I have yet to see a private charity that disburses 99.2 percent of what it brings in.
That is not quite an accurate assessment. See Robert Genetski's essay to understand why. Summary: the SSA is actually extremely efficient at disbursing benefits, but some expenses are outsourced and are not accurately reflected in the efficiency figures you see generally bandied about. When accounting for all costs like the very low returns, the overall program's efficiency fares very poorly.
And if private charities are so hot, why did we need SS in the first place?
While the nation suffered hardships, and there undoubtedly were some people who passed away because the economic impact mortally affected their nutrition or sources of heat, it was not noticeably more than any other period, and the records say it was actually less.
If the rationale for establishing Social Security was because people were starving to death and freezing to death, then we did not "need" Social Security then, and we don't need it now. It was a political football from its genesis to its current form today. You can cry all you want about "heartless extreme right wingers", but the simple fact of the matter is that as a nation, we simply lack the out of pocket funds to pay for its future liabilities as currently constituted. Billions of Chinese, Japanese, and to a lesser extent Europeans via their central banks are floating the entire American financial house of cards, which is the only reason Social Security even stands today. Dude, you have not seen heartless yet. The day Mr. Market comes to collect rent, interest, and back penalties, you'll see heartless that will take the breath away of even the spawn of Sauron and Darth Vader.
The choice is as stark as it is simple. Either let social welfare programs' fiscal demands continue to erode the nation's financial standing, and one day figure out how to deal with the aftermath of a collapse worse on senior citizens than the Soviet Union's. Or figure out today how to restructure the nation's finances to a sustainable footing while we still have the thin resources to even contemplate doing so.
If we stop SS today, how do we take care of those that are within 10 years of retirement (given as many of them didn't have the time to build up a 401k and some of them may not have a company pension plan)? And, what about those from 10 to 20 years from retirement?
The simple answer is you don't. Don't mandate a grandfather clause cutoff, that is.
Say we stop Social Security and Medicare in their current forms starting January 1, 2006. The actuaries can tell you approximately how much of a gap they anticipate you will have to fund (because the programs are pay-as-you-go). Issue very long-dated bonds to cover this gap.
Everyone born on or after January 1, 2006 cannot participate in the programs; their employers get to remit their entire gross (after deducting federal income tax, state unemployment tax and for some unfortunates state income tax and city income tax) to them. Everyone else has a one-time election: stay in or leave. They don't have to make the decision by some deadline, but once they make the decision, they cannot change it.
There are many permutations you can play with this basic plan, of course. Read up on Chile's privatization to gain a sense of the mechanics of the transition. But the general idea is you take the one-time hit to exit the programs by floating the debt on the money markets and pay it back out of general operations funds over the next several decades. You take future liabilities off the books, but at an up front hit to the nation's creditworthiness basically (although smart traders would probably recognize the beneficial free market implications right away and not discount the nation's economy so heavily). It hurts at first, but the financial pain pretty rapidly tapers off as the freed up funds find their way into various investments. Assuming that is, we even have the wherewithal to take the financial hit. America's national financial health is on a quicksand foundation.
Any number of exogenous events can seriously damage our ability to wind down these welfare liabilities in an orderly fashion. The longer seniors demand their pound of flesh, the closer we come to a day when there might not be an option except for the abrupt "Out of Business" one. Like the monkey trapped by a jar in which he thrust his fist to grab a bauble he won't let go, America as a nation might not let go of these welfare programs until it is knocked flat on its ass by its creditors.
Considering how much of a fiscal mess the "Greatest Generation" and the "Boomer Generation" are leaving their sucessors, they have probably literally spent whatever good legacy they have built up, and history may remember them in a dim, unapproving light.
You can pick up a used unit, or if that disappears, just wait long enough and the Magma units show up from time to time. Now if you demand a new unit, or like-new, that you can have right away, and cheaply...well, sorry, you're breaking a variation of the fast-cheap-right rule.
So bring in a standard COM system, and standardise the shell interfaces and you will have kde and gnome applications that can integrate with the shell without having to have separate progams.
I thought CORBA at one time was supposed to be embraced by *nix as The One True Component Model, but when the rubber met the road back in the day, the adoption effort shattered for a variety of reasons. Now however, I see that both Gnome and KDE support CORBA (KDE support explained, Gnome support explained). All the preceding is moot of course, if you and I cannot agree that CORBA is a component model, or if you think CORBA is not a valid consideration today.
But racism ? Sorry. Western world has a sole claim on that.
You obviously have not been around Asians of one nation talking about Asians of other nations. I've seen it everywhere I've been in the world. Racism is a human trait, not a culturally specific attribute.
I've been to Europe a couple of times on vacation and the most dissappointing thing was the food.
Your results might depend upon your expectations and willingness to explore, or simply we visited different parts of Europe. For example, my personal all time favorite restaurant is a tie between two: Lyon de Lyon in Lyon, France and Atelier in New York City. But that is for the multi-course tasting menu (with a wine paired to match each course); if you go to either place for just a steak, you are likely to be unimpressed, especially for the prices.
On the other hand, in Southern France we still enjoyed ourselves when we just stopped into different restaurants that hit our fancy, some of them little hole in the wall places. The food was definitely fresh (I prefer seafood, and am extremely sensitive to any spoilage because I can smell ammonia starting in very low concentrations).
European restaurants definitely have different ideas of service than American restaurants, but I ascribe this to a cultural difference. More European restaurants are simply much more concerned about the total experience they offer to their patrons, and I'm not surprised some simply have a blanket no-toddlers policy. Whereas I've noticed American restauranteurs are generally willing to take a chance on all comers, and only confront parents if their children are really obnoxious; they usually politely ask the parents to restrain the children for their own safety because of all the hot plates running around, for example.
Most of my points of reference come from Southern France, Rhine Valley Germany, Belgium and Holland, so I'm curious what part(s) of Europe you had experience with.
T-Mobile -used- to but I don't know if they will anymore
They just unlocked my GSM phone (a SonyEricsson T610) after six months when I requested it and explained I was out of the country and wanted to use prepaid phone cards. This was only two weeks ago. I believe their waiting period is 3 months. I just called 611 on my phone and hit 0 to speak with an operator, and said I wanted to unlock my phone.
