I guess you're talking about projecting into the pupil from some nearby device, not from glasses.
That technique is much further away, because the pupil tracking is much harder computation, and requires much more accurate projector aiming. There's really nothing wrong with just "widescreen" glasses that encompass at least 300 degrees of view. The glasses are limited so far because the displays are small, just putting detailed view in front of the fovea, which sees details. But as solid-state displays get much more R&D (now that CRT is solidly in the past), the display inside the glasses will get there fairly quickly. Probably the breakthru will come when OLEDs are fast enough for high framerates, which should be at least 80fps to start really fooling the 40Hz (clockless) optic nerve. 120fps will be even more convincing, even at that close range.
Pupil tracking will be a benefit, even before it's really accurate, just by cropping out display area outside the fovea at any given moment, so hirez/fps is rendered only where the fovea is looking, supplying much easier lowrez/fps to the much larger display area not being seen in detail. That tracking doesn't need to drive even trickier accurate projection, so it will arrive sooner.
The combo of the techs will allow glasses cheap and fast enough that they will probably compete with the $200 high-end designer sunglasses, but actually be as smart as they are pretty.
The stock market is down 5% and plummeting from these failures. A family member who I talked with yesterday has lost 5% of their boring old 401k plan's value, on top of its other 5% decline since the start of the year. The debt that each American owes is now even huger because it includes the collapse costs of Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros, AIG, and any number of other banks already and yet to come, while cutting into our ability to protect ourselves from anything else with a depleted Treasury.
That all (and much more) happened because you Republicans made it legal to do what they did, though it was illegal before, so it didn't happen. Though, as I explained, before Democrats prohibited it, you Republicans let it run amok and created the Great Depression. During which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac worked just fine, until you Republicans deregulated its industry, and charged the Fed with pumping its credit into an economy you were running into the ground, so we wouldn't notice until it was too late.
Obama has hundreds, thousands of "advisors", and is not some Republican mouthpiece (like McCain, or the rest of his "K Street Project" cohort) who can only repeat whatever lobbyists are paid to tell him to say. If I were president, I'd haul into my office the fools who ran those lenders into the ground - it's a credit to Obama's leadership that he doesn't even have to be president to get them to tell him what else is rotting under the hood that he'll be responsible for in 4 months.
The Great Depression was just like this, right down to its decade of Republican power monopoly and empty calories of debt propping up their fake economy. But why should that shock any sense into you Republicans? You freaks haven't even learned from Iraq not to start unnecessary wars on lies, after failing to learn the same lesson from Vietnam. My Slashdot posts aren't going to cure your insanity.
You'd rather lose the country to win a partisan argument, even though you can't do that either. Go to hell with your fundamentalist cronies.
If 3D glasses just dumped the monitors and went wireless, they'd catch on. They need to be transparent, so the display is projected into the real field of view, and maybe have a black LCD layer to actually shut out the outside light.
But if they worked like that, the first iPod to use them for video would push them over the edge into the mainstream once and for all.
Unfortunately, we'll need a breakthru in batteries to power high framerate hirez good color wireless glasses with fast radio bandwidth to the device putting out the frames. Maybe the breakthru glasses will be hollow for fuelcell juice.
The Russian nuclear fleet is indeed engaged in joint military exercises with Venezuela in the Caribbean. Which I believe is quite close to the United States somewere...
You are just a Republican, er, "libertarian" cherrypicking facts and blending them to fit your notion that government is the problem, and unfettered rich people is the answer.
The huge economic losses that are taking down whole huge banks right now are the result of deregulating specifically the rules preventing different kinds of financial institutions from doing business across industry barriers like "investment bank" vs "mortgage bank" vs "insurance corp" vs "brokerage". Those laws were enacted by FDR and the Democratic Congress in 1934 because they would prevent the damage of the 1929 economic crash from spreading across sectors, if it happened again. The 1929 crash was triggered by "margin buying", which was simply buying stocks without money, instead owing the price as a debt to the seller. That kind of unlimited debt was backed by the Federal government loaning out all kinds of money, until the voodoo didn't work anymore. And then the 1920s illusion of wealth collapsed, because it was fake all the time. Which left a crater in the economy, because a decade of fake wealth instead of building a real economy kills the ability to run an economy, and the debt on the books still has to be repaid. The 1920s featured a series of Republican presidents and their Republican Congresses that let it all happen, until swept out after the crash. Along the way, the Republican government failed to protect the environment as much as it failed to protect the economy, instead ruling with incentives to burn up both, until the Great Depression crashed amidst the clouds of the Dust Bowl.
That is exactly what just happened again. Even to the extent that the Republican government monopoly repealed the 1934 rules protecting the economy from the same unsupportable debt and "firewall-free" risk chain reaction.
Because Republicans love monopolies, as rich people generally do, because monopolies are the ultimate in the rich getting richer though the poor starve. Without the people banding together to protect ourselves, the rich create monopolies. That's the corporate anarchy that you Republicans, er, "libertarians", always drive us to whenever you get the power.
Of course, you Republicans always create the biggest government ever seen, with the biggest jumps in its size ever seen, and the biggest government expenses. It's only under Democratic presidents that this economy ever grows for real (ie. not an illusion built of debt that then can't be repaid).
