Seven-in-ten scientists favor building more nuclear power plants to generate electricity, while 27% are opposed.
That's the thing though. From your data over a quarter of the people who are supposedly the best informed on the subject think it is a bad idea. That is NOWHERE near a scientific consensus. Scientists, as a general rule, are not dogmatic about policy and will change their mind if the evidence supports an opposing viewpoint. The fact that 1 out of 4 educated and ostensibly well informed people who are willing to change their mind when the facts dictate doing so means that the "facts" are not clear and there is no scientific consensus.
Of course just saying "scientists" is actually kind of meaningless because my wife is a scientist of a sort (medical) but knows little to nothing about nuclear power. WHICH alleged scientists were polled in this survey? Maybe they polled a bunch of computer scientists instead of nuclear engineers.
Few schools are likely to formally support linux at this time. Too many distros, too few knowledgeable support professionals, and extra cost for what will be a small percentage of the student body at most universities. Most won't prohibit it but you'll be on your own getting it to work - though there is a very good chance the techies that actually run the place will be nice and help if you can reach them. The general feeling seems to be that if you are interested in linux you probably know what you are doing anyway and don't need much handholding.
My alma matter only formally supported Windows but they made all the resources available for those who wanted to run Macs and linux. When I wanted to do something offbeat they were usually pretty cool about it since professors and grad students were often working with unusual operating systems and hardware. I seldom had to ask for more than some server addresses and configuration settings which the admins knew from memory when they weren't documented. Pretty much as long as you don't cause the administrators any problems, odds are they'll be indifferent at worst and helpful at best.
What you're describing is how the really stupid thieves get caught. The ones who have any kind of brains would fence them.
In all likelihood they'll end up on eBay if the thieves aren't caught soon. The amount of stolen good on eBay is rather astonishing. Sometimes I think eBay should be called eFence.
Because it's sound business practice to have insurance, and in a country like the US where you can be sued for about anything it is much more advisable
Don't confuse having insurance with needing insurance for everything. No company has or could afford insurance against every contingency. I assure you that Apple is well covered in this regard.
The only reason to have insurance is to spread risk and the associated costs of that risk. If it is a small risk you can easily absorb, there is no reason to have insurance for that. Apple has literally billions of dollars in cash on their balance sheet. The cost of this theft isn't even a rounding error on their balance sheet and they probably lose more than this company-wide in a typical week in shrinkage (shoplifting & employee theft). Apple undoubtedly has a liability policy since the potential financial risk is much greater there but I'd be shocked if they had any sort of policy for thefts of this scale. No large retailer I'm aware of does - the benefit doesn't justify the reward. Most retail stores have shrinkage of about 1-2% per year. Money is set aside every year on the books because of this. Apple is no different in this regard.
What makes you think that Apple's stores don't have an insurance policy?
Probably because many large companies are self insured for issues such as theft. Apple undoubtedly has liability insurance and likely for fire and similar catastrophes. But a few computers lost to theft is a foreseeable cost that a company with billions on the balance sheet can easily absorb. This theft sounds like a lot to you or me but to Apple it's not actually that much money.
It is typically required to take out a commercial lease. When I opened my gaming store, I was required to have a $1M insurance policy. Standard practice.
You aren't a multi-billion dollar corporation either. Leases are negotiated and a big company like Apple will get a better deal than you or I ever could hope for. I doubt the leaseholder is worried about Apple's solvency but they probably would be worried about yours. Apple also has flesh eating lawyers to take care of liability and any other legal issues that us small guys could never hope to handle.
Has lighter versions (many bikes these days are much less than 20lbs)
That's just off the top of my head. I admire the designer trying but the bicycle is really a very elegant piece of engineering. I find it hysterical they compare it to the old high wheeler design (which was notoriously dangerous) rather than a modern bicycle.
Both systems employ a Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser (COIL) that is made by combining a bunch of nasty chemicals - potassium, peroxide, chlorine, iodine and other stuff and then fired at supersonic speeds.
I'm pretty sure the laser fires at the speed of light which I guess is technically supersonic. Correct but a retarded way to explain technology the author clearly doesn't understand.
Then TFA follows up the next sentence with the following gem:
According to as post on Wikipedia...
So Wikipedia is a source of journalistic research now? Oh dear... This guy isn't even smart enough to hide the fact he used Wikipedia as a primary source AND he has a typo in the same sentence. Is he trying to get on the Slashdot editing staff?
Known as the SWEEPER, which is wicked short for short-range wide-field-of-view extremely-agile electronically-steered photonic emitters
"Wicked short"? Is this some teenager from Boston writing this? Not according to the picture but the author certainly writes like a high school freshman.
Fine, *process* your stuff on the laptop, for which you may need all kinds of horsepower. But the files themselves shouldn't be there; have your apps access them remotely.
Great idea but doesn't work when you are working with gigabyte sized graphics files. It's easy to come up with other examples of large files making remote access impractical. Networks simply aren't fast enough to make that feasible at all times. I like the approach of remote access but sometimes it simply can't work for purely technical reasons.
WTF, why are they still making an otherwise modern mouse using PS2 connectors!?
As a Certified Bean Counter my guess would be that the cost of USB still is higher that of PS2 connections. PS2 connectors have been around so long the fixed costs have basically gone to zero and the machinery to produce them is fully depreciated. They're cheap and do the job. It's probably only a few cents difference per unit, but in quantity that adds up to real money. You have to remember too that margins are quite tight. (Dell's net profit is presently around 2-3%) HP might only make $25-50 profit on the machine - possibly less.
Since HP doesn't make any money because of the keyboard or mouse but still needs to include them sometimes, some accountant probably told the engineers to use PS2 connectors because it saves a little bit per unit. That's why you almost never get a decent keyboard or mouse with a PC. There's simply no margin available to include them because few people have proven willing to pay extra for a decent keyboard/mouse. Especially on a sub $500 PC.