One company I worked for purchased some software from Tivoli. After 6 months, and a team of engineers onsite from the vendor, they still couldn't get the components to talk for more than a day without problems (after weeks of installation), and still couldn't get useful data out of the database due to its size, so we took our $500mil back and bought something else.
I would like to know the specifics of this project. Was this a Tivoli Storage Manager project (because you were talking about storage and archival limits earlier in your post)? As an IBM Business Partner that specializes in Tivoli services, I collect stories of Tivoli project failures to learn from them. Many (not all, but many) Tivoli project failures (and indeed, IT project failures in general) are not the result of technology deficiencies, but rather soft project management and/or poor design factors.
If you had bought $500M of Tivoli software, and IBM had, say, $100M of annual maintenance fees on the line, it must have been a whopper of a technology deficiency for them to walk away from the deal. I've seen IBM do custom development to address technology gaps unique to a single client's site for that level of deal in the past, and have seen other vendors do the same for this scale of deal. Basically, when you hit $500M and up on the initial sale, and you aren't financing it but paying cash over the barrel up front, if it takes throwing a team of programmers at a technology gap to close the deal, paying the development team $0.5-1.0M or more out of the sale to cook up some additional code on spec for a single site is seen as a cost of doing business to these giant vendors. There are few technical gaps that cannot be closed at this level. If you don't want to discuss what kind of technology gap it was here on Slashdot (understandable), please let me know at tyen $at$ netcom $dot$ com what kind of whopper it was if possible.
Back in the dot com boom, a T1 of Internet could fetch $1500 a month. You can pick it up for about $350-500 now.
Tell me what outfit in the U.S. is selling nailed up, fully dedicated, no bandwidth cap T1 lines for $350-500 per month. It is popular to quote numbers like $350-500, but all I've seen so far are those lines are capped at 10 GB per month or so. Full lines have been at about $1000-1500 per month ever since the dot com days, and have not trended down at all.
Thanks, I stand corrected; some further research after I posted that pointed out the same thing you did, but I didn't think anyone would read it since it was scored so low. As I understand it, this means that the ATA100 interface only means lower transfer speeds than what I'm used to with AT133 drives and interfaces. If so, then I'm definitely looking into these products.
The basic problem is still that the issuance of the patent presumes that integrating all this is non-obvious, which is debatable.
Furthermore, within the position paper itself, they assert "These questions relate generally to the false premise that the patent covers the simple automation of an old process on conducting international trade." Then later they claim clients can "turn to a software system and have all the necessary tasks efficiently performed" as the novelty of their patent claim. This fails to adequately refute the counter-claim that they are claiming novelty by merely automating existing processes. Reading through the patent filing, I still fail to see how this is novel. The import-export and shipping businesses are horrendously inefficient; that's a business condition, not a patentable insight.
Useful? Without a doubt. Automation of existing manual or unintegrated automated processes is always a productivity enhancer. But it fails the novelty test because they have conflated the tediousness of implementing complex regulatory-induced processes with unique insight. If this is patentable, Fred Smith could have patented FedEx, and innumerable other business opportunities capitalized by entrepreneurs every year predicated upon performing existing tasks more efficiently can also be patented.
This is an abuse of the patent system, plain and simple. I hope their patent is revoked and they're sued into oblivion. They could have made a killing just building the system and maintaining compliance with the constantly changing regulatory and pricing environments, and offering a mass-production version of import-export services (and an outsourcing option for large companies that currently internally manage import-export issues). Trying to patent this however, is just plain folly, because it raises the ire of the large companies that already do this internally, and could have been their outsourcing client pool.
Hmm...the specs say they only support up to ATA 100. So that means we're stuck with the 138 GB limit? Looking at pricewatch, it appears that the sweet spot for IDE drives in $/GB terms are 160 GB drives, and that sweet spot tends to move about 12-18 months to the next tier of capacity. I would be all over Arco Data's products if they could support the larger drives that require ATA 133 (have a RAID 5 now, but looking into building large RAID 1 caches tied together with LVM for a hierarchical storage management system because a lot of my data is read less and less frequently over time).
No one has been able to fully enumerate the five Congressional members and their offspring who are serving in Iraq. However, some facts pointed out in this discussion:
Moore never asserted in his movie that the children of US Congressmen are under-represented in US forces in Iraq. See the movie transcript to verify from primary source. Instead, he asked the people that authorized the Iraq war (members of Congress) if they would send thier kids to Iraq.
Equally factual is that in the United States, you can only enlist in the armed forces when you are of the age of majority. Meaning your parents (the Congressmen Moore was posing his question to) cannot do what he posits. They can no more send their children to Iraq than violate some fundamental precepts of the Constitution.
Quote: Senators and Congressmen (and Pentagon workers, and the President himself) ARE on the front lines of this war, and have been since its opening salvo. They don't need their children to be put in harm's way to show their bravery and resolve. They need only show up for work. If you don't think Washington, D.C. is a target, you haven't been listening to Osama.
The Congressional members who are known to have children serving in the Enduring Freedom theatre of operations or are expected to be there soon are: Sen. Tim Johnson, D-SD, son Brooks Johnson, 31, a staff sergeant with the Army's 101st Airborne Division; Rep. John Kline, R-MN, son, Dan Kline who is slotted for shipping out.
For anyone who still wants to play the statistics game and still assert that Congress members' families are under-represented, fine. Let's see where the numbers take us. Quote: The correct comparison would be to compare the total number of parents in the US with children of military age over the total number of troops and then the same comparison in the Congress - number of Reps with children of military age vs. number serving...assume that all people from the age of 40 to 79 have children of military age and likewise all Congressional Reps. - the errors are likely to be in the same direction (overstated in both cases) and so even out. There are around 130 million in the 40 to 79 age group. So the rate of service is around 1 per thousand potential parents. Applying this to Congress, you'd expect less than 1 child in Iraq. Instead, we can count one for certain, possibly another four depending upon your sources. So the representation, in known terms from primary sources, is at least the enlistment rate of the general population.
