I have heard many male engineers say that they would prefer a more gender balanced workplace, and have never heard any say they wouldn't like that.
Why would they actually say they wouldn't like a gender balanced workplace? I think most engineers would welcome any competent and professional co-worker regardless of gender. On the other side of the equation the few men who are sexist enough to actually not want women around the office are usually not going to be dumb enough to say it out loud. They (usually) know perfectly well that nothing good could come to them by telling everyone that they don't respect women.
I think the dearth of female programmers is simply that women are not attracted to a career that involves sitting in a cubicle interacting with a computer.
Then how do you explain the huge numbers of women in accounting? I am an accountant and an engineer and have done both jobs. Though I'm not really a software guy I have done some development. I assure you that most accountants spend almost as much time in front of a computer as a typical programmer. I don't think the mere fact of sitting in front of a computer is what bothers women.
The scenario presented for a possible mission around the year 2025 involves literally bagging an asteroid in a huge inflatable cylinder and returning it to lunar orbit for astronauts to study.
I'm kind of at a loss for why you would want to do that. Ignoring for the moment the geopolitical WMD ramifications of doing this, what advantage would there be in having people there that we cannot accomplish with robots? Sending people adds massively to the cost, complexity and danger. If we have the ability to capture the asteroid with robot we probably have the ability to analyze the asteroid with robots too. I just don't see what the gain of sending people would be other than bragging rights. Because we can isn't an adequate reason because we can send people to other more useful missions and accomplish research/exploration goals.
Why use a multibillion dollar tried and tested launch facility, like the ones in Florida and Califorinia, when you can build a new one in a poor location?
Wallops Flight Facility has been in operation for over 50 years and has launched over 16,000 rockets including orbital missions. But don't let those actual facts get in the way of your prejudiced rant.
I wondered the same thing. further there's a whole cadre of instrumentation that needs to be built up to create a valid launch range, and we already have that, so why spend all that money on something closer to D.C.?
Wallops Flight Facility is already heavily instrumented and has been in operation for over 50 years. There have been 16,000 launches from that facility including orbital launches.
Now as for why they are doing this particular mission at WFF instead of Canaveral, I have no idea. Could be an effort by NASA to cater to a wider swath of congress. Could be military related in some way. Might be that the resources for that particular mission were more conveniently located there. I'm sure there is a reason but it isn't obvious what that reason might be.
It is dead simple to use with all the key management being done without user intervention.
See that is THE problem because how do you know the key management software has not been compromised? How do you revoke and replace the keys without any user comprehension of the process? How do you ensure that a third party has not intercepted the keys during distribution? How do you make sure the keys are securely stored at the end points? That is why it is so hard to automate key management. I'm not going to say it is impossible, I'm just saying that establishing a truly secure communication path is genuinely hard to do and I have yet to see any way to make it truly easy for more than a portion of the process. You can have it easy or you can have it secure but so far easy and secure is a bridge too far. Don't get me wrong, I hope someone figures it out. I'm just not optimistic that anyone will.
You do need a trusted 3rd party involved but I think that drawback can be overcome.
It really cannot in most cases. The whole point of encryption is to ensure that third parties cannot read the document. If you trust a third party then you pretty much by definition have no way to know if your keys have been compromised. The concept of a trusted third party is close to being a non-sequitur. While not impossible (trusted third parties do sometimes exist) it's not a particularly safe state of affairs. Kind of like in physics, three body systems are inherently unstable.
Yes it is. It fails the mom test badly. More properly it is key management that is too difficult. The actual key generation can be automated mostly. Distribution and use of keys is inherently difficult with no obviously easy solution.
Microsoft often feels like it's struggling in the wake of Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook.
That's because Microsoft has basically been a monopoly for so long they lost whatever entrepreneurial spirit they once had. For two decades now Microsoft has been about protecting Windows and Office which to this day remain their big money makers. It's really hard to blow everything up when you are making billions in profit every year. Balmer is a classic example of the and the company seems to be a case study in the innovator's dilemma.
Worse the company has to fight against the law of big numbers as well. There simply aren't that many projects available to you that are going to move the needle for a company like Microsoft. Microsoft brought in around $77 billion in sales last year with a profit of $21 billion. That means for them to grow just 5% a year they will have to essentially build a company that sells nearly $4 billion each year and next year the hurdle is even higher. To do that while maintaining a 27% net profit margin is absurdly difficult.
They have the bankroll to survive but it is not at all clear how they will find another opportunity remotely as profitable as Windows/Office. It's also not clear if Windows/Office has a long term future. Short term, nothing is going to hurt them but long term things are quite unclear. There are some serious competitive threats to Windows/Office out there. I think Microsoft management is aware of the problem and I think they are equally mystified about what to do about it. The fact that they offered over $30 billion for Yahoo speaks volumes about how empty of ideas they have become. (It speaks bigger volumes about how stupid Yahoo management was that they didn't take the deal) Even when they get the direction right (Surface Pro is a sound concept - integrating tablets and PCs) they tend to screw up the execution. They even tend to screw up when they try to buy their way into a market. It's taken them so much money to make Xbox competitive that I doubt they'll ever actually recoup the investment. Microsoft might be able to grow through acquisitions though I'm not sure they have the culture for it. I really don't see most of their acquisitions thriving. Anyone think Microsoft is going to do anything amazing with Skype? Didn't think so.