Now you could argue that the added complexity of keeping the PS2 ports is adding expense back and you would be right but probably it's still currently cheaper to include the PS2 ports because of the cost of including the keyboard and mouse. Eventually that equation will change but PS2 ports are going to be with us a while longer I think.
Its not a niche market, its every single palm phone except the absolute most recent one. Every single palm sold before June 6th, 2009 is affected.
Even Palm does a crappy job providing integration with computers for their own devices and has for years so I don't see why this is Apple's fault. I dropped my palm years ago because they fell WAY behind the curve on keeping their software modern and it was a pain to communicate with my PC. Unless I happened to use Outlook (I don't) or the near useless Palm Desktop I couldn't sync the address books which pretty much made their PDAs and phones useless to me since there are plenty of smartphones on the market which are much more capable and modern than the Treos. (I'm not about to tie myself to some third party integration tool either) Furthermore Palm themselves declared PalmOS dead. If you purchase something which the maker itself is telling you that it has a limited future, that is just dumb.
What about them? Apple is the dominant player but they aren't by an stretch a monopoly like Microsoft has with Windows. Might get there someday but they sure aren't there now. Frankly the dedicated MP3 player market has probably peaked and will slowly but steadily decline. MP3 players are going to get increasingly integrated into cell phones. As popular as the iPhone is, Apple has no where near the pull in the cell phone market they do in the MP3 player or even PC markets.
The iPod and iTunes don't exactly play nice with other software or hardware.
And there are plenty of other options available so that really isn't a big deal. ITunes is nice but hardly the only way to sync an MP3 player with your song collection. Apple has to be careful. They've gone too proprietary before with their PCs (resulting in 10% marketshare) and it would be easy to make the same mistake with their music businesses.
Fairly often it is Apple - for better or worse. They're not always the first but when Apple decides something is no longer worth including in their computers, other PC makers often follow suit. They really were the big influence that finally got everyone to drop 1.44MB floppies even though everyone knew for years that they were a technology well past it's prime. They also were ahead of the curve on eliminating 1.2MB floppy drives, DB9 and DB25 serial ports, and a number of other ports. There are other examples besides. Apple isn't always right and not always first, but they are almost always influential.
What part of "don't have to pay Apple money to develop for Android" and "don't have to get Apple's permission to distribute" did you not understand?
Free (as in beer) is nice but that doesn't prove "friendliness" or the lack of it. Being cheap doesn't cause something to be of good quality or well designed or well documented. It's not hard to find crappy software and being free doesn't make it less crappy.
As for needing permission to distribute, that is potentially annoying I'll grant you though to be fair it's not without some benefit to both developers and users. It has the potential to keep a lot of bad software and (probably) malware out of the platform which is a good thing on balance. Nevertheless I'll agree that it has the potential to be frustrating. Does Apple abuse their position sometimes? Yep - so that is one strike against Apple but not by itself conclusive proof that Android is more friendly to developers.
on the Android platform, replacing core apps with your own version is *encouraged*, and in fact *designed into the platform*.
Again, none of this *necessarily* means "friendlier" to developers. Freedom (as in speech) is only a part of the equation. If the development tools suck or the platform is hard to write for or the documentation sucks, developers won't care whether you can replace the core apps or not. You are talking about how open the platform is which is just one factor in determining how friendly a platform is to developers. Android might be the best thing since sliced bread but you are providing little evidence to prove that assertion.
...but as a developer platform and ecosystem, the only thing Android is missing is higher handset sales.
Really? Are the development tools better and/or more mature? Is the interface easier and/or faster for developers? Is the documentation thorough, easy to read and clearer than the documentation for the iPhone? Is the hardware platform more stable and well understood? Are there more developers actively developing for Android than the iPhone? You assert that it is "better" but you provide almost no evidence to back up your argument. I'm willing to be convinced either way but please make a decent argument.
Well, you don't have to pay Apple money to develop for Android, and you don't have to get Apple's permission to distribute your app to users.
Those are nice factors worth considering but you didn't really answer the question. Is it true that "Android is far friendlier to developers"? I don't actually know the answer and don't pretend to know. I've certainly seen no compelling evidence that Android actually is meaningfully friendlier (whatever that means) or better meets the needs/desires of developers. It might be but the evidence seems to be lacking.
I can't stand for a moment the assertion that the USA is the most polluting nation on the Earth.
Oh boo-hoo! The data doesn't fit your preconceived notion of reality. It is an objective and easily verified fact that for a wide variety polluting emissions, including gases, particulates, and chemical, the US produces among the most pollution on earth, both in total and per capita. This is in significant part due to the size of the US economy and population (largest and third largest in the world respectively) and really shouldn't be surprising. Furthermore environmental regulations are almost always opposed on economic grounds (sometimes sensibly, often not) by various companies and industry associations. Do we really need to get into American's love affair with oversized, over-polluting automobiles?
That is a flat out lie and an attempt to skew statistics in some anti-America hate that doesn't really know what is happening.
Ahh, I get it. Everyone that points out a flaw in America must hate America. Sorry, as an American I'm not buying that shitty argument. Patriotism isn't a substitute for facts. The US has made good progress in environmental stewardship but let's not pretend that we live in some sort of unpolluted garden of eden shall we? I think if you bother to consult with any epidemiologist or someone who actually studies pollution and its effects you'll find that there is some pretty nasty stuff out there. I can introduce you to several if you like. I grew up less than 20 miles from a superfund site near Cleveland (Diamond Alkali Painseville Works if you care) that last time checked still has not been cleaned up decades after production ceased. I live in the US and I'm not so naive as to think that pollution isn't a very real and serious problem.