This is just immediate family members. Including first relations, representation of Congress members' families is likely to go much, much higher. If you are a Moore fan, would you care to chase down primary sources on that, which will only widen the gap further, o
Your example of the AIDS help that America gives to Africa is just one small example of the terrible hypocrisy that plagues the American hating world. No other country has sacrificed so much and given so much for complete strangers
A quick Google led me to the verification of a counter-argument to the AIDS protestors. I had heard that the United States federal government spends more on AIDS research than the rest of the world, combined. So this is not counting private research efforts, which expands this gap even further. I found out the precise claim is that America, in fiscal 2002 and 2003, spent more than the rest of the world combined. Accounting for fully 50% of global expenditures in each of 2002 and 2003 is not as impressive a claim as spending more in one year than the rest of the world combined, but it is still a metric assload of money, considering America is not the source of 50% of AIDS cases in the world (source).
But wait, there's more. American taxpayers, starting with the current fiscal year, are spending not just more than the rest of the world's nations combined, but nearly twice as much! So we are going from about 50% to nearly 200% in one year, and it's still not enough for these protestors! So why are we still spat upon? Apparently because:
Critics say Washington's bilateral effort undermines the U.N.-backed Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria, which is facing a funding shortfall. The United States is already the biggest donor to the fund.
I'm incredulous at this point. Let me see if I have this right. Because we decide not to fund the UN effort, for whatever reason, we are the equivalent of evil incarnate, as if we spent zero on AIDS activities. Let's say for the sake of argument we don't quite trust the UN with a big wad of cash (ever seen an audit of UN finances that will stand up to scrutiny?) and try for once to be responsible with how taxpayer dollars are spent. The net result, whatever the root cause of the decision not to go through the UN, is someone's pet organization is maligned.
So instead of saying, "well, it's your money so you get to spend it the best way you see fit," or try to make UN finances transparent to the outside world so we can actually trust them with tons of cash, or do something constructive to find out why the UN was not chosen and fix that, they point the fingers at them dirty Americans and scream that we're just religious nutcases that want to bomb the rest of the world into mega-corporation submission. At the same time we don't choose the UN as the recipient of the increased funding, we still spend so much of our tax dollars on the UN AIDS organization we supposedly don't care about that we outstrip every other nation's funding for that very organization! And we're still hated for it!? Honestly, I don't even know why we Americans even try to be more nice than absolutely necessary to maintain civil but cool relationships with those who won't be satisfied no matter what we do. We're going to be hated and vilified regardless of our actions.
I guarantee you that if an American mega-corporate pharmaceutical finds a cure for AIDS, it still won't be enough for these protestors. They'll have to take a loss "for the good of mankind", and sell it at or below cost.
I'm looking for help securing an OS/2200 mainframe (or access to one) so I can develop some code to integrate it against some IBM software. Apparently these systems are still big in Taiwan for running data warehouses. I may also need to hire an OS/2200 system programmer. So if you have some pointers or tips, please email me at tyen@netcom.com.
The PDB format is well-documented, and yes even the built-in applications' field formats are documented, but have you ever tried to decode say, DateBk4's extended fields, or how SuperNames stores links to other records in other applications? The last time I looked at their EULA's by the way, they would frown if you reverse-engineered those extended fields or proprietary record linking formats, and used what you learned in your own application without asking them first. So even if it was technically feasible to obtain the formats, the marketing insight to focus upon the data and make it interchangeable amongst applications as a system-level property, rather than an application-level property, is lacking. If this was wrong as you assert, then please explain why third-party applications use hacks like storing extended information in separate PDBs, specially formatted content in note fields, and proprietary record linking formats.
PDAs have saturated the market for users willing to dedicate a substantial amount of effort to overcoming their usability issues. This is a market ripe for Apple to pick up, because the market of casual users is still untapped.
Someone else already related how when the battery goes, today's PDAs reset themselves. Glaring usability issue for casual users. I've heard this same complaint from my non-technical friends who tried a PDA, then ditched them in favor of paper and pen. When you are trying to woo people away from an intimate routine in their daily life, at first it is sufficient to offer something that addresses the needs of people trying to solve scalability problems with their routines, like the consultant in this thread who has hundreds of contacts they have to keep up with on a monthly basis, or the poster in the healthcare field who needs to tote around a small cart of books in their hands. The PDA companies have been selling into business users for the most part, and to continue their growth they have to crack the casual user market.
Business users tend to be willing to put up with a lot that casual users will not. If a business user perceives that they obtain an edge with a particular product or service, they will invest the effort necessary to overcome the idiosyncracies to achieve that edge. Casual users will not, because the product or service is less integral to the happiness of their lives.
That you have to purchase third party applications before you can obtain seamless linking between your day timer and address book drives up the barrier to adoption by casual users. This is what leads to the perception that PDAs are nothing more than DayTimers for gadget freaks. In their default, out of the box configuration, they merely transfer the manual activities of a DayTimer onto an electronic system. That's like asking a company to adopt a computerized accounting system, only to have an army of clerks still manually reconcile accounts instead of hooking into an OFX interface.
Just shrinking the form factor and the price misses the entire point of trying to capture the casual user market.
More than ten years on after the introduction of the original Apple Newton MessagePad, I'm still surprised that neither Palm nor Microsoft have adopted the soups and slots style architecture of the NewtonOS. Today, RDF and XML could be used to implement a similar data presentation architecture, making it more useful outside of the PDA as well. More important than the technical contributions of the Newton however, were some of the marketing insights that were associated with the technical implementation.
The realization by the Newton team that most PDA applications would be relatively Unix-like (small, purpose-built applications) was spot on. The key marketing insight was that for a thriving user base and developer base to grow up around the platform, it had to be technically feasible to organically mold the user experience. It had to be easy and seamless to add functionality for example, to the out of the box address book. Or if you had to replace the address book with a more powerful address book implemented in a completely different way, it had to be easy for other developers to access the new data fields the new address book supports.
Today on PalmOS, there is one-way sharing of data fields. Address and date book replacements (the only way to extend functionality of the built-in applications is to replace them wholesale) can manipulate the built-in data fields, but it requires a separate contract negotiation with the individual developer of the new application (or reverse engineering) to obtain the formats for the additional data fields so that you could use it in yet another application.
