Carly Fiorina has not been the CEO of anything in years, yet she is still considered an business executive more than a politician.
And no one calls her CEO of Hewlett Packard anymore either. What's your point?
Sarah Palin did not even complete one term as Governor before quitting, and she is called Governor.
Not by me she isn't. She left the title when she left the job. Calling someone governor who isn't one presently doesn't make much sense.
This is a guy who has been into space, something that only maybe 500 people have done. He is an astronaut. Saying he isn't is sign of desperation.
He WAS an astronaut. Once you leave the job you leave the title too. John Glen WAS an astronaut, then he WAS a senator and now he is a retired astronaut and a retired senator. If you call him by either title now you are just kissing up.
It's more than just an occupation. You can say "I used to be an accountant" but, like being a Senator or a Congressman or the President, you've earned that title for the rest of your life.
Hogwash. When they leave office they are no longer a senator or a congressman or a president. Someone else has that job now and they are no longer entitled to it. I actually am a certified accountant but if I wasn't actively practicing I wouldn't call myself one. I would have no problem calling someone a Former Senator but they lose the job title when they lose the job.
If the guy was actively working as an astronaut (even if just on ground stuff and never going back to space) I have no problem with him calling himself one. If he had retired from that job his new job title is retired astronaut or former astronaut or whatever else he is actively doing at the time.
I don't see how it's feasible for a retail store to match Amazon's prices. The whole point of Amazon is that they have lower overhead due to lack of a store front, sales staff etc. and they pass that savings along to the consumer. A retail store cannot match their prices and operate at a profit.
The way you match or beat Amazon's prices is with scale (like Walmart) or with specialization in products Amazon can't accommodate easily (like John Deere) or by being the manufacturer and selling direct (like Apple). Also remember that Amazon has costs the retail stores don't (particularly in IT).
In many cases, the opposite is true... Personally i find such clothing extremely uncomfortable
A decent pair of dress pants is more comfortable than any jeans. I see no point to neckties but good dress clothes are actually more comfortable than anything except pajamas. I don't care for suits and neck ties either but those are a somewhat silly extension of dressing up.
Business cards i think are just obsolete
Sorry but they aren't. You can find corner cases where some other technologies are better, but there is nothing out there that is going to make business cards go away any time soon.
Suits and ties never served any useful purpose whatsoever.
They serve a useful purpose. That purpose is to provide a neat and tidy appearance and instill confidence in those you are interacting with. Some people do not require a suit for this purpose to be accomplished. Some do. If you want to sell financial products, people are going to expect something more than jeans and a tshirt.
Palm had a good idea: you could send an address book entry to another Palm device using its IR interface. Dead simple, too.
Except that you then clutter up your address book with a bunch of addresses of people who you don't/barely know and won't contact again. And it wasn't really dead simple and it wasn't especially quick either.
Is Bluetooth ubiquitous enough to be usable for this?
"Chalk up another looming casualty of the Internet age: business cards. Ubiquitous as pinstripes, the 2-by-3.5-inch pieces of card stock have long been a staple in executive briefcases.
This hasn't changed and isn't going to change anytime soon. (and pinstripes haven't been ubiquitous for a loooongggg time)
But now, writes Matt Stevens, young and Web-savvy people who are accustomed to connecting digitally, see business cards as irrelevant, wasteful — and just plain lame.
Only if you interact with a rather narrow group of people. Being "young and web-savvy" doesn't equal greater intellect or better ideas. In most of the world business cards remain ubiquitous and aren't going away any time soon.
'When I go into a meeting and there are five bankers across the table, they all hand me business cards and they all end up in a pile, in a shoe box somewhere,' says Diego Berdakin, the founder of BeachMint, a fast-growing e-commerce site that has raised $75 million from investors without ever bothering to print a card.
The ability to raise money has little to do with handing out business cards.
Some 77 million smartphone users have downloaded the Bump app, which allows them to bump their phones together and instantly exchange contact information.
And yet oddly I've never run into a single one of them. I've never even had anyone ask if I had that app. Even if I did, I don't really want my smartphone address book getting cluttered up with a bunch of random people's contact info. I do take pictures of business cards I want to keep but don't want to carry and use Evernote or Dropbox to hold them. Then I can write notes later if needed.
Daily. I actually use it as a middleware layer between our MRP database and some accounting functions I'm responsible for. I use ODBC to get at the tables and then do the actual analysis mostly in a spreadsheet with some custom queries in the Base part. It has worked extremely well, has been easy to use and hasn't cost us a penny in capital expenditures.
