most of his research to date has been with cobalt, phosporus, tungstun and rhodium. Not sure where all this stuff comes from, but hopefully it is widespread enough won't turn into another middle east problem.
I can take a book on the subway and do the same thing.
Of course you can take a book however you cannot take a whole library with you. You can't play a game on your book. You can't read email on your book. You can't view a spreadsheet on your book. You can't surf the web on your book. You can't listen to music on your book. You can't watch a movie on your book.
There is nothing wrong with a book but let's not pretend you are comparing apples to apples here.
What is the one thing you can do on a tablet and not on a laptop?
You are drawing a meaningless distinction. Both are computers and it is possible to do the same tasks on each but not in the same way. They are used in different ways because the interface is different. A tablet is more comfortable for certain tasks and a laptop is more comfortable for others. It is not that you can't do something on one that the other can't do. The difference is in what is comfortable and efficient to do on each. I'd much rather read a book on a tablet and do a spreadsheet on a laptop but it's quite possible to do both on either device. Choose the best tool for the job at hand.
I was just saying that in my own humble opinion, they are too expensive for what they are.
Depends on your specific needs. Very well might be true for you. However the price will come down. Laptops have had far more time to develop economies of scale. This will happen to tablets in due time but it will not be immediate.
The PROBLEM with electric cars today isn't really the range, it's the price.
No the problem is range more than cost. I could afford to buy a Nissan Leaf but I would still need to either buy or rent another vehicle for longer trips. It's not remotely unusual for me to drive more than 150 miles in a single day. Not every day but often enough - at least 2X per week. (I drive about 30-40K miles/year) Current electric cars are really cool but they are only usable within a fairly short radius (30-60 miles). Now they have other charms (quiet, efficient, etc) which I definitely like but range is a BIG problem if you actually drive a lot. Don't get me wrong, I'd be first in line for a electric car that fit my needs but their battery packs just have a log ways to go yet. Absent some major advances in batteries and/or battery replacement technology, I just don't see electric cars being more than niche products. I'd buy a Tesla Roadster but only as a second vehicle.
The problem with HYBRIDS is cost. My daily driver is a pickup and the only hybrid pickup I'm aware of (Chevy Silverado) costs $20,000 more than my current ride with similar features. All for only 4-5mpg improvement. Even with tax breaks that's just way too expensive. I think hybrids are the future of automobiles but economies of scale need to kick in and bring the cost down.
If they were competing, they'd be trying to gain market share at the expense of the other players.
Not necessarily true. It's easy to show situations where gains in market share result in losses of profits. Happens with the car companies all the time. The fiduciary duty of company is to maximize profits for the shareholders, not market share. You can gain huge amounts of market share by selling $2 for $1 but you'll be hugely unprofitable doing so.
The folks running the big telecoms are engaging in some game theory. They have little to gain from a price war and they all know it so they tacitly signal (read collude) their strategies to maintain prices at levels you'd expect from an oligopoly. They have little to fear from new market entrants and they've been playing this game with each other for quite some time. As a result prices tend to remain artificially high despite the fact that cell phone minutes are pretty much the definition of a commodity.
There really is no other rational explanation for the fact that text messaging, which costs them basically nothing, remains ridiculously expensive. These companies are purposely not competing in order to maximize profits. It may not be collusion in the smoke filled back room sense but the effect is basically the same.
Yeah, getting a person's card means that you have to manually transcribe the information on it to your phone or PC and then dispose of the card.
As opposed to weeding out that information from your PC once you realize this is a person you are never going to contact again. Thanks, I prefer to keep the size of my electronic address book manageable and cruft free. Hard enough to manage them without cluttering it up with a bunch of contact info I'll have to clean up later.
Business cards have the additional nice feature that they are FAST to exchange. I don't have to pull out my phone and spending the better part of a minute (presuming the other person knows what they are doing - longer otherwise) fiddling with it to exchange data. With a business card I can just hand them the card and keep talking rather than wasting time paying attention to a computer instead of the person I'm talking to. Your attention should be on the person, not your iPhone.
Getting contact information directly means that you get what you want, in the format that you want without any of the wasteful side-effects.
And what if what I want is their name and contact information written on a little piece of paper that takes 2 seconds to exchange so that I can decide what I want to do with the information later? To me the wasteful side effect is spending time and electricity instead of just handing over a pre-printed piece of information and moving on with business.