There were a "handful" of dirty players in the finance industry about as much as there were just "a few bad apples" running Abu Ghraib. The entire industry was rotten, inspired by Enron and following the same rails of Republican deregulation that allows hiding debt until it's necessary for the public to take it over or face unacceptable damage to the whole economy these huge failures threaten. An economy already damaged by those rich people sending their money and the jobs offshore. You just accused Democrats of doing what doesn't happen under Democrats, but which is exactly what Republicans cause.
Oh, and Obama defining "rich" as much less than $250K:y but only raising taxes at $250K+ means that Obama isn't even taxing all the rich people, just the very rich.
But why should you care, when you can just get everything wrong, defy history and the facts, because you're so committed to worshiping the rich on faith?
Yes, we're going to come through this. But we will have squandered all kinds of opportunities to get our economy (and through it, the world's) under control on our terms. Now we have to follow the terms of our creditors, which are largely foreign, as we already have. We are bailing out the banks with the foreign creditors. Foreigners who are Arabs and Chinese, our greatest rivals and enemies in the world.
All of which is indeed Republicans' fault. You Republicans controlled Congress for 12 years, and the presidency for its last 8, in lockstep until 2006. When not only did Bush start issuing his firs
I didn't say that Tim Berners-Lee proposed such a thing. I simply pointed out that though I had just described a system mediated by a single org hosting the decentralized commentary, such a system would be even better with multiple mediators. And that if Berners-Lee were interested in the goals that my proposal solved, that he should sponsor starting up not just one mediator, but several competing mediators.
Why don't you Read My Fucking Post right, before you get snotty with me. Especially since I have spent every reply since that OP having to remind the critic replying to me to at least read my post before arguing some strawman that I didn't say.
As I explicitly pointed out, it failed as the Bubble popped. Do I have to post a reply reminding each carper to actually read the post where I said what "prebunks" the trivial complaint they're making?
What was proven, despite the whining in the comment I replied to, was that the app worked as a social network, not as a "central authority".
Look, I know it's hard to read. But if you can't even read the clear comments in this discussion, how will you ever hope to read the web ratings that tell you about what you're reading?
The richest Americans aren't "the most productive" members of society. They're the ones running GM, Ford, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and all the rest of the economy they inherited into the ground. They're the ones who paid the way for the Republican Era that has ruined the economy, robbed America, destroyed our global political clout and our first-rate military.
You can lie about Obama's tax policies, but I just showed you how it will cut taxes on everyone but those who've been gaming the economy at our expense the last decade. Those people send their money offshore, buy disposable luxury items, and don't circulate it around the American economy. Most Americans, whose taxes will be cut, are spending the savings on their neighbors.
But hey, why not go back to the Reagan 1986 tax code, which was the largest, most complex law ever passed, and which was part of how Reagan/Bush multiplied the size of the government by four times, while also funding the previous fake growth cycle with the bank heist called "the S&L Crisis".
You Republicans, er, "libertarians", have gotten everything wrong every time you've been asked. The country's in tatters, with greater foreign rivals and enemies, worse than ever since probably 1812. Since you people can't possibly guess right, as you've proven every time, you should at least stop prattling about your worship of the rich who have squandered so much of what this country has built over long times and at great costs. I know you won't stop, but you should at least know that I'm not going to let you slide when you keep on the wrong track you can't do without.
Funny, when Obama is willing to go along with your Republican delusions, he's always right, but when he tells you truth you don't like, he's abomination.
Because the very next thing Obama said was exactly what I just said, the truth:
SEN. OBAMA: No. Hold on a second, Bill. If you look at the debate that was taking place, we had gone through five years of mismanagement of this war that I thought was disastrous. And the president wanted to double-down and continue on open-ended policy that did not create the kinds of pressure in the Iraqis to take responsibility and reconcile --
MR. O'REILLY: It worked. Come on.
SEN. OBAMA: Bill, what I've said is -- I've already said it succeeded beyond our wildest dreams.
MR. O'REILLY: Right! So why can't you just say, I was right in the beginning, and I was wrong about the surge?
SEN. OBAMA: Because there is an underlying problem with what we've done. We have reduced the violence --
MR. O'REILLY: Yeah?
SEN. OBAMA: -- but the Iraqis still haven't taken a responsibility. And we still don't have the kind of political reconciliation. We are still spending, Bill, 10 (billion dollars) to $12 billion a month.
Of course the military succeeded in beating back our violent enemies when we sent more of them there. Why do you and O'Reilly suggest that our excellent troops might somehow not do their job?
The problem is that the surge failed to fix Iraq because the surge could never fix Iraq. Iraq has a fake puppet government, built on a bloodbath, kept together by only the force of the US military killing its enemies every day. Keeping our military there, occupying Iraq to do that, is not "success". It's the kind of failure that a compulsive gambler thinks is "winning" because they've got deep enough pockets to sit at the table all night, but never cut their losses by leaving the table before it breaks them.
And Iraq has broken the military, and our economy, and it has broken Iraq, so very badly. The surge hasn't changed any of that. All it's done is waste more money and lives to prop up the unworkable Iraq that John McCain created.
