BIOS has a LOT of limitations. >2TB hard drives, network boot, disk controllers, GPU's, IPMI,... everything has to subvert the BIOS in some way which makes it mightily slow. My iMac boots with Lion in 7 seconds. My Linux machine takes 15 seconds just getting to Grub, my servers take up to 45 seconds to get to the boot loader.
All of the things you mentioned above are _positive_ things, in that you would have to be crazy to use the bios for anything other than loading the os and getting the hell out.
How exactly is a longer boot time and slow operation that needs to be circumvented a "positive" thing? The mere fact that you can work around the BIOS does not make it good.
A lot of small businesses are either simple proprietorships/partnerships or LLCs, for which the profits are taxed as an addition to personal income.
As opposed to C-Corps where they are taxed at BOTH the personal level and on the profits of the business. Essentially double dipping by the government. S-Corps and LLCs pay less tax overall in most cases.
Proprietors and partners will pay these taxes from the cash on hand of the business, meaning that the business has fewer resources to expand and hire more employees.
All businesses pay for taxes with the cash of the business and that isn't unique to smaller businesses. Most small businesses do not have profits in excess of $1 million. If they do have profits in excess of $1 million, I'm happy for them but then they *should* expect a big tax bill and can damn well afford it.
Nobody is going to invade the US, without coming home to a glass parking lot anyway, and all that money is just thrown down a hole
America doesn't have 12 aircraft carriers because they are worried about invasion. They have them for force projection. They allow the US to influence behavior through the implied threat (sometimes carried out) of military force. Parking an aircraft carrier off the coast of a country tends to get the attention of anyone nearby.
I agree that the US spends far too much on its military. I'm merely pointing out that it isn't done strictly for defense.
If American Express and Visa can mine transaction data and put a stop order on credit cards when you unexpectedly buy gas out of state, it seems like there could be patterns to watch for when the amounts are in the billions, too.
Apples to oranges in a lot of cases. Credit card transactions have huge volume, are fairly similar, and its relatively easy to see if someone is making a purchase that is unusual for them. There is a lot of data to compare against. Investment bankers sometimes do routine trades but they also invest in all sorts of complicated ways that aren't routine and that really can't be evaluated for statistical anomalies. Not to say they shouldn't use IT to track what they are doing but it is not nearly as easy as the glib summary makes it sound. There are lots of very effective controls used in the financial world that aren't based in IT.
That said, the real responsibility falls to management and especially to the risk management folks at the bank. It may not have been an IT problem but there still should have been controls in place to ensure this sort of thing doesn't happen.
First, it won't form a monopoly. There will be 2 other major carriers besides AT&T.
An oligopoly is hardly much better. Oligopolies have a reliably tendency to act a lot like monopolies. Each of the firms is well aware of the actions of the others and while they will compete, in general prices will generally be higher and the firms will retain more profits. If you want to see this in action look at the pricing of text messaging. The cost of it to the carriers is a good approximation of zero and yet they are able to charge huge margins on it. In a competitive marketplace this should be impossible but instead we have an oligopoly where each of the carriers is smart enough to not rock the boat on text message pricing. Technically it's not collusion but the net effect is identical.
Furthermore, one of those other major carriers (Sprint) is limping along and is very likely to be absorbed by someone else. I really would be surprised if they were around in another 10 years. I figure they'll either be bought by Verizon or sell their assets to some other players. Wouldn't entirely shock me to see Apple or Google or even Microsoft (maybe all three even) buy Sprint's data network though that is a rather remote possibility.
But the reality is that in the market that is promoted with all this inflation and destruction of investment and savings, there are no investors...
Really? There were approximately 2 billion shares traded on the New York Stock exchange today. No investors? Really?
There should not be any government protections to people, who are investors except that contract law needs to be upheld by courts
100% of the point of corporations is to protect investors from liability due to the actions of the corporation in order to encourage them to utilize their capital in productive ways. That is THE fundamental feature of a corporation. Without such liability protection the only organizations that can realistically raise substantial amounts of capital are sovereign nations and governmental bodies. Basically you are saying that we should do away with the entire modern economy and go back to something vaguely akin to feudalism.
Can investors sue the Federal reserve for DESTROYING their US dollar denominated savings and investments?
No. That is a stupid question with an unsubstantiated premise and no evidentiary support.
After all, the US federal reserve is causing money destruction that is causing the federal reserve notes to lose over 10% of value per year.
Compared to what? Currency only has value in relation to something else so what is the something else you are comparing to?
Very inefficiently in capital intensive industries. If you have a product that is manpower intensive, patents won't matter. Before patents most industry was in agriculture which (at the time) was not a capital intensive industry. If you have a capital intensive product (which describes most things we'd call technology these days) invention is very difficult because the incentive to invest is seriously impacted by the free rider problem. You simply aren't going to invest billions in research if someone else gets most of the benefit.
Economic incentives exist without patents.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You will note that countries without strong patent laws and a justice system to go with it tend to be quite unable to develop capital intensive industries. India has a drug industry but for the longest time you could only patent a process, not a product. As a result India developed very few novel drugs and instead only could produce copies of existing drugs. The lack of effective patent protection killed any financial incentive to invest in R&D for that industry.
Inventors just keep things much more secret than before to hold on to it longer; which is probably more effective than any patent China just ignores after reading the publicly published details-- not even that hard, they make it already so they just take of your brand name and sell another one from the same factory.