Frankly I think whoever takes over the reigns next is not going to have an easy time of it. I'm not ready to say Microsoft is doomed but turning that ship around is going to be a herculean task.
(stupid oversight. the last 15 or so years, cable and connector designers have been pretty idiotic. don't get me started on that rant..)
I'll do that rant since I run a company that manufactures cables and cable assemblies. I can't speak to the software (I'm not a software guy) but the hardware on USB cables is less than impressive. They designed it to have a cheap controller but at the expense of needlessly complicated and expensive cables. That would have been ok if the cables themselves were well designed but they're pretty flawed designed in my opinion.
The USB connectors are keyed, presumably for cost and safety reasons. Now that isn't an entirely bad idea since you obviously don't want a connector to plug in the wrong way. But they could have designed it so that you didn't have to worry about orientation at all. Seems like everytime I try to insert a USB cable it invariably is upside down. While I'm not a huge fan of Apple's Lightning connector, the fact that I don't have to fuss with orientation when inserting is a terrific feature. I shudder to think how many many hours have been wasted by trying to insert USB cables upside down. It wouldn't be hard to have a wiring topology that figures out the orientation and behaves accordingly.
Many USB cables use different connectors on each end. This was done to mechanically prevent two powered devices from causing problems to each other. While simple it really is kind of a bandaid fix that needlessly increases the price of every USB cable. The devices should have enough smarts to handle that rather than using an unnecessary and costly second connector on every single cable. So now we have at least six different standard USB connectors when there should be at most two and probably just one.
USB cables are almost exactly the same width as the 8P8C (commonly called RJ45) ethernet connectors so as pointed out before you can insert on into that socket. They easily could have designed it to a different width than another super common connector on PCs.
USB cables are not physically robust. I've seen quite a few destroyed even without rough handling. The connectors simply aren't designed to be as durable as it should be.
Your citation is a survey, not a study. People are demonstrably HUGE liars about what it is they eat. The only thing a survey like that proves is what people say they eat, not what they actually do eat. We can however prove what people eat by looking at financial data.
And your opinion that EVERYONE eats at McDonalds all the time is completely baseless.
I never claimed everyone eats there all the time. But I have NO doubt whatsoever that most of the population eats fast food with considerable regularity. McDonalds (and the rest of the fast food industry) generated sales of about $600 per person in the US in 2010. That is about 100 meals per person per year which works out to about 10-15% of all meals consumed. That means on average you would expect an american chosen at random to eat at a fast food joint 2-3 times per week. On average that HAS to be true as we have the sales numbers to prove it. Now granted there are many people who don't eat fast food that often but any pretense that the majority of the population does not eat fast food on a regular basis is simply not supported by the available facts. The financial numbers don't lie about how often we eat out. People however do lie all the time to surveys regarding what they think they eat.
I'm not even counting traditional restaurants which account for a large percentage of meals consumed as well - typically 1-2 meals per week. Between that and fast food you easily get a result of people eating out 4-5X per week on average. Don't forget to count Starbucks/Dunkin Doughnuts coffee. That counts too.
Some people don't EVER eat at McDonalds or similar fast-food places, and yet they're fat, too.
A lot of people don't admit they eat at McDonalds and yet in 2010 the industry generated $184 Billion in sales. I think a lot of people who claim they don't eat at McDonalds are lying.
Wrong question; what you should be asking is, "why spend 100K, when I can buy a car with an almost equivalent safety rating for leas than half that price?
You can buy a car with a 5 star safety rating AND which performs like a Tesla for half the money? Where can I find this incredible vehicle?
Nobody buys a car just for the safety rating. Your argument is a strawman.
Without a large motor in the way Tesla is able to use the whole front compartment as a crumple zone as opposed to most combustion vehicles that primary use the sides as a crumple zone. While I don't think the ratings were manipulated they are artificially high because the Tesla design is able to game the system.
Explain to me exactly how having an enormous crumple zone in front of the driver is somehow a bad thing. Would you rather have an engine pushed into your lap from a frontal collision? Their is no evidence I've seen that their ratings are "artificially high". The results are what they are.
Because the gov't want to promote electric cars, will we now see artificially high safety ratings on electric cars to promote sales?
Wow, cynical much? Maybe, just maybe, the engineers at Tesla actually did a really good job. If the vehicle is subjected to the same tests and scores higher then what possible problem could you have with that? If you have evidence that the government somehow held Tesla to a different standard then by all means please share with the rest of the class. But if you are just being snarky then shut up.
People in fine arts on average earn far less than the average techie, so you know what? Stop trying to foist your "free" philosophy on everyone.
They knew (or should have known) that when then they took up fine arts as a profession. Nobody is entitled to make a living from art just because they think they should. They have to earn it the same as anyone else.
It's disingenuous to suggest that art should be free (or even cheap) when you're pulling in $100k securing networks against people who would use them for free.