By nearly every possible measure, America is a much cleaner and healthier place to life, raise children, and grow food.
Cleaner than what? Cleaner than who? Cleaner than when? Be specific. There are plenty of places in the world measurably cleaner than the many places in the US. There are plenty of industrialized countries with measurably fewer health problems from pollution and longer life spans. The US has made progress (sometimes very impressive progress sometimes not so much) but don't pretend it is even close to ideal. The US generates FAR more particulate and gaseous pollution than most countries on earth. Really only China comes close and they are handicapped in dealing with it by their economic growth needs. (Hard to control pollution when you need 8% annual growth in the economy) I hope the US government continues to improve environmental policies but the US frequently isn't even leading the way much less the cleanest.
Job flight didn't start under Bush either - a lot of it happened under Clinton.
I think it is hysterical when fools attempt to attribute long term global economic trends to the policies of their recent political foes. Globalization is a process that has little to do with any single US president. Clinton, Bush, and/or Obama could no more stop globalization than they could stop the tides from occurring. Trying to credit or blame any of them for trends that seem to (but probably didn't) start during their respective administrations is at best a straw man and mostly just sounds foolish to informed ears. Globalization is a trend that has been occurring for decades. Improved communication networks have increased the pace recently but global trade has been increasing rapidly for decades (actually centuries). The various attempts in this thread to pin these global trends on presidents not fitting a particular blind ideology may feel good to you but makes each person that makes such arguments sound like a fool.
"Job flight" as you call it has always occurred and always will. Work tends to migrate to where the cost is lower. Always has and always will. If you actually can be bothered to look instead of uselessly trying to blame a president for economic realities they had nearly nothing to do with, you'll find countless examples of businesses moving to where they have a cost advantage. It doesn't even have to be absolutely cheaper, just comparatively cheaper to the alternatives.
The fact is that the pursuit of certain policies - or even the lack of pursuit of certain policies - has made the USA uncompetitive.
Has it really? The US has the largest and by many measures I've ever seen, most competitive economy in the world. There is a lot of hand wringing lately about China recently - which to those of us old enough to remember the 1980s, sounds a LOT like the hand wringing over Japan 20-30 years ago. Yes, there are new competitive pressures and the US economy will have to adapt. Some policies will have to change and some people will be made uncomfortable by those changes. It is a serious discussion but there is no reason to think that everything the US is doing is broken or that the US economy will be unable to adapt. It won't be easy but then it never has been.
The USA could have a lot more engineers available in its domestic workforce, thus driving down the cost of such skills, if its education system wasn't infested by numerous interest groups all intent on protecting themselves while ignoring the interests of students themselves.
You are a LONG way from proving that unions of any kind are directly or indirectly responsible for the state of US education or for the number of engineers graduating holding US citizenship. If you are going to blame teachers unions for the lack of engineers, you need to make a LOT more coherent and substantiated argument than the handwave I've quoted above. I think you'd have an easier time blaming pro sports or American Idol for the lack on interest in engineering but please, dazzle me.
These interest groups are mainly left-wing, of course. Just look at how many teachers' unions supported Obama over Bush, and it's pretty obvious.
Yes, teachers unions generally support the Democrats who historically have been more supportive of unions in general for a variety of complicated reasons. Unions often have serious and significant flaws but they often serve a useful purpose as well, namely to advocate the interests of the union membership. One has only to look back on some of the more abusive employment practices in years gone by to understand why they exist and continue to exist. Union membership is not an inherently evil proposition. There is nothing inherently wrong with groups of people with common interests n
Now, start all over again, and give him a raise instead of extra hours. He takes more home with a $1.00 raise than he does with 10 hours of overtime, because he isn't bumped from one tax bracket to another.
Disclosure: I am among other things a certified accountant so I feel qualified to comment.
There certainly are some corner cases where crossing into another tax bracket will cause a net loss of income due to an increased tax burden so it is *possible* this happened to you. That said, situations like what you describe are VERY uncommon and almost always occur to those who already are earning an amount just barely below the break point between the two tax brackets and bump up just barely enough to get to the next bracket. Technically this is called a marginal cost - the tax cost of increasing production (hours in your case) by one unit. Since the tax brackets are not a continuous function (they have discrete steps), occasionally this is a problem but only rarely. The odds of this happening to a given person are really quite slim. You may have been one of the unlucky few but if so you are without question the exception to the rule.
In Georgia today, diesel is $0.10/gal to $0.30/gal **more** than gasoline.
Which means that diesel is still cheaper because you'll get 10-25% better fuel economy with a diesel.
Last year, it was $1/gal more.
With gas at $4 a gallon and diesel at $5, it might still be a wash with some of the more efficient diesels out there. That's only a 25% premium per gallon and most if not all of that will be recouped by the better fuel economy of the diesel.
Show me more than a handful of non-hybrid SULEV vehicles. Besides, since diesels hardly sell in the US, there hasn't been a lot of point in developing the technology. SULEV is a US (not EU) standard, and diesels only account for a small percentage of passenger car sales. Most of the diesel vehicles are produced by EU companies and there is no reason SULEV cannot be achieved by diesel.
The modern "clean diesels" generally barely meet modern US emissions reqs.
The regulations are arbitrarily established standards. Some gasoline engines "barely" meet the requirements and some exceed them. Same with diesels.
The only reason they're so widespread in Europe is because they have more lax emissions reqs.
The reason diesels are popular in Europe is because gasoline is so heavily taxed in Europe that the 10-30% improvement in fuel economy diesels get adds up to real money. Furthermore as of this writing the EU and Japan have more stringent emissions standards than the US.