As a standalone database, I think Access is significantly better right now but as a way for your office suite to communicate with another database, LibreOffice Base is terriffic.
I've seen senior accountants use pocket calculators to sum columns of numbers in Excel.
Sadly this is very common. I am a certified accountant and it continues to flabbergast me why so many of my fellow accountants keep using paper tape calculators when they have a spreadsheet at their fingertips. It makes no sense whatsoever.
I shudder whenever I see someone using a spreadsheet to make important business decisions because I know there are errors in every non-trivial spreadsheet.
There are errors in every non-trivial database too. And pretty much every non-trivial program of any sort.
I tend to think of a spreadsheet as a data prototyping tool. It's very easy to mock up a tool to manage a moderate amount of data. You don't have to have to model built before starting. Once you've got the basic kinks worked out you can then rebuild it in a database if appropriate. While I am an engineer (and an accountant too) I'm not a programmer and a database would be overkill for much of my needs. Worse, the tools to create and manage a database are not designed for a non-programmer and are much slower for many tasks. A spreadsheet is approachable and easy to use by comparison and I can get useful work done. Show me a general purpose database that makes it as easy to prototype and analyze data sets of moderate size as a spreadsheet and I'll be all over it but right now no such beast exists.
It's really impossible to properly audit or verify a spreadsheet. They are so easy to corrupt with improper references and random data entry
You are assuming such auditing is necessary. For many tasks it simply isn't. I actually do work with databases too. I use Access, LibreOffice Base and occasionally PostgreSQL but most of the time I live in a spreadsheet. My job isn't programming or database administration. Software is just a means to an end for me.
Spreadsheets are only widespread because most office drones don't have a clue about proper data management
Spreadsheets are widespread because they get the job done and are sufficiently easy to use. Databases are undeniably valuable but for many tasks using a relational or similar database would be like hunting ducks with a howitzer. It's just overkill much of the time.
99% of the time a hosed IT infrastructure is because management refused to spend any money so it had to be half assed.
It is certainly true that a great many companies are penny-wise-pound-foolish when it comes to IT but it is VERY premature to jump to that conclusion here. I've seen almost as many cases where companies over spent on IT for things they didn't really need. My current company has a piece of accounting software that is seriously overkill for our relatively pedestrian needs. Cost our company $80,000 when $3000 on Quickbooks Enterprise would have done the job fine. ( Bought by the previous owners who were all engineers without a lick of business savvy)
In any case it is much more likely that any "half assed" solutions were due to a lack of competence rather than a lack of money. It sounds like this guy has done a lot to improve things without throwing big bucks at the problem so I'm inclined to suspect his predecessor was not especially gifted.
Money whipping a problem should always be the solution of last resort. While it is certainly possible this company isn't spending enough, you don't spend money on anything without a reasonable expected ROI. Spending money as a first impulse usually means you haven't really thought about the problem sufficiently and are just assuming that a more expensive product will solve all your problems. If I hired an IT guy and the first thing out of his mouth was that I wasn't spending enough I'd be seriously worried.
The Tandy actually had much better battery life than an iPad, but could do far less.
In what possible way could a 30 year old computer with an 80C85 processor and 32 Kilobits of RAM and an 240x64 non-backlit LCD display be a meaningful comparison to any modern computer? Of course it needed less power. That's like comparing a Model T to a Bugatti Veyron.
damn i hate that! why the heck are you calling me?
Because calls tend to get better results most of the time. Email is fine for something that doesn't require an immediate response but sometimes you need someone's full and undivided attention regardless of whether they think it is a convenient time.
send me an email or IM! that is self documenting, and i can review it as often as i want to make sure i understood what you wrote
Or you could just call them back if there are missing details. Not everything needs to be documented in an email and you are perfectly writing down the details of the conversation. Furthermore, just because it is written in an email doesn't necessarily mean it is accurate or complete.
and can file it away in my TODO list so i don't forget..
You don't need an email from someone else to do that.
With a call as soon as you hang up i can't go back and replay it. If someone calls me and asks me to do something the first thing i always ask is for them to send me an email or IM with the request.
There is this nifty invention called taking notes. Perhaps you should try it some time. Frankly I find it rather irritating if I explain something to someone and then they ask me to explain it again. I hate calling on the phone so if I bother to do it I damn well expect you pay attention and take notes if you can't remember the salient details.
Also with phone they expect an immediate response, and so i have to interrupt what i am working on to respond to them.
Heaven forbid you respond to something at a time that isn't perfectly convenient for you. You seem to have a rather self centered idea of how the adult world works. Your personal convenience is not necessarily the most important important factor in the working world. Sometimes things need to be done at a time that is not ideal for your schedule. If you can't do it then, say so and deal with the consequences.