Who said it had to be free as in beer? What is being discussed here is whether it should be free as in speech. I have no problem at all with someone making lots of money from their art. What I DO have a problem with is the artist and their descendants have a perpetual income from those works. Copyright is supposed to be for a LIMITED time and there certainly is no justifiable reason why the copyright should extend beyond the time required to settle the estate of the artist.
If someone is willing to put something resembling an open source license on an artistic work then good for them. They are contributing to the betterment of society by doing so by encouraging more creative works.
Thing is, its amortization schedule was roughly 2 decades at least if I were to guess.
Just being pedantic here but properly speaking it would be depreciation, not amortization. Amortization is for intangible property. Depreciation is for tangible. And under MACRS depreciation schedule (typically required for taxes) most if not all of the depreciation would have occurred in the first 7 years.
To be able to make electronic transactions without dependence on Visa / MasterCard / PayPal is benefit enough.
Only if you are doing something pretty sketchy (read illegal) and have little knowledge about the options available. There are LOTS of ways to exchange money besides the few methods you mentioned. Wire transfers, Western Union, money orders, ACH payments, SWIFT, RTGS, etc. Apparently you have some sort of ideological problem with Visa/MC/Paypal. If you don't like those then use something else. Bitcoin is among the riskiest and worst options out there but suit yourself.
So, you can, say, send $50k from someone in the USA to someone in Australia instantly, using existing currencies?
Sure, via a wire transfer among other means. (Fedwire, Western Union, SWIFT, RTGS, etc) I've had jobs where I did that almost daily in amounts between $30-200K per transaction. (commodities trading) All you have to do is fill out a form and the money will be transferred to (almost) any account anywhere in the world.
One thing you really can't argue about bitcoin is that this ability is leaps and bounds ahead of existing monetary systems
Actually the reverse is true and the person receiving the money on the other end does not have the hassle of exchanging the bitcoins for an actually useful currency as well as then depositing that currency into their working capital account. By avoiding bitcoins one also endures *considerably* less exchange rate risk, market risk, liquidity risk and legal risk. You really aren't considering the entire transaction process.
If you want to directly send money to someone electronically, you have to go to the bank, fill out a ton of paperwork, and wait a minimum of 3 days for the funds to arrive.
I don't know where you got that information but you are quite mistaken. I've worked doing global sourcing (buying stuff from other countries) for years. I bought a several thousand dollar piece of production equipment for my plant from Switzerland last week. All I had to do was fill in a form with the account numbers of the recipient and their bank name and the money was delivered to their account that same day. If I needed to I could have had the money held in escrow pending delivery and if I needed to they could have had the money effectively instantly.
In comparison, bitcoin is effectively instantaneous and requires no paperwork and no hassle.
Bitcoin isn't instantaneous because you still need to convert currencies in most cases. Consider the ENTIRE transaction. Also the lack of paperwork isn't necessarily a benefit unless you really don't care about accounting for your money. What paperwork there is with traditional methods (which is pretty minimal) exists for VERY good reasons. As for hassle, bitcoin is an enormous hassle since virtually no one uses bitcoin. I would have to convince someone to utilize an illiquid and volatile currency that they probably have never heard of. Then I would have to convince them that somehow it is a good idea to accept payment in a virtual currency instead of the currency they actually want. You seriously think that is "no hassle"? If so I want to know what color the sky is on your planet. Bitcoin is only less hassle in situations where you are doing something that is probably illegal.
It's 2013, they should have finished scanning all of their documents in by 2002, 2005 at the very latest. What on earth are they printing over there?
Patient medical charts and financial information mostly. Getting all that digital is an incredibly difficult and a FAR more challenging problem than most people realize. In a lot of cases the economic case for paper is actually better because going digital is so difficult and/or expensive.
I work in a regulated industry and we shred everything we print. On a bad week I might print all of 10 pages.
The industry you work in has precisely NOTHING to do with how healthcare can or should be managed. That would be like me saying what works for engineering should be perfectly appropriate for accounting. the argument makes no sense. As it turns out health care is incredibly complex and designing IT systems to do away with paper is difficult, time consuming and frequently not actually the most efficient way to solve many of the problems they face. If there is a more complicated industry than health care I'm not aware of it. Just because theoretically we can solve problems with IT doesn't mean it can be done today or that it is necessarily the correct answer to every problem.
Bitcoin could have been a useful petty cash system for the Internet.
Not really. Despite the claims of proponents, bitcoin provides little tangible benefit over existing currencies in almost all circumstances. Bitcoin scratches an ideological itch for some geeks who have a poor grasp of economics and a worse grasp of risk. Bitcoin only is cheaper to use than existing currencies if you ignore the externalities, opportunity cost and financial risk. Outside of a few rare corner cases people have virtually nothing to gain by using bitcoin and stand to lose quite a lot. Bitcoin is at best an interesting (though flawed) academic exercise.
The question here is how the finance ministry would come to know of a person's Bitcoin holding as it is a decentralized currency with no governing body to keep count on the number of Bitcoins a person has.