And you Republicans helped them. And even now, you want more, nothing but more, of that unsupportable failure.
Just because you can hear only what you want to hear doesn't mean the rest of us have to listen to you.
Scott Adams is an idiot. He had a funny take on the other idiots who surrounded him in his PacTel cubicle in the 1990s, but that's just the idiot leading the idiots. Read his "Dogbert management books" for business insights that aren't even funny, in ways that show he actually knows as little about business management as the idiots he mocks.
Here's Adams' latest demonstration of his idiocy, in this stupid (and not funny) editorial:
donated to John McCain's campaign because he had promised a friend he would do so if the surge of troops to Iraq worked. "I figured my money was safe," Adams says.
The surge escalation has failed. Of course throwing tens of thousands of new US troops at a civil war will succeed in beating back the enemies, making them less likely to try attacks than when the US military was spread too thin to intimidate. No one questions whether our military is good at killing and intimidating enemies, when Washington (run by Bush and McCain's Republican Party) isn't keeping them too weak to do the job.
But the surge's job wasn't just to drop the killing. That was a means to an end, to create a political opportunity that was totally squandered. The Iraqi government is a farce that hasn't governed anything, even when we give it a break in the action during which it can concentrate on governing. It has failed. And since the purpose of the surge escalation has failed, the surge has failed. Anyone saying any different just thinks that the purpose of war is to kill. It's not, and those people have lost the Iraq War since they started it.
But hey, if the surge worked, then we won. Let's get the hell out of there already. Not stay the "100 years, maybe forever" that McCain thinks equals victory. If we've got to keep troops there, we're losing. Only getting out of there is any real measure of victory.
Dilbert creator Scott Adams hired a polling firm to survey economists on which candidate is best for the economy.
Yeah, and then he totally ignored that most economists are Democrats. Because people who understand the economy vote for Democrats. Even among Republican economists, more Republicans support Obama than Democrat economists for McCain. That speaks much more than what Adams' single datapoint survey says.
I should pause here and confess my personal biases, since the messenger is part of the story. On social issues, I lean Libertarian, minus the crazy stuff.
Of course, that is what every single American (who isn't crazy) says about their political bias.
Moneywise, I can't support a candidate who promises to tax the bejeezus out of my bracket, give the windfall to a bunch of clowns with a 14 percent approval rating (Congress), and hope they spend it wisely.
Unfortunately, the alternative to the guy who promises to pillage my wallet is a lukewarm cadaver. I'm in trouble either way.
And there we have the basic evidence of Scott Adams idiocy. Or rather, his lying. Obama might be raising Adams' taxes, if he makes over $250,000 a year. He's almost certainly not going to raise yours. You can see for yourself with the Obama Tax Cut Web Calculator, which takes 15 seconds and 3 status facts about you to show you the dollar amount of your Obama tax cut.
Adams is a rich guy who makes his money satirizing incompetents running big orgs. His pocketbook is threatened by Obama because he's made so much more money than most people, benefited so much more than most people, from the exact kinds of idiots he needs in power for him to sell more books and cartoons. He's as scared of McCain as he is of Obama, because though he believes McCain won't tax him (but the country would fall apart, an expensive proposition even for a cartoonist who has to live in it), because McCain is boring. Which means he won't be a good c
Reread the part of my description where the notes are selectable by in or out per person or group.
And the part where I explained that this was a real, running app, not just an "idea". It worked. Centralized control doesn't ensure anything except that the bias of the controllers shows in the notes.
The decentralized social network is the way that everyone knows everything we trust. That doesn't work very well, but it's the least bad way we've got. All the theoretical handwaving in the world about "centralized control" is debunked by the proven reality of both the online stuff like what I described, and the way the world works all the time.
What really bugs me is how smug people are who are so locked into theoretical criticism that they can't even notice that they're arguing with something real and proven.
Right before the Web Bubble popped in 1999, there was a company called ThirdVoice that was rising to the surface. It was a browser plugin that made a layer of "post-it notes" that were attached to specific pages shown in the browser, even tagging specific items on the page. Anyone with the plugin was letting their browser hit the ThirdVoice server, which contained a list of notes indexed to the page, with pointers to which item was notated. So viewers could switch on and off the layer, and see how anyone else had marked up the page. That let people give ratings to pages, and people could look at them, make up their minds, and post their own take on things. There was also a feature to add or remove specific users or user groups to what was displayed, to cut out spam.
That kind of independent rating and commentary, right there on the page, is what should satisfy Berners-Lee. He should just dig up the old ThirdVoice app, or this Slashdot post, and pay a few dozen thousand bucks at a team to dust it off. If he wanted to do it right, he'd sponsor the startup of two or three independent teams which would then compete with each other, for true independence. We don't need some "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval To Rule Them All" imposing a front layer from a single powerful org that controls the whole Web with its opinion of what lies beneath.
Internal tech support is part of the critical path of the production of the company's product, except the costs of supporting the "business" part, which is indeed a management cost. The accounting department is not in the critical path of producing the product, except for small costs in determining pricing. The internal HR/pay systems are, by that reckoning, part of management, though the billing systems, which support the sales department, are part of production.