By sending electronic business cards. I haven't used paper business cards since the late 90s, when I could just beam my e-card via my Palm PDA (back then almost every single techie owned a Palm or compatible PDA).
There are FAR more people who aren't techies and I shudder at the thought of trying to explain to them how to beam contact information from their iPhone to some other random piece of technology.
Business cards are useful and there is no adequate replacement.
Easy - text messaging. Cost per megabyte is absolutely astronomical while the actual cost to the telecom provider is a good approximation of zero. Costs them more to bill you for the text message than they likely spend delivering it.
My vote for second most overpriced is inkjet printer ink. Costs more per ounce than human blood.
From the ludicrous stereo to the 50p light snesing diode that seems to translate to hundreds of pounds when translated into the phrase "automatic headlights", in-car tech is ripe for commoditisation.
My company makes wire harnesses and other auto electronics and I'm both the accountant and the engineer. These parts are not as cheap as you think they are, particularly when you consider the labor cost involved. A simple diode may be cheap but car companies don't buy a single diode - they buy sub-assemblies. That has to all be assembled ($$), engineered (more $$), tested (still more $$), etc.
Anywhere that you have an abstracted interface that can change, knobs and buttons don't work.
The folks at BMW disagree with you. You may or may not like their IDrive system (personally I like it) but it's designed explicitly to not require a touch screen. Reason being is that the act of moving your finger at arms length to a specific point on a screen with no tactile feedback requires a dangerous amount of attention from your eyes. You cannot help but be distracted for a scary amount of time. With the controls in the BMW you can navigate the system with much shorter spans of distraction. The quality of execution of their particular system is debatable but in principle I think they are on the right track. Touch screens as they are presently implemented have interfaces that are relatively dangerous to operate while driving.
My truck has a built in touch screen and it is difficult to navigate the menus while safely driving. Fortunately it also has some voice controls so I frequently can get around this problem. I like having it but they really needed to put more thought and research into the interface. My eyes need to be on the road as much as possible, not navigating menus on an LCD screen.
is this really the core competency of a car company?
If you are asking can car companies do software, the answer is absolutely yes. Modern cars are loaded with software and every major car company has to be good at it. HOWEVER, the car companies are not very good at the sort of software you find in consumer electronics. Their development cycles are too slow, volumes are too low and their costs are too high to play in that space.
Ford actually did something pretty smart with their Sync platform and (finally) realized that they just need to provide an interface to the stuff on your smartphone instead of trying to reinvent it themselves. (and they did try - repeatedly) Lets the consumer electronics companies do what they do well and let the car companies do what they do well. Took Ford a lot of wasted development efforts to realize that but they seem to have come to their senses.
Oh, and I'm pretty sure a company founded by Elon Musk probably will have some clue how software works.
This is just like all those articles that say that BrowserX has a javascript engine that is 15% faster than BrowserY. As an engineer that is a tiny bit interesting (only a tiny bit mind you) but as an end user I could not possibly care less. I honestly cannot feel the difference even if it is measurable. Benchmarks hold little fascination for me and are almost always irrelevant to my choice of device. A 2 second versus a 3 second load time? Sure there is a difference but not enough for me to really notice much less care. I hope they continue to improve it but I'm not about to buy a smartphone based solely on webpage loads that are just a bit faster and neither is (almost) anyone else.
Because it has value to you. People have been paying for news or information (one way or another) for a long time. Information has value and people ARE willing to pay for it. I certainly am and I suspect you are too, at least up to a point.
The problem is that it's very difficult to figure out exactly what information is valuable to specific people and even harder to place a dollar value on that information. What I value is certainly different than what you value and our willingness to pay is different. Additionally, information is an experience good. You don't actually know exactly how valuable a piece of information is to you until after you have that information and payment can't reasonably be demanded for information you already have. It also is a wasting product, meaning that its value often drops with time.
Mass news media (newspapers, tv, etc) was able to get around this by having advertisers foot the bill for much of the cost and simply presenting a broad spectrum of news to the public coupled with a distribution monopoly. They didn't have to figure out what you value specifically because they threw enough information into their product that something was likely to be of value to your.