We should put tariffs in place for any and ALL goods coming FROM China into the U.S.
And what do you hope to accomplish with doing that? You think causing a global recession, massive increases in a huge array of products, and significant damage to the multitude of business that do business with the worlds second largest economy is a good thing? Relations with China are not nearly as simple as you seem to believe...
That might level the playing field with their blatant currency manipulations.
China is/was manipulating their currency but that's not really as big a problem as it is often made out to be - certainly not the biggest problem. There are bigger problems. Forget currency subsidies, a lot of the large Chinese manufacturing concerns are directly owned by the government (including the military) and are given the sorts of advantages you might expect in such a situation. US companies have rarely been permitted to operate with the same degree of freedom in China that they enjoy elsewhere. The playing field is definitely not level over there. Doesn't mean US companies can't compete at all, but it is hard when the government is your direct competitor.
Plus a lot of the reason much manufacturing has moved there is simply that China has a lot of inexpensive labor. They have 5X the population of the US so labor is a resource they have an ample supply of. If you have a lot of something you can charge less for it. Simple supply and demand. That means goods with a high labor content are far more likely to be produced there. Having lots of people creates problems but it also is a competitive advantage in some ways too.
Yes it is. It is the best answer anyone has come up with so far to the free rider problem. Thanks to copyright we have industries that have generated Trillions of dollars of economic good, including software, music, books, art and much more. It is very easy to make a compelling case that FAR less of that economic development would have occurred without copyright.
Free software will keep existing without copyright.
That does not mean that it will maximize good to society at large. Nor does that fact make for a compelling argument against copyright. If you want to argue against copyright you'll need to come up with a compelling argument for how you will solve the free rider problem.
Sure you can take the source and make a closed product - but how are you going to complete with the continued development of the open branch? After all, BSD is still around.
And virtually no one uses BSD EXCEPT for cases like Apple where they have taken bits of it proprietary and made it de-facto no longer free. It contributes to society in the same way that a university research lab does. Creative works that are later made truly useful to society by someone else with a profit motive.
There is absolutely no justification for copyright in the modern world.
Really? You've solved the free rider problem? We should alert the Nobel committee so you can collect your prize.
They created Blue-Ray as streaming shows was becoming the norm.
There is a large and profitable market for media delivered on Blu-Ray. If you are looking for examples of product failures you're picking bad examples.
They raised the prices of Macintoshes until they were at the brink of extinction.
Nice bit of revisionist history. Actually it was LOWERING the prices on Macs combined with a lack of differentiated products that nearly killed Apple. Apple tried to compete on price for a while there and almost killed the company. There was no margin and without fat margins they don't have the money to develop new and interesting products they can charge for. Apple simply cannot compete in low margin commodity hardware/software. They tried and failed.
Whether or not freedom of speech covers the internet is up to the courts to decide, not congress. And since they've already determined that writing is a form of speech I don't see how writing "on the internet" would be any different.
It likely isn't any different. We just have relatively little case law backing that up compared to case law for printed speech.
Nevertheless, Congress IS able to pass laws regarding internet access (whatever you mean by "access") and until such time as the courts interpret them they carry the force of law. And it is quite possible the courts will support whatever Congress decides.
I have the right to "speak" to whoever I wish, provided myself and the person I am speaking to wishes to have that conversation
Agreed and the First Amendment covers that.
I can go to any damned website I want; if I am breaking the law through my actions on said site, that is one thing, but I have every fucking right to pull up The Pirate Bay if I want to. Until I start downloading those torrents I have done nothing wrong.
And that is covered by the Fourth Amendment. Do you have a point to make or were you just ranting? The internet is just a specific case of things that we already deal with. Some new laws will be needed to clarify some of the corner cases here and there and I'm sure the Commerce Clause will come into play from time to time. Be patient and let things work themselves out. There is no obvious need for a new amendment to the Constitution for the internet.
If it's not in the Constitution, Congress cannot make any laws about it.
There are many things not explicitly in the Constitution that have been interpreted in such a way that Congress can and has made laws about them. Much of the Internet almost without question falls under the Commerce Clause and many aspects of the internet are therefore subject to federal regulation. And we haven't even gotten into the ability of the States themselves to regulate the internet or how the courts will interpret the Constitution.
AFAIK, that's why abortion is legal in the USA, because it's not mentioned in the Constitution.