They might not know about it but that doesn't relieve the taxpayer of their legal obligations. If you get audited and it comes to light that you aren't declaring income then you can find yourself in deeeeeep trouble. They can send you to jail for tax evasion. I'm not familiar with how it works in Germany but in the US you would at minimum declare income from bitcoin related activities on line 21 of your 1040 form under Other Income. The legality or source of this income is irrelevant to whether you are required to declare it. If you mine bitcoins then you are generating income (you have acquired an asset with a market value hence it counts as income) and you would be required to declare it as such on your tax return.
Gee, this is going to throw out the doomsday scenarios of all those neo-ecovists who claim our increasing energy consumption and pollution are going to destroy the planet.
No, just likely our ability (along with many other species) ability to exist on the planet. No biggie. Who cares about the continued existence of the species.
2) Energy usage is getting more efficient - my new freezer, refrigerator, computer, fan, van all use far less energy to do the same work as pervious models.
Which we respond to by using more of it. We generally waste most gains in efficiency by using more energy the moment it becomes economically feasible to do so. Cars today are FAR more fuel efficient per horsepower then they were just 30 years ago. But average fuel economy has not gone up at even close to the same rate. Why? Because cars today have much more horsepower which effectively negates much of the fuel efficiency gains.
25kW/33hp is more than adequate if people could only let go of the idea that their cars need to weigh two tonnes and have a large overcapacity for the majority of their needs.
There are a lot more considerations than just fuel economy for most of us.
A single-occupant commuter vehicle with a space frame and carbon fibre body weighing more like 500kg would have excellent performance with 25kW.
So we're supposed to buy a second car just to commute to/from work? Very few people have the luxury of buying a car just to handle their daily commute. If you're one who does, good for you. The rest of us are going to remain stuck making tradeoffs among the various requirements of our lives.
Average # of passengers is almost always >1 so your proposed vehicle immediately becomes useless the moment you need to carry a passenger. Such a vehicle would be virtually unusable where I live for 4+ months of the year. (top tip - light cars are demonstrably dangerous to drive in 1-2 feet of snow which happens regularly in some places) A light car like that wouldn't likely be particularly comfortable, quiet or pleasant to drive. Not to mention it would virtually require owning a second vehicle or keeping a rental company on retainer. Add in that it would cost $ to insure, require space to park, and create a bunch of extra pollution just creating the thing. Let's not forget that most of us have families and do a significant amount of driving with at least one extra person in the car. Frankly I'd be better off buying a motorcycle except for the risk to life and limb.
I figure to come up with that many errors, there must have been several thousand searches per year that were done as intended and according to the law.
This is a secret program and the only thing you can be sure of is that your do NOT have all the facts. This is an agency and a program that has NO accountability to the electorate. They operate in secret, their findings are secret, their actions on those findings are secret, their oversight is toothless and secret, and we can't even fight against the program because we cannot prove we were harmed and thus can't prove standing in front of a judge. Exactly how stupid do you have to be to think that the NSA is to be trusted unconditionally based on a tiny bit of leaked information?
If they were 99.9% in compliance, there would be about 900,000 searches to get about 900 errors.
Even if they were 100% in compliance it STILL would be a violation of our 4th amendment rights. The NSA's actions have never come under serious judicial review. The FISA court is a rubber stamp fig leaf of a justification. You can loudly proclaim that this program is "legal" all you want but that doesn't make it so nor does it make it right. Jim Crow laws once were "legal" but they still were wrong and ultimately unconstitutional. Furthermore even if we take your 900 number at face value (and in reality I do not) that is 900 people who were unlawfully deprived of their civil rights in some manner. Even one is too many.
Are you seriously arguing we should have stayed out of those wars? It wouldn't have mattered which party was in the white house. They are called WORLD wars for a reason.
Republicans are hawks, Democrats enter us in some of the biggest wars.
You seem to have left out the two gulf wars as well as Afganistan, all of which were stared under republican presidents. You also failed to mention that our involvement in Vietnam actually started MUCH earlier (in the 1950s) than you claim and both republican and democrat presidents share the burden of our involvement there.
Republicans are supposed to be for family values, but how many get caught in extramarital affairs?
They aren't for "family values". The term family values is a cynical political marketing term used to mask fear of families that aren't white, conservative and christian. It's a way of pandering to the religious right.
Democrats want to help the minorities. But almost the entire party fought the civil rights movement.
Conveniently your characterization of the Democrats ignores the changes that happened after 1964. Those same democrats who were against civil rights (virtually all of them southerners) switched to the republican party and have stayed there ever since. 93% of Southern Democrats and 100% of Southern Republicans voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But don't let actual facts get in your way of pretending that the current democrats are the same people.
the SR-71 is probably the most beautiful plane ever to have flown.
The SR-71 is undeniably a gorgeous plane and I agree that the P-38 is striking as well. But for my money I love the look of the YF-23 if we are talking about jets and the P-51 Mustang if we are talking about prop planes. Just my own preferences of course. I like the U2 just because it is SO simple in design. Basically a powered glider. Simple, elegant and still functional to this day.
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I have heard many male engineers say that they would prefer a more gender balanced workplace, and have never heard any say they wouldn't like that.