The network effects of applications and more importantly
Just within the last month I saw Segways in two places that made sense. One was at Old Port of Montreal beside Vieux ("Old") Montreal through Source Segway Canada. My girlfriend and I took the quick, CDN $20 orientation, and it was fun. This outfit also rents out the units, though they are priced higher than the Chicago lakeside outfit's guided tour, at USD $110.95 for three hours of rental. That's even more expensive than Gyro Glide Rentals in San Diego, where a 3 hour rental comes out to USD $89.85. When we were there, they had a full class of people viewing an orientation video for their 1 hour rental. The Old Montreal area is not what I would say is ideal for first time Segway users, but I could easily see experienced users navigating around easily.
Chicago O'Hare airport's police also use Segways now, apparently purchased back around the beginning of the year. Saw one zip by really fast the other week, easily at a good running pace. Man, for those incredibly long hikes in DFW airport in the American Airlines terminals to catch a connection, I would easily pay USD $5, even USD $10, just to flash a card proving I've taken an orientation course and jump on a Segway for a couple minutes instead of running for 10 minutes to that gate that is in the opposite direction of that damn tram.
Turkey Guts
on
Out of Gas
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Changing World Technologies is the company behind the "turkey guts" thermal depolymerization (TDP) plant in Carthage, MO, USA.
Running some back of the envelope calculations shows some interesting figures. First establish what we use today. In 2002, the United States used an estimated 19.7 million barrels. Per day.
A plant of this size produces 180,000 barrels of oil per year; it is claimed that this is over and above the energy it uses. That works out to 493.15 barrels per day out of 200 tons each day. There are 160 million tons of wood waste per year (1998 figures) alone. That works out to 1,080,876 barrels per day if we assume the same conversion rate of 200 tons of organic matter to 493.15 barrels per day. 5.4% of our daily total oil demand from wood waste alone. Enough to affect prices at the margin, where it counts. At current rates, we will import 68% of our oil by 2025. This same reference cites DOE figures that say we currently import about 50%, or about 10 million barrels. If we put this in place today, the percentage of imports this represents rises to 10.8%.
Pulling our focus back a bit, we find that agriculture produces about 1 billion tons of waste per year. Remember, agricultural waste streams are not the only feedstock; some manufacturing waste streams are also eligible. But for the sake of back of the envelope calculations, let's assume that all eligible waste streams for TDP amounts to 1 billion tons per year. That works out to 6,755,479 barrels per day, or about 67% of daily import demand today.
Even if we project out increased demand for petroleum in the future, the potential for this technique to affect prices at the margin should not be dismissed out of hand. It is highly unlikely that we can use this technique (assuming all the engineering, business and logistical details are worked out --- the reaction chambers need to be calibrated for the feedstock, and they don't have many "recipes" worked out yet, and don't even know what is or is not feasible) to supplant import demand. Fortunately, we don't need it to wholesale replace imports: if we can make it affect the marginal price, that's still a useful tool in our national assets.
If the Changing World folks really are on the up and up, and they produce a small net of oil from these big brother versions of the pilot plant, then this is a strong piece of evidence for the school of thought who contend that market mechanisms will produce solutions as the need arises. As others in this thread have already pointed out, we certainly have nowhere approached the theoretical physics-imposed limits of available energy that can be gathered from the sun.
If you're self-employed and this month you only have 20 hours a week of work to do, your salary gets cut in half and you have trouble paying the rent.
This is only a problem if you spend your income as fast as you bring it in, and have not set aside a reserve. The typical recommendation for self-employed is to set aside 6-12 months of living expenses, more if you can swing it. Then the gaps become productive periods to refresh your sales and marketing campaigns and contacts, learn more (not just technical stuff, either), or just recharge. In fact, by not having to carry the enormous overhead of several management layers, yet billing the same rates, I've been able to learn more, relax more, and enjoy my work more than when I worked for a conventional consulting firm.
You have cause and effect in this situation backwards when you refer to companies paying political contributions and say,
Of course it's unethical...
What is unethical is a citizenry who has no moral qualms with using the force of government to compel other citizens to pay for wants they don't want to pay for themselves out of their own pockets. Once that camel's nose is in the tent, it's all over because you have ceded your sovereign power to a politician. That power is used to extort large companies to pay political contributions as the cost of doing business. And that power is very, very difficult for citizens to reclaim. Historical record tells us it is rarely reclaimed without bloodshed, and unfortunately, the citizens proceed to almost immediately cede it away from themselves again.
Take away the politican's power to extort and you will diminish companies' incentive to seek out access to that power, simply to protect themselves from harrassment if nothing else. We never receive the government we need or want, but the government we deserve.
...but are they really that useful to the terminally broke?
You don't say what you do for a living, but if you are learning how to sell, just a few tools can make you stand heads and shoulders above other salespeople in your field. A PDA is one of those tools. If your raw sales skills are about par, employing these tools with the savviness of a geek will set you apart. The really outstanding salespeople I've met had some things in common. A biggie I've seen is they follow up until they get a sale (then they keep following up to get the next sale), and they stay hyper-organized to do that. They also organize a systematic way of selling and marketing. Keeping track of hundreds, even thousands of sales leads and clients simultaneously is ridiculously easy when you are systematized and computerized.
If you are like most Slashdotters, you'll dismiss sales and marketing work. Before you do however, consider this. High end sales and marketing skills (that is, involving more than phone monkey work, and require domain knowledge of an industry) are the one set of skills that have never been outsourced. Ever. If you learn how to market and sell, and you are a geek in even a modestly-growing area, you will never lack for a job. Hell, you can always create your own job when push comes to shove. Remember, even during the Great Depression, the worst economic calamity the U.S. has experienced to date, there were still want ads in the paper...for sales positions. If you are a rainmaker, doors open. Geeks have natural talents that can be applied to sales and marketing tasks, with tremendous leverage. If you just have to get over the awkward social skills you currently labor under, there are coaches and mentors to help you with that; if it helps you learn how to market and sell, their fees are repaid orders of magnitude over.