It's almost 15% denser and releases correspondingly more CO2 per gallon
Even if that were true (and this study says you are wrong), diesel also uses 10-25% less fuel for the same power output thanks to that same energy density. Diesels get 10-25% better fuel economy which offsets their emmissions. It's a wash at worst. There are particulate differences and some other output differences but please at least think it through. There is no reason to accept that petroleum is inherently cleaner than diesel.
And it's no longer true, thanks to modern desulfurization reqs, that diesel takes significantly less energy to refine, offsetting the difference.
Yes cleaner diesel requires more processing but you haven't provided any evidence that it is worse than gasoline in this regard.
So it's diesel - is it as gutless as I've been led to believe diesel cars are?
Where on earth did you get the idea that diesel's are "gutless"? They generate heaping gobs of torque and along with it's fuel economy there are good reason virtually every cargo hauler on earth uses diesel. Gutless they ain't. If you want performance, turbocharged performance diesels are available today from BMW, Mercedes and Audi. I've personally driven the BMW 335d and it is a fantastic car to drive. Terrific acceleration and gets 33mpg on the highway.
I've never driven one, but I am genuinely curious....
So stop asking stupid questions publicly and go test drive a BMW 335d. If you call that gutless I would call you a fool.
They don't need my SSN if they have my name, phone number, and the doctor I want the results sent to.
While it is true they do not need your SSN (and I support you not giving it out), the hospital does need at least two pieces of identifying information to try to ensure the reports are for the correct patient. These bits of information do not legally have to be individually or collectively unique, but together they do need to make it highly unlikely the wrong patient will be treated. Name and date of birth are common (highly unlikely two patients with the same name and DOB will show up at the same time in the same place) but others can be and are used. SSNs should not be used for this purpose but obviously they can and do serve as a unique identifier. Just your name, phone number and doctor's name would be insufficient and any doctor/hospital who used only that information to create/send a report would be exposing themselves to potential liability for sending a report without adequate confirmation of the identity of the patient.
...drop FICA and Medicare taxes, seeing that College age students will never benefit from the programs because they will be long broke by the time the students reach retirement.
Nice sound bite but it is only true if the funding for those programs remains like it is today. I think the odds of that happening is a pretty good approximation of zero. Social Security and Medicare are the largest and most popular government programs out there. It is unlikely Congress will act quickly absent a fiscal emergency but sooner or later they'll have to address the funding of those programs.
Combined that with dropping the aggregate (State + Federal) Corporate tax rate to less than 10% and you will see Companies rushing into the US, bye bye 10% unemployment.
With the additional effect of causing millions of senior citizens who lose their primary income and health care. Which would have a devastating effect on their economic well being. There is no free lunch. Those programs serve a very real and very important purpose in spite of their problems.
We are already why to the right on the Laffer Curve and going further to the right is just going to push up unemployment more.
Sounds to me like you don't actually understand the Laffer Curve. The Laffer Curve hypotheses that there is an optimum tax rate - it might be necessary to raise OR cut taxes to reach that optimum. It does NOT tell you where you are on the Laffer curve, nor does it tell you what that optimum actually is. The Laffer curve does not prescribe or predict - it merely is a theory that an optimum exists. This makes it of limited value. The only way to find out for certain is to change the tax rate and see what happens but it is entirely possible we have a tax rate that is too low. That's the dirty little secret of those who constantly push for lowering taxes claiming that it will increase revenue based on the Laffer curve. You cannot possibly know where you are on that curve so you cannot use the Laffer curve as evidence that cutting taxes (or raising them) will be good policy.
They don't even manufacture the body of the car they sell.
That's not so unusual. Do you think the big auto makers actually make most of the parts that go into their cars? They don't. In fact it is standard practice to outsource even entire subsystems of the car to the Tier 1 suppliers. The body of the car is just another part which can be purchased from a supplier if desired. It's less common to outsource that part but not unheard of.
They are an IP company through and through.
So are most manufacturers when you get right down to it. Any sophisticated product not covered by patents and trade secrets will be copied quite rapidly these days.
but you can boil it all down to "you can be right, or you can be happy."
The reason that is insightful is because in a relationship most arguments are not about facts - they are about feelings. If you "win" an argument over feelings, you are basically saying 'your feelings are worth less than mine'. It's ok to stand your ground when it is truly important but for $diety's sake, pick your battles. Do NOT let your ego get in the way of what's really important to you, which *should* be each other. You are going to fight from time to time but why fight over anything you don't really care about? It is ok to point out to your wife that her behavior has hurt your feelings and, believe it or not, most women respond very well to such an admission. If you know you aren't being rational but you feel strongly about some non-critical thing anyway, acknowledge that and *ask* for your spouse to cut you some slack. Usually they will unless you are really being ridiculous.
Some other stuff:
Yes, your wife is going to be irrational sometimes. So are you. Acknowledge it and try to recognize when it happens. Discuss irrational behavior only when you both are calm and able to laugh about it. (unless you or your wife is in actual danger - then do what needs to be done and discuss it later)
Sometimes what you say is going to be misinterpreted. If you chose your words poorly, or even if she thinks you did, apologize for that and explain what it was you meant a different way. Focus on what is meant, not what is said. (but try to say what you mean)
Never let your wife feel insecure about money or sex (that includes how she looks) if you can help it. Most marriages fail due to arguments about one of those two things.
Never buy anything that it requires two salaries to own. Odds are good that one of you might lose or leave a job and then you are hosed. See the point about about marriages failing over money.
Some things your spouse does will annoy you and vice-versa. Talk about it and each of you needs to be willing to make compromises. For instance I tend to forget that the laundry needs to be rotated and hate folding clothes but I like to cook and am reasonably good at it. So my wife and I made a deal that she (usually) takes care of the laundry and I (usually) take care of the cooking. We talked about it and worked out an arrangement that works for us so we both are less annoyed.
i'm nearly 100% certain that it's accurate.