Why would they actually say they wouldn't like a gender balanced workplace? I think most engineers would welcome any competent and professional co-worker regardless of gender. On the other side of the equation the few men who are sexist enough to actually not want women around the office are usually not going to be dumb enough to say it out loud. They (usually) know perfectly well that nothing good could come to them by telling everyone that they don't respect women.
I think the dearth of female programmers is simply that women are not attracted to a career that involves sitting in a cubicle interacting with a computer.
Then how do you explain the huge numbers of women in accounting? I am an accountant and an engineer and have done both jobs. Though I'm not really a software guy I have done some development. I assure you that most accountants spend almost as much time in front of a computer as a typical programmer. I don't think the mere fact of sitting in front of a computer is what bothers women.
The scenario presented for a possible mission around the year 2025 involves literally bagging an asteroid in a huge inflatable cylinder and returning it to lunar orbit for astronauts to study.
I'm kind of at a loss for why you would want to do that. Ignoring for the moment the geopolitical WMD ramifications of doing this, what advantage would there be in having people there that we cannot accomplish with robots? Sending people adds massively to the cost, complexity and danger. If we have the ability to capture the asteroid with robot we probably have the ability to analyze the asteroid with robots too. I just don't see what the gain of sending people would be other than bragging rights. Because we can isn't an adequate reason because we can send people to other more useful missions and accomplish research/exploration goals.
Why use a multibillion dollar tried and tested launch facility, like the ones in Florida and Califorinia, when you can build a new one in a poor location?
Wallops Flight Facility has been in operation for over 50 years and has launched over 16,000 rockets including orbital missions. But don't let those actual facts get in the way of your prejudiced rant.
I wondered the same thing. further there's a whole cadre of instrumentation that needs to be built up to create a valid launch range, and we already have that, so why spend all that money on something closer to D.C.?
Wallops Flight Facility is already heavily instrumented and has been in operation for over 50 years. There have been 16,000 launches from that facility including orbital launches.
Now as for why they are doing this particular mission at WFF instead of Canaveral, I have no idea. Could be an effort by NASA to cater to a wider swath of congress. Could be military related in some way. Might be that the resources for that particular mission were more conveniently located there. I'm sure there is a reason but it isn't obvious what that reason might be.
It is dead simple to use with all the key management being done without user intervention.
See that is THE problem because how do you know the key management software has not been compromised? How do you revoke and replace the keys without any user comprehension of the process? How do you ensure that a third party has not intercepted the keys during distribution? How do you make sure the keys are securely stored at the end points? That is why it is so hard to automate key management. I'm not going to say it is impossible, I'm just saying that establishing a truly secure communication path is genuinely hard to do and I have yet to see any way to make it truly easy for more than a portion of the process. You can have it easy or you can have it secure but so far easy and secure is a bridge too far. Don't get me wrong, I hope someone figures it out. I'm just not optimistic that anyone will.
You do need a trusted 3rd party involved but I think that drawback can be overcome.
It really cannot in most cases. The whole point of encryption is to ensure that third parties cannot read the document. If you trust a third party then you pretty much by definition have no way to know if your keys have been compromised. The concept of a trusted third party is close to being a non-sequitur. While not impossible (trusted third parties do sometimes exist) it's not a particularly safe state of affairs. Kind of like in physics, three body systems are inherently unstable.
Encryption: It's not hard
Yes it is. It fails the mom test badly. More properly it is key management that is too difficult. The actual key generation can be automated mostly. Distribution and use of keys is inherently difficult with no obviously easy solution.
Microsoft often feels like it's struggling in the wake of Amazon, Google, Apple, and Facebook.
That's because Microsoft has basically been a monopoly for so long they lost whatever entrepreneurial spirit they once had. For two decades now Microsoft has been about protecting Windows and Office which to this day remain their big money makers. It's really hard to blow everything up when you are making billions in profit every year. Balmer is a classic example of the and the company seems to be a case study in the innovator's dilemma.
Worse the company has to fight against the law of big numbers as well. There simply aren't that many projects available to you that are going to move the needle for a company like Microsoft. Microsoft brought in around $77 billion in sales last year with a profit of $21 billion. That means for them to grow just 5% a year they will have to essentially build a company that sells nearly $4 billion each year and next year the hurdle is even higher. To do that while maintaining a 27% net profit margin is absurdly difficult.
They have the bankroll to survive but it is not at all clear how they will find another opportunity remotely as profitable as Windows/Office. It's also not clear if Windows/Office has a long term future. Short term, nothing is going to hurt them but long term things are quite unclear. There are some serious competitive threats to Windows/Office out there. I think Microsoft management is aware of the problem and I think they are equally mystified about what to do about it. The fact that they offered over $30 billion for Yahoo speaks volumes about how empty of ideas they have become. (It speaks bigger volumes about how stupid Yahoo management was that they didn't take the deal) Even when they get the direction right (Surface Pro is a sound concept - integrating tablets and PCs) they tend to screw up the execution. They even tend to screw up when they try to buy their way into a market. It's taken them so much money to make Xbox competitive that I doubt they'll ever actually recoup the investment. Microsoft might be able to grow through acquisitions though I'm not sure they have the culture for it. I really don't see most of their acquisitions thriving. Anyone think Microsoft is going to do anything amazing with Skype? Didn't think so.
