Are they planning to offer gift certificates? I have some RIAA/MPAA attorneys who I'd like to remember next Christmas. (There is a high likelihood of fatality, right?)
Turbolinux would be acquiring LinuxCare in a pretty standard stock for stock transfer.
If I were selling my high-tech company to another, these days I'd be wanting at least some cold, hard, cash out of the deal. A lot of people have ended up broke after their new stock tanked.
Actually, only the retail rates are capped elsewhere in the state. The wholesale price being paid by the utilities is the same as San Diego Gas and Electric. Thus, the utilities are losing their asses, financially-speaking, and facing bankruptcy. Pacific Gas and Electric has just laid off @300 workers and says unless the situation changes, will soon lay off another 700. Only the intervention of the federal government, forcing power generators to sell to essentially insolvent utilities has averted rolling blackouts (so far). To describe the situation as a complete mess would be tremendous understatement.
Contrary to what the governor is saying, what failed isn't 'deregulation', but the way the state went about it. Elsewhere in the country, like Texas and Pennsylvania for example, deregulation has been a success. Allowing the building of more power plants is one reason (California hasn't brought a new one online in 10 years), but also removing the idiotic restrictions that California imposed. Such as allowing utilities to contract ahead for power (present state law forces them to buy on the one-day-ahead market), not capping retail rates while allowing wholesale rates to float, not forcing the market to buy under the nutty rules of the Power Exchange which cause prices to be higher than necessary, etc.
Can anyone out thattaway comment on the power situation as it affects you?
Here in San Diego, we have the privilege of both exhorbitant rates and the prospect of blackouts. The manner in which energy was 'deregulated' (it wasn't, but that's a topic left for another time) meant that when a utility paid off its old debt, it could then pass thru its true costs to the customer. San Diego Gas and Electric was the first to effect a payoff, and we now pay the full freight. Where we were before paying around 3 cents per KWH, the price on the spot market has gone to as high as $2.50 at times. My last bill averaged out at 21 cents per KWH, about 7 times the rate of before, and I expect the next one to be a multiple of that. The real cost is masked by an emergency bill that was rushed thru the legislature capping the rate charged to me at around 6 cents. However, each bill shows an 'adjustment' (an accumulating debt that somebody, i.e. probably me, is going to end up paying eventually). Businesses are closing, people are getting laid off, and most everyone is shutting off every power consuming device they can. The entire state is facing an economic crisis. And today in the Los Angeles Times, there's a story about how the new budget just passed assumes continuing economic prosperity. The state budget has increased 43% in 3 years. The governor in his state-of-the-state speech seemed to favor CA condemning power plants under eminent domain and then running them itself. That plus apparently sending invading armies to border states to force them to sell us power (or at least that's how it sounded). If you're holding any California bonds in your portfolio, I'd be dumping them now.
How about hitting up the manufacturers/distributors of the components you're using? Perhaps being able to say "our widgets helped trash our competitor's widgets" would be sufficient incentive.
I don't think the data can necessarily be easily arrested, but it can be monitored. A few showy 'examples' can be made of people to keep others in line, sort of the way the U.S. Internal Revenue Service announces prosecutions during tax season. Besides the governmental monitoring, there will also be the neighbors. There are 'block captains' who keep tabs on who's up to what (one of the ways China enforces its draconian "one-child" policy). I'm sure there will be ways around the blockades, but anyone wanting to access forbidden information is going to have to want it pretty badly. As a point of comparison, think of possessing a gun in New York City. It's possible, but the consequences of discovery could be dire.
I suspect that the Navy really developed this as a way to expand the SOSUS (SOund SUrveillance System) sonar network, which presently uses long undersea cables to connect the sensors to the monitoring point. Being able to drop buoys wherever and immediately start collecting data would be a great boon. There have been earlier unattached buoys used by the Navy, but they were typically deployed against a specific threat and died quickly. A perpetually self-powered one that didn't have to poke a large solar array above the water and betray its presense would be far better. It would certainly be much less vulnerable to having the enemy (and the occasional accident) cut the sensor cables.
The real pests on AOL run automatic Instant Messaging spambots. If you go into a chat room, your AOL Id is then visible, even to those outside the room, and their bots then IM you with their crap. They use the chatroom approach rather than just looking through the AOL directory to see who's on because the name of the chatroom lets them target their stuff more precisely. It's infuriating to have to turn off IMing just to chat in peace, and interferes with IMing those you're chatting with. I don't want these jackals sued, I want them imprisoned and tortured.