You've got that mostly right but you left out a key part. It's legal because the Supreme Court interpreted the Constitution in such a manner that to date has prohibited Congress from passing such laws. The Supreme Court could theoretically change its mind in a future ruling and make it illegal. Remember that the Supreme Court upheld Jim Crow laws for the better part of a century. The Constitution for better or worse is very subject to interpretation.
Actually not "the internet" but unfiltered internet ACCESS is what is should become a inalienable right.
The problem you have is you need to clearly define what you mean by "access". What services does that cover? What technologies? For what uses and what purposes? Are there minimum service levels? The concept of internet access is a pretty broad topic and there needs to be at least the potential for a pretty serious problem before we go modifying the Constitution. It's not clear that there is such a problem at this time.
Just because 10% of people on the internet are trading warez or pirated movies and music doesn't give them the right to infringe upon my rights to freely travel the internet.
Actually absent any specific law or judicial interpretation specifically disallowing such behavior they can do EXACTLY that. The word "internet" does not appear even once in the US Constitution. Much like the word "privacy" does not appear anywhere in the Constitution - it is inferred from various amendments. As such Congress is perfectly able legislate restrictions on internet use and the judiciary is perfectly able to interpret existing laws in ways contrary to your convenience and security. You have no explicit "right to freely travel the internet". Whether you should have such an explicit right is another matter but it doesn't exist now.
And, bonus, to go along with the uptick in costs, we might well have an uptick in employment
Huh? Increasing prices will increase employment? What universe are you living in? Increasing prices in the face of competition pretty much has exactly the opposite effect. Burying our head in the sand an pretending China doesn't exist isn't going to magically make things better. Furthermore increasing prices on some goods like steel makes everything you make out of those goods more expensive. It hurts economic growth in a very easy to demonstrate way. There is a reason virtually all economists think tariffs are a bad idea almost all the time. You are protecting a very few jobs at the expense of vastly more jobs.
I disagree, yes there will be consequences, but, the reason the US economy is in the tank to begin with is a lack of jobs.
The reason the economy went into the tank and remains there is a liquidity trap specifically caused by the liquidity crisis in 2008. Lack of jobs is a by product, not the root cause of the problem. The jobs didn't just magically disappear of their own accord.
Stuff from China is poor quality and has a high markup.
That's complete nonsense which doesn't stand up to even the basic scrutiny. I've been to China myself and been in factories where they make parts for Dell, Emerson Electric, and about 10 other Fortune 500 companies with well deserved reputations for good to excellent products. While there is of course some shoddy production from China there is a lot of very high quality manufacturing as well - every bit as good as anything in the US.
I think the low income portion of the population (that spends almost all its money on rent/transportation/food anyway) wouldn't mind paying a little more if it meant they got factory jobs.
Imposing tariffs won't bring jobs back and we're not talking about "a little more". The cost of labor in the US is too high relative to other places in the world. Not just China either. If you cut off production from one location it will simply move elsewhere. China is not the only nation with low labor costs. Cut off production from everywhere else and you screw the economy. You seriously need to learn about comparative advantage.
What a strange question. Of course customers pay for marketing costs, at least the ones susceptible to marketing, who else should?
Those who value being marketed to of course. Their promotion has essentially no value to me and I'm not willing to pay for that part of their overhead. Walmart makes exactly this argument to their suppliers. If the record companies want to spend huge amounts of money promoting the latest Brittany Spears album, that has no value to me whatsoever and I'm not willing to pay for that marketing. Some people are but you have to decide for yourself if you are willing to pay for a large marketing budget.
That's why it is cheaper to buy the non-brand product, even if the content may be the same.
The difference in price between branded and non-branded goods is significantly more than just the cost of marketing. If the cost of marketing was the only difference there would be no reason for anyone to ever buy a branded good.
Enough playing Tiddly Wings with China. Tariff them until our trade between them balances.
That's fine. How do you plan to deal with the large increases in prices of a huge number of goods? A lot of goods are made in China because of cost and it is highly non-trivial, not to mention expensive, to relocate all of that production. Much of the burden of the increased costs of goods will fall on the low income portion of the the population.
Riding your high horse isn't without a cost.
Plus, the US gov't can use the revenue right now.
What revenue? You think there would be no consequences? Raise prices suddenly on a wide variety of goods and you are almost certainly going to send the US economy into the tank again. Tax revenues would plummet much more than any money that would be raised from tariffs.
Slashdot Mirror
Carly Fiorina has not been the CEO of anything in years, yet she is still considered an business executive more than a politician.
And no one calls her CEO of Hewlett Packard anymore either. What's your point?