Which depresses profit margins, slows invention and makes people unwilling to invest. I've been to China. I've had things manufactured there. Companies are VERY hesitant to take any sensitive intellectual property there because of the free rider problem. It is very hard to make the case to invest large amounts of capital if anyone can just copy your invention freely at a fraction of the cost.
If you do something innovative, the most you can hope for is to sell your company to a bigger player... you have next to no chance of actually becoming big yourself
Complete nonsense. It is pretty clear you aren't an entrepreneur. Yes it is hard to grow from a small company to a bigger one but it happens every single day. Large companies have advantages but new smaller companies push them out of the way all the time. There is only one company in the Dow Jones index that was there 100 years ago (GE) and in another 100 years the list will likely change completely again. If you've got something genuinely valuable it isn't especially difficult to get capital to grow the business regardless of size. Most patents are not actually very valuable and thus will not attract capital. Companies like IBM have huge patent portfolios but relatively few of those patents are actually worth much.
Innovation alone is not sufficient either. A better mousetrap without a well executed business surrounding it will accomplish nothing. Running a business effectively is very difficult. There are lots of "innovations" that did not succeed for reasons other than getting crushed by a larger competitor. In fact many companies manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory due to their incompetence at business.
Furthermore you talk about selling a small company or its assets to a bigger company like that is a bad thing. Lots of companies are started with that exact end in mind. The point is to make money - if you build a business that is valuable enough that someone wants to buy it then you have succeeded.
This critic argues that the bill fails to address the most important problem in patent law: that it still exists!
That is indeed unfortunate but until you can solve the even bigger problem of the free rider problem then a well designed patent regime remains better than no patent regime. Patents may slow invention but the free rider problem can halt invention entirely. There is no point in investing lots of money developing a technology that can be copied much more cheaply by someone who doesn't have to pay your R&D costs.
You can argue (and I will probably agree) that our current patent system is rather broken. That is not the same thing as making a credible argument that it should disappear.
In order to actually be running the robot will have to actually leave the ground between steps. Otherwise it is walking. So is it going to walk the course or run the course?
Then you need a better way to do the whitelisting:)
Having no whitelist at all is easier and cheaper than any whitelist.:-) Seriously, a whitelist is costly in terms of time, equipment and payroll. Absent some huge liability concern or legal requirement, I cannot fathom any reason why any company would bother. The return on investment is horrendous. It's much cheaper and easier to log usage, spot check occasionally and warn/fire any abusers.
You tell squidGuard which categories to block based upon your business needs, and squidGuard does the rest. You can even add rules that allow more liberal policies at certain times of the day (after hours, weekends, lunch time, etc.) and you can add rules that whitelist certain web sites in a category that you want blocked (for example, we block "chat" which includes/., but we explicitly allow./).
By having a community-maintained block list and blocking by category rather than individual domain or URL, the overhead associated with whitelisting goes way, way down.
And is utterly useless because any community other than my actual place of employment cannot possibly know what domains or URLs or other services we will need to use. Sure, some are easy to figure out but I have NEVER seen a filter that actually gets it right. The number of false positives and false negatives is guaranteed to be outrageously high. Furthermore I have to invest money in a equipment to host the software and personnel to maintain and monitor it. It's a complicated, expensive solution that I can solve much easier with two words: "You're fired".
I'm not sure that blocking Facebook/Twitter does a whole lot for the company... personally I think it hurts more than it helps. The reason is that quite a few people these days have some sort of mobile that allows them to access those sites anyway.
That's fine if they do that because then they aren't using the company network. If it becomes a problem then you fire them for goofing off at work. This is a people problem, not a technology problem. Honestly companies generally don't care if people do a *little bit* of personal stuff during their day just so long as they don't cause any problems and get their work done. There are exceptions where companies need to bring down the technological hammer but these are fairly rare.
Frankly if someone is spending to much time goofing off then it is probably best that they "succeed elsewhere".
Business shouldn't do blacklisting. They should do whitelisting (everything is forbidden, you only allow specifics).
That presumes two things. 1) that the overhead of whitelisting is not prohibitive and 2) That your users have rather specific and unchanging needs. Speaking for our business, the overhead of whitelisting would be incredibly burdensome. We deal with many vendors and have to research topics all the time. There is no reasonable way to know in advance exactly which websites we will need to visit. Furthermore it requires a significant investment of time which could be better spend elsewhere.
The best alternative is to block specific problem websites (Facebook, Twitter, etc for example) and only allow access to those via a whitelist. Keep logs of network access in case further problems arise. If someone is found to be ignoring company policies you can warn them or fire them and make an example out of them. You can solve 99% of the problem with quite a lot less work.
Try curling up into a ball, or leaving with tears on your face over being excluded by people who don't even realize it, and you are closer.
Everyone feels this way sometimes. Seriously, everyone. We're social animals and we generally care about being accepted by others even when it should not matter. Any guy who has ever tried to ask a girl out of a date knows that it can be terrifying, even if you are normally loaded with self confidence. And if you get turned down it can really really hard. People fear public speaking basically out of fear of rejection. Being rejected or turn down for a job, a friendship, or even just a friendly conversation is depressing and hurts in a very real way. I myself am naturally a relatively shy person who has to work hard to maintain social connections. It's not easy.
The good news is that there are over 6 BILLION people in this world. I guarantee you that there are people out there who will be interested in you for who you are. You don't have to like everyone and you don't have to be liked by everyone. Most people in this world are just like you, trying to find a few people who they fit in with and can be accepted by.