The large majority of those specific IT systems support the production cycle (which includes sales). But the parts that don't actually make the product, sell it, and collect the money to pay for materials and labor to make the product, are outside the production loop, and fall into the management loops.
There's not a clear difference in "collar color" in modern businesses anymore. But there is still a difference between what work actually "does the company's job", and what other work is done to ensure that the company's job is done for the maximum profit of the owners, which has always been the distinction. "Management" vs labor is really just a standin for "owners vs workers". Seeing who works most directly for the owners vs who works most directly for the product (some would say "for the customers"), is a way to see that distinction more clearly.
Here in NYC, premium gasoline is about $4 a gallon, diesel about $4.50; about 12.5% higher. The Prius is getting about 50MPG max out there, so this Ford is about 30% better at 65MPG. 30% better mileage at 112.5% the cost is a savings of over 15% in money.
The Prius sells pretty well here in NYC, AFAICT on the streets. A Ford that's 15% cheaper to fuel, and probably will last a lot longer with less (and less expensive) maintenance on a diesel engine, should also sell.
There's also no intrinsic reason why diesel economics should be better in Europe than in the USA. Ford is I think the biggest car maker in the world. That status used to bring a kind of clout that could overcome the market manipulations that make something like artificially expensive fuel come back down. Pulling that off would not only sell a lot of cars, and improve America's energy efficiency, but also fix something very wrong with the American industrial economy. But I suppose that not ever Ford can fight the Saud family that Ford has made so rich and powerful.
What do accountants produce that the company sells? Unless it's simply an accountancy, nothing. And if it's an accountancy, there are separate accountants in the "business" part of the company, that manage the company, counting beans that just happen to be labeled "accounting hours". They're in management, not production.
IT managers are managing the production department directly. They are not managing the corporation, except for the CTO or CIO. And that is one reason why the CTO/CIO is usually distrusted by even the IT managers below them, because they're management. To confirm the point, the feeling is usually mutual.
Most of "spy" work is done by intel analysts compiling all the public sources of info, and indexing them, then making connections.
Of course there's much more public info every day than the secret info even the best spies can find out. And of course all the public info must be dealt with, because otherwise anyone could have an advantage in that blind spot. So simple logic shows how there's vastly more public sources for intel services than secret info.
This basic fact has been known to anyone serious with any interest for a long time. This story is obviously disinformation.
But such a disinfo story is no great feat for our huge, $50B+ annual spy budgets. What it really shows is that even after (pretending to) cover a global Terror War for most of a decade, our journalists will still just publish whatever claptrap the spooks tell them, without bothering to even think about it.
Or to look at the many public sources of info that say this story is the oldest news. So how much of their stories about secret info are even more made up?
"Dangerous to the person building it" can be minimized by patents. Not all dangerous tech is dangerous enough to risk getting shut down by a patent violation, especially when the point of making it is to profit, not lose money, even if you look badass doing it.
The "tech vs biz" feuds are an extension of the conflicts between management and labor. Tech divisions, though they have their own managers, are responsible for doing the production work of the company, while the biz offices are responsible for managing the company (and, ultimately, the tech division).
The management vs labor conflict is as old as the division of labor. Tech vs biz is probably at least as old as the first person to market the inventor of the wheel's widget.
Extra money in the US Treasury is circular logic. The value of money in the US Treasury is in what is its benefit to the public when it's spent.
We don't invest in the public benefit by a public vote. We have a republic, the entire point of which is to use representatives of the public to focus government decisions in manageably small groups. Like NASA, which doesn't design Space Shuttles on the first Tuesday in November.
We have a government that has done a largely excellent job of investing in technology, by any measure. Even if not measuring by intangibles like global leadership, inspiring generations of Americans to beat all kinds of challenges, the economic ROI on the space program is unbeaten anywhere. And that includes tech transfer to American industry.
Properly transferred, NASA tech returns a lot more money to the taxpayers' pockets than they pulled out to send to NASA. And unlike spending that money directly on individual corporations' products or their equity to fund their R&D, the scale of the returns is nationwide. And then there's those intangibles that inspire the entire nation, and the world.
Sure, Conservatives (er, "libertarians") want to privatize all government. But corporate anarchy is not just a fabulous way for a nation to become first meaningless and next overrun by actual countries. It's also the road to monopolies, which are about the most wasteful economies, accomplishing little but keeping their monopolies, and returning little on investment compared to a properly managed economy under a Constitutional democratic republic. Oh, and the other ways are anti-American.
Every gas pump I've ever seen here in NYC has a diesel dispenser. There is absolutely no reason why they couldn't sell those cars into the huge NYC market, which is full of people looking for better gas mileage.
If Ford can't figure that out, it's got a lot bigger problems than just this one car.
When its "fair market value" is below the cost to produce it, a cost paid by the taxpayers, that's a subsidy.
I didn't argue with the auction as the format to sell it. But I will, since you brought it up: the better way to award the patent, if that is at all appropriate, is strategically to a company that will provide the most public benefit (or patch a hole in a public liability).