So even if you only make USD 20K per annum right now, a PDA is appropriate if you are at the stage where you are applying your sales skills, and need a way to keep track of your contacts. I say this as a geek who eventually learned how to market and sell well enough to do it on my own. Believe me, it was worth it in spades.
Re:Could have been worse in Q4 2003. Couldn't it?
on
The Future of Security
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· Score: 1
If you have the skill to write such a virus, you can probably imagine the consequences.
If you have the skill to write such a virus, you would be better compensated by taking private sector work as a consultant. Despite all the oursourcing whinging going on, if you are that good, I know any number of employers, including myself, who would pay you easily six figures if you can deliver that skill level consistently and without a heaping pile of 'tude.
Slashdot Mirror
I have yet to see a private charity that disburses 99.2 percent of what it brings in.
That is not quite an accurate assessment. See Robert Genetski's essay to understand why. Summary: the SSA is actually extremely efficient at disbursing benefits, but some expenses are outsourced and are not accurately reflected in the efficiency figures you see generally bandied about. When accounting for all costs like the very low returns, the overall program's efficiency fares very poorly.
And if private charities are so hot, why did we need SS in the first place?
Statements like this without discussing the context of the Great Depression carry no weight. While it is impressive to say for example, 4 hospitals in New York reported 95 deaths from starvation, mortality surveys result in summaries that say "There was no sharp rise in deaths from starvation and disease. On the contrary, the world death-rate declined in the 1930's, and life expectancy continued to rise." As for people freezing to death, in the late 20th century in America, the CDC reported an annualized rate of 1,552 deaths from hypothermia over a 9 year period. As late as 2003, we simply expect about 600 deaths from hypothermia per year. If you want to refute the League of Nations' morbidity tables that show no statistically significant increase in malnutrition and hypothermia related deaths, then please share the source material you reference for your claim whose sum total of these deaths exceeds the per capita rate in the ten year periods immediately before and after the Great Depression.
While the nation suffered hardships, and there undoubtedly were some people who passed away because the economic impact mortally affected their nutrition or sources of heat, it was not noticeably more than any other period, and the records say it was actually less.
If the rationale for establishing Social Security was because people were starving to death and freezing to death, then we did not "need" Social Security then, and we don't need it now. It was a political football from its genesis to its current form today. You can cry all you want about "heartless extreme right wingers", but the simple fact of the matter is that as a nation, we simply lack the out of pocket funds to pay for its future liabilities as currently constituted. Billions of Chinese, Japanese, and to a lesser extent Europeans via their central banks are floating the entire American financial house of cards, which is the only reason Social Security even stands today. Dude, you have not seen heartless yet. The day Mr. Market comes to collect rent, interest, and back penalties, you'll see heartless that will take the breath away of even the spawn of Sauron and Darth Vader.
The choice is as stark as it is simple. Either let social welfare programs' fiscal demands continue to erode the nation's financial standing, and one day figure out how to deal with the aftermath of a collapse worse on senior citizens than the Soviet Union's. Or figure out today how to restructure the nation's finances to a sustainable footing while we still have the thin resources to even contemplate doing so.
If we stop SS today, how do we take care of those that are within 10 years of retirement (given as many of them didn't have the time to build up a 401k and some of them may not have a company pension plan)? And, what about those from 10 to 20 years from retirement?
The simple answer is you don't. Don't mandate a grandfather clause cutoff, that is.
Say we stop Social Security and Medicare in their current forms starting January 1, 2006. The actuaries can tell you approximately how much of a gap they anticipate you will have to fund (because the programs are pay-as-you-go). Issue very long-dated bonds to cover this gap.
Everyone born on or after January 1, 2006 cannot participate in the programs; their employers get to remit their entire gross (after deducting federal income tax, state unemployment tax and for some unfortunates state income tax and city income tax) to them. Everyone else has a one-time election: stay in or leave. They don't have to make the decision by some deadline, but once they make the decision, they cannot change it.
There are many permutations you can play with this basic plan, of course. Read up on Chile's privatization to gain a sense of the mechanics of the transition. But the general idea is you take the one-time hit to exit the programs by floating the debt on the money markets and pay it back out of general operations funds over the next several decades. You take future liabilities off the books, but at an up front hit to the nation's creditworthiness basically (although smart traders would probably recognize the beneficial free market implications right away and not discount the nation's economy so heavily). It hurts at first, but the financial pain pretty rapidly tapers off as the freed up funds find their way into various investments. Assuming that is, we even have the wherewithal to take the financial hit. America's national financial health is on a quicksand foundation.
Any number of exogenous events can seriously damage our ability to wind down these welfare liabilities in an orderly fashion. The longer seniors demand their pound of flesh, the closer we come to a day when there might not be an option except for the abrupt "Out of Business" one. Like the monkey trapped by a jar in which he thrust his fist to grab a bauble he won't let go, America as a nation might not let go of these welfare programs until it is knocked flat on its ass by its creditors.Considering how much of a fiscal mess the "Greatest Generation" and the "Boomer Generation" are leaving their sucessors, they have probably literally spent whatever good legacy they have built up, and history may remember them in a dim, unapproving light.
You can pick up a used unit, or if that disappears, just wait long enough and the Magma units show up from time to time. Now if you demand a new unit, or like-new, that you can have right away, and cheaply...well, sorry, you're breaking a variation of the fast-cheap-right rule.
So bring in a standard COM system, and standardise the shell interfaces and you will have kde and gnome applications that can integrate with the shell without having to have separate progams.
I thought CORBA at one time was supposed to be embraced by *nix as The One True Component Model, but when the rubber met the road back in the day, the adoption effort shattered for a variety of reasons. Now however, I see that both Gnome and KDE support CORBA (KDE support explained, Gnome support explained). All the preceding is moot of course, if you and I cannot agree that CORBA is a component model, or if you think CORBA is not a valid consideration today.
But racism ? Sorry. Western world has a sole claim on that.
You obviously have not been around Asians of one nation talking about Asians of other nations. I've seen it everywhere I've been in the world. Racism is a human trait, not a culturally specific attribute.
Argh. It should be spelled Léon de Lyon.