Sarah Palin did not even complete one term as Governor before quitting, and she is called Governor.
Not by me she isn't. She left the title when she left the job. Calling someone governor who isn't one presently doesn't make much sense.
This is a guy who has been into space, something that only maybe 500 people have done. He is an astronaut. Saying he isn't is sign of desperation.
He WAS an astronaut. Once you leave the job you leave the title too. John Glen WAS an astronaut, then he WAS a senator and now he is a retired astronaut and a retired senator. If you call him by either title now you are just kissing up.
It's more than just an occupation. You can say "I used to be an accountant" but, like being a Senator or a Congressman or the President, you've earned that title for the rest of your life.
Hogwash. When they leave office they are no longer a senator or a congressman or a president. Someone else has that job now and they are no longer entitled to it. I actually am a certified accountant but if I wasn't actively practicing I wouldn't call myself one. I would have no problem calling someone a Former Senator but they lose the job title when they lose the job.
If the guy was actively working as an astronaut (even if just on ground stuff and never going back to space) I have no problem with him calling himself one. If he had retired from that job his new job title is retired astronaut or former astronaut or whatever else he is actively doing at the time.
I don't see how it's feasible for a retail store to match Amazon's prices. The whole point of Amazon is that they have lower overhead due to lack of a store front, sales staff etc. and they pass that savings along to the consumer. A retail store cannot match their prices and operate at a profit.
The way you match or beat Amazon's prices is with scale (like Walmart) or with specialization in products Amazon can't accommodate easily (like John Deere) or by being the manufacturer and selling direct (like Apple). Also remember that Amazon has costs the retail stores don't (particularly in IT).
In many cases, the opposite is true... Personally i find such clothing extremely uncomfortable
A decent pair of dress pants is more comfortable than any jeans. I see no point to neckties but good dress clothes are actually more comfortable than anything except pajamas. I don't care for suits and neck ties either but those are a somewhat silly extension of dressing up.
Business cards i think are just obsolete
Sorry but they aren't. You can find corner cases where some other technologies are better, but there is nothing out there that is going to make business cards go away any time soon.
Suits and ties never served any useful purpose whatsoever.
They serve a useful purpose. That purpose is to provide a neat and tidy appearance and instill confidence in those you are interacting with. Some people do not require a suit for this purpose to be accomplished. Some do. If you want to sell financial products, people are going to expect something more than jeans and a tshirt.
Palm had a good idea: you could send an address book entry to another Palm device using its IR interface. Dead simple, too.
Except that you then clutter up your address book with a bunch of addresses of people who you don't/barely know and won't contact again. And it wasn't really dead simple and it wasn't especially quick either.
Is Bluetooth ubiquitous enough to be usable for this?
Not remotely. (no pun intended)
"Chalk up another looming casualty of the Internet age: business cards. Ubiquitous as pinstripes, the 2-by-3.5-inch pieces of card stock have long been a staple in executive briefcases.
This hasn't changed and isn't going to change anytime soon. (and pinstripes haven't been ubiquitous for a loooongggg time)
But now, writes Matt Stevens, young and Web-savvy people who are accustomed to connecting digitally, see business cards as irrelevant, wasteful — and just plain lame.
Only if you interact with a rather narrow group of people. Being "young and web-savvy" doesn't equal greater intellect or better ideas. In most of the world business cards remain ubiquitous and aren't going away any time soon.
'When I go into a meeting and there are five bankers across the table, they all hand me business cards and they all end up in a pile, in a shoe box somewhere,' says Diego Berdakin, the founder of BeachMint, a fast-growing e-commerce site that has raised $75 million from investors without ever bothering to print a card.
The ability to raise money has little to do with handing out business cards.
Some 77 million smartphone users have downloaded the Bump app, which allows them to bump their phones together and instantly exchange contact information.
And yet oddly I've never run into a single one of them. I've never even had anyone ask if I had that app. Even if I did, I don't really want my smartphone address book getting cluttered up with a bunch of random people's contact info. I do take pictures of business cards I want to keep but don't want to carry and use Evernote or Dropbox to hold them. Then I can write notes later if needed.
Anyone used this suite's database component?
Daily. I actually use it as a middleware layer between our MRP database and some accounting functions I'm responsible for. I use ODBC to get at the tables and then do the actual analysis mostly in a spreadsheet with some custom queries in the Base part. It has worked extremely well, has been easy to use and hasn't cost us a penny in capital expenditures.
As a standalone database, I think Access is significantly better right now but as a way for your office suite to communicate with another database, LibreOffice Base is terriffic.