The problem is not the preference: that's a proper role for the government to play, when such preference is in the public interest. The problem is that the public interest doesn't seem to enter into these transactions at all. Only a way to subsidize some private interests, even if they have to fight among themselves for the privilege of being the one to win the prize.
I like the idea of the US government requiring all patents it registers to be licensed or sold to only US companies, or else revert back to the US government.
But I see no sign that such a policy is in effect.
As for the WTO, if someone wants to sue the US government for preferring to subsidize US people, I'd like to see such an argument make a lot of noise, enough to get the US out of the WTO - or any other international trade regime that requires a "suicide pact".
Slashdot Mirror
I guess you're talking about projecting into the pupil from some nearby device, not from glasses.
That technique is much further away, because the pupil tracking is much harder computation, and requires much more accurate projector aiming. There's really nothing wrong with just "widescreen" glasses that encompass at least 300 degrees of view. The glasses are limited so far because the displays are small, just putting detailed view in front of the fovea, which sees details. But as solid-state displays get much more R&D (now that CRT is solidly in the past), the display inside the glasses will get there fairly quickly. Probably the breakthru will come when OLEDs are fast enough for high framerates, which should be at least 80fps to start really fooling the 40Hz (clockless) optic nerve. 120fps will be even more convincing, even at that close range.
Pupil tracking will be a benefit, even before it's really accurate, just by cropping out display area outside the fovea at any given moment, so hirez/fps is rendered only where the fovea is looking, supplying much easier lowrez/fps to the much larger display area not being seen in detail. That tracking doesn't need to drive even trickier accurate projection, so it will arrive sooner.
The combo of the techs will allow glasses cheap and fast enough that they will probably compete with the $200 high-end designer sunglasses, but actually be as smart as they are pretty.
The stock market is down 5% and plummeting from these failures. A family member who I talked with yesterday has lost 5% of their boring old 401k plan's value, on top of its other 5% decline since the start of the year. The debt that each American owes is now even huger because it includes the collapse costs of Bear Stearns, Lehman Bros, AIG, and any number of other banks already and yet to come, while cutting into our ability to protect ourselves from anything else with a depleted Treasury.
That all (and much more) happened because you Republicans made it legal to do what they did, though it was illegal before, so it didn't happen. Though, as I explained, before Democrats prohibited it, you Republicans let it run amok and created the Great Depression. During which Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac worked just fine, until you Republicans deregulated its industry, and charged the Fed with pumping its credit into an economy you were running into the ground, so we wouldn't notice until it was too late.
Obama has hundreds, thousands of "advisors", and is not some Republican mouthpiece (like McCain, or the rest of his "K Street Project" cohort) who can only repeat whatever lobbyists are paid to tell him to say. If I were president, I'd haul into my office the fools who ran those lenders into the ground - it's a credit to Obama's leadership that he doesn't even have to be president to get them to tell him what else is rotting under the hood that he'll be responsible for in 4 months.
The Great Depression was just like this, right down to its decade of Republican power monopoly and empty calories of debt propping up their fake economy. But why should that shock any sense into you Republicans? You freaks haven't even learned from Iraq not to start unnecessary wars on lies, after failing to learn the same lesson from Vietnam. My Slashdot posts aren't going to cure your insanity.
You'd rather lose the country to win a partisan argument, even though you can't do that either. Go to hell with your fundamentalist cronies.
If 3D glasses just dumped the monitors and went wireless, they'd catch on. They need to be transparent, so the display is projected into the real field of view, and maybe have a black LCD layer to actually shut out the outside light.
But if they worked like that, the first iPod to use them for video would push them over the edge into the mainstream once and for all.
Unfortunately, we'll need a breakthru in batteries to power high framerate hirez good color wireless glasses with fast radio bandwidth to the device putting out the frames. Maybe the breakthru glasses will be hollow for fuelcell juice.
True - braino.
The Russian nuclear fleet is indeed engaged in joint military exercises with Venezuela in the Caribbean. Which I believe is quite close to the United States somewere...
You are just a Republican, er, "libertarian" cherrypicking facts and blending them to fit your notion that government is the problem, and unfettered rich people is the answer.
The huge economic losses that are taking down whole huge banks right now are the result of deregulating specifically the rules preventing different kinds of financial institutions from doing business across industry barriers like "investment bank" vs "mortgage bank" vs "insurance corp" vs "brokerage". Those laws were enacted by FDR and the Democratic Congress in 1934 because they would prevent the damage of the 1929 economic crash from spreading across sectors, if it happened again. The 1929 crash was triggered by "margin buying", which was simply buying stocks without money, instead owing the price as a debt to the seller. That kind of unlimited debt was backed by the Federal government loaning out all kinds of money, until the voodoo didn't work anymore. And then the 1920s illusion of wealth collapsed, because it was fake all the time. Which left a crater in the economy, because a decade of fake wealth instead of building a real economy kills the ability to run an economy, and the debt on the books still has to be repaid. The 1920s featured a series of Republican presidents and their Republican Congresses that let it all happen, until swept out after the crash. Along the way, the Republican government failed to protect the environment as much as it failed to protect the economy, instead ruling with incentives to burn up both, until the Great Depression crashed amidst the clouds of the Dust Bowl.
