When I was in South Africa, if you order from KFC, they give you little mini loaves of bread, instead of biscuits. Thought that was funny. Like they said in Pulp Fiction, it's the little differences.
Hybrids are 10% *heavier* on average? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Isn't the whole purpose of a hybrid to get better gas mileage? Shouldn't one of the first design criteria for a hybrid be a decrease in weight, to increase fuel economy?
Financial incentives are important, but we need more than a higher number of engineering graduates. We need a legion of enthusiastic experts who live and breathe it. Who love it to the point they're almost willing to do it for free. We need something to truly inspire them. Something to challenge them to change our world as we know it.
There was a time when a President stood and said, in this decade we will put a man on the moon. This ushered in an unprecedented leap forward in technology, and at the heart of it were a wave of engineers who were given a concrete goal they could achieve.
It's time for a new mission. The next leap forward.
There are many regions around the world, particularly in India and Africa that are desperate for fresh water. Why not send a tanker up there with a legion of laborers to harvest these icebergs? Instead of just letting it melt into the ocean.
People may not know this, but before modern refrigeration, workers used to manually harvest big blocks of ice out of lakes with saws. Then your local Ice-guy would walk up to the side of your house, open a little door and stick a smaller block of ice through your wall, and into your icebox. This was how you kept food relatively cool.
I hate interviews, so I started up my own company. Half the time you work for someone else you're thinking you could do their job much better anyhow if only you were in charge. Great thing about having your own company, you get to be in charge, and you get to do whatever the eff you want to do, exactly how you believe it should be done.
When you register a trademark, you have to select which class(es) of service the goods or services your company sells should cover. This seems to imply to me that a trademark only covers those classes of service, so unless Apple Inc registered their trademark for selling actual fruit, I don't understand how this works under the law. Why even have classes of service if company's are going to claim trademark infringement willy nilly on any classes of service, even ones they don't offer?
Your logic, as is current drug policy, is foolishness. Your contention is this substance is harmful, therefore it should be illegal. Your contention is people should be arrested, processed through our courts, and jailed and/or imprisoned. Over a plant. What makes this foolish, is your assumption that making something illegal makes it unavailable. In fact, the opposite is true. The only thing prohibition policy does is creates a black market. That's it. Black market profiteers don't fear getting their 7-11 shut down, so they have no incentive to follow the prohibition law. You can only control availability when it is legal, but regulated. Like tobacco. Prohibition, making something illegal, merely determines who profits from the substance.
But what's worse, is your ignorance behind the statement this issue is not worthy of the President's time. Make no mistake, drug prohibition is one of the most significant social justice issues of our generation. Over 50,000 Mexican citizens have been murdered in the last 5 years. We only lost 3,000 on 9/11 in America. Over 750,000 Americans are arrested every year for possession of a plant. Over $1 Trillion dollars has been wasted over the last 40 years on the failed war on drugs, which is really a war on its own citizens.
Just because a substance is not healthy, does not mean it should be criminalized. In fact, as we learned in the 20's, the consequences of prohibition are far more disastrous.
Bottom line, the CSA (Controlled Substances Act), or at least the criminalizing prohibition pieces, must be repealed, just as the 18th Amendment was repealed.
“Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes.” — Abraham Lincoln
I like your standardized units. Just to add, he talks about slashing military spending more seriously than any other candidate. In every debate, he is a strong proponent of closing bases and bring troops home from around the world, ending wars, etc...
This is cool from an engineering perspective, but solar panel tech is a drop in the energy density bucket. We need revolutionary leaps forward in science here. You can help, add your name to the White House petition. There are several other petitions you might find of interest as well...
Direct NASA/DARPA-E to begin the next Manhattan project to invent a new domestic energy source that gets a 1,000 MPGE. http://wh.gov/ghD
Abolish the TSA, and use its monstrous budget to fund more sophisticated, less intrusive counter-terrorism intelligence. http://wh.gov/gRT
Direct the Patent Office to Cease Issuing Software Patents http://wh.gov/gEm
Legalize and Regulate Marijuana in a Manner Similar to Alcohol. http://wh.gov/gDQ
I run Windows 7 in one of my MacBook Pro OSX Spaces through VMWare Fusion every day. It's the best of both worlds. There are several significant features in OSX (like Spaces) that aren't in Windows, as well as OSX being required for iOS programming. And there is a lot of software I need for Windows based programming that only runs on Windows. On top of that, the MacBook Pro has tremendous battery life and is lightweight for a full laptop.
I love it. I need it. I can't imagine living without it.
Exactly. Moreover, when it comes to budgeting, one thing you don't have to worry about with contractors is the rising cost of health care benefits. With perm employees, many people lose out on seeing an increase in wages, because their employer is picking up the rising cost of their health care. Which is why that "benefit" should be decoupled from employment. After all, your company doesn't pay for your car insurance.
"The real kicker is that as a contractor you have an incentive to not really fix things, but to just patch them. "
As a contractor, I take offense with this. Being a contractor or not has no bearing on the quality you produce. Quality of work is determined by quality of the worker, it's that simple. To suggest an IT contractor would even need to create more work for himself is out of touch with the reality of IT itself. There is always more work. There is always some new requirement, new feature, new technology, or list of bugs that needs attention. In fact, most contractors do good work, so they can get the next contract.
Personally, I am committed to quality, because I take great pride in my work. It upsets me greatly if someone manages to somehow find a bug in what I produce. But we're all human, contractor or perm.