If that isn't enough there are professional counselors out there who can help. There are anxiety and other disorders that are medical and can be treated. Social behavior can be coached if you find it difficult. None of this is anything to feel ashamed about.
Try talking to fifty people and only get one response because someone felt obliged. Sure, that is awkward, but that's not the problem. Seeing those other 49 joke and laugh as a reminder of what you won't experience is what hurts.
If that happens then it is time to seek acceptance with a different group. Speaking from personal experience I only really have maybe 3-4 people outside of my family I would regard as friends and actually worry about what they think. Don't worry about what 50 people say. (easier said than done, I know) Find a few people you really care about and who care about you and worry about what they say. Spend your time with them. If you find a social situation awkward, ask those few close people for help and listen to what they say.
If you worry about the 50 saying rude things then you are giving them power over you. I know from personal experience it isn't easy but ultimately you have to decide that their opinion doesn't matter to you and move on. If you did something which was embarrassing or socially awkward, acknowledge it, own it and move on. We all do it and we all get laughed at when we do it. No one likes to be embarrassed or worse, excluded. Sometimes the problem comes when we take ourselves too seriously. I heard Conan O'Brien once say that "comedy is throwing out your dignity and hoping that you get it back". Don't hold on so tightly to your dignity and you might find that some of those people are laughing with you instead of at you.
The problem is that you stop being social with those who need it the most - those you won't find on Facebook.
Someone who has that much difficulty being social won't be found outside of Facebook either. If someone is interested in being social they will find a way to do it - with or without Facebook. Believe it or not it's 100% possible to have a social life without using Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, email, instant messaging or even... gasp, the internet.
So Facebook will be around for a long time to come and people like me who know there's better alternatives will still be forced to use it.
Huh? Unless you are in the unlikely circumstance where your employer requires you to use Facebook as part of your job, no one is forced to use Facebook. I don't have an account and live quite happily without Facebook. In fact I cannot see any real fit for it in my life - it just has nothing to offer me that I need or want. I'm not denying that Facebook can be useful/fun for many people but it is highly overrated in terms of it being necessary.
Until you have a cost for the full cycle of nuclear, including disposal of waste fuel, plant and equipment, refinery dross that can actually, reliably be executed, you cannot claim that nuclear is "economical" at all because you don't know what it costs at all.
That goes for almost any form of power generation. You are not quite correct though as the total costs can be calculated to a reasonable approximation. (I'm actually a cost accountant in my day job) Any forward looking economic analysis is going to have a significant amount of uncertainty to it but it's by no means impossible to work out probabilistic costs. The entire business of insurance underwriting does this.
That said, the economic costs that we do presently pay (discovery, refining, generation, delivery, and a portion of disposal) dictate that nuclear and fossil fuels are going to be vital and cheap (compared to the alternatives) for the foreseeable future. We subsidize technologies like solar so that they can scale and develop sufficiently to be cost competitive. Without such subsidies it is probable they would not be developed at all, or at best much slower. But we do not presently possess any technology that will come to market in the next three decades (baring a Nobel prize worthy breakthrough) that will push fission and fossil fuels out of the picture.
Apparently by your definition economical nuclear power is science fiction too.
In a sense it is. Same with fossil fuels. We're not realizing the total cost of these power sources in our electric bills. There is an economic impact to all that pollution. There is no question fission can provide very large scale base load power. The economic case for nuclear fission is marginal largely due to the liability issue but not generally due to the operational costs. Nuclear, like fossil fuels, presently can be delivered for competitive (though as you point out not all inclusive) amounts of money. For that matter hydro costs aren't typically all inclusive either - it's cheap where it is available but no one usually considers the full lifetime costs of large scale dams when pricing.
But your tendency to ignore both hydro and geothermal is annoying. Neither of those things is science fiction.
Stop wasting time being annoyed and read *everything* I wrote. I said " The only conceivable replacements are currently either science fiction or cannot economically scale to sufficient levels". Note the last bit about scaling economically. That bit applies to geothermal and hydro for most of us.
Both have been around for a long time and neither provides more than single digit percentages of our energy. Even if we damed every river in the world (a very stupid idea and very environmentally damaging), it still would not replace fossil/nuclear. Geothermal is not available in sufficient quantities in much of the world. It's great if you live in Iceland or near some active volcano but most of us do not. Both are useful power sources with some real advantages but they aren't going to be more than relatively small pieces of the puzzle for most of us.
Speaking for myself, I do not live in an area where geothermal power is economically practical, and all the rivers that can/should be damed near me already have been. I have about 20 dams within a 10 mile radius of my house. I'm already getting as much base load from those sources as I'm going to get without some technological miracle and what I get is far less than 10% of my power.
After 50 years of neutron bombardment, even the concrete and steel of the containment is radioactive. What are you going to do with THAT? Bury an entire nuclear reactor in hard steel containers in the desert? What is that going to cost?
A lot. So will disposing of all the waste from fossil fuels (including carbon). There is no free lunch here. Any energy solution will be expensive if you include all of the costs including disposal of waste products. Right now we are simply living out the Tragedy of the Commons and praying that things won't turn out horribly. I'm not optimistic about that plan.
If they want us to respect their engineering, they have to think about these obvious details before they break ground on a plant. If your plan is to "wing it" I don't want you building a nuclear plant in my area.