The distribution monopoly has been broken and with it much of the economic rents the newspapers and mass media enjoyed. People will still pay for news, but the price is going to have to drop. Newspapers will no longer enjoy outsized profits. They still can be profitable, just not in their current forms and not likely with the same margins. People will pay for news but not in the same way and probably not as much.
Some Dvorak users with RSI claim that their pain became more tolerable after having switched from QWERTY.
People claim all sorts of things that are explained better by the placebo effect. This also could fall under the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. People are amazing at convincing themselves of all sorts of things.
Sorry to burst your applesauce bubble, but 512mb ram is hardly ample in 2011.
Depends entirely on the device and what you are using it for. There are plenty of devices in 2011 for which 512mb is a huge amount of RAM. Just because you can put more memory in a device doesn't mean it is needed. Comparing the iPad hardware to a desktop/laptop computer is pretty much pointless because they run very different software and are used for different (if sometimes overlapping) purposes. The fact that my desktop PC has 4GB of RAM has means absolutely nothing with regard to how much is appropriate in a tablet PC.
In the end, you know an expensive piece of tech like this should have at least double, if not quadruple that ram
Maybe you like throwing money at hardware you are never going to use but personally I'd rather it have exactly the amount I actually will use. Anything more is a waste of money and resources. That extra memory is not free. When you can actually point to a specific use for that extra memory then (and ONLY then) will I concede the point. But right now your argument is basically that because it was technologically possible to put more memory on the device they should have.
Disclosure: I don't own an iPad nor do I plan on it anytime soon.
If people need to be in the same place to work how does telecommuting work?
Poorly in most cases. Telecommuting can work in some cases but only for cases where the need to communicate is either minimal or well defined. I've telecommuted (worked from home) and I'm nowhere near as productive. Most jobs involve a significant amount of communication and it is MUCH easier to communicate in person. Emails and phone calls are great but there is no substitute for face to face communication and close proximity when collaborating on a project. There are exceptions where telecommuting works great but they are and will remain exceptions for most of us.
Difficult people are behind every project it is called pride, get over it
There is pride and there is arrogance and they are not the same thing. Being proud of what you have done doesn't give you or anyone else the right to be a jerk.
Mistrust develops because one side does all the work while the other complains about it.
Mistrust is caused by many things. Every argument has two sides and in almost every case both sides have a least some (though rarely equal) legitimacy to their arguments. People are political animals by nature and if they aren't able to talk about what they are doing AND their motivations for doing so in an efficient manner, mistrust is the inevitable result.
I've never understood why everyone gets so offended at SMS rates.
Because the cost to the telecom company is almost zero and the only way it should be staying so high is if the telecom companies are either expressly or tacitly colluding. There is no other explanation for the cost of text messaging being as high as it is when all other forms of data are constantly dropping in price. Competition should be driving the price down but that isn't happening.
You cannot begrudge a company a profit.
Sure I can, especially if that profit comes at some detrimental expense to society or myself. I definitely begrudge the profit that tobacco companies make. Just because companies exist to make a profit doesn't mean any and all behavior becomes acceptable.
Regularly. Despite what many believe about themselves, most people are shitty multi-taskers. I merely acknowledge that fact with regard to myself - I simply don't do more than one thing at a time effectively. While I may have several applications open, I normally only am working directly with one at a time unless I am transcribing data from one to another. I do have multiple monitors because it makes the occasions when I am working with multiple apps much easier but most of the time I could turn off the second monitor and never notice it missing.
Do you have a tiny monitor? I could see maximizing on a laptop with a smallish resolution, but on a 1920x1280 desktop screen the concept is ridiculous.
Not ridiculous at all. I run spreadsheets every day that use every inch of screen real estate I have and I could use more. My monitor is a 24" with 1920x1280 resolution. On my home rig where I have multiple monitors I normally keep one application maximized on each monitor. I use lots of applications that maximizing is beneficial for the way I work.
Yes but that is relatively easy to copy and relatively difficult to read. It does get read but few organizations have the equipment to do so with any amount of efficiency. Furthermore a serial number is useless without a database to compare it too. A chip could carry actual data beyond simply a serial number.
So they can already be tracked, just scan the number.
Possible in theory but not really in practice for private enterprise. OCR systems are still quite complicated and expensive. Plus having a chip in the currency allows you to do other things besides simply track where the money is without having to have access to a centralized database.