I've been to Europe a couple of times on vacation and the most dissappointing thing was the food.
Your results might depend upon your expectations and willingness to explore, or simply we visited different parts of Europe. For example, my personal all time favorite restaurant is a tie between two: Lyon de Lyon in Lyon, France and Atelier in New York City. But that is for the multi-course tasting menu (with a wine paired to match each course); if you go to either place for just a steak, you are likely to be unimpressed, especially for the prices.
On the other hand, in Southern France we still enjoyed ourselves when we just stopped into different restaurants that hit our fancy, some of them little hole in the wall places. The food was definitely fresh (I prefer seafood, and am extremely sensitive to any spoilage because I can smell ammonia starting in very low concentrations).
European restaurants definitely have different ideas of service than American restaurants, but I ascribe this to a cultural difference. More European restaurants are simply much more concerned about the total experience they offer to their patrons, and I'm not surprised some simply have a blanket no-toddlers policy. Whereas I've noticed American restauranteurs are generally willing to take a chance on all comers, and only confront parents if their children are really obnoxious; they usually politely ask the parents to restrain the children for their own safety because of all the hot plates running around, for example.
Most of my points of reference come from Southern France, Rhine Valley Germany, Belgium and Holland, so I'm curious what part(s) of Europe you had experience with.
T-Mobile -used- to but I don't know if they will anymore
They just unlocked my GSM phone (a SonyEricsson T610) after six months when I requested it and explained I was out of the country and wanted to use prepaid phone cards. This was only two weeks ago. I believe their waiting period is 3 months. I just called 611 on my phone and hit 0 to speak with an operator, and said I wanted to unlock my phone.
One company I worked for purchased some software from Tivoli. After 6 months, and a team of engineers onsite from the vendor, they still couldn't get the components to talk for more than a day without problems (after weeks of installation), and still couldn't get useful data out of the database due to its size, so we took our $500mil back and bought something else.
I would like to know the specifics of this project. Was this a Tivoli Storage Manager project (because you were talking about storage and archival limits earlier in your post)? As an IBM Business Partner that specializes in Tivoli services, I collect stories of Tivoli project failures to learn from them. Many (not all, but many) Tivoli project failures (and indeed, IT project failures in general) are not the result of technology deficiencies, but rather soft project management and/or poor design factors.
If you had bought $500M of Tivoli software, and IBM had, say, $100M of annual maintenance fees on the line, it must have been a whopper of a technology deficiency for them to walk away from the deal. I've seen IBM do custom development to address technology gaps unique to a single client's site for that level of deal in the past, and have seen other vendors do the same for this scale of deal. Basically, when you hit $500M and up on the initial sale, and you aren't financing it but paying cash over the barrel up front, if it takes throwing a team of programmers at a technology gap to close the deal, paying the development team $0.5-1.0M or more out of the sale to cook up some additional code on spec for a single site is seen as a cost of doing business to these giant vendors. There are few technical gaps that cannot be closed at this level. If you don't want to discuss what kind of technology gap it was here on Slashdot (understandable), please let me know at tyen $at$ netcom $dot$ com what kind of whopper it was if possible.
Back in the dot com boom, a T1 of Internet could fetch $1500 a month. You can pick it up for about $350-500 now.
Tell me what outfit in the U.S. is selling nailed up, fully dedicated, no bandwidth cap T1 lines for $350-500 per month. It is popular to quote numbers like $350-500, but all I've seen so far are those lines are capped at 10 GB per month or so. Full lines have been at about $1000-1500 per month ever since the dot com days, and have not trended down at all.
Thanks, I stand corrected; some further research after I posted that pointed out the same thing you did, but I didn't think anyone would read it since it was scored so low. As I understand it, this means that the ATA100 interface only means lower transfer speeds than what I'm used to with AT133 drives and interfaces. If so, then I'm definitely looking into these products.
The basic problem is still that the issuance of the patent presumes that integrating all this is non-obvious, which is debatable.
Furthermore, within the position paper itself, they assert "These questions relate generally to the false premise that the patent covers the simple automation of an old process on conducting international trade." Then later they claim clients can "turn to a software system and have all the necessary tasks efficiently performed" as the novelty of their patent claim. This fails to adequately refute the counter-claim that they are claiming novelty by merely automating existing processes. Reading through the patent filing, I still fail to see how this is novel. The import-export and shipping businesses are horrendously inefficient; that's a business condition, not a patentable insight.
Useful? Without a doubt. Automation of existing manual or unintegrated automated processes is always a productivity enhancer. But it fails the novelty test because they have conflated the tediousness of implementing complex regulatory-induced processes with unique insight. If this is patentable, Fred Smith could have patented FedEx, and innumerable other business opportunities capitalized by entrepreneurs every year predicated upon performing existing tasks more efficiently can also be patented.
This is an abuse of the patent system, plain and simple. I hope their patent is revoked and they're sued into oblivion. They could have made a killing just building the system and maintaining compliance with the constantly changing regulatory and pricing environments, and offering a mass-production version of import-export services (and an outsourcing option for large companies that currently internally manage import-export issues). Trying to patent this however, is just plain folly, because it raises the ire of the large companies that already do this internally, and could have been their outsourcing client pool.
Hmm...the specs say they only support up to ATA 100. So that means we're stuck with the 138 GB limit? Looking at pricewatch, it appears that the sweet spot for IDE drives in $/GB terms are 160 GB drives, and that sweet spot tends to move about 12-18 months to the next tier of capacity. I would be all over Arco Data's products if they could support the larger drives that require ATA 133 (have a RAID 5 now, but looking into building large RAID 1 caches tied together with LVM for a hierarchical storage management system because a lot of my data is read less and less frequently over time).
This is for all the responding posts to the parent asking for corroboration. 10 minutes of Googling later, here (requires registration) are some related links.