I would say the same about a coal plant. You have any idea how many people die each year from pollution from fossil fuels? It's not trivial. So (literally) pick your poison. Would you rather die from an unlikely but serious radiation spill or a steady stream of particulate and gas pollution. Right now you only have the two choices in most parts of the world.
It also has no plan to dispose of the radioactive waste created - not just the fuel, all reactors create many tons of radioactive steel or concrete also.
For that matter fossil fuels have no plans to dispose of much of the waste they create either. We simply dump fossil fuel waste into the environment and pray that the consequences aren't horrible. If you think nuclear creates a lot of waste, fossil fuels create MUCH more. The only difference is that the fossil fuel waste is generally less acutely toxic but it is potentially more damaging in the long run.
The point is that none of our current base load options are good ones. Nuclear fission and fossil fuels all come with huge and currently intractable problems. The only conceivable replacements are currently either science fiction or cannot economically scale to sufficient levels.
None of which are available in sufficient quantities for most of the places where we need them. Hydro comes with a very significant environmental price tag, geothermal is only reasonable in select places for reasonable amounts of money (like Iceland), and tidal requires tides/waves, is (usually) not constant, AND hasn't been sufficiently developed. All three have geographical restrictions. To use them remotely also comes with the problem of transmission losses which has not been adequately solved either. Each of those are useful and have benefits but there is no evidence that they can be economically scaled sufficiently to provide more than a fraction of what we currently get from fossil/nuclear. It wasn't an accident that I didn't mention them before. They simply can supplement the base but no more than that.
Also note that hydro has the benefit of being able to quickly increase generation to allow for peaks in demand, and also to story energy cheaply.
Hydro also requires a river of large size, causes significant environmental problems, and cannot reasonably be scaled sufficiently to replace fossil/nuclear. It also is susceptible to climate change and drought. Hydro does have significant benefits too (some of which you've pointed out) but it's at most a small part of the solution.
Unless/until we can develop some form of industrial scale fusion, any of the base load options (nuclear, gas, coal, oil) are going to be necessary and will come with a serious environmental price tag attached. Solar and wind need to be developed and widely used but absent some miracles in battery technology and/or transmission losses (high temp superconductors) they will have limits.
If Germany wants to use fossil fuels instead of nuclear that is their prerogative but they are simply trading one problem for another one, possibly worse than the original. I don't really understand what they think they will accomplish other than to mollify people who are (reasonably or unreasonably) terrified of nuclear fission.
Upon getting a job with a company, employee gets a set amount of employee stock.
Exactly what do you define as "employee stock"? How does it differ from common or preferred stock? How is it valued, what are the terms of holding, under what circumstances can it be sold or transferred, what is its liquidation preference, etc.
No bonus are given. Instead, dividends are paid to employees or (employees AND common stock).
A dividend paid to an employee is a bonus. Call it whatever you like but the result is the same.
With this approach, all have a common interest in seeing the company make the most money possible over a long term.
Hah! You think that cannot be gamed for short term interests? All it takes is for the board to declare a special dividend. You are talking about problems of agency and those are not easy problems to solve. I seriously doubt you can devise an incentive scheme that cannot be gamed by someone determined to do so.
With your approach, executives have a strong incentive to play the stock market game, instead of focusing on the company's long term gains.
The job of executives is to increase the value of the shareholders investment. If the shareholders desire short term gains then that is the failure of the shareholders, not the executive they hired to deliver those short term gains. If the shareholders (the owners of the company) desire longer term gains, they have the ability to direct the company officers to take a longer term perspective.
I think it's that "business" folk in general are shit. They're great at fiddling spreadsheets, and ensuring they get awesome payouts for the most random reasons, and they're great at acquiring companies, ripping them to shreds and making headlines that give investors hardons.
Sterotypes are easy. If you think "ensuring they get awesome payouts" is an easy thing to do, why aren't you doing it? Fact is that actually starting, running or turning around a business is hard. VERY hard. If you think that "fiddling spreadsheets" is all it takes, you pretty much are admitting you are clueless about how to buy, own, operate, start or sell a business.
The reason original founders do well isn't because they have a stake in the company...
Actually founders of business very rarely continue to operate the business once it grows to a significant size. The skill set to start a bootstrap operation and the skill set to run a mid to large sized company are completely different. It is exceedingly rare to find someone like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs who manages to make that transition. Once the company gets large enough to have outside investors it is fairly normal for the founder to step aside or even step away because they quickly get out of their depth. The Google founders hired Schmidt precisely because they knew they did not have the necessary experience or skill set needed to run a large and fast growing company.
This is why Google dumped Schmidt and handed things back to Larry, because Schmidt is a businessman. He's great at lobbying politicians and so forth, but creating worthwhile and innovative new products? That's not really Schmidt's area of expertise.
It's not Larry's demonstrated area of expertise either. If it was he'd still be doing engineering. Someone else is making the products. The CEO job is to look at the bigger picture. They make major decisions but they don't create any products. Even Steve Jobs doesn't create the products, he provides feedback and direction but someone else creates the "worthwhile and innovative new products". The only reason Google could hand the job back to Larry is because he's been able to learn from Schmidt for the past decade up close about what it takes to run a company the size of Google. They don't teach that at Stanford, even in the business school. Whether Larry will do well or will make a hash of it remains to be seen.
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BIOS has a LOT of limitations. >2TB hard drives, network boot, disk controllers, GPU's, IPMI, ... everything has to subvert the BIOS in some way which makes it mightily slow. My iMac boots with Lion in 7 seconds. My Linux machine takes 15 seconds just getting to Grub, my servers take up to 45 seconds to get to the boot loader.