I just came to the realization that this absurd 'if it moves, patent it' stuff could be a force for good as well as evil. What we should have done is patent every idiotic copy-protection concept being floated (as per this SlashDot story) just to tie them up and make sure they're never used. Unfortunately, it looks like we're too late. Alas.
According to Jackson's suit, also filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., he was repeatedly passed over for promotions to jobs for which he was qualified, losing out to white candidates from both inside and outside of the company.
Applying Occam's razor, I find it much more likely that this guy is either incompetent, obnoxious, or doesn't bathe than that there's institutionalized racism within Microsoft. I've worked in lots of high-tech areas, and anyone dumb enough to bypass a good employee just because of his/her race wouldn't last long. Good people are so difficult to find that companies can't afford to waste them.
Speaking as an investor in the semiconductor industry, I'm all for development of these devices. Can you imagine how much replacement electronics would have to be bought if a few of tese were each activated in the 10 largest cities? Ka-ching. Of course, if one were activated in the Wall Street district, the resulting financial crisis would probably put us into a major depression. Maybe those Y2K supplies weren't such a bad idea after all.
Remember the "NSA key" brouhaha around Microsoft a while back? I'd be equally concerned about MSFT putting stuff in their code on purpose, and not just some group of crackers. Not to mention the inadvertent (or are they? Hmmm.) security bugs that show up every week or so.
eBay can't stop private individuals from completing private transactions, regardless of how they came into contact with each other.
I agree that they can't actually prevent the transactions themselves. However, their threats to jerk the accounts of those who go around them is probably within their rights. As far as I can tell (IANAL) there's nothing that can be done legally to them if they do. Flack from their customers seems to be the only outlet.
Hard to believe that Descent II didn't make it even to runner-up status. I wasted more time on that than I like to think about. And maybe it's too new, but Everquest certainly belongs among the most influential. I don't play it, but I know a couple of people who do, and it's like talking to drug addicts; it's taken over their lives.
My point, Do they need an Olympic-sized swimming pool with underwater viewing room? A ZOO?! For that kind of money they could have gotten professors from really good collages to work there. Teachers that know how to teach students properly.
Sure they could have. Over the existing teacher's dead bodies. You have to realize that public schools aren't about educating kids. They're job machines for unionized government workers. That's why any time vouchers come up, the argument is always about what it's going to do to the public schools, not for the kids. I wager that you could toss virtually unlimited sums at public schools and they wouldn't do a better job of educating children until they were faced with some serious competition. Without it, there's just no incentive to improve.
Even accepting your argument that this expenditure simply restored the district to where it should have been, why did it result in no improvement? The central point is:
MoreMoney != BetterResults Nothing you've said refutes that.
And reply #3? Why the neglect in the first
place? Why the "white flight"? Who's left
behind when that happens, and what is the
effect?
Why the neglect? Because politicians will ignore anyone who doesn't have the power to hurt them. Why white flight? Obvious. People don't want their kids attending dangerous and low-quality schools. If non-whites had the money, they'd have done the same. The government school monopoly sees to it that these people remain chained to the oars by fighting every reform that might allow them to escape, such as vouchers. As for the last questions, the central premise behind them (and behind the district's stated goal of getting more whites to come back) is that there's something magical about whites that needs to be present so that it will rub off on minorities and help them succeed. That's unbelieveably insulting. If the facilities and staff are first-rate, so what if all the whites leave? Are you suggesting that minorities can't hack it without them?
In other news, Kansas City just spent millions on a new stadium, track, baseball field and other sporting equipment.
You're not going to get a pro-arena argument from me. I live in San Diego, where the city council inked one of the most boneheaded deals (and that's saying something) in the history of sports. The city commmitted to guaranteeing the Chargers tickets. No limits on how much the Chargers can raise prices, no requirement that they do more than make a 'good-faith' effort to even sell the damned things (what a surprise, they don't even take out ads now). It's now costing the city $5 million net outlay each year, plus the costs of paying off the bonds that they floated to upgrade the stadium. All of this was supposed to keep the team in San Diego, but the owner is already talking about moving it.