Frankly I think whoever takes over the reigns next is not going to have an easy time of it. I'm not ready to say Microsoft is doomed but turning that ship around is going to be a herculean task.
(stupid oversight. the last 15 or so years, cable and connector designers have been pretty idiotic. don't get me started on that rant..)
I'll do that rant since I run a company that manufactures cables and cable assemblies. I can't speak to the software (I'm not a software guy) but the hardware on USB cables is less than impressive. They designed it to have a cheap controller but at the expense of needlessly complicated and expensive cables. That would have been ok if the cables themselves were well designed but they're pretty flawed designed in my opinion.
The USB connectors are keyed, presumably for cost and safety reasons. Now that isn't an entirely bad idea since you obviously don't want a connector to plug in the wrong way. But they could have designed it so that you didn't have to worry about orientation at all. Seems like everytime I try to insert a USB cable it invariably is upside down. While I'm not a huge fan of Apple's Lightning connector, the fact that I don't have to fuss with orientation when inserting is a terrific feature. I shudder to think how many many hours have been wasted by trying to insert USB cables upside down. It wouldn't be hard to have a wiring topology that figures out the orientation and behaves accordingly.
Many USB cables use different connectors on each end. This was done to mechanically prevent two powered devices from causing problems to each other. While simple it really is kind of a bandaid fix that needlessly increases the price of every USB cable. The devices should have enough smarts to handle that rather than using an unnecessary and costly second connector on every single cable. So now we have at least six different standard USB connectors when there should be at most two and probably just one.
USB cables are almost exactly the same width as the 8P8C (commonly called RJ45) ethernet connectors so as pointed out before you can insert on into that socket. They easily could have designed it to a different width than another super common connector on PCs.
USB cables are not physically robust. I've seen quite a few destroyed even without rough handling. The connectors simply aren't designed to be as durable as it should be.
Your citation is a survey, not a study. People are demonstrably HUGE liars about what it is they eat. The only thing a survey like that proves is what people say they eat, not what they actually do eat. We can however prove what people eat by looking at financial data.
And your opinion that EVERYONE eats at McDonalds all the time is completely baseless.
I never claimed everyone eats there all the time. But I have NO doubt whatsoever that most of the population eats fast food with considerable regularity. McDonalds (and the rest of the fast food industry) generated sales of about $600 per person in the US in 2010. That is about 100 meals per person per year which works out to about 10-15% of all meals consumed. That means on average you would expect an american chosen at random to eat at a fast food joint 2-3 times per week. On average that HAS to be true as we have the sales numbers to prove it. Now granted there are many people who don't eat fast food that often but any pretense that the majority of the population does not eat fast food on a regular basis is simply not supported by the available facts. The financial numbers don't lie about how often we eat out. People however do lie all the time to surveys regarding what they think they eat.
I'm not even counting traditional restaurants which account for a large percentage of meals consumed as well - typically 1-2 meals per week. Between that and fast food you easily get a result of people eating out 4-5X per week on average. Don't forget to count Starbucks/Dunkin Doughnuts coffee. That counts too.
Most people don't eat out more than once a week, yet they're overweight.
Citation needed. The data I see indicates most americans eat out 4-5 times per week.
Some people don't EVER eat at McDonalds or similar fast-food places, and yet they're fat, too.
A lot of people don't admit they eat at McDonalds and yet in 2010 the industry generated $184 Billion in sales. I think a lot of people who claim they don't eat at McDonalds are lying.
Wrong question; what you should be asking is, "why spend 100K, when I can buy a car with an almost equivalent safety rating for leas than half that price?
You can buy a car with a 5 star safety rating AND which performs like a Tesla for half the money? Where can I find this incredible vehicle?
Nobody buys a car just for the safety rating. Your argument is a strawman.
Without a large motor in the way Tesla is able to use the whole front compartment as a crumple zone as opposed to most combustion vehicles that primary use the sides as a crumple zone. While I don't think the ratings were manipulated they are artificially high because the Tesla design is able to game the system.
Explain to me exactly how having an enormous crumple zone in front of the driver is somehow a bad thing. Would you rather have an engine pushed into your lap from a frontal collision? Their is no evidence I've seen that their ratings are "artificially high". The results are what they are.
Because the gov't want to promote electric cars, will we now see artificially high safety ratings on electric cars to promote sales?
Wow, cynical much? Maybe, just maybe, the engineers at Tesla actually did a really good job. If the vehicle is subjected to the same tests and scores higher then what possible problem could you have with that? If you have evidence that the government somehow held Tesla to a different standard then by all means please share with the rest of the class. But if you are just being snarky then shut up.
People in fine arts on average earn far less than the average techie, so you know what? Stop trying to foist your "free" philosophy on everyone.
They knew (or should have known) that when then they took up fine arts as a profession. Nobody is entitled to make a living from art just because they think they should. They have to earn it the same as anyone else.