All of the things you mentioned above are _positive_ things, in that you would have to be crazy to use the bios for anything other than loading the os and getting the hell out.
How exactly is a longer boot time and slow operation that needs to be circumvented a "positive" thing? The mere fact that you can work around the BIOS does not make it good.
A lot of small businesses are either simple proprietorships/partnerships or LLCs, for which the profits are taxed as an addition to personal income.
As opposed to C-Corps where they are taxed at BOTH the personal level and on the profits of the business. Essentially double dipping by the government. S-Corps and LLCs pay less tax overall in most cases.
Proprietors and partners will pay these taxes from the cash on hand of the business, meaning that the business has fewer resources to expand and hire more employees.
All businesses pay for taxes with the cash of the business and that isn't unique to smaller businesses. Most small businesses do not have profits in excess of $1 million. If they do have profits in excess of $1 million, I'm happy for them but then they *should* expect a big tax bill and can damn well afford it.
Nobody is going to invade the US, without coming home to a glass parking lot anyway, and all that money is just thrown down a hole
America doesn't have 12 aircraft carriers because they are worried about invasion. They have them for force projection. They allow the US to influence behavior through the implied threat (sometimes carried out) of military force. Parking an aircraft carrier off the coast of a country tends to get the attention of anyone nearby.
I agree that the US spends far too much on its military. I'm merely pointing out that it isn't done strictly for defense.
If American Express and Visa can mine transaction data and put a stop order on credit cards when you unexpectedly buy gas out of state, it seems like there could be patterns to watch for when the amounts are in the billions, too.
Apples to oranges in a lot of cases. Credit card transactions have huge volume, are fairly similar, and its relatively easy to see if someone is making a purchase that is unusual for them. There is a lot of data to compare against. Investment bankers sometimes do routine trades but they also invest in all sorts of complicated ways that aren't routine and that really can't be evaluated for statistical anomalies. Not to say they shouldn't use IT to track what they are doing but it is not nearly as easy as the glib summary makes it sound. There are lots of very effective controls used in the financial world that aren't based in IT.
That said, the real responsibility falls to management and especially to the risk management folks at the bank. It may not have been an IT problem but there still should have been controls in place to ensure this sort of thing doesn't happen.
First, it won't form a monopoly. There will be 2 other major carriers besides AT&T.
An oligopoly is hardly much better. Oligopolies have a reliably tendency to act a lot like monopolies. Each of the firms is well aware of the actions of the others and while they will compete, in general prices will generally be higher and the firms will retain more profits. If you want to see this in action look at the pricing of text messaging. The cost of it to the carriers is a good approximation of zero and yet they are able to charge huge margins on it. In a competitive marketplace this should be impossible but instead we have an oligopoly where each of the carriers is smart enough to not rock the boat on text message pricing. Technically it's not collusion but the net effect is identical.
Furthermore, one of those other major carriers (Sprint) is limping along and is very likely to be absorbed by someone else. I really would be surprised if they were around in another 10 years. I figure they'll either be bought by Verizon or sell their assets to some other players. Wouldn't entirely shock me to see Apple or Google or even Microsoft (maybe all three even) buy Sprint's data network though that is a rather remote possibility.
I shouldn't feed the trolls but...
But the reality is that in the market that is promoted with all this inflation and destruction of investment and savings, there are no investors...
Really? There were approximately 2 billion shares traded on the New York Stock exchange today. No investors? Really?
There should not be any government protections to people, who are investors except that contract law needs to be upheld by courts
100% of the point of corporations is to protect investors from liability due to the actions of the corporation in order to encourage them to utilize their capital in productive ways. That is THE fundamental feature of a corporation. Without such liability protection the only organizations that can realistically raise substantial amounts of capital are sovereign nations and governmental bodies. Basically you are saying that we should do away with the entire modern economy and go back to something vaguely akin to feudalism.
Can investors sue the Federal reserve for DESTROYING their US dollar denominated savings and investments?
No. That is a stupid question with an unsubstantiated premise and no evidentiary support.
After all, the US federal reserve is causing money destruction that is causing the federal reserve notes to lose over 10% of value per year.
Compared to what? Currency only has value in relation to something else so what is the something else you are comparing to?
Invention happened BEFORE patents existed.
Very inefficiently in capital intensive industries. If you have a product that is manpower intensive, patents won't matter. Before patents most industry was in agriculture which (at the time) was not a capital intensive industry. If you have a capital intensive product (which describes most things we'd call technology these days) invention is very difficult because the incentive to invest is seriously impacted by the free rider problem. You simply aren't going to invest billions in research if someone else gets most of the benefit.
Economic incentives exist without patents.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. You will note that countries without strong patent laws and a justice system to go with it tend to be quite unable to develop capital intensive industries. India has a drug industry but for the longest time you could only patent a process, not a product. As a result India developed very few novel drugs and instead only could produce copies of existing drugs. The lack of effective patent protection killed any financial incentive to invest in R&D for that industry.
Inventors just keep things much more secret than before to hold on to it longer; which is probably more effective than any patent China just ignores after reading the publicly published details-- not even that hard, they make it already so they just take of your brand name and sell another one from the same factory.
Which depresses profit margins, slows invention and makes people unwilling to invest. I've been to China. I've had things manufactured there. Companies are VERY hesitant to take any sensitive intellectual property there because of the free rider problem. It is very hard to make the case to invest large amounts of capital if anyone can just copy your invention freely at a fraction of the cost.