I've seen senior accountants use pocket calculators to sum columns of numbers in Excel.
Sadly this is very common. I am a certified accountant and it continues to flabbergast me why so many of my fellow accountants keep using paper tape calculators when they have a spreadsheet at their fingertips. It makes no sense whatsoever.
I shudder whenever I see someone using a spreadsheet to make important business decisions because I know there are errors in every non-trivial spreadsheet.
There are errors in every non-trivial database too. And pretty much every non-trivial program of any sort.
I tend to think of a spreadsheet as a data prototyping tool. It's very easy to mock up a tool to manage a moderate amount of data. You don't have to have to model built before starting. Once you've got the basic kinks worked out you can then rebuild it in a database if appropriate. While I am an engineer (and an accountant too) I'm not a programmer and a database would be overkill for much of my needs. Worse, the tools to create and manage a database are not designed for a non-programmer and are much slower for many tasks. A spreadsheet is approachable and easy to use by comparison and I can get useful work done. Show me a general purpose database that makes it as easy to prototype and analyze data sets of moderate size as a spreadsheet and I'll be all over it but right now no such beast exists.
It's really impossible to properly audit or verify a spreadsheet. They are so easy to corrupt with improper references and random data entry
You are assuming such auditing is necessary. For many tasks it simply isn't. I actually do work with databases too. I use Access, LibreOffice Base and occasionally PostgreSQL but most of the time I live in a spreadsheet. My job isn't programming or database administration. Software is just a means to an end for me.
Spreadsheets are only widespread because most office drones don't have a clue about proper data management
Spreadsheets are widespread because they get the job done and are sufficiently easy to use. Databases are undeniably valuable but for many tasks using a relational or similar database would be like hunting ducks with a howitzer. It's just overkill much of the time.
99% of the time a hosed IT infrastructure is because management refused to spend any money so it had to be half assed.
It is certainly true that a great many companies are penny-wise-pound-foolish when it comes to IT but it is VERY premature to jump to that conclusion here. I've seen almost as many cases where companies over spent on IT for things they didn't really need. My current company has a piece of accounting software that is seriously overkill for our relatively pedestrian needs. Cost our company $80,000 when $3000 on Quickbooks Enterprise would have done the job fine. ( Bought by the previous owners who were all engineers without a lick of business savvy)
In any case it is much more likely that any "half assed" solutions were due to a lack of competence rather than a lack of money. It sounds like this guy has done a lot to improve things without throwing big bucks at the problem so I'm inclined to suspect his predecessor was not especially gifted.
Money whipping a problem should always be the solution of last resort. While it is certainly possible this company isn't spending enough, you don't spend money on anything without a reasonable expected ROI. Spending money as a first impulse usually means you haven't really thought about the problem sufficiently and are just assuming that a more expensive product will solve all your problems. If I hired an IT guy and the first thing out of his mouth was that I wasn't spending enough I'd be seriously worried.
The Tandy actually had much better battery life than an iPad, but could do far less.
In what possible way could a 30 year old computer with an 80C85 processor and 32 Kilobits of RAM and an 240x64 non-backlit LCD display be a meaningful comparison to any modern computer? Of course it needed less power. That's like comparing a Model T to a Bugatti Veyron.
damn i hate that! why the heck are you calling me?
Because calls tend to get better results most of the time. Email is fine for something that doesn't require an immediate response but sometimes you need someone's full and undivided attention regardless of whether they think it is a convenient time.
send me an email or IM! that is self documenting, and i can review it as often as i want to make sure i understood what you wrote
Or you could just call them back if there are missing details. Not everything needs to be documented in an email and you are perfectly writing down the details of the conversation. Furthermore, just because it is written in an email doesn't necessarily mean it is accurate or complete.
and can file it away in my TODO list so i don't forget..
You don't need an email from someone else to do that.
With a call as soon as you hang up i can't go back and replay it. If someone calls me and asks me to do something the first thing i always ask is for them to send me an email or IM with the request.
There is this nifty invention called taking notes. Perhaps you should try it some time. Frankly I find it rather irritating if I explain something to someone and then they ask me to explain it again. I hate calling on the phone so if I bother to do it I damn well expect you pay attention and take notes if you can't remember the salient details.
Also with phone they expect an immediate response, and so i have to interrupt what i am working on to respond to them.
Heaven forbid you respond to something at a time that isn't perfectly convenient for you. You seem to have a rather self centered idea of how the adult world works. Your personal convenience is not necessarily the most important important factor in the working world. Sometimes things need to be done at a time that is not ideal for your schedule. If you can't do it then, say so and deal with the consequences.