At the end of the day, the saying goes: speed, quality, cost, pick 2.
How government defines the problem: A backlog of 700,000 patent applications.
How government responds: Add more resources; people, money. While incentivizing more patent applications with FTF, which will require more resources.
How government should have solved it: Eliminate 90% of patent applications by limiting patents to actual, tangible innovations.
How exactly: Apply for patents online. Stage 1: Inventor enters summary of invention and selects category. A panel of 5 experts in category, vote on whether summary is new, novel, not frivolous, not overly broad, not an abstract idea like software or business methods, and finally based on their expertise in the field, has no known prior art or current use in the marketplace. Stage 2: If majority of panel approves, allow inventor to submit details, and 2 examiners perform a comprehensive analysis on whether invention is worthy of awarding a patent.
That's interesting, but after last night's cascading power outage that put millions in the dark, myself included, from one little glitch out in the middle of the Arizona desert, I say, get us off this grid.
I would like to see small, independent power stations installed with every home, about the size of an outdoor AC unit, that provides enough energy for that family, supplemented by additional stations installed next to every gas pump. This would eliminate the interdependent risk of the grid, and reduce the waste from power lost in today's long line transmission.
Whether "Climate Change", or "Global Warming" or "Global Cooling" or "Global Dimming" before it, are real or not, why does it matter?
If there is one issue everyone should be able to agree on, for different reasons, it's that we need a new energy source. The reasons seems secondary, as long as it gets done.
Instead of continuing wars to attempt to "preserve peace" in oil producing regions, why not take that money and devote it to a Manhattan style moonshot project for finding a new energy source with the necessary energy density, positive EROEI, portability, etc... that can begin to rebuild our petroleum-based economy.
It's going to take at least a decade to transform our national infrastructure. Why Mr. President, aren't we getting started on that now? After all, we've got some recently unemployed NASA folks who actually are rocket scientists.
"Slave-labor" wages are really a matter of perspective, based on your personal standard of living. The people filling these jobs, particularly in China, are from rural areas, who take them because they are a substantial increase in pay for their family from what they as farmers were making toiling over fields. As hard as the manufacturing work seems to us in America who comparatively have it pretty easy, isn't sitting in a chair putting electronics together somewhat less back-breaking work than bending over harvesting crops all day?
The House Republicans took a lot of heat for wanting to decrease spending so we can merely lower our planned and projected annual budget deficits. Meaning, we stop adding to the accumulated debt. I think that is the absolute LEAST we should be doing right now. Not only are they not even attempting to actually pay off the current accumulated national debt, but President Obama's current projections are that we will owe more than $20 trillion in 2020. And this assumes someone is willing to loan us that money so we can continue our deficit financing.
Last week, even before S&P lowered our rating, China's largest rating agency lowered our credit rating. Their evaluation of our fiscal situation is much more pessimistic than our own. That should say something, considering China is are largest lender.
China's Yuan is expected to become the world's reserve currency by 2020. Their monetary policy is much more strategically long term than our own. Also notice that China isn't wasting trillions of dollars on wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and the so-called drug war from our failed drug prohibition policy. And while the President can fume about Congress pushing for real spending cuts, the truth is as the President, Obama can stop the wars immediately as Commander and Chief. If he did just this one thing alone, he could take those trillions being spent on all our wars and actually invest in rebuilding America for the 21st Century. More than a campaign slogan with pretty patriotic banners, but actual change. You'd think of all people, a Democrat would do that. He hasn't. We aren't. But China is.
since installing the 2 software updates Apple released to prep Snow Leopard before installing Lion. My VMWare Fusion freezes, and spits out an exception with log detail about video. So I've held off on Lion.
Software, algorithms, and business methods should never be patentable. It violates the original intent of patents for real inventions by claiming the machine-or-transformation test applies just because it runs on hardware like a computer.
Patents should be rare, and only awarded for tangible objects. And even then, only for their unique implementation. Edison and Tesla both invented light bulbs. Both are valid and necessary for progress. No one should have a monopoly on light bulbs in general, or products, or markets for that matter.
Because invention itself is almost always evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Incremental improvements of ideas, and the next idea borrows from previous ideas. We all stand on shoulders of giants.
Actually, if you're born in the city, typically someone middle or upper class who doesn't work in a factory, you get free government healthcare. If you're born out in the rural areas, typically someone in poverty who takes a factory job (because it still pays better than what they would earn farming), then they don't get free government healthcare.
In China, they actually have two different classes of citizenship, and they intentionally segregate the people in order to keep a dirt cheap manufacturing labor pool going, which in turn drives their lucrative export economy.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was in South Africa, if you order from KFC, they give you little mini loaves of bread, instead of biscuits. Thought that was funny. Like they said in Pulp Fiction, it's the little differences.
Hybrids are 10% *heavier* on average? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Isn't the whole purpose of a hybrid to get better gas mileage? Shouldn't one of the first design criteria for a hybrid be a decrease in weight, to increase fuel economy?
Financial incentives are important, but we need more than a higher number of engineering graduates. We need a legion of enthusiastic experts who live and breathe it. Who love it to the point they're almost willing to do it for free. We need something to truly inspire them. Something to challenge them to change our world as we know it.
There was a time when a President stood and said, in this decade we will put a man on the moon. This ushered in an unprecedented leap forward in technology, and at the heart of it were a wave of engineers who were given a concrete goal they could achieve.