I've known my wife for 20 years. Yeah, there's more than a little truth in it - but not for the reason people think. Argue the facts but take great care when arguing feelings. Most guys seem to have trouble separating the two.
Slashdot Mirror
Seven-in-ten scientists favor building more nuclear power plants to generate electricity, while 27% are opposed.
That's the thing though. From your data over a quarter of the people who are supposedly the best informed on the subject think it is a bad idea. That is NOWHERE near a scientific consensus. Scientists, as a general rule, are not dogmatic about policy and will change their mind if the evidence supports an opposing viewpoint. The fact that 1 out of 4 educated and ostensibly well informed people who are willing to change their mind when the facts dictate doing so means that the "facts" are not clear and there is no scientific consensus.
Of course just saying "scientists" is actually kind of meaningless because my wife is a scientist of a sort (medical) but knows little to nothing about nuclear power. WHICH alleged scientists were polled in this survey? Maybe they polled a bunch of computer scientists instead of nuclear engineers.
Few schools are likely to formally support linux at this time. Too many distros, too few knowledgeable support professionals, and extra cost for what will be a small percentage of the student body at most universities. Most won't prohibit it but you'll be on your own getting it to work - though there is a very good chance the techies that actually run the place will be nice and help if you can reach them. The general feeling seems to be that if you are interested in linux you probably know what you are doing anyway and don't need much handholding.
My alma matter only formally supported Windows but they made all the resources available for those who wanted to run Macs and linux. When I wanted to do something offbeat they were usually pretty cool about it since professors and grad students were often working with unusual operating systems and hardware. I seldom had to ask for more than some server addresses and configuration settings which the admins knew from memory when they weren't documented. Pretty much as long as you don't cause the administrators any problems, odds are they'll be indifferent at worst and helpful at best.
What you're describing is how the really stupid thieves get caught. The ones who have any kind of brains would fence them.
In all likelihood they'll end up on eBay if the thieves aren't caught soon. The amount of stolen good on eBay is rather astonishing. Sometimes I think eBay should be called eFence.
Because it's sound business practice to have insurance, and in a country like the US where you can be sued for about anything it is much more advisable
Don't confuse having insurance with needing insurance for everything. No company has or could afford insurance against every contingency. I assure you that Apple is well covered in this regard.
The only reason to have insurance is to spread risk and the associated costs of that risk. If it is a small risk you can easily absorb, there is no reason to have insurance for that. Apple has literally billions of dollars in cash on their balance sheet. The cost of this theft isn't even a rounding error on their balance sheet and they probably lose more than this company-wide in a typical week in shrinkage (shoplifting & employee theft). Apple undoubtedly has a liability policy since the potential financial risk is much greater there but I'd be shocked if they had any sort of policy for thefts of this scale. No large retailer I'm aware of does - the benefit doesn't justify the reward. Most retail stores have shrinkage of about 1-2% per year. Money is set aside every year on the books because of this. Apple is no different in this regard.
What makes you think that Apple's stores don't have an insurance policy?
Probably because many large companies are self insured for issues such as theft. Apple undoubtedly has liability insurance and likely for fire and similar catastrophes. But a few computers lost to theft is a foreseeable cost that a company with billions on the balance sheet can easily absorb. This theft sounds like a lot to you or me but to Apple it's not actually that much money.
It is typically required to take out a commercial lease. When I opened my gaming store, I was required to have a $1M insurance policy. Standard practice.
You aren't a multi-billion dollar corporation either. Leases are negotiated and a big company like Apple will get a better deal than you or I ever could hope for. I doubt the leaseholder is worried about Apple's solvency but they probably would be worried about yours. Apple also has flesh eating lawyers to take care of liability and any other legal issues that us small guys could never hope to handle.
Or I can just ride a regular bicycle which has at minimum the following advantages:
That's just off the top of my head. I admire the designer trying but the bicycle is really a very elegant piece of engineering. I find it hysterical they compare it to the old high wheeler design (which was notoriously dangerous) rather than a modern bicycle.
From TFA:
Both systems employ a Chemical Oxygen Iodine Laser (COIL) that is made by combining a bunch of nasty chemicals - potassium, peroxide, chlorine, iodine and other stuff and then fired at supersonic speeds.
I'm pretty sure the laser fires at the speed of light which I guess is technically supersonic. Correct but a retarded way to explain technology the author clearly doesn't understand.
Then TFA follows up the next sentence with the following gem:
According to as post on Wikipedia...
So Wikipedia is a source of journalistic research now? Oh dear... This guy isn't even smart enough to hide the fact he used Wikipedia as a primary source AND he has a typo in the same sentence. Is he trying to get on the Slashdot editing staff?
Known as the SWEEPER, which is wicked short for short-range wide-field-of-view extremely-agile electronically-steered photonic emitters
"Wicked short"? Is this some teenager from Boston writing this? Not according to the picture but the author certainly writes like a high school freshman.
Fine, *process* your stuff on the laptop, for which you may need all kinds of horsepower. But the files themselves shouldn't be there; have your apps access them remotely.
Great idea but doesn't work when you are working with gigabyte sized graphics files. It's easy to come up with other examples of large files making remote access impractical. Networks simply aren't fast enough to make that feasible at all times. I like the approach of remote access but sometimes it simply can't work for purely technical reasons.
WTF, why are they still making an otherwise modern mouse using PS2 connectors!?