What difference does it make if it is electronic or not?
Efficiency, plain and simple. The goal is to reduce the cost of tracking. Whether the tracking is a good thing or not is another matter..
O, I don't know. Seems like 12 seconds in the microwave, or under a steam iron, or maybe thru the delicate cycle in the washer would pretty much render these inoperable.
Terrific. And then when you try to pass these inoperable bills at Walmart they'll run them by a scanner to see if they are real and then refuse to accept them as valid currency. Congratulations! You just literally threw away perfectly good money in a fit of paranoia.
I always though that the dollar bill, as opposed to just any money in the world, was made on purpose easy to counterfeit so that it would be used as the de facto worldwide currency.
Yeah, I'm sure the facts that the US economy is by far the largest economy of any single country in the world by a wide margin and the fact that most money is not printed plays no role at all in the dollar being the world's reserve currency. [/sarcasm] The US maintains about $800 billion in circulation at any given time. This amount while large is dwarfed by the amount of money in circulation that is not printed currency. The US GDP is somewhere around $14 Trillion by comparison.
I mean it's only 2 colors (green and black) and the security measures on it are ridiculous (some hair in the paper, are you serious?).
It's not two colors and hasn't been for a very long time if it ever was. Some of the security measures are easy to see so that people can easily weed out the bad quality counterfeits. Others are less obvious to weed out the better counterfeits. If you seriously believe what you are saying you have basically announced your ignorance to the world. There is no bill that can't be counterfeited. The dollar may be easier than some but it's not nearly as easy as you make it out to be. It's estimated that there are about $70 million in counterfeit US bills in circulation at any given time. Compare $70 million with $800 billion.
it indeed dissolves if you forget it in your pants while using the washing mashine
You've never actually washed a dollar have you? They are remarkably durable and are designed to withstand washing. I've accidentally washed bills on numerous occasions and they have invariably come out just fine. A little beat up but fine.
To add the superfluousness of the nobel, the irony of the 2009 recipient hosting a dinner for the man who is imprisoning the 2010 winner was lost on the populace.
A fair criticism though I don't think it was lost on anyone. My response would be: what do you want Mr. Obama to do about it? Seriously. It's not an idle or simple question and I'm not interested in unrealistic or idealistic answers. China cannot reasonably be ignored or browbeaten into releasing Liu Xiaobo from prison (not to mention other political prisoners). Our government has made their opinion on the matter clear enough but beyond that what do you seriously expect Mr. Obama to do? The relationship of the US with China is more complicated than civil rights of one man. For that matter the history of the US on civil rights is pretty bad too so it's not as if we can lecture the world without some amount of hypocrisy. One only has to look as far as Guantanamo to see where China could respond on current US policy for civil rights.
It's easy to say we shouldn't host such events with China in order to make a statement. I understand the appeal and simplicity of the logic. Nevertheless that sort of passive aggressive scolding accomplishes little and really ignores the bigger picture.
They told me if I voted for McCain these things would happen.
Yes they probably would have. It didn't much matter who became president. Whatever their differences the political realities of the US relationship with China will tend to override the specific preferences of whoever happens to be president at a given time.
When our cosmos expands, it's not expanding into some pre-existing bit of volume and taking it over, it's creating volume that didn't exist before.
To be fair, we don't actually know that. Our models tell us something like what you describe might be happening but to say our models of the universe are imperfect would be a gross understatement.
Here's a solution to the problem with the FBI. Prosecute each violation vigorously and to the fullest extent of the law.
You are asking the government to prosecute itself. Without a person at the top with a highly developed sense of morality it isn't likely to happen within the same branch of government. Even with such a person at the top, political reality may make it impossible. That's why we have separation of powers. It will ONLY happen if a different branch of government is the one who decides to press the issue. Expecting the executive branch to spank itself is simply wishful thinking most of the time. If congress or the judiciary can be prodded into action, then something might happen. Otherwise, forget it.
For what it's worth I don't expect much out of Congress either. Very easy to score "soft on crime" political points on someone who criticizes the FBI even if the FBI deserves it.
Slashdot Mirror
most of his research to date has been with cobalt, phosporus, tungstun and rhodium. Not sure where all this stuff comes from, but hopefully it is widespread enough won't turn into another middle east problem.