No one has been able to fully enumerate the five Congressional members and their offspring who are serving in Iraq. However, some facts pointed out in this discussion:
Your example of the AIDS help that America gives to Africa is just one small example of the terrible hypocrisy that plagues the American hating world. No other country has sacrificed so much and given so much for complete strangers
A quick Google led me to the verification of a counter-argument to the AIDS protestors. I had heard that the United States federal government spends more on AIDS research than the rest of the world, combined. So this is not counting private research efforts, which expands this gap even further. I found out the precise claim is that America, in fiscal 2002 and 2003, spent more than the rest of the world combined. Accounting for fully 50% of global expenditures in each of 2002 and 2003 is not as impressive a claim as spending more in one year than the rest of the world combined, but it is still a metric assload of money, considering America is not the source of 50% of AIDS cases in the world (source).
But wait, there's more. American taxpayers, starting with the current fiscal year, are spending not just more than the rest of the world's nations combined, but nearly twice as much! So we are going from about 50% to nearly 200% in one year, and it's still not enough for these protestors! So why are we still spat upon? Apparently because:
I'm incredulous at this point. Let me see if I have this right. Because we decide not to fund the UN effort, for whatever reason, we are the equivalent of evil incarnate, as if we spent zero on AIDS activities. Let's say for the sake of argument we don't quite trust the UN with a big wad of cash (ever seen an audit of UN finances that will stand up to scrutiny?) and try for once to be responsible with how taxpayer dollars are spent. The net result, whatever the root cause of the decision not to go through the UN, is someone's pet organization is maligned.
So instead of saying, "well, it's your money so you get to spend it the best way you see fit," or try to make UN finances transparent to the outside world so we can actually trust them with tons of cash, or do something constructive to find out why the UN was not chosen and fix that, they point the fingers at them dirty Americans and scream that we're just religious nutcases that want to bomb the rest of the world into mega-corporation submission. At the same time we don't choose the UN as the recipient of the increased funding, we still spend so much of our tax dollars on the UN AIDS organization we supposedly don't care about that we outstrip every other nation's funding for that very organization! And we're still hated for it!? Honestly, I don't even know why we Americans even try to be more nice than absolutely necessary to maintain civil but cool relationships with those who won't be satisfied no matter what we do. We're going to be hated and vilified regardless of our actions.
I guarantee you that if an American mega-corporate pharmaceutical finds a cure for AIDS, it still won't be enough for these protestors. They'll have to take a loss "for the good of mankind", and sell it at or below cost.
The following is not on topic.
I'm looking for help securing an OS/2200 mainframe (or access to one) so I can develop some code to integrate it against some IBM software. Apparently these systems are still big in Taiwan for running data warehouses. I may also need to hire an OS/2200 system programmer. So if you have some pointers or tips, please email me at tyen@netcom.com.
The PDB format is well-documented, and yes even the built-in applications' field formats are documented, but have you ever tried to decode say, DateBk4's extended fields, or how SuperNames stores links to other records in other applications? The last time I looked at their EULA's by the way, they would frown if you reverse-engineered those extended fields or proprietary record linking formats, and used what you learned in your own application without asking them first. So even if it was technically feasible to obtain the formats, the marketing insight to focus upon the data and make it interchangeable amongst applications as a system-level property, rather than an application-level property, is lacking. If this was wrong as you assert, then please explain why third-party applications use hacks like storing extended information in separate PDBs, specially formatted content in note fields, and proprietary record linking formats.
PDAs have saturated the market for users willing to dedicate a substantial amount of effort to overcoming their usability issues. This is a market ripe for Apple to pick up, because the market of casual users is still untapped.
Someone else already related how when the battery goes, today's PDAs reset themselves. Glaring usability issue for casual users. I've heard this same complaint from my non-technical friends who tried a PDA, then ditched them in favor of paper and pen. When you are trying to woo people away from an intimate routine in their daily life, at first it is sufficient to offer something that addresses the needs of people trying to solve scalability problems with their routines, like the consultant in this thread who has hundreds of contacts they have to keep up with on a monthly basis, or the poster in the healthcare field who needs to tote around a small cart of books in their hands. The PDA companies have been selling into business users for the most part, and to continue their growth they have to crack the casual user market.
Business users tend to be willing to put up with a lot that casual users will not. If a business user perceives that they obtain an edge with a particular product or service, they will invest the effort necessary to overcome the idiosyncracies to achieve that edge. Casual users will not, because the product or service is less integral to the happiness of their lives.
That you have to purchase third party applications before you can obtain seamless linking between your day timer and address book drives up the barrier to adoption by casual users. This is what leads to the perception that PDAs are nothing more than DayTimers for gadget freaks. In their default, out of the box configuration, they merely transfer the manual activities of a DayTimer onto an electronic system. That's like asking a company to adopt a computerized accounting system, only to have an army of clerks still manually reconcile accounts instead of hooking into an OFX interface.
Just shrinking the form factor and the price misses the entire point of trying to capture the casual user market.
More than ten years on after the introduction of the original Apple Newton MessagePad, I'm still surprised that neither Palm nor Microsoft have adopted the soups and slots style architecture of the NewtonOS. Today, RDF and XML could be used to implement a similar data presentation architecture, making it more useful outside of the PDA as well. More important than the technical contributions of the Newton however, were some of the marketing insights that were associated with the technical implementation.
The realization by the Newton team that most PDA applications would be relatively Unix-like (small, purpose-built applications) was spot on. The key marketing insight was that for a thriving user base and developer base to grow up around the platform, it had to be technically feasible to organically mold the user experience. It had to be easy and seamless to add functionality for example, to the out of the box address book. Or if you had to replace the address book with a more powerful address book implemented in a completely different way, it had to be easy for other developers to access the new data fields the new address book supports.
Today on PalmOS, there is one-way sharing of data fields. Address and date book replacements (the only way to extend functionality of the built-in applications is to replace them wholesale) can manipulate the built-in data fields, but it requires a separate contract negotiation with the individual developer of the new application (or reverse engineering) to obtain the formats for the additional data fields so that you could use it in yet another application.
The network effects of applications and more importantly
Just within the last month I saw Segways in two places that made sense. One was at Old Port of Montreal beside Vieux ("Old") Montreal through Source Segway Canada. My girlfriend and I took the quick, CDN $20 orientation, and it was fun. This outfit also rents out the units, though they are priced higher than the Chicago lakeside outfit's guided tour, at USD $110.95 for three hours of rental. That's even more expensive than Gyro Glide Rentals in San Diego, where a 3 hour rental comes out to USD $89.85. When we were there, they had a full class of people viewing an orientation video for their 1 hour rental. The Old Montreal area is not what I would say is ideal for first time Segway users, but I could easily see experienced users navigating around easily.