As a Certified Bean Counter my guess would be that the cost of USB still is higher that of PS2 connections. PS2 connectors have been around so long the fixed costs have basically gone to zero and the machinery to produce them is fully depreciated. They're cheap and do the job. It's probably only a few cents difference per unit, but in quantity that adds up to real money. You have to remember too that margins are quite tight. (Dell's net profit is presently around 2-3%) HP might only make $25-50 profit on the machine - possibly less.
Since HP doesn't make any money because of the keyboard or mouse but still needs to include them sometimes, some accountant probably told the engineers to use PS2 connectors because it saves a little bit per unit. That's why you almost never get a decent keyboard or mouse with a PC. There's simply no margin available to include them because few people have proven willing to pay extra for a decent keyboard/mouse. Especially on a sub $500 PC.
Now you could argue that the added complexity of keeping the PS2 ports is adding expense back and you would be right but probably it's still currently cheaper to include the PS2 ports because of the cost of including the keyboard and mouse. Eventually that equation will change but PS2 ports are going to be with us a while longer I think.
Its not a niche market, its every single palm phone except the absolute most recent one. Every single palm sold before June 6th, 2009 is affected.
Even Palm does a crappy job providing integration with computers for their own devices and has for years so I don't see why this is Apple's fault. I dropped my palm years ago because they fell WAY behind the curve on keeping their software modern and it was a pain to communicate with my PC. Unless I happened to use Outlook (I don't) or the near useless Palm Desktop I couldn't sync the address books which pretty much made their PDAs and phones useless to me since there are plenty of smartphones on the market which are much more capable and modern than the Treos. (I'm not about to tie myself to some third party integration tool either) Furthermore Palm themselves declared PalmOS dead. If you purchase something which the maker itself is telling you that it has a limited future, that is just dumb.
What about MP3 players?
What about them? Apple is the dominant player but they aren't by an stretch a monopoly like Microsoft has with Windows. Might get there someday but they sure aren't there now. Frankly the dedicated MP3 player market has probably peaked and will slowly but steadily decline. MP3 players are going to get increasingly integrated into cell phones. As popular as the iPhone is, Apple has no where near the pull in the cell phone market they do in the MP3 player or even PC markets.
The iPod and iTunes don't exactly play nice with other software or hardware.
And there are plenty of other options available so that really isn't a big deal. ITunes is nice but hardly the only way to sync an MP3 player with your song collection. Apple has to be careful. They've gone too proprietary before with their PCs (resulting in 10% marketshare) and it would be easy to make the same mistake with their music businesses.
Who decides what technology has become "legacy"?
Fairly often it is Apple - for better or worse. They're not always the first but when Apple decides something is no longer worth including in their computers, other PC makers often follow suit. They really were the big influence that finally got everyone to drop 1.44MB floppies even though everyone knew for years that they were a technology well past it's prime. They also were ahead of the curve on eliminating 1.2MB floppy drives, DB9 and DB25 serial ports, and a number of other ports. There are other examples besides. Apple isn't always right and not always first, but they are almost always influential.
What part of "don't have to pay Apple money to develop for Android" and "don't have to get Apple's permission to distribute" did you not understand?
Free (as in beer) is nice but that doesn't prove "friendliness" or the lack of it. Being cheap doesn't cause something to be of good quality or well designed or well documented. It's not hard to find crappy software and being free doesn't make it less crappy.
As for needing permission to distribute, that is potentially annoying I'll grant you though to be fair it's not without some benefit to both developers and users. It has the potential to keep a lot of bad software and (probably) malware out of the platform which is a good thing on balance. Nevertheless I'll agree that it has the potential to be frustrating. Does Apple abuse their position sometimes? Yep - so that is one strike against Apple but not by itself conclusive proof that Android is more friendly to developers.
on the Android platform, replacing core apps with your own version is *encouraged*, and in fact *designed into the platform*.
Again, none of this *necessarily* means "friendlier" to developers. Freedom (as in speech) is only a part of the equation. If the development tools suck or the platform is hard to write for or the documentation sucks, developers won't care whether you can replace the core apps or not. You are talking about how open the platform is which is just one factor in determining how friendly a platform is to developers. Android might be the best thing since sliced bread but you are providing little evidence to prove that assertion.
...but as a developer platform and ecosystem, the only thing Android is missing is higher handset sales.
Really? Are the development tools better and/or more mature? Is the interface easier and/or faster for developers? Is the documentation thorough, easy to read and clearer than the documentation for the iPhone? Is the hardware platform more stable and well understood? Are there more developers actively developing for Android than the iPhone? You assert that it is "better" but you provide almost no evidence to back up your argument. I'm willing to be convinced either way but please make a decent argument.
Well, you don't have to pay Apple money to develop for Android, and you don't have to get Apple's permission to distribute your app to users.
Those are nice factors worth considering but you didn't really answer the question. Is it true that "Android is far friendlier to developers"? I don't actually know the answer and don't pretend to know. I've certainly seen no compelling evidence that Android actually is meaningfully friendlier (whatever that means) or better meets the needs/desires of developers. It might be but the evidence seems to be lacking.
I can't stand for a moment the assertion that the USA is the most polluting nation on the Earth.
Oh boo-hoo! The data doesn't fit your preconceived notion of reality. It is an objective and easily verified fact that for a wide variety polluting emissions, including gases, particulates, and chemical, the US produces among the most pollution on earth, both in total and per capita. This is in significant part due to the size of the US economy and population (largest and third largest in the world respectively) and really shouldn't be surprising. Furthermore environmental regulations are almost always opposed on economic grounds (sometimes sensibly, often not) by various companies and industry associations. Do we really need to get into American's love affair with oversized, over-polluting automobiles?
That is a flat out lie and an attempt to skew statistics in some anti-America hate that doesn't really know what is happening.