Production locations for:
Cobalt
Phosphorus
Tungsten
Rhodium
Not looking good...
I can take a book on the subway and do the same thing.
Of course you can take a book however you cannot take a whole library with you. You can't play a game on your book. You can't read email on your book. You can't view a spreadsheet on your book. You can't surf the web on your book. You can't listen to music on your book. You can't watch a movie on your book.
There is nothing wrong with a book but let's not pretend you are comparing apples to apples here.
What is the one thing you can do on a tablet and not on a laptop?
You are drawing a meaningless distinction. Both are computers and it is possible to do the same tasks on each but not in the same way. They are used in different ways because the interface is different. A tablet is more comfortable for certain tasks and a laptop is more comfortable for others. It is not that you can't do something on one that the other can't do. The difference is in what is comfortable and efficient to do on each. I'd much rather read a book on a tablet and do a spreadsheet on a laptop but it's quite possible to do both on either device. Choose the best tool for the job at hand.
I was just saying that in my own humble opinion, they are too expensive for what they are.
Depends on your specific needs. Very well might be true for you. However the price will come down. Laptops have had far more time to develop economies of scale. This will happen to tablets in due time but it will not be immediate.
The PROBLEM with electric cars today isn't really the range, it's the price.
No the problem is range more than cost. I could afford to buy a Nissan Leaf but I would still need to either buy or rent another vehicle for longer trips. It's not remotely unusual for me to drive more than 150 miles in a single day. Not every day but often enough - at least 2X per week. (I drive about 30-40K miles/year) Current electric cars are really cool but they are only usable within a fairly short radius (30-60 miles). Now they have other charms (quiet, efficient, etc) which I definitely like but range is a BIG problem if you actually drive a lot. Don't get me wrong, I'd be first in line for a electric car that fit my needs but their battery packs just have a log ways to go yet. Absent some major advances in batteries and/or battery replacement technology, I just don't see electric cars being more than niche products. I'd buy a Tesla Roadster but only as a second vehicle.
The problem with HYBRIDS is cost. My daily driver is a pickup and the only hybrid pickup I'm aware of (Chevy Silverado) costs $20,000 more than my current ride with similar features. All for only 4-5mpg improvement. Even with tax breaks that's just way too expensive. I think hybrids are the future of automobiles but economies of scale need to kick in and bring the cost down.
If they were competing, they'd be trying to gain market share at the expense of the other players.
Not necessarily true. It's easy to show situations where gains in market share result in losses of profits. Happens with the car companies all the time. The fiduciary duty of company is to maximize profits for the shareholders, not market share. You can gain huge amounts of market share by selling $2 for $1 but you'll be hugely unprofitable doing so.
The folks running the big telecoms are engaging in some game theory. They have little to gain from a price war and they all know it so they tacitly signal (read collude) their strategies to maintain prices at levels you'd expect from an oligopoly. They have little to fear from new market entrants and they've been playing this game with each other for quite some time. As a result prices tend to remain artificially high despite the fact that cell phone minutes are pretty much the definition of a commodity.
There really is no other rational explanation for the fact that text messaging, which costs them basically nothing, remains ridiculously expensive. These companies are purposely not competing in order to maximize profits. It may not be collusion in the smoke filled back room sense but the effect is basically the same.
Yeah, getting a person's card means that you have to manually transcribe the information on it to your phone or PC and then dispose of the card.
As opposed to weeding out that information from your PC once you realize this is a person you are never going to contact again. Thanks, I prefer to keep the size of my electronic address book manageable and cruft free. Hard enough to manage them without cluttering it up with a bunch of contact info I'll have to clean up later.
Business cards have the additional nice feature that they are FAST to exchange. I don't have to pull out my phone and spending the better part of a minute (presuming the other person knows what they are doing - longer otherwise) fiddling with it to exchange data. With a business card I can just hand them the card and keep talking rather than wasting time paying attention to a computer instead of the person I'm talking to. Your attention should be on the person, not your iPhone.
Getting contact information directly means that you get what you want, in the format that you want without any of the wasteful side-effects.
And what if what I want is their name and contact information written on a little piece of paper that takes 2 seconds to exchange so that I can decide what I want to do with the information later? To me the wasteful side effect is spending time and electricity instead of just handing over a pre-printed piece of information and moving on with business.