It's disingenuous to suggest that art should be free (or even cheap) when you're pulling in $100k securing networks against people who would use them for free.
Who said it had to be free as in beer? What is being discussed here is whether it should be free as in speech. I have no problem at all with someone making lots of money from their art. What I DO have a problem with is the artist and their descendants have a perpetual income from those works. Copyright is supposed to be for a LIMITED time and there certainly is no justifiable reason why the copyright should extend beyond the time required to settle the estate of the artist.
If someone is willing to put something resembling an open source license on an artistic work then good for them. They are contributing to the betterment of society by doing so by encouraging more creative works.
Thing is, its amortization schedule was roughly 2 decades at least if I were to guess.
Just being pedantic here but properly speaking it would be depreciation, not amortization. Amortization is for intangible property. Depreciation is for tangible. And under MACRS depreciation schedule (typically required for taxes) most if not all of the depreciation would have occurred in the first 7 years.
To be able to make electronic transactions without dependence on Visa / MasterCard / PayPal is benefit enough.
Only if you are doing something pretty sketchy (read illegal) and have little knowledge about the options available. There are LOTS of ways to exchange money besides the few methods you mentioned. Wire transfers, Western Union, money orders, ACH payments, SWIFT, RTGS, etc. Apparently you have some sort of ideological problem with Visa/MC/Paypal. If you don't like those then use something else. Bitcoin is among the riskiest and worst options out there but suit yourself.
So, you can, say, send $50k from someone in the USA to someone in Australia instantly, using existing currencies?
Sure, via a wire transfer among other means. (Fedwire, Western Union, SWIFT, RTGS, etc) I've had jobs where I did that almost daily in amounts between $30-200K per transaction. (commodities trading) All you have to do is fill out a form and the money will be transferred to (almost) any account anywhere in the world.
One thing you really can't argue about bitcoin is that this ability is leaps and bounds ahead of existing monetary systems
Actually the reverse is true and the person receiving the money on the other end does not have the hassle of exchanging the bitcoins for an actually useful currency as well as then depositing that currency into their working capital account. By avoiding bitcoins one also endures *considerably* less exchange rate risk, market risk, liquidity risk and legal risk. You really aren't considering the entire transaction process.
If you want to directly send money to someone electronically, you have to go to the bank, fill out a ton of paperwork, and wait a minimum of 3 days for the funds to arrive.
I don't know where you got that information but you are quite mistaken. I've worked doing global sourcing (buying stuff from other countries) for years. I bought a several thousand dollar piece of production equipment for my plant from Switzerland last week. All I had to do was fill in a form with the account numbers of the recipient and their bank name and the money was delivered to their account that same day. If I needed to I could have had the money held in escrow pending delivery and if I needed to they could have had the money effectively instantly.
In comparison, bitcoin is effectively instantaneous and requires no paperwork and no hassle.
Bitcoin isn't instantaneous because you still need to convert currencies in most cases. Consider the ENTIRE transaction. Also the lack of paperwork isn't necessarily a benefit unless you really don't care about accounting for your money. What paperwork there is with traditional methods (which is pretty minimal) exists for VERY good reasons. As for hassle, bitcoin is an enormous hassle since virtually no one uses bitcoin. I would have to convince someone to utilize an illiquid and volatile currency that they probably have never heard of. Then I would have to convince them that somehow it is a good idea to accept payment in a virtual currency instead of the currency they actually want. You seriously think that is "no hassle"? If so I want to know what color the sky is on your planet. Bitcoin is only less hassle in situations where you are doing something that is probably illegal.
It's 2013, they should have finished scanning all of their documents in by 2002, 2005 at the very latest. What on earth are they printing over there?
Patient medical charts and financial information mostly. Getting all that digital is an incredibly difficult and a FAR more challenging problem than most people realize. In a lot of cases the economic case for paper is actually better because going digital is so difficult and/or expensive.
I work in a regulated industry and we shred everything we print. On a bad week I might print all of 10 pages.
The industry you work in has precisely NOTHING to do with how healthcare can or should be managed. That would be like me saying what works for engineering should be perfectly appropriate for accounting. the argument makes no sense. As it turns out health care is incredibly complex and designing IT systems to do away with paper is difficult, time consuming and frequently not actually the most efficient way to solve many of the problems they face. If there is a more complicated industry than health care I'm not aware of it. Just because theoretically we can solve problems with IT doesn't mean it can be done today or that it is necessarily the correct answer to every problem.
Bitcoin could have been a useful petty cash system for the Internet.
Not really. Despite the claims of proponents, bitcoin provides little tangible benefit over existing currencies in almost all circumstances. Bitcoin scratches an ideological itch for some geeks who have a poor grasp of economics and a worse grasp of risk. Bitcoin only is cheaper to use than existing currencies if you ignore the externalities, opportunity cost and financial risk. Outside of a few rare corner cases people have virtually nothing to gain by using bitcoin and stand to lose quite a lot. Bitcoin is at best an interesting (though flawed) academic exercise.
The question here is how the finance ministry would come to know of a person's Bitcoin holding as it is a decentralized currency with no governing body to keep count on the number of Bitcoins a person has.