Ahh, I get it. Everyone that points out a flaw in America must hate America. Sorry, as an American I'm not buying that shitty argument. Patriotism isn't a substitute for facts. The US has made good progress in environmental stewardship but let's not pretend that we live in some sort of unpolluted garden of eden shall we? I think if you bother to consult with any epidemiologist or someone who actually studies pollution and its effects you'll find that there is some pretty nasty stuff out there. I can introduce you to several if you like. I grew up less than 20 miles from a superfund site near Cleveland (Diamond Alkali Painseville Works if you care) that last time checked still has not been cleaned up decades after production ceased. I live in the US and I'm not so naive as to think that pollution isn't a very real and serious problem.
By nearly every possible measure, America is a much cleaner and healthier place to life, raise children, and grow food.
Cleaner than what? Cleaner than who? Cleaner than when? Be specific. There are plenty of places in the world measurably cleaner than the many places in the US. There are plenty of industrialized countries with measurably fewer health problems from pollution and longer life spans. The US has made progress (sometimes very impressive progress sometimes not so much) but don't pretend it is even close to ideal. The US generates FAR more particulate and gaseous pollution than most countries on earth. Really only China comes close and they are handicapped in dealing with it by their economic growth needs. (Hard to control pollution when you need 8% annual growth in the economy) I hope the US government continues to improve environmental policies but the US frequently isn't even leading the way much less the cleanest.
Job flight didn't start under Bush either - a lot of it happened under Clinton.
I think it is hysterical when fools attempt to attribute long term global economic trends to the policies of their recent political foes. Globalization is a process that has little to do with any single US president. Clinton, Bush, and/or Obama could no more stop globalization than they could stop the tides from occurring. Trying to credit or blame any of them for trends that seem to (but probably didn't) start during their respective administrations is at best a straw man and mostly just sounds foolish to informed ears. Globalization is a trend that has been occurring for decades. Improved communication networks have increased the pace recently but global trade has been increasing rapidly for decades (actually centuries). The various attempts in this thread to pin these global trends on presidents not fitting a particular blind ideology may feel good to you but makes each person that makes such arguments sound like a fool.
"Job flight" as you call it has always occurred and always will. Work tends to migrate to where the cost is lower. Always has and always will. If you actually can be bothered to look instead of uselessly trying to blame a president for economic realities they had nearly nothing to do with, you'll find countless examples of businesses moving to where they have a cost advantage. It doesn't even have to be absolutely cheaper, just comparatively cheaper to the alternatives.
The fact is that the pursuit of certain policies - or even the lack of pursuit of certain policies - has made the USA uncompetitive.
Has it really? The US has the largest and by many measures I've ever seen, most competitive economy in the world. There is a lot of hand wringing lately about China recently - which to those of us old enough to remember the 1980s, sounds a LOT like the hand wringing over Japan 20-30 years ago. Yes, there are new competitive pressures and the US economy will have to adapt. Some policies will have to change and some people will be made uncomfortable by those changes. It is a serious discussion but there is no reason to think that everything the US is doing is broken or that the US economy will be unable to adapt. It won't be easy but then it never has been.
The USA could have a lot more engineers available in its domestic workforce, thus driving down the cost of such skills, if its education system wasn't infested by numerous interest groups all intent on protecting themselves while ignoring the interests of students themselves.
You are a LONG way from proving that unions of any kind are directly or indirectly responsible for the state of US education or for the number of engineers graduating holding US citizenship. If you are going to blame teachers unions for the lack of engineers, you need to make a LOT more coherent and substantiated argument than the handwave I've quoted above. I think you'd have an easier time blaming pro sports or American Idol for the lack on interest in engineering but please, dazzle me.
These interest groups are mainly left-wing, of course. Just look at how many teachers' unions supported Obama over Bush, and it's pretty obvious.
Yes, teachers unions generally support the Democrats who historically have been more supportive of unions in general for a variety of complicated reasons. Unions often have serious and significant flaws but they often serve a useful purpose as well, namely to advocate the interests of the union membership. One has only to look back on some of the more abusive employment practices in years gone by to understand why they exist and continue to exist. Union membership is not an inherently evil proposition. There is nothing inherently wrong with groups of people with common interests n
Now, start all over again, and give him a raise instead of extra hours. He takes more home with a $1.00 raise than he does with 10 hours of overtime, because he isn't bumped from one tax bracket to another.
Disclosure: I am among other things a certified accountant so I feel qualified to comment.
There certainly are some corner cases where crossing into another tax bracket will cause a net loss of income due to an increased tax burden so it is *possible* this happened to you. That said, situations like what you describe are VERY uncommon and almost always occur to those who already are earning an amount just barely below the break point between the two tax brackets and bump up just barely enough to get to the next bracket. Technically this is called a marginal cost - the tax cost of increasing production (hours in your case) by one unit. Since the tax brackets are not a continuous function (they have discrete steps), occasionally this is a problem but only rarely. The odds of this happening to a given person are really quite slim. You may have been one of the unlucky few but if so you are without question the exception to the rule.
In Georgia today, diesel is $0.10/gal to $0.30/gal **more** than gasoline.
Which means that diesel is still cheaper because you'll get 10-25% better fuel economy with a diesel.
Last year, it was $1/gal more.
With gas at $4 a gallon and diesel at $5, it might still be a wash with some of the more efficient diesels out there. That's only a 25% premium per gallon and most if not all of that will be recouped by the better fuel economy of the diesel.
Show me a single SULEV diesel, for example.
Show me more than a handful of non-hybrid SULEV vehicles. Besides, since diesels hardly sell in the US, there hasn't been a lot of point in developing the technology. SULEV is a US (not EU) standard, and diesels only account for a small percentage of passenger car sales. Most of the diesel vehicles are produced by EU companies and there is no reason SULEV cannot be achieved by diesel.