By sending electronic business cards. I haven't used paper business cards since the late 90s, when I could just beam my e-card via my Palm PDA (back then almost every single techie owned a Palm or compatible PDA).
There are FAR more people who aren't techies and I shudder at the thought of trying to explain to them how to beam contact information from their iPhone to some other random piece of technology.
Business cards are useful and there is no adequate replacement.
the most overpriced piece of technology you use.
Easy - text messaging. Cost per megabyte is absolutely astronomical while the actual cost to the telecom provider is a good approximation of zero. Costs them more to bill you for the text message than they likely spend delivering it.
My vote for second most overpriced is inkjet printer ink. Costs more per ounce than human blood.
From the ludicrous stereo to the 50p light snesing diode that seems to translate to hundreds of pounds when translated into the phrase "automatic headlights", in-car tech is ripe for commoditisation.
My company makes wire harnesses and other auto electronics and I'm both the accountant and the engineer. These parts are not as cheap as you think they are, particularly when you consider the labor cost involved. A simple diode may be cheap but car companies don't buy a single diode - they buy sub-assemblies. That has to all be assembled ($$), engineered (more $$), tested (still more $$), etc.
Anywhere that you have an abstracted interface that can change, knobs and buttons don't work.
The folks at BMW disagree with you. You may or may not like their IDrive system (personally I like it) but it's designed explicitly to not require a touch screen. Reason being is that the act of moving your finger at arms length to a specific point on a screen with no tactile feedback requires a dangerous amount of attention from your eyes. You cannot help but be distracted for a scary amount of time. With the controls in the BMW you can navigate the system with much shorter spans of distraction. The quality of execution of their particular system is debatable but in principle I think they are on the right track. Touch screens as they are presently implemented have interfaces that are relatively dangerous to operate while driving.
My truck has a built in touch screen and it is difficult to navigate the menus while safely driving. Fortunately it also has some voice controls so I frequently can get around this problem. I like having it but they really needed to put more thought and research into the interface. My eyes need to be on the road as much as possible, not navigating menus on an LCD screen.
is this really the core competency of a car company?
If you are asking can car companies do software, the answer is absolutely yes. Modern cars are loaded with software and every major car company has to be good at it. HOWEVER, the car companies are not very good at the sort of software you find in consumer electronics. Their development cycles are too slow, volumes are too low and their costs are too high to play in that space.
Ford actually did something pretty smart with their Sync platform and (finally) realized that they just need to provide an interface to the stuff on your smartphone instead of trying to reinvent it themselves. (and they did try - repeatedly) Lets the consumer electronics companies do what they do well and let the car companies do what they do well. Took Ford a lot of wasted development efforts to realize that but they seem to have come to their senses.
Oh, and I'm pretty sure a company founded by Elon Musk probably will have some clue how software works.
This is just like all those articles that say that BrowserX has a javascript engine that is 15% faster than BrowserY. As an engineer that is a tiny bit interesting (only a tiny bit mind you) but as an end user I could not possibly care less. I honestly cannot feel the difference even if it is measurable. Benchmarks hold little fascination for me and are almost always irrelevant to my choice of device. A 2 second versus a 3 second load time? Sure there is a difference but not enough for me to really notice much less care. I hope they continue to improve it but I'm not about to buy a smartphone based solely on webpage loads that are just a bit faster and neither is (almost) anyone else.
Why would I ever want to pay for news?
Because it has value to you. People have been paying for news or information (one way or another) for a long time. Information has value and people ARE willing to pay for it. I certainly am and I suspect you are too, at least up to a point.
The problem is that it's very difficult to figure out exactly what information is valuable to specific people and even harder to place a dollar value on that information. What I value is certainly different than what you value and our willingness to pay is different. Additionally, information is an experience good. You don't actually know exactly how valuable a piece of information is to you until after you have that information and payment can't reasonably be demanded for information you already have. It also is a wasting product, meaning that its value often drops with time.
Mass news media (newspapers, tv, etc) was able to get around this by having advertisers foot the bill for much of the cost and simply presenting a broad spectrum of news to the public coupled with a distribution monopoly. They didn't have to figure out what you value specifically because they threw enough information into their product that something was likely to be of value to your.