If you do something innovative, the most you can hope for is to sell your company to a bigger player... you have next to no chance of actually becoming big yourself
Complete nonsense. It is pretty clear you aren't an entrepreneur. Yes it is hard to grow from a small company to a bigger one but it happens every single day. Large companies have advantages but new smaller companies push them out of the way all the time. There is only one company in the Dow Jones index that was there 100 years ago (GE) and in another 100 years the list will likely change completely again. If you've got something genuinely valuable it isn't especially difficult to get capital to grow the business regardless of size. Most patents are not actually very valuable and thus will not attract capital. Companies like IBM have huge patent portfolios but relatively few of those patents are actually worth much.
Innovation alone is not sufficient either. A better mousetrap without a well executed business surrounding it will accomplish nothing. Running a business effectively is very difficult. There are lots of "innovations" that did not succeed for reasons other than getting crushed by a larger competitor. In fact many companies manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory due to their incompetence at business.
Furthermore you talk about selling a small company or its assets to a bigger company like that is a bad thing. Lots of companies are started with that exact end in mind. The point is to make money - if you build a business that is valuable enough that someone wants to buy it then you have succeeded.
This critic argues that the bill fails to address the most important problem in patent law: that it still exists!
That is indeed unfortunate but until you can solve the even bigger problem of the free rider problem then a well designed patent regime remains better than no patent regime. Patents may slow invention but the free rider problem can halt invention entirely. There is no point in investing lots of money developing a technology that can be copied much more cheaply by someone who doesn't have to pay your R&D costs.
You can argue (and I will probably agree) that our current patent system is rather broken. That is not the same thing as making a credible argument that it should disappear.
In order to actually be running the robot will have to actually leave the ground between steps. Otherwise it is walking. So is it going to walk the course or run the course?
Then you need a better way to do the whitelisting :)
Having no whitelist at all is easier and cheaper than any whitelist. :-) Seriously, a whitelist is costly in terms of time, equipment and payroll. Absent some huge liability concern or legal requirement, I cannot fathom any reason why any company would bother. The return on investment is horrendous. It's much cheaper and easier to log usage, spot check occasionally and warn/fire any abusers.
You tell squidGuard which categories to block based upon your business needs, and squidGuard does the rest. You can even add rules that allow more liberal policies at certain times of the day (after hours, weekends, lunch time, etc.) and you can add rules that whitelist certain web sites in a category that you want blocked (for example, we block "chat" which includes /., but we explicitly allow ./).
I'm being pedantic but that is a blacklist, not a whitelist.
By having a community-maintained block list and blocking by category rather than individual domain or URL, the overhead associated with whitelisting goes way, way down.
And is utterly useless because any community other than my actual place of employment cannot possibly know what domains or URLs or other services we will need to use. Sure, some are easy to figure out but I have NEVER seen a filter that actually gets it right. The number of false positives and false negatives is guaranteed to be outrageously high. Furthermore I have to invest money in a equipment to host the software and personnel to maintain and monitor it. It's a complicated, expensive solution that I can solve much easier with two words: "You're fired".
I'm not sure that blocking Facebook/Twitter does a whole lot for the company... personally I think it hurts more than it helps. The reason is that quite a few people these days have some sort of mobile that allows them to access those sites anyway.
That's fine if they do that because then they aren't using the company network. If it becomes a problem then you fire them for goofing off at work. This is a people problem, not a technology problem. Honestly companies generally don't care if people do a *little bit* of personal stuff during their day just so long as they don't cause any problems and get their work done. There are exceptions where companies need to bring down the technological hammer but these are fairly rare.
Frankly if someone is spending to much time goofing off then it is probably best that they "succeed elsewhere".
I'm a normal person with the choice of buying an Android or Windows tablet, am I going to buy the one that plays Flash or the one that doesn't?
If you are a "normal person" you'll buy an iPad so apparently the answer is that you'll buy the one that doesn't.
Business shouldn't do blacklisting. They should do whitelisting (everything is forbidden, you only allow specifics).
That presumes two things. 1) that the overhead of whitelisting is not prohibitive and 2) That your users have rather specific and unchanging needs. Speaking for our business, the overhead of whitelisting would be incredibly burdensome. We deal with many vendors and have to research topics all the time. There is no reasonable way to know in advance exactly which websites we will need to visit. Furthermore it requires a significant investment of time which could be better spend elsewhere.
The best alternative is to block specific problem websites (Facebook, Twitter, etc for example) and only allow access to those via a whitelist. Keep logs of network access in case further problems arise. If someone is found to be ignoring company policies you can warn them or fire them and make an example out of them. You can solve 99% of the problem with quite a lot less work.
Try curling up into a ball, or leaving with tears on your face over being excluded by people who don't even realize it, and you are closer.
Everyone feels this way sometimes. Seriously, everyone. We're social animals and we generally care about being accepted by others even when it should not matter. Any guy who has ever tried to ask a girl out of a date knows that it can be terrifying, even if you are normally loaded with self confidence. And if you get turned down it can really really hard. People fear public speaking basically out of fear of rejection. Being rejected or turn down for a job, a friendship, or even just a friendly conversation is depressing and hurts in a very real way. I myself am naturally a relatively shy person who has to work hard to maintain social connections. It's not easy.