They might not know about it but that doesn't relieve the taxpayer of their legal obligations. If you get audited and it comes to light that you aren't declaring income then you can find yourself in deeeeeep trouble. They can send you to jail for tax evasion. I'm not familiar with how it works in Germany but in the US you would at minimum declare income from bitcoin related activities on line 21 of your 1040 form under Other Income. The legality or source of this income is irrelevant to whether you are required to declare it. If you mine bitcoins then you are generating income (you have acquired an asset with a market value hence it counts as income) and you would be required to declare it as such on your tax return.
Gee, this is going to throw out the doomsday scenarios of all those neo-ecovists who claim our increasing energy consumption and pollution are going to destroy the planet.
No, just likely our ability (along with many other species) ability to exist on the planet. No biggie. Who cares about the continued existence of the species.
2) Energy usage is getting more efficient - my new freezer, refrigerator, computer, fan, van all use far less energy to do the same work as pervious models.
Which we respond to by using more of it. We generally waste most gains in efficiency by using more energy the moment it becomes economically feasible to do so. Cars today are FAR more fuel efficient per horsepower then they were just 30 years ago. But average fuel economy has not gone up at even close to the same rate. Why? Because cars today have much more horsepower which effectively negates much of the fuel efficiency gains.
25kW/33hp is more than adequate if people could only let go of the idea that their cars need to weigh two tonnes and have a large overcapacity for the majority of their needs.
There are a lot more considerations than just fuel economy for most of us.
A single-occupant commuter vehicle with a space frame and carbon fibre body weighing more like 500kg would have excellent performance with 25kW.
So we're supposed to buy a second car just to commute to/from work? Very few people have the luxury of buying a car just to handle their daily commute. If you're one who does, good for you. The rest of us are going to remain stuck making tradeoffs among the various requirements of our lives.
Average # of passengers is almost always >1 so your proposed vehicle immediately becomes useless the moment you need to carry a passenger. Such a vehicle would be virtually unusable where I live for 4+ months of the year. (top tip - light cars are demonstrably dangerous to drive in 1-2 feet of snow which happens regularly in some places) A light car like that wouldn't likely be particularly comfortable, quiet or pleasant to drive. Not to mention it would virtually require owning a second vehicle or keeping a rental company on retainer. Add in that it would cost $ to insure, require space to park, and create a bunch of extra pollution just creating the thing. Let's not forget that most of us have families and do a significant amount of driving with at least one extra person in the car. Frankly I'd be better off buying a motorcycle except for the risk to life and limb.
I figure to come up with that many errors, there must have been several thousand searches per year that were done as intended and according to the law.
This is a secret program and the only thing you can be sure of is that your do NOT have all the facts. This is an agency and a program that has NO accountability to the electorate. They operate in secret, their findings are secret, their actions on those findings are secret, their oversight is toothless and secret, and we can't even fight against the program because we cannot prove we were harmed and thus can't prove standing in front of a judge. Exactly how stupid do you have to be to think that the NSA is to be trusted unconditionally based on a tiny bit of leaked information?
If they were 99.9% in compliance, there would be about 900,000 searches to get about 900 errors.
Even if they were 100% in compliance it STILL would be a violation of our 4th amendment rights. The NSA's actions have never come under serious judicial review. The FISA court is a rubber stamp fig leaf of a justification. You can loudly proclaim that this program is "legal" all you want but that doesn't make it so nor does it make it right. Jim Crow laws once were "legal" but they still were wrong and ultimately unconstitutional. Furthermore even if we take your 900 number at face value (and in reality I do not) that is 900 people who were unlawfully deprived of their civil rights in some manner. Even one is too many.
1917 US enters WW1 1941 The US enters WW2
Are you seriously arguing we should have stayed out of those wars? It wouldn't have mattered which party was in the white house. They are called WORLD wars for a reason.
Republicans are hawks, Democrats enter us in some of the biggest wars.
You seem to have left out the two gulf wars as well as Afganistan, all of which were stared under republican presidents. You also failed to mention that our involvement in Vietnam actually started MUCH earlier (in the 1950s) than you claim and both republican and democrat presidents share the burden of our involvement there.
Republicans are supposed to be for family values, but how many get caught in extramarital affairs?
They aren't for "family values". The term family values is a cynical political marketing term used to mask fear of families that aren't white, conservative and christian. It's a way of pandering to the religious right.
Democrats want to help the minorities. But almost the entire party fought the civil rights movement.
Conveniently your characterization of the Democrats ignores the changes that happened after 1964. Those same democrats who were against civil rights (virtually all of them southerners) switched to the republican party and have stayed there ever since. 93% of Southern Democrats and 100% of Southern Republicans voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But don't let actual facts get in your way of pretending that the current democrats are the same people.
the SR-71 is probably the most beautiful plane ever to have flown.
The SR-71 is undeniably a gorgeous plane and I agree that the P-38 is striking as well. But for my money I love the look of the YF-23 if we are talking about jets and the P-51 Mustang if we are talking about prop planes. Just my own preferences of course. I like the U2 just because it is SO simple in design. Basically a powered glider. Simple, elegant and still functional to this day.