So yeah, as far as I'm concerned, every sports franchise can build their own freekin' stadiums.
Reply#1: Compared to inflation during the same
period?
What part of 'real dollars' is unclear?
As for the rest of your replies, I'll just refer you to the report on the Kansas City debacle put out by the Libertarian Cato Institute. Here's the executive summary:
For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them." The education establishment and its supporters have replied, "No one's ever tried." In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can't be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.
Another section of the population to consider are the children of migrant workers. Many are ignored by uncaring, understaffed or simply prejudiced school districts.
Even worse, schools have a perverse incentive to give these children an inferior education. The more kids that can be classified as 'learning disabled', 'non-English-speaking', or 'poor,' the more money the district gets. Until recent reforms in California, many Hispanic kids were dragooned into bilingual-ed classes, even if they spoke no Spanish and even if the parents objected. All because the school districts got extra money for bilingual-ed.
Just give more money to the public school system, improve the quality of teaching from k12 to college (introduce computer science or coding ?) and you'll have better results !
Spending on education has gone up severalfold in real dollars since 1950 while math and reading test scores have been flat. Kansas City was forced by a judge to spend billions on its school system, and produced educational palaces. Result: no improvement on test scores. Simply tossing more bales of money on the fire isn't a solution; bring in market forces if you want to see improvement.
Anyone remember the bitching and moaning when used CD stores were starting up? Garth Brooks and others made this same tired argument. Publishers of everything from books to software aren't going to be happy until they can charge you every single time you access their material. And what's the difference whether Amazon is selling used books, or it's happening via another site like Bibliofind.com?
The article states that the $50 is for 'peace of mind' that the article will continue to be available into the future. Search engines like Google cache some of this material. The articles, at least for a time, were freely visible on the net, so does taking a snapshot of them at that instant in time and making it viewable after the articles have been taken down mean that Google is violating the rights of the copyright holder? Google's cache is one of it's handiest features.
Based on interviews I've read with filmmakers, it's a normal part of the process to stress out about what you're producing. Steven Spielberg once said that during the filming of portions of Raiders of the Lost Ark, he thought he was creating the worst movie ever made. If a director like Spielberg can feel that way about a movie like Raiders, it's not a surprise that Lucas might have some second thoughts here and there. I'm betting that it'll turn out fine; Lucas has great instincts.
Slashdot Mirror
Are they planning to offer gift certificates? I have some RIAA/MPAA attorneys who I'd like to remember next Christmas. (There is a high likelihood of fatality, right?)
If I were selling my high-tech company to another, these days I'd be wanting at least some cold, hard, cash out of the deal. A lot of people have ended up broke after their new stock tanked.
Unfortunately, it isn't unique. Cops in the United States can do that and more. Take a look at this.
Contrary to what the governor is saying, what failed isn't 'deregulation', but the way the state went about it. Elsewhere in the country, like Texas and Pennsylvania for example, deregulation has been a success. Allowing the building of more power plants is one reason (California hasn't brought a new one online in 10 years), but also removing the idiotic restrictions that California imposed. Such as allowing utilities to contract ahead for power (present state law forces them to buy on the one-day-ahead market), not capping retail rates while allowing wholesale rates to float, not forcing the market to buy under the nutty rules of the Power Exchange which cause prices to be higher than necessary, etc.
Here in San Diego, we have the privilege of both exhorbitant rates and the prospect of blackouts. The manner in which energy was 'deregulated' (it wasn't, but that's a topic left for another time) meant that when a utility paid off its old debt, it could then pass thru its true costs to the customer. San Diego Gas and Electric was the first to effect a payoff, and we now pay the full freight. Where we were before paying around 3 cents per KWH, the price on the spot market has gone to as high as $2.50 at times. My last bill averaged out at 21 cents per KWH, about 7 times the rate of before, and I expect the next one to be a multiple of that. The real cost is masked by an emergency bill that was rushed thru the legislature capping the rate charged to me at around 6 cents. However, each bill shows an 'adjustment' (an accumulating debt that somebody, i.e. probably me, is going to end up paying eventually). Businesses are closing, people are getting laid off, and most everyone is shutting off every power consuming device they can. The entire state is facing an economic crisis. And today in the Los Angeles Times, there's a story about how the new budget just passed assumes continuing economic prosperity. The state budget has increased 43% in 3 years. The governor in his state-of-the-state speech seemed to favor CA condemning power plants under eminent domain and then running them itself. That plus apparently sending invading armies to border states to force them to sell us power (or at least that's how it sounded). If you're holding any California bonds in your portfolio, I'd be dumping them now.