That is exactly what just happened again. Even to the extent that the Republican government monopoly repealed the 1934 rules protecting the economy from the same unsupportable debt and "firewall-free" risk chain reaction.
Because Republicans love monopolies, as rich people generally do, because monopolies are the ultimate in the rich getting richer though the poor starve. Without the people banding together to protect ourselves, the rich create monopolies. That's the corporate anarchy that you Republicans, er, "libertarians", always drive us to whenever you get the power.
Of course, you Republicans always create the biggest government ever seen, with the biggest jumps in its size ever seen, and the biggest government expenses. It's only under Democratic presidents that this economy ever grows for real (ie. not an illusion built of debt that then can't be repaid).
There were a "handful" of dirty players in the finance industry about as much as there were just "a few bad apples" running Abu Ghraib. The entire industry was rotten, inspired by Enron and following the same rails of Republican deregulation that allows hiding debt until it's necessary for the public to take it over or face unacceptable damage to the whole economy these huge failures threaten. An economy already damaged by those rich people sending their money and the jobs offshore. You just accused Democrats of doing what doesn't happen under Democrats, but which is exactly what Republicans cause.
Oh, and Obama defining "rich" as much less than $250K:y but only raising taxes at $250K+ means that Obama isn't even taxing all the rich people, just the very rich.
But why should you care, when you can just get everything wrong, defy history and the facts, because you're so committed to worshiping the rich on faith?
Yes, we're going to come through this. But we will have squandered all kinds of opportunities to get our economy (and through it, the world's) under control on our terms. Now we have to follow the terms of our creditors, which are largely foreign, as we already have. We are bailing out the banks with the foreign creditors. Foreigners who are Arabs and Chinese, our greatest rivals and enemies in the world.
All of which is indeed Republicans' fault. You Republicans controlled Congress for 12 years, and the presidency for its last 8, in lockstep until 2006. When not only did Bush start issuing his firs
Apology accepted :).
Adams says that his 500 (cherrypicked) economists are:
And then he says
What a load of bullshit.
Moderation +1
70% Interesting
30% Troll
Well, I did say that
But evidently, trollMods other than Adams are idiotic enough to lie and trivialize this election like Adams is.
I didn't say that Tim Berners-Lee proposed such a thing. I simply pointed out that though I had just described a system mediated by a single org hosting the decentralized commentary, such a system would be even better with multiple mediators. And that if Berners-Lee were interested in the goals that my proposal solved, that he should sponsor starting up not just one mediator, but several competing mediators.
Why don't you Read My Fucking Post right, before you get snotty with me. Especially since I have spent every reply since that OP having to remind the critic replying to me to at least read my post before arguing some strawman that I didn't say.
As I explicitly pointed out, it failed as the Bubble popped. Do I have to post a reply reminding each carper to actually read the post where I said what "prebunks" the trivial complaint they're making?
What was proven, despite the whining in the comment I replied to, was that the app worked as a social network, not as a "central authority".
Look, I know it's hard to read. But if you can't even read the clear comments in this discussion, how will you ever hope to read the web ratings that tell you about what you're reading?
The richest Americans aren't "the most productive" members of society. They're the ones running GM, Ford, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and all the rest of the economy they inherited into the ground. They're the ones who paid the way for the Republican Era that has ruined the economy, robbed America, destroyed our global political clout and our first-rate military.
You can lie about Obama's tax policies, but I just showed you how it will cut taxes on everyone but those who've been gaming the economy at our expense the last decade. Those people send their money offshore, buy disposable luxury items, and don't circulate it around the American economy. Most Americans, whose taxes will be cut, are spending the savings on their neighbors.
But hey, why not go back to the Reagan 1986 tax code, which was the largest, most complex law ever passed, and which was part of how Reagan/Bush multiplied the size of the government by four times, while also funding the previous fake growth cycle with the bank heist called "the S&L Crisis".
You Republicans, er, "libertarians", have gotten everything wrong every time you've been asked. The country's in tatters, with greater foreign rivals and enemies, worse than ever since probably 1812. Since you people can't possibly guess right, as you've proven every time, you should at least stop prattling about your worship of the rich who have squandered so much of what this country has built over long times and at great costs. I know you won't stop, but you should at least know that I'm not going to let you slide when you keep on the wrong track you can't do without.
Funny, when Obama is willing to go along with your Republican delusions, he's always right, but when he tells you truth you don't like, he's abomination.
Because the very next thing Obama said was exactly what I just said, the truth:
Of course the military succeeded in beating back our violent enemies when we sent more of them there. Why do you and O'Reilly suggest that our excellent troops might somehow not do their job?
The problem is that the surge failed to fix Iraq because the surge could never fix Iraq. Iraq has a fake puppet government, built on a bloodbath, kept together by only the force of the US military killing its enemies every day. Keeping our military there, occupying Iraq to do that, is not "success". It's the kind of failure that a compulsive gambler thinks is "winning" because they've got deep enough pockets to sit at the table all night, but never cut their losses by leaving the table before it breaks them.