The good news is that there are over 6 BILLION people in this world. I guarantee you that there are people out there who will be interested in you for who you are. You don't have to like everyone and you don't have to be liked by everyone. Most people in this world are just like you, trying to find a few people who they fit in with and can be accepted by.
If that isn't enough there are professional counselors out there who can help. There are anxiety and other disorders that are medical and can be treated. Social behavior can be coached if you find it difficult. None of this is anything to feel ashamed about.
Try talking to fifty people and only get one response because someone felt obliged. Sure, that is awkward, but that's not the problem. Seeing those other 49 joke and laugh as a reminder of what you won't experience is what hurts.
If that happens then it is time to seek acceptance with a different group. Speaking from personal experience I only really have maybe 3-4 people outside of my family I would regard as friends and actually worry about what they think. Don't worry about what 50 people say. (easier said than done, I know) Find a few people you really care about and who care about you and worry about what they say. Spend your time with them. If you find a social situation awkward, ask those few close people for help and listen to what they say.
If you worry about the 50 saying rude things then you are giving them power over you. I know from personal experience it isn't easy but ultimately you have to decide that their opinion doesn't matter to you and move on. If you did something which was embarrassing or socially awkward, acknowledge it, own it and move on. We all do it and we all get laughed at when we do it. No one likes to be embarrassed or worse, excluded. Sometimes the problem comes when we take ourselves too seriously. I heard Conan O'Brien once say that "comedy is throwing out your dignity and hoping that you get it back". Don't hold on so tightly to your dignity and you might find that some of those people are laughing with you instead of at you.
Good luck
The problem is that you stop being social with those who need it the most - those you won't find on Facebook.
Someone who has that much difficulty being social won't be found outside of Facebook either. If someone is interested in being social they will find a way to do it - with or without Facebook. Believe it or not it's 100% possible to have a social life without using Facebook, Twitter, text messaging, email, instant messaging or even... gasp, the internet.
So Facebook will be around for a long time to come and people like me who know there's better alternatives will still be forced to use it.
Huh? Unless you are in the unlikely circumstance where your employer requires you to use Facebook as part of your job, no one is forced to use Facebook. I don't have an account and live quite happily without Facebook. In fact I cannot see any real fit for it in my life - it just has nothing to offer me that I need or want. I'm not denying that Facebook can be useful/fun for many people but it is highly overrated in terms of it being necessary.
Until you have a cost for the full cycle of nuclear, including disposal of waste fuel, plant and equipment, refinery dross that can actually, reliably be executed, you cannot claim that nuclear is "economical" at all because you don't know what it costs at all.
That goes for almost any form of power generation. You are not quite correct though as the total costs can be calculated to a reasonable approximation. (I'm actually a cost accountant in my day job) Any forward looking economic analysis is going to have a significant amount of uncertainty to it but it's by no means impossible to work out probabilistic costs. The entire business of insurance underwriting does this.
That said, the economic costs that we do presently pay (discovery, refining, generation, delivery, and a portion of disposal) dictate that nuclear and fossil fuels are going to be vital and cheap (compared to the alternatives) for the foreseeable future. We subsidize technologies like solar so that they can scale and develop sufficiently to be cost competitive. Without such subsidies it is probable they would not be developed at all, or at best much slower. But we do not presently possess any technology that will come to market in the next three decades (baring a Nobel prize worthy breakthrough) that will push fission and fossil fuels out of the picture.
Apparently by your definition economical nuclear power is science fiction too.
In a sense it is. Same with fossil fuels. We're not realizing the total cost of these power sources in our electric bills. There is an economic impact to all that pollution. There is no question fission can provide very large scale base load power. The economic case for nuclear fission is marginal largely due to the liability issue but not generally due to the operational costs. Nuclear, like fossil fuels, presently can be delivered for competitive (though as you point out not all inclusive) amounts of money. For that matter hydro costs aren't typically all inclusive either - it's cheap where it is available but no one usually considers the full lifetime costs of large scale dams when pricing.
But your tendency to ignore both hydro and geothermal is annoying. Neither of those things is science fiction.
Stop wasting time being annoyed and read *everything* I wrote. I said " The only conceivable replacements are currently either science fiction or cannot economically scale to sufficient levels". Note the last bit about scaling economically. That bit applies to geothermal and hydro for most of us.
Both have been around for a long time and neither provides more than single digit percentages of our energy. Even if we damed every river in the world (a very stupid idea and very environmentally damaging), it still would not replace fossil/nuclear. Geothermal is not available in sufficient quantities in much of the world. It's great if you live in Iceland or near some active volcano but most of us do not. Both are useful power sources with some real advantages but they aren't going to be more than relatively small pieces of the puzzle for most of us.
Speaking for myself, I do not live in an area where geothermal power is economically practical, and all the rivers that can/should be damed near me already have been. I have about 20 dams within a 10 mile radius of my house. I'm already getting as much base load from those sources as I'm going to get without some technological miracle and what I get is far less than 10% of my power.
After 50 years of neutron bombardment, even the concrete and steel of the containment is radioactive. What are you going to do with THAT? Bury an entire nuclear reactor in hard steel containers in the desert? What is that going to cost?
A lot. So will disposing of all the waste from fossil fuels (including carbon). There is no free lunch here. Any energy solution will be expensive if you include all of the costs including disposal of waste products. Right now we are simply living out the Tragedy of the Commons and praying that things won't turn out horribly. I'm not optimistic about that plan.