How about hitting up the manufacturers/distributors of the components you're using? Perhaps being able to say "our widgets helped trash our competitor's widgets" would be sufficient incentive.
I don't think the data can necessarily be easily arrested, but it can be monitored. A few showy 'examples' can be made of people to keep others in line, sort of the way the U.S. Internal Revenue Service announces prosecutions during tax season. Besides the governmental monitoring, there will also be the neighbors. There are 'block captains' who keep tabs on who's up to what (one of the ways China enforces its draconian "one-child" policy). I'm sure there will be ways around the blockades, but anyone wanting to access forbidden information is going to have to want it pretty badly. As a point of comparison, think of possessing a gun in New York City. It's possible, but the consequences of discovery could be dire.
I suspect that the Navy really developed this as a way to expand the SOSUS (SOund SUrveillance System) sonar network, which presently uses long undersea cables to connect the sensors to the monitoring point. Being able to drop buoys wherever and immediately start collecting data would be a great boon. There have been earlier unattached buoys used by the Navy, but they were typically deployed against a specific threat and died quickly. A perpetually self-powered one that didn't have to poke a large solar array above the water and betray its presense would be far better. It would certainly be much less vulnerable to having the enemy (and the occasional accident) cut the sensor cables.
The real pests on AOL run automatic Instant Messaging spambots. If you go into a chat room, your AOL Id is then visible, even to those outside the room, and their bots then IM you with their crap. They use the chatroom approach rather than just looking through the AOL directory to see who's on because the name of the chatroom lets them target their stuff more precisely. It's infuriating to have to turn off IMing just to chat in peace, and interferes with IMing those you're chatting with. I don't want these jackals sued, I want them imprisoned and tortured.
Acroname makes some interesting robotic stuff. Here's a palm-pilot robot kit that they produce.
I just came to the realization that this absurd 'if it moves, patent it' stuff could be a force for good as well as evil. What we should have done is patent every idiotic copy-protection concept being floated (as per this SlashDot story) just to tie them up and make sure they're never used. Unfortunately, it looks like we're too late. Alas.
Applying Occam's razor, I find it much more likely that this guy is either incompetent, obnoxious, or doesn't bathe than that there's institutionalized racism within Microsoft. I've worked in lots of high-tech areas, and anyone dumb enough to bypass a good employee just because of his/her race wouldn't last long. Good people are so difficult to find that companies can't afford to waste them.
Speaking as an investor in the semiconductor industry, I'm all for development of these devices. Can you imagine how much replacement electronics would have to be bought if a few of tese were each activated in the 10 largest cities? Ka-ching. Of course, if one were activated in the Wall Street district, the resulting financial crisis would probably put us into a major depression. Maybe those Y2K supplies weren't such a bad idea after all.
Remember the "NSA key" brouhaha around Microsoft a while back? I'd be equally concerned about MSFT putting stuff in their code on purpose, and not just some group of crackers. Not to mention the inadvertent (or are they? Hmmm.) security bugs that show up every week or so.
I agree that they can't actually prevent the transactions themselves. However, their threats to jerk the accounts of those who go around them is probably within their rights. As far as I can tell (IANAL) there's nothing that can be done legally to them if they do. Flack from their customers seems to be the only outlet.
Hard to believe that Descent II didn't make it even to runner-up status. I wasted more time on that than I like to think about. And maybe it's too new, but Everquest certainly belongs among the most influential. I don't play it, but I know a couple of people who do, and it's like talking to drug addicts; it's taken over their lives.
Sure they could have. Over the existing teacher's dead bodies. You have to realize that public schools aren't about educating kids. They're job machines for unionized government workers. That's why any time vouchers come up, the argument is always about what it's going to do to the public schools, not for the kids. I wager that you could toss virtually unlimited sums at public schools and they wouldn't do a better job of educating children until they were faced with some serious competition. Without it, there's just no incentive to improve.
MoreMoney != BetterResults
Nothing you've said refutes that.
And reply #3? Why the neglect in the first place? Why the "white flight"? Who's left behind when that happens, and what is the effect?