And Iraq has broken the military, and our economy, and it has broken Iraq, so very badly. The surge hasn't changed any of that. All it's done is waste more money and lives to prop up the unworkable Iraq that John McCain created.
And you Republicans helped them. And even now, you want more, nothing but more, of that unsupportable failure.
Just because you can hear only what you want to hear doesn't mean the rest of us have to listen to you.
Scott Adams is an idiot. He had a funny take on the other idiots who surrounded him in his PacTel cubicle in the 1990s, but that's just the idiot leading the idiots. Read his "Dogbert management books" for business insights that aren't even funny, in ways that show he actually knows as little about business management as the idiots he mocks.
Here's Adams' latest demonstration of his idiocy, in this stupid (and not funny) editorial:
The surge escalation has failed. Of course throwing tens of thousands of new US troops at a civil war will succeed in beating back the enemies, making them less likely to try attacks than when the US military was spread too thin to intimidate. No one questions whether our military is good at killing and intimidating enemies, when Washington (run by Bush and McCain's Republican Party) isn't keeping them too weak to do the job.
But the surge's job wasn't just to drop the killing. That was a means to an end, to create a political opportunity that was totally squandered. The Iraqi government is a farce that hasn't governed anything, even when we give it a break in the action during which it can concentrate on governing. It has failed. And since the purpose of the surge escalation has failed, the surge has failed. Anyone saying any different just thinks that the purpose of war is to kill. It's not, and those people have lost the Iraq War since they started it.
But hey, if the surge worked, then we won. Let's get the hell out of there already. Not stay the "100 years, maybe forever" that McCain thinks equals victory. If we've got to keep troops there, we're losing. Only getting out of there is any real measure of victory.
Yeah, and then he totally ignored that most economists are Democrats. Because people who understand the economy vote for Democrats. Even among Republican economists, more Republicans support Obama than Democrat economists for McCain. That speaks much more than what Adams' single datapoint survey says.
Of course, that is what every single American (who isn't crazy) says about their political bias.
And there we have the basic evidence of Scott Adams idiocy. Or rather, his lying. Obama might be raising Adams' taxes, if he makes over $250,000 a year. He's almost certainly not going to raise yours. You can see for yourself with the Obama Tax Cut Web Calculator, which takes 15 seconds and 3 status facts about you to show you the dollar amount of your Obama tax cut.
Adams is a rich guy who makes his money satirizing incompetents running big orgs. His pocketbook is threatened by Obama because he's made so much more money than most people, benefited so much more than most people, from the exact kinds of idiots he needs in power for him to sell more books and cartoons. He's as scared of McCain as he is of Obama, because though he believes McCain won't tax him (but the country would fall apart, an expensive proposition even for a cartoonist who has to live in it), because McCain is boring. Which means he won't be a good c
Reread the part of my description where the notes are selectable by in or out per person or group.
And the part where I explained that this was a real, running app, not just an "idea". It worked. Centralized control doesn't ensure anything except that the bias of the controllers shows in the notes.
The decentralized social network is the way that everyone knows everything we trust. That doesn't work very well, but it's the least bad way we've got. All the theoretical handwaving in the world about "centralized control" is debunked by the proven reality of both the online stuff like what I described, and the way the world works all the time.
What really bugs me is how smug people are who are so locked into theoretical criticism that they can't even notice that they're arguing with something real and proven.
Right before the Web Bubble popped in 1999, there was a company called ThirdVoice that was rising to the surface. It was a browser plugin that made a layer of "post-it notes" that were attached to specific pages shown in the browser, even tagging specific items on the page. Anyone with the plugin was letting their browser hit the ThirdVoice server, which contained a list of notes indexed to the page, with pointers to which item was notated. So viewers could switch on and off the layer, and see how anyone else had marked up the page. That let people give ratings to pages, and people could look at them, make up their minds, and post their own take on things. There was also a feature to add or remove specific users or user groups to what was displayed, to cut out spam.
That kind of independent rating and commentary, right there on the page, is what should satisfy Berners-Lee. He should just dig up the old ThirdVoice app, or this Slashdot post, and pay a few dozen thousand bucks at a team to dust it off. If he wanted to do it right, he'd sponsor the startup of two or three independent teams which would then compete with each other, for true independence. We don't need some "Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval To Rule Them All" imposing a front layer from a single powerful org that controls the whole Web with its opinion of what lies beneath.
Internal tech support is part of the critical path of the production of the company's product, except the costs of supporting the "business" part, which is indeed a management cost. The accounting department is not in the critical path of producing the product, except for small costs in determining pricing. The internal HR/pay systems are, by that reckoning, part of management, though the billing systems, which support the sales department, are part of production.
The large majority of those specific IT systems support the production cycle (which includes sales). But the parts that don't actually make the product, sell it, and collect the money to pay for materials and labor to make the product, are outside the production loop, and fall into the management loops.
There's not a clear difference in "collar color" in modern businesses anymore. But there is still a difference between what work actually "does the company's job", and what other work is done to ensure that the company's job is done for the maximum profit of the owners, which has always been the distinction. "Management" vs labor is really just a standin for "owners vs workers". Seeing who works most directly for the owners vs who works most directly for the product (some would say "for the customers"), is a way to see that distinction more clearly.