The modern "clean diesels" generally barely meet modern US emissions reqs.
The regulations are arbitrarily established standards. Some gasoline engines "barely" meet the requirements and some exceed them. Same with diesels.
The only reason they're so widespread in Europe is because they have more lax emissions reqs.
The reason diesels are popular in Europe is because gasoline is so heavily taxed in Europe that the 10-30% improvement in fuel economy diesels get adds up to real money. Furthermore as of this writing the EU and Japan have more stringent emissions standards than the US.
It's almost 15% denser and releases correspondingly more CO2 per gallon
Even if that were true (and this study says you are wrong), diesel also uses 10-25% less fuel for the same power output thanks to that same energy density. Diesels get 10-25% better fuel economy which offsets their emmissions. It's a wash at worst. There are particulate differences and some other output differences but please at least think it through. There is no reason to accept that petroleum is inherently cleaner than diesel.
And it's no longer true, thanks to modern desulfurization reqs, that diesel takes significantly less energy to refine, offsetting the difference.
Yes cleaner diesel requires more processing but you haven't provided any evidence that it is worse than gasoline in this regard.
So it's diesel - is it as gutless as I've been led to believe diesel cars are?
Where on earth did you get the idea that diesel's are "gutless"? They generate heaping gobs of torque and along with it's fuel economy there are good reason virtually every cargo hauler on earth uses diesel. Gutless they ain't. If you want performance, turbocharged performance diesels are available today from BMW, Mercedes and Audi. I've personally driven the BMW 335d and it is a fantastic car to drive. Terrific acceleration and gets 33mpg on the highway.
I've never driven one, but I am genuinely curious....
So stop asking stupid questions publicly and go test drive a BMW 335d. If you call that gutless I would call you a fool.
They don't need my SSN if they have my name, phone number, and the doctor I want the results sent to.
While it is true they do not need your SSN (and I support you not giving it out), the hospital does need at least two pieces of identifying information to try to ensure the reports are for the correct patient. These bits of information do not legally have to be individually or collectively unique, but together they do need to make it highly unlikely the wrong patient will be treated. Name and date of birth are common (highly unlikely two patients with the same name and DOB will show up at the same time in the same place) but others can be and are used. SSNs should not be used for this purpose but obviously they can and do serve as a unique identifier. Just your name, phone number and doctor's name would be insufficient and any doctor/hospital who used only that information to create/send a report would be exposing themselves to potential liability for sending a report without adequate confirmation of the identity of the patient.
...drop FICA and Medicare taxes, seeing that College age students will never benefit from the programs because they will be long broke by the time the students reach retirement.
Nice sound bite but it is only true if the funding for those programs remains like it is today. I think the odds of that happening is a pretty good approximation of zero. Social Security and Medicare are the largest and most popular government programs out there. It is unlikely Congress will act quickly absent a fiscal emergency but sooner or later they'll have to address the funding of those programs.
Combined that with dropping the aggregate (State + Federal) Corporate tax rate to less than 10% and you will see Companies rushing into the US, bye bye 10% unemployment.
With the additional effect of causing millions of senior citizens who lose their primary income and health care. Which would have a devastating effect on their economic well being. There is no free lunch. Those programs serve a very real and very important purpose in spite of their problems.
We are already why to the right on the Laffer Curve and going further to the right is just going to push up unemployment more.
Sounds to me like you don't actually understand the Laffer Curve. The Laffer Curve hypotheses that there is an optimum tax rate - it might be necessary to raise OR cut taxes to reach that optimum. It does NOT tell you where you are on the Laffer curve, nor does it tell you what that optimum actually is. The Laffer curve does not prescribe or predict - it merely is a theory that an optimum exists. This makes it of limited value. The only way to find out for certain is to change the tax rate and see what happens but it is entirely possible we have a tax rate that is too low. That's the dirty little secret of those who constantly push for lowering taxes claiming that it will increase revenue based on the Laffer curve. You cannot possibly know where you are on that curve so you cannot use the Laffer curve as evidence that cutting taxes (or raising them) will be good policy.
They don't even manufacture the body of the car they sell.
That's not so unusual. Do you think the big auto makers actually make most of the parts that go into their cars? They don't. In fact it is standard practice to outsource even entire subsystems of the car to the Tier 1 suppliers. The body of the car is just another part which can be purchased from a supplier if desired. It's less common to outsource that part but not unheard of.
They are an IP company through and through.
So are most manufacturers when you get right down to it. Any sophisticated product not covered by patents and trade secrets will be copied quite rapidly these days.
Things taste better when reheated on the stove or oven, and taste differently to some degree when reheated or cooked in the microwave.
The most common reason for that is the Maillard reaction. Microwave cooking has its uses but it rarely improves the taste of anything you cook.
but you can boil it all down to "you can be right, or you can be happy."
The reason that is insightful is because in a relationship most arguments are not about facts - they are about feelings. If you "win" an argument over feelings, you are basically saying 'your feelings are worth less than mine'. It's ok to stand your ground when it is truly important but for $diety's sake, pick your battles. Do NOT let your ego get in the way of what's really important to you, which *should* be each other. You are going to fight from time to time but why fight over anything you don't really care about? It is ok to point out to your wife that her behavior has hurt your feelings and, believe it or not, most women respond very well to such an admission. If you know you aren't being rational but you feel strongly about some non-critical thing anyway, acknowledge that and *ask* for your spouse to cut you some slack. Usually they will unless you are really being ridiculous.
Some other stuff:
i'm nearly 100% certain that it's accurate.
I've known my wife for 20 years. Yeah, there's more than a little truth in it - but not for the reason people think. Argue the facts but take great care when arguing feelings. Most guys seem to have trouble separating the two.