The distribution monopoly has been broken and with it much of the economic rents the newspapers and mass media enjoyed. People will still pay for news, but the price is going to have to drop. Newspapers will no longer enjoy outsized profits. They still can be profitable, just not in their current forms and not likely with the same margins. People will pay for news but not in the same way and probably not as much.
Some Dvorak users with RSI claim that their pain became more tolerable after having switched from QWERTY.
People claim all sorts of things that are explained better by the placebo effect. This also could fall under the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc. People are amazing at convincing themselves of all sorts of things.
Managing people requires a different skill set than writing code. News at 11...
Sorry to burst your applesauce bubble, but 512mb ram is hardly ample in 2011.
Depends entirely on the device and what you are using it for. There are plenty of devices in 2011 for which 512mb is a huge amount of RAM. Just because you can put more memory in a device doesn't mean it is needed. Comparing the iPad hardware to a desktop/laptop computer is pretty much pointless because they run very different software and are used for different (if sometimes overlapping) purposes. The fact that my desktop PC has 4GB of RAM has means absolutely nothing with regard to how much is appropriate in a tablet PC.
In the end, you know an expensive piece of tech like this should have at least double, if not quadruple that ram
Maybe you like throwing money at hardware you are never going to use but personally I'd rather it have exactly the amount I actually will use. Anything more is a waste of money and resources. That extra memory is not free. When you can actually point to a specific use for that extra memory then (and ONLY then) will I concede the point. But right now your argument is basically that because it was technologically possible to put more memory on the device they should have.
Disclosure: I don't own an iPad nor do I plan on it anytime soon.
If people need to be in the same place to work how does telecommuting work?
Poorly in most cases. Telecommuting can work in some cases but only for cases where the need to communicate is either minimal or well defined. I've telecommuted (worked from home) and I'm nowhere near as productive. Most jobs involve a significant amount of communication and it is MUCH easier to communicate in person. Emails and phone calls are great but there is no substitute for face to face communication and close proximity when collaborating on a project. There are exceptions where telecommuting works great but they are and will remain exceptions for most of us.
Difficult people are behind every project it is called pride, get over it
There is pride and there is arrogance and they are not the same thing. Being proud of what you have done doesn't give you or anyone else the right to be a jerk.
Mistrust develops because one side does all the work while the other complains about it.
Mistrust is caused by many things. Every argument has two sides and in almost every case both sides have a least some (though rarely equal) legitimacy to their arguments. People are political animals by nature and if they aren't able to talk about what they are doing AND their motivations for doing so in an efficient manner, mistrust is the inevitable result.
I've never understood why everyone gets so offended at SMS rates.
Because the cost to the telecom company is almost zero and the only way it should be staying so high is if the telecom companies are either expressly or tacitly colluding. There is no other explanation for the cost of text messaging being as high as it is when all other forms of data are constantly dropping in price. Competition should be driving the price down but that isn't happening.
You cannot begrudge a company a profit.
Sure I can, especially if that profit comes at some detrimental expense to society or myself. I definitely begrudge the profit that tobacco companies make. Just because companies exist to make a profit doesn't mean any and all behavior becomes acceptable.
You only use ONE application at a time?
Regularly. Despite what many believe about themselves, most people are shitty multi-taskers. I merely acknowledge that fact with regard to myself - I simply don't do more than one thing at a time effectively. While I may have several applications open, I normally only am working directly with one at a time unless I am transcribing data from one to another. I do have multiple monitors because it makes the occasions when I am working with multiple apps much easier but most of the time I could turn off the second monitor and never notice it missing.
Do you have a tiny monitor? I could see maximizing on a laptop with a smallish resolution, but on a 1920x1280 desktop screen the concept is ridiculous.
Not ridiculous at all. I run spreadsheets every day that use every inch of screen real estate I have and I could use more. My monitor is a 24" with 1920x1280 resolution. On my home rig where I have multiple monitors I normally keep one application maximized on each monitor. I use lots of applications that maximizing is beneficial for the way I work.
Don't all bills have a unique serial number?
Yes but that is relatively easy to copy and relatively difficult to read. It does get read but few organizations have the equipment to do so with any amount of efficiency. Furthermore a serial number is useless without a database to compare it too. A chip could carry actual data beyond simply a serial number.