We should put tariffs in place for any and ALL goods coming FROM China into the U.S.
And what do you hope to accomplish with doing that? You think causing a global recession, massive increases in a huge array of products, and significant damage to the multitude of business that do business with the worlds second largest economy is a good thing? Relations with China are not nearly as simple as you seem to believe...
That might level the playing field with their blatant currency manipulations.
China is/was manipulating their currency but that's not really as big a problem as it is often made out to be - certainly not the biggest problem. There are bigger problems. Forget currency subsidies, a lot of the large Chinese manufacturing concerns are directly owned by the government (including the military) and are given the sorts of advantages you might expect in such a situation. US companies have rarely been permitted to operate with the same degree of freedom in China that they enjoy elsewhere. The playing field is definitely not level over there. Doesn't mean US companies can't compete at all, but it is hard when the government is your direct competitor.
Plus a lot of the reason much manufacturing has moved there is simply that China has a lot of inexpensive labor. They have 5X the population of the US so labor is a resource they have an ample supply of. If you have a lot of something you can charge less for it. Simple supply and demand. That means goods with a high labor content are far more likely to be produced there. Having lots of people creates problems but it also is a competitive advantage in some ways too.
Copyright is a force for the public good?
Yes it is. It is the best answer anyone has come up with so far to the free rider problem. Thanks to copyright we have industries that have generated Trillions of dollars of economic good, including software, music, books, art and much more. It is very easy to make a compelling case that FAR less of that economic development would have occurred without copyright.
Free software will keep existing without copyright.
That does not mean that it will maximize good to society at large. Nor does that fact make for a compelling argument against copyright. If you want to argue against copyright you'll need to come up with a compelling argument for how you will solve the free rider problem.
Sure you can take the source and make a closed product - but how are you going to complete with the continued development of the open branch? After all, BSD is still around.
And virtually no one uses BSD EXCEPT for cases like Apple where they have taken bits of it proprietary and made it de-facto no longer free. It contributes to society in the same way that a university research lab does. Creative works that are later made truly useful to society by someone else with a profit motive.
There is absolutely no justification for copyright in the modern world.
Really? You've solved the free rider problem? We should alert the Nobel committee so you can collect your prize.
The reason to limit copying was to give the artist a better chance at making money with his creation, and thus encourage the artist to create more.
Specifically copyright (and patents) are an attempt to get around the free rider problem.
Commercial copying was rampant when copyright laws were first introduced.
Travel to certain parts of the world and you'll find it still is rampant. Even in countries that have copyright laws.
They created Blue-Ray as streaming shows was becoming the norm.
There is a large and profitable market for media delivered on Blu-Ray. If you are looking for examples of product failures you're picking bad examples.
They raised the prices of Macintoshes until they were at the brink of extinction.
Nice bit of revisionist history. Actually it was LOWERING the prices on Macs combined with a lack of differentiated products that nearly killed Apple. Apple tried to compete on price for a while there and almost killed the company. There was no margin and without fat margins they don't have the money to develop new and interesting products they can charge for. Apple simply cannot compete in low margin commodity hardware/software. They tried and failed.
Whether or not freedom of speech covers the internet is up to the courts to decide, not congress. And since they've already determined that writing is a form of speech I don't see how writing "on the internet" would be any different.
It likely isn't any different. We just have relatively little case law backing that up compared to case law for printed speech.
Nevertheless, Congress IS able to pass laws regarding internet access (whatever you mean by "access") and until such time as the courts interpret them they carry the force of law. And it is quite possible the courts will support whatever Congress decides.
I have the right to "speak" to whoever I wish, provided myself and the person I am speaking to wishes to have that conversation
Agreed and the First Amendment covers that.
I can go to any damned website I want; if I am breaking the law through my actions on said site, that is one thing, but I have every fucking right to pull up The Pirate Bay if I want to. Until I start downloading those torrents I have done nothing wrong.
And that is covered by the Fourth Amendment. Do you have a point to make or were you just ranting? The internet is just a specific case of things that we already deal with. Some new laws will be needed to clarify some of the corner cases here and there and I'm sure the Commerce Clause will come into play from time to time. Be patient and let things work themselves out. There is no obvious need for a new amendment to the Constitution for the internet.
If it's not in the Constitution, Congress cannot make any laws about it.
There are many things not explicitly in the Constitution that have been interpreted in such a way that Congress can and has made laws about them. Much of the Internet almost without question falls under the Commerce Clause and many aspects of the internet are therefore subject to federal regulation. And we haven't even gotten into the ability of the States themselves to regulate the internet or how the courts will interpret the Constitution.