Chicago O'Hare airport's police also use Segways now, apparently purchased back around the beginning of the year. Saw one zip by really fast the other week, easily at a good running pace. Man, for those incredibly long hikes in DFW airport in the American Airlines terminals to catch a connection, I would easily pay USD $5, even USD $10, just to flash a card proving I've taken an orientation course and jump on a Segway for a couple minutes instead of running for 10 minutes to that gate that is in the opposite direction of that damn tram.
Changing World Technologies is the company behind the "turkey guts" thermal depolymerization (TDP) plant in Carthage, MO, USA.
Running some back of the envelope calculations shows some interesting figures. First establish what we use today. In 2002, the United States used an estimated 19.7 million barrels. Per day.
A plant of this size produces 180,000 barrels of oil per year; it is claimed that this is over and above the energy it uses. That works out to 493.15 barrels per day out of 200 tons each day. There are 160 million tons of wood waste per year (1998 figures) alone. That works out to 1,080,876 barrels per day if we assume the same conversion rate of 200 tons of organic matter to 493.15 barrels per day. 5.4% of our daily total oil demand from wood waste alone. Enough to affect prices at the margin, where it counts. At current rates, we will import 68% of our oil by 2025. This same reference cites DOE figures that say we currently import about 50%, or about 10 million barrels. If we put this in place today, the percentage of imports this represents rises to 10.8%.
Pulling our focus back a bit, we find that agriculture produces about 1 billion tons of waste per year. Remember, agricultural waste streams are not the only feedstock; some manufacturing waste streams are also eligible. But for the sake of back of the envelope calculations, let's assume that all eligible waste streams for TDP amounts to 1 billion tons per year. That works out to 6,755,479 barrels per day, or about 67% of daily import demand today.
Even if we project out increased demand for petroleum in the future, the potential for this technique to affect prices at the margin should not be dismissed out of hand. It is highly unlikely that we can use this technique (assuming all the engineering, business and logistical details are worked out --- the reaction chambers need to be calibrated for the feedstock, and they don't have many "recipes" worked out yet, and don't even know what is or is not feasible) to supplant import demand. Fortunately, we don't need it to wholesale replace imports: if we can make it affect the marginal price, that's still a useful tool in our national assets.
If the Changing World folks really are on the up and up, and they produce a small net of oil from these big brother versions of the pilot plant, then this is a strong piece of evidence for the school of thought who contend that market mechanisms will produce solutions as the need arises. As others in this thread have already pointed out, we certainly have nowhere approached the theoretical physics-imposed limits of available energy that can be gathered from the sun.
If you're self-employed and this month you only have 20 hours a week of work to do, your salary gets cut in half and you have trouble paying the rent.
This is only a problem if you spend your income as fast as you bring it in, and have not set aside a reserve. The typical recommendation for self-employed is to set aside 6-12 months of living expenses, more if you can swing it. Then the gaps become productive periods to refresh your sales and marketing campaigns and contacts, learn more (not just technical stuff, either), or just recharge. In fact, by not having to carry the enormous overhead of several management layers, yet billing the same rates, I've been able to learn more, relax more, and enjoy my work more than when I worked for a conventional consulting firm.
Per request, a link.
You have cause and effect in this situation backwards when you refer to companies paying political contributions and say,
What is unethical is a citizenry who has no moral qualms with using the force of government to compel other citizens to pay for wants they don't want to pay for themselves out of their own pockets. Once that camel's nose is in the tent, it's all over because you have ceded your sovereign power to a politician. That power is used to extort large companies to pay political contributions as the cost of doing business. And that power is very, very difficult for citizens to reclaim. Historical record tells us it is rarely reclaimed without bloodshed, and unfortunately, the citizens proceed to almost immediately cede it away from themselves again.
Take away the politican's power to extort and you will diminish companies' incentive to seek out access to that power, simply to protect themselves from harrassment if nothing else. We never receive the government we need or want, but the government we deserve.
You don't say what you do for a living, but if you are learning how to sell, just a few tools can make you stand heads and shoulders above other salespeople in your field. A PDA is one of those tools. If your raw sales skills are about par, employing these tools with the savviness of a geek will set you apart. The really outstanding salespeople I've met had some things in common. A biggie I've seen is they follow up until they get a sale (then they keep following up to get the next sale), and they stay hyper-organized to do that. They also organize a systematic way of selling and marketing. Keeping track of hundreds, even thousands of sales leads and clients simultaneously is ridiculously easy when you are systematized and computerized.
If you are like most Slashdotters, you'll dismiss sales and marketing work. Before you do however, consider this. High end sales and marketing skills (that is, involving more than phone monkey work, and require domain knowledge of an industry) are the one set of skills that have never been outsourced. Ever. If you learn how to market and sell, and you are a geek in even a modestly-growing area, you will never lack for a job. Hell, you can always create your own job when push comes to shove. Remember, even during the Great Depression, the worst economic calamity the U.S. has experienced to date, there were still want ads in the paper...for sales positions. If you are a rainmaker, doors open. Geeks have natural talents that can be applied to sales and marketing tasks, with tremendous leverage. If you just have to get over the awkward social skills you currently labor under, there are coaches and mentors to help you with that; if it helps you learn how to market and sell, their fees are repaid orders of magnitude over.
So even if you only make USD 20K per annum right now, a PDA is appropriate if you are at the stage where you are applying your sales skills, and need a way to keep track of your contacts. I say this as a geek who eventually learned how to market and sell well enough to do it on my own. Believe me, it was worth it in spades.
If you have the skill to write such a virus, you can probably imagine the consequences.
If you have the skill to write such a virus, you would be better compensated by taking private sector work as a consultant. Despite all the oursourcing whinging going on, if you are that good, I know any number of employers, including myself, who would pay you easily six figures if you can deliver that skill level consistently and without a heaping pile of 'tude.