So they can already be tracked, just scan the number.
Possible in theory but not really in practice for private enterprise. OCR systems are still quite complicated and expensive. Plus having a chip in the currency allows you to do other things besides simply track where the money is without having to have access to a centralized database.
What difference does it make if it is electronic or not?
Efficiency, plain and simple. The goal is to reduce the cost of tracking. Whether the tracking is a good thing or not is another matter..
O, I don't know. Seems like 12 seconds in the microwave, or under a steam iron, or maybe thru the delicate cycle in the washer would pretty much render these inoperable.
Terrific. And then when you try to pass these inoperable bills at Walmart they'll run them by a scanner to see if they are real and then refuse to accept them as valid currency. Congratulations! You just literally threw away perfectly good money in a fit of paranoia.
I always though that the dollar bill, as opposed to just any money in the world, was made on purpose easy to counterfeit so that it would be used as the de facto worldwide currency.
Yeah, I'm sure the facts that the US economy is by far the largest economy of any single country in the world by a wide margin and the fact that most money is not printed plays no role at all in the dollar being the world's reserve currency. [/sarcasm] The US maintains about $800 billion in circulation at any given time. This amount while large is dwarfed by the amount of money in circulation that is not printed currency. The US GDP is somewhere around $14 Trillion by comparison.
I mean it's only 2 colors (green and black) and the security measures on it are ridiculous (some hair in the paper, are you serious?).
It's not two colors and hasn't been for a very long time if it ever was. Some of the security measures are easy to see so that people can easily weed out the bad quality counterfeits. Others are less obvious to weed out the better counterfeits. If you seriously believe what you are saying you have basically announced your ignorance to the world. There is no bill that can't be counterfeited. The dollar may be easier than some but it's not nearly as easy as you make it out to be. It's estimated that there are about $70 million in counterfeit US bills in circulation at any given time. Compare $70 million with $800 billion.
it indeed dissolves if you forget it in your pants while using the washing mashine
You've never actually washed a dollar have you? They are remarkably durable and are designed to withstand washing. I've accidentally washed bills on numerous occasions and they have invariably come out just fine. A little beat up but fine.
To add the superfluousness of the nobel, the irony of the 2009 recipient hosting a dinner for the man who is imprisoning the 2010 winner was lost on the populace.
A fair criticism though I don't think it was lost on anyone. My response would be: what do you want Mr. Obama to do about it? Seriously. It's not an idle or simple question and I'm not interested in unrealistic or idealistic answers. China cannot reasonably be ignored or browbeaten into releasing Liu Xiaobo from prison (not to mention other political prisoners). Our government has made their opinion on the matter clear enough but beyond that what do you seriously expect Mr. Obama to do? The relationship of the US with China is more complicated than civil rights of one man. For that matter the history of the US on civil rights is pretty bad too so it's not as if we can lecture the world without some amount of hypocrisy. One only has to look as far as Guantanamo to see where China could respond on current US policy for civil rights.
It's easy to say we shouldn't host such events with China in order to make a statement. I understand the appeal and simplicity of the logic. Nevertheless that sort of passive aggressive scolding accomplishes little and really ignores the bigger picture.
They told me if I voted for McCain these things would happen.
Yes they probably would have. It didn't much matter who became president. Whatever their differences the political realities of the US relationship with China will tend to override the specific preferences of whoever happens to be president at a given time.
When our cosmos expands, it's not expanding into some pre-existing bit of volume and taking it over, it's creating volume that didn't exist before.
To be fair, we don't actually know that. Our models tell us something like what you describe might be happening but to say our models of the universe are imperfect would be a gross understatement.
Here's a solution to the problem with the FBI. Prosecute each violation vigorously and to the fullest extent of the law.
You are asking the government to prosecute itself. Without a person at the top with a highly developed sense of morality it isn't likely to happen within the same branch of government. Even with such a person at the top, political reality may make it impossible. That's why we have separation of powers. It will ONLY happen if a different branch of government is the one who decides to press the issue. Expecting the executive branch to spank itself is simply wishful thinking most of the time. If congress or the judiciary can be prodded into action, then something might happen. Otherwise, forget it.
For what it's worth I don't expect much out of Congress either. Very easy to score "soft on crime" political points on someone who criticizes the FBI even if the FBI deserves it.