Why the neglect? Because politicians will ignore anyone who doesn't have the power to hurt them. Why white flight? Obvious. People don't want their kids attending dangerous and low-quality schools. If non-whites had the money, they'd have done the same. The government school monopoly sees to it that these people remain chained to the oars by fighting every reform that might allow them to escape, such as vouchers. As for the last questions, the central premise behind them (and behind the district's stated goal of getting more whites to come back) is that there's something magical about whites that needs to be present so that it will rub off on minorities and help them succeed. That's unbelieveably insulting. If the facilities and staff are first-rate, so what if all the whites leave? Are you suggesting that minorities can't hack it without them?
You're not going to get a pro-arena argument from me. I live in San Diego, where the city council inked one of the most boneheaded deals (and that's saying something) in the history of sports. The city commmitted to guaranteeing the Chargers tickets. No limits on how much the Chargers can raise prices, no requirement that they do more than make a 'good-faith' effort to even sell the damned things (what a surprise, they don't even take out ads now). It's now costing the city $5 million net outlay each year, plus the costs of paying off the bonds that they floated to upgrade the stadium. All of this was supposed to keep the team in San Diego, but the owner is already talking about moving it.
So yeah, as far as I'm concerned, every sports franchise can build their own freekin' stadiums.
What part of 'real dollars' is unclear?
As for the rest of your replies, I'll just refer you to the report on the Kansas City debacle put out by the Libertarian Cato Institute. Here's the executive summary:
For decades critics of the public schools have been saying, "You can't solve educational problems by throwing money at them." The education establishment and its supporters have replied, "No one's ever tried." In Kansas City they did try. To improve the education of black students and encourage desegregation, a federal judge invited the Kansas City, Missouri, School District to come up with a cost-is-no-object educational plan and ordered local and state taxpayers to find the money to pay for it.
Kansas City spent as much as $11,700 per pupil--more money per pupil, on a cost of living adjusted basis, than any other of the 280 largest districts in the country. The money bought higher teachers' salaries, 15 new schools, and such amenities as an Olympic-sized swimming pool with an underwater viewing room, television and animation studios, a robotics lab, a 25-acre wildlife sanctuary, a zoo, a model United Nations with simultaneous translation capability, and field trips to Mexico and Senegal. The student-teacher ratio was 12 or 13 to 1, the lowest of any major school district in the country.
The results were dismal. Test scores did not rise; the black-white gap did not diminish; and there was less, not greater, integration.
The Kansas City experiment suggests that, indeed, educational problems can't be solved by throwing money at them, that the structural problems of our current educational system are far more important than a lack of material resources, and that the focus on desegregation diverted attention from the real problem, low achievement.
Even worse, schools have a perverse incentive to give these children an inferior education. The more kids that can be classified as 'learning disabled', 'non-English-speaking', or 'poor,' the more money the district gets. Until recent reforms in California, many Hispanic kids were dragooned into bilingual-ed classes, even if they spoke no Spanish and even if the parents objected. All because the school districts got extra money for bilingual-ed.
Spending on education has gone up severalfold in real dollars since 1950 while math and reading test scores have been flat. Kansas City was forced by a judge to spend billions on its school system, and produced educational palaces. Result: no improvement on test scores. Simply tossing more bales of money on the fire isn't a solution; bring in market forces if you want to see improvement.
Anyone remember the bitching and moaning when used CD stores were starting up? Garth Brooks and others made this same tired argument. Publishers of everything from books to software aren't going to be happy until they can charge you every single time you access their material. And what's the difference whether Amazon is selling used books, or it's happening via another site like Bibliofind.com?
The article states that the $50 is for 'peace of mind' that the article will continue to be available into the future. Search engines like Google cache some of this material. The articles, at least for a time, were freely visible on the net, so does taking a snapshot of them at that instant in time and making it viewable after the articles have been taken down mean that Google is violating the rights of the copyright holder? Google's cache is one of it's handiest features.
Based on interviews I've read with filmmakers, it's a normal part of the process to stress out about what you're producing. Steven Spielberg once said that during the filming of portions of Raiders of the Lost Ark, he thought he was creating the worst movie ever made. If a director like Spielberg can feel that way about a movie like Raiders, it's not a surprise that Lucas might have some second thoughts here and there. I'm betting that it'll turn out fine; Lucas has great instincts.