are ignored. Yes, it makes using voice slightly more inconvenient. On the up side, you can tell users they are giving their computer a name. Instead of 'open internet explorer', it is 'arglebargle, open internet explorer'.
Except that no compiler would do that. A compiler would apply a little analysis to the code, realize c depends on a, and not parallelize the code. So what good does that do, if the code is still serial? Well, in real world applications, there WILL be blocks that can be executed in parallel (even should be executed in parallel [witness threads])- it isn't all or nothing. Dependency analysis is used in compilers all the time in order to order instructions for execution in the optimal order (to keep the pipeline filled).
Board members are chosen by election by shareholders. The board members are not managers. They might happen to be (if they are managers with a sh*t ton of company stock).
Not if s/he is from China. Do you even have the faintest idea how these things work?
He was probably pointing out that you don't have use Obj-C to write OS X apps. Thus Java, because you can use Java.
Thank god somebody finally said it. Upon reflecting upon the criticism that Stephenson and several other writers with similar style have received (about endings, exposition, etc) I've realized something. A lot of geeks don't want a novel, they want a mythology. They want a complete, well-fleshed out, extensive universe for a setting. As a result, they want to know what happens to every character, start to finish. Think about it-- star wars, star trek, and LoTR all have extensive backstory. It is basically posible to know what happens to every character, and every legendary sword/ship from birth to death. Tolkien, for example, had notebooks and notebooks of unpublished stories to flesh out his universe and even invented languages.
NASA has their own language.
Then what happens to the capital stock that would have been allocated to the new factory/machinary/etc. Companies won't just let it sit idle. They invest it and get an RoR (quite possibly in that same country that we 'lost' to). The result is that the same RoR still ends up in America. Sure, the wages don't, but you can't simulataneously complain about increases in corporate profits and claim that corporate profits are a much less important part of the economic pie than wages. In other words, the money saved on the wages ends up in American hands anyway. The result? Higher demand for intellectual and human capital, higher demand for people to make investment decisions, more working capital availible to people who want to start small businesses. I'm sorry, but if factory workers are losing their jobs and being replaced by investment bankers and entrepeneurs, I'm all for it.
You shouldn't talk about things you know nothing about. How charitable foundations/trusts typically work is that they take a huge wad of cash and invest it. This investment makes a rate of return (essentially interest). The foundation then spends the interest. This allows foundations to exist essentially in perpetuity (witness Ford and Rockefeller). The disadvantage is that since the revenue generated by the investment is much smaller than the amount of the generating assets, the foundation can't spend as much as if it just straightforwardly spent all of its assets. This is Bill's strategy-- he wants to make a big impact sooner rather than later, at the cost of not being able to do a little bit each year forever.
"They also return absolutely nothing of value to the US for the money being sent to them. They contribute nothing to our economy in exchange for the millions of dollars they extract from US citizens." There's nothing I hate more than a mercantilist. Firstly, online gambling provides entertainment. Entertainment is a service. It has every bit a much value as the movie theater or a golf course. Secondly, your argument was stricken dead in 1776, but unfortunately is still in its dead throes. No, not by the declaration. By The Wealth of Nations. Both countries prosper when they trade in goods they have an advantage in. Since online gambling is not even legal in America, there is an unsatisfied demand that online gambling takes care of. In exchange, they get dollars, which they use to buy american products or invest in american business. Any reasonable person would see this as a good thing, unless you are of the radical nationalist "OMG THE CHINESE ARE BUYING AMERICA" school. And in a minor point, no, intellectual property does NOT take less effort to produce than physical goods. It may take less physical effort. It also requires more mental effort (over the span of years, including roughly 20 years of school). Additionally, it requires capital, just like factory production.
"They happen specifically because investment is financed thru the banks, which is financed thru the Federal reserve, which is financed by nothing. I mean, when they need money to loan out - they print it up and loan it out. That means that over time, more and more money goes into circulation driving up prices, driving up debt, and driving out private savings."
D. While student acknowledges that inflation is a monetary phenomena, he fails to understand that the federal reserve typically manipulates the money supply through open market operations, which adjust volume in the bond market. They don't print money. That's the mint, which has essentially no role on monetary policy. Additionally, student fails to recognize that money and gold, like all commodities have values regotiated by supply and demand-- gold is NOT an unshakable store of value. It has a price that goes up and down relative to other commodities, like anything else.
For me, it isn't so much the new 'stalking' potential, it is the fact that the new layout is extremely visually offensive. Seriously, it was so ugly that I logged in and immediately considered cancelling my account. It is so insane busy that I can't seem to decipher any of the information presented. Right now I'm waiting to see if they come to their senses or otherwise I'll kiss facebook goodbye.
First of all, I had no idea what the article was about from the summary. Once I clicked through however I became even more perplexed, for a different reason.
The idea behind the contest is that you build an application bundle that can be run "out of the box" inside of vmware, with no configuration or installation.
So the question is, if you are going to target your application to a virtual machine, why use vmware? Why wouldn't you use java or python, for example?
So, if they don't pay taxes or for insurance, what is the best solution? Send them back to wherever they are from so they seize to be part of american industry, further weakening our competitiveness in international trade? Or give them citizenship so they WILL pay taxes and WILL have to get insurance? Then they will be paying for public education and subsidized healthcare, just like everyone else. Problem solved.
Ruining the public schools? There are plenty of dumb American kids to do that, and that HAVE been doing that for years.
Furthermore, I would like to point out that your kids have no right to employment, and if they price themselves out of the market that's their own damn fault. If someone else is willing to work harder for less money, how exactly _is it_ that you expect a market economy to act?
It also depends heavily on language. In many languages, repeated negatives are explicitly used to emphasize the negative nature of the phrase. Negatives were even used this way in english until its modernization.
I'm gonna go ahead and send the mayor my "DNA sample" right now. Hope he wasn't hopeing for diploids...
Yeah, if you are interested in eliminating entire ethnic groups.