Here in NYC, premium gasoline is about $4 a gallon, diesel about $4.50; about 12.5% higher. The Prius is getting about 50MPG max out there, so this Ford is about 30% better at 65MPG. 30% better mileage at 112.5% the cost is a savings of over 15% in money.
The Prius sells pretty well here in NYC, AFAICT on the streets. A Ford that's 15% cheaper to fuel, and probably will last a lot longer with less (and less expensive) maintenance on a diesel engine, should also sell.
There's also no intrinsic reason why diesel economics should be better in Europe than in the USA. Ford is I think the biggest car maker in the world. That status used to bring a kind of clout that could overcome the market manipulations that make something like artificially expensive fuel come back down. Pulling that off would not only sell a lot of cars, and improve America's energy efficiency, but also fix something very wrong with the American industrial economy. But I suppose that not ever Ford can fight the Saud family that Ford has made so rich and powerful.
What do accountants produce that the company sells? Unless it's simply an accountancy, nothing. And if it's an accountancy, there are separate accountants in the "business" part of the company, that manage the company, counting beans that just happen to be labeled "accounting hours". They're in management, not production.
IT managers are managing the production department directly. They are not managing the corporation, except for the CTO or CIO. And that is one reason why the CTO/CIO is usually distrusted by even the IT managers below them, because they're management. To confirm the point, the feeling is usually mutual.
Most of "spy" work is done by intel analysts compiling all the public sources of info, and indexing them, then making connections.
Of course there's much more public info every day than the secret info even the best spies can find out. And of course all the public info must be dealt with, because otherwise anyone could have an advantage in that blind spot. So simple logic shows how there's vastly more public sources for intel services than secret info.
This basic fact has been known to anyone serious with any interest for a long time. This story is obviously disinformation.
But such a disinfo story is no great feat for our huge, $50B+ annual spy budgets. What it really shows is that even after (pretending to) cover a global Terror War for most of a decade, our journalists will still just publish whatever claptrap the spooks tell them, without bothering to even think about it.
Or to look at the many public sources of info that say this story is the oldest news. So how much of their stories about secret info are even more made up?
"Dangerous to the person building it" can be minimized by patents. Not all dangerous tech is dangerous enough to risk getting shut down by a patent violation, especially when the point of making it is to profit, not lose money, even if you look badass doing it.
The "tech vs biz" feuds are an extension of the conflicts between management and labor. Tech divisions, though they have their own managers, are responsible for doing the production work of the company, while the biz offices are responsible for managing the company (and, ultimately, the tech division).
The management vs labor conflict is as old as the division of labor. Tech vs biz is probably at least as old as the first person to market the inventor of the wheel's widget.
Extra money in the US Treasury is circular logic. The value of money in the US Treasury is in what is its benefit to the public when it's spent.
We don't invest in the public benefit by a public vote. We have a republic, the entire point of which is to use representatives of the public to focus government decisions in manageably small groups. Like NASA, which doesn't design Space Shuttles on the first Tuesday in November.
We have a government that has done a largely excellent job of investing in technology, by any measure. Even if not measuring by intangibles like global leadership, inspiring generations of Americans to beat all kinds of challenges, the economic ROI on the space program is unbeaten anywhere. And that includes tech transfer to American industry.
Properly transferred, NASA tech returns a lot more money to the taxpayers' pockets than they pulled out to send to NASA. And unlike spending that money directly on individual corporations' products or their equity to fund their R&D, the scale of the returns is nationwide. And then there's those intangibles that inspire the entire nation, and the world.
Sure, Conservatives (er, "libertarians") want to privatize all government. But corporate anarchy is not just a fabulous way for a nation to become first meaningless and next overrun by actual countries. It's also the road to monopolies, which are about the most wasteful economies, accomplishing little but keeping their monopolies, and returning little on investment compared to a properly managed economy under a Constitutional democratic republic. Oh, and the other ways are anti-American.
Every gas pump I've ever seen here in NYC has a diesel dispenser. There is absolutely no reason why they couldn't sell those cars into the huge NYC market, which is full of people looking for better gas mileage.
If Ford can't figure that out, it's got a lot bigger problems than just this one car.
When its "fair market value" is below the cost to produce it, a cost paid by the taxpayers, that's a subsidy.
I didn't argue with the auction as the format to sell it. But I will, since you brought it up: the better way to award the patent, if that is at all appropriate, is strategically to a company that will provide the most public benefit (or patch a hole in a public liability).
The problem is not the preference: that's a proper role for the government to play, when such preference is in the public interest. The problem is that the public interest doesn't seem to enter into these transactions at all. Only a way to subsidize some private interests, even if they have to fight among themselves for the privilege of being the one to win the prize.
I like the idea of the US government requiring all patents it registers to be licensed or sold to only US companies, or else revert back to the US government.
But I see no sign that such a policy is in effect.
As for the WTO, if someone wants to sue the US government for preferring to subsidize US people, I'd like to see such an argument make a lot of noise, enough to get the US out of the WTO - or any other international trade regime that requires a "suicide pact".