AFAIK, that's why abortion is legal in the USA, because it's not mentioned in the Constitution.
You've got that mostly right but you left out a key part. It's legal because the Supreme Court interpreted the Constitution in such a manner that to date has prohibited Congress from passing such laws. The Supreme Court could theoretically change its mind in a future ruling and make it illegal. Remember that the Supreme Court upheld Jim Crow laws for the better part of a century. The Constitution for better or worse is very subject to interpretation.
Actually not "the internet" but unfiltered internet ACCESS is what is should become a inalienable right.
The problem you have is you need to clearly define what you mean by "access". What services does that cover? What technologies? For what uses and what purposes? Are there minimum service levels? The concept of internet access is a pretty broad topic and there needs to be at least the potential for a pretty serious problem before we go modifying the Constitution. It's not clear that there is such a problem at this time.
Just because 10% of people on the internet are trading warez or pirated movies and music doesn't give them the right to infringe upon my rights to freely travel the internet.
Actually absent any specific law or judicial interpretation specifically disallowing such behavior they can do EXACTLY that. The word "internet" does not appear even once in the US Constitution. Much like the word "privacy" does not appear anywhere in the Constitution - it is inferred from various amendments. As such Congress is perfectly able legislate restrictions on internet use and the judiciary is perfectly able to interpret existing laws in ways contrary to your convenience and security. You have no explicit "right to freely travel the internet". Whether you should have such an explicit right is another matter but it doesn't exist now.
And, bonus, to go along with the uptick in costs, we might well have an uptick in employment
Huh? Increasing prices will increase employment? What universe are you living in? Increasing prices in the face of competition pretty much has exactly the opposite effect. Burying our head in the sand an pretending China doesn't exist isn't going to magically make things better. Furthermore increasing prices on some goods like steel makes everything you make out of those goods more expensive. It hurts economic growth in a very easy to demonstrate way. There is a reason virtually all economists think tariffs are a bad idea almost all the time. You are protecting a very few jobs at the expense of vastly more jobs.
I disagree, yes there will be consequences, but, the reason the US economy is in the tank to begin with is a lack of jobs.
The reason the economy went into the tank and remains there is a liquidity trap specifically caused by the liquidity crisis in 2008. Lack of jobs is a by product, not the root cause of the problem. The jobs didn't just magically disappear of their own accord.
Stuff from China is poor quality and has a high markup.
That's complete nonsense which doesn't stand up to even the basic scrutiny. I've been to China myself and been in factories where they make parts for Dell, Emerson Electric, and about 10 other Fortune 500 companies with well deserved reputations for good to excellent products. While there is of course some shoddy production from China there is a lot of very high quality manufacturing as well - every bit as good as anything in the US.
I think the low income portion of the population (that spends almost all its money on rent/transportation/food anyway) wouldn't mind paying a little more if it meant they got factory jobs.
Imposing tariffs won't bring jobs back and we're not talking about "a little more". The cost of labor in the US is too high relative to other places in the world. Not just China either. If you cut off production from one location it will simply move elsewhere. China is not the only nation with low labor costs. Cut off production from everywhere else and you screw the economy. You seriously need to learn about comparative advantage.
What a strange question. Of course customers pay for marketing costs, at least the ones susceptible to marketing, who else should?
Those who value being marketed to of course. Their promotion has essentially no value to me and I'm not willing to pay for that part of their overhead. Walmart makes exactly this argument to their suppliers. If the record companies want to spend huge amounts of money promoting the latest Brittany Spears album, that has no value to me whatsoever and I'm not willing to pay for that marketing. Some people are but you have to decide for yourself if you are willing to pay for a large marketing budget.
That's why it is cheaper to buy the non-brand product, even if the content may be the same.
The difference in price between branded and non-branded goods is significantly more than just the cost of marketing. If the cost of marketing was the only difference there would be no reason for anyone to ever buy a branded good.
Enough playing Tiddly Wings with China. Tariff them until our trade between them balances.
That's fine. How do you plan to deal with the large increases in prices of a huge number of goods? A lot of goods are made in China because of cost and it is highly non-trivial, not to mention expensive, to relocate all of that production. Much of the burden of the increased costs of goods will fall on the low income portion of the the population.
Riding your high horse isn't without a cost.
Plus, the US gov't can use the revenue right now.
What revenue? You think there would be no consequences? Raise prices suddenly on a wide variety of goods and you are almost certainly going to send the US economy into the tank again. Tax revenues would plummet much more than any money that would be raised from tariffs.