If they want us to respect their engineering, they have to think about these obvious details before they break ground on a plant. If your plan is to "wing it" I don't want you building a nuclear plant in my area.
I would say the same about a coal plant. You have any idea how many people die each year from pollution from fossil fuels? It's not trivial. So (literally) pick your poison. Would you rather die from an unlikely but serious radiation spill or a steady stream of particulate and gas pollution. Right now you only have the two choices in most parts of the world.
It also has no plan to dispose of the radioactive waste created - not just the fuel, all reactors create many tons of radioactive steel or concrete also.
For that matter fossil fuels have no plans to dispose of much of the waste they create either. We simply dump fossil fuel waste into the environment and pray that the consequences aren't horrible. If you think nuclear creates a lot of waste, fossil fuels create MUCH more. The only difference is that the fossil fuel waste is generally less acutely toxic but it is potentially more damaging in the long run.
The point is that none of our current base load options are good ones. Nuclear fission and fossil fuels all come with huge and currently intractable problems. The only conceivable replacements are currently either science fiction or cannot economically scale to sufficient levels.
hydro, geothermal, tidal...
None of which are available in sufficient quantities for most of the places where we need them. Hydro comes with a very significant environmental price tag, geothermal is only reasonable in select places for reasonable amounts of money (like Iceland), and tidal requires tides/waves, is (usually) not constant, AND hasn't been sufficiently developed. All three have geographical restrictions. To use them remotely also comes with the problem of transmission losses which has not been adequately solved either. Each of those are useful and have benefits but there is no evidence that they can be economically scaled sufficiently to provide more than a fraction of what we currently get from fossil/nuclear. It wasn't an accident that I didn't mention them before. They simply can supplement the base but no more than that.
Also note that hydro has the benefit of being able to quickly increase generation to allow for peaks in demand, and also to story energy cheaply.
Hydro also requires a river of large size, causes significant environmental problems, and cannot reasonably be scaled sufficiently to replace fossil/nuclear. It also is susceptible to climate change and drought. Hydro does have significant benefits too (some of which you've pointed out) but it's at most a small part of the solution.
Unless/until we can develop some form of industrial scale fusion, any of the base load options (nuclear, gas, coal, oil) are going to be necessary and will come with a serious environmental price tag attached. Solar and wind need to be developed and widely used but absent some miracles in battery technology and/or transmission losses (high temp superconductors) they will have limits.
If Germany wants to use fossil fuels instead of nuclear that is their prerogative but they are simply trading one problem for another one, possibly worse than the original. I don't really understand what they think they will accomplish other than to mollify people who are (reasonably or unreasonably) terrified of nuclear fission.
Upon getting a job with a company, employee gets a set amount of employee stock.
Exactly what do you define as "employee stock"? How does it differ from common or preferred stock? How is it valued, what are the terms of holding, under what circumstances can it be sold or transferred, what is its liquidation preference, etc.
No bonus are given. Instead, dividends are paid to employees or (employees AND common stock).
A dividend paid to an employee is a bonus. Call it whatever you like but the result is the same.
With this approach, all have a common interest in seeing the company make the most money possible over a long term.
Hah! You think that cannot be gamed for short term interests? All it takes is for the board to declare a special dividend. You are talking about problems of agency and those are not easy problems to solve. I seriously doubt you can devise an incentive scheme that cannot be gamed by someone determined to do so.
With your approach, executives have a strong incentive to play the stock market game, instead of focusing on the company's long term gains.
The job of executives is to increase the value of the shareholders investment. If the shareholders desire short term gains then that is the failure of the shareholders, not the executive they hired to deliver those short term gains. If the shareholders (the owners of the company) desire longer term gains, they have the ability to direct the company officers to take a longer term perspective.
I think it's that "business" folk in general are shit. They're great at fiddling spreadsheets, and ensuring they get awesome payouts for the most random reasons, and they're great at acquiring companies, ripping them to shreds and making headlines that give investors hardons.
Sterotypes are easy. If you think "ensuring they get awesome payouts" is an easy thing to do, why aren't you doing it? Fact is that actually starting, running or turning around a business is hard. VERY hard. If you think that "fiddling spreadsheets" is all it takes, you pretty much are admitting you are clueless about how to buy, own, operate, start or sell a business.
The reason original founders do well isn't because they have a stake in the company...
Actually founders of business very rarely continue to operate the business once it grows to a significant size. The skill set to start a bootstrap operation and the skill set to run a mid to large sized company are completely different. It is exceedingly rare to find someone like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs who manages to make that transition. Once the company gets large enough to have outside investors it is fairly normal for the founder to step aside or even step away because they quickly get out of their depth. The Google founders hired Schmidt precisely because they knew they did not have the necessary experience or skill set needed to run a large and fast growing company.
This is why Google dumped Schmidt and handed things back to Larry, because Schmidt is a businessman. He's great at lobbying politicians and so forth, but creating worthwhile and innovative new products? That's not really Schmidt's area of expertise.
It's not Larry's demonstrated area of expertise either. If it was he'd still be doing engineering. Someone else is making the products. The CEO job is to look at the bigger picture. They make major decisions but they don't create any products. Even Steve Jobs doesn't create the products, he provides feedback and direction but someone else creates the "worthwhile and innovative new products". The only reason Google could hand the job back to Larry is because he's been able to learn from Schmidt for the past decade up close about what it takes to run a company the size of Google. They don't teach that at Stanford, even in the business school. Whether Larry will do well or will make a hash of it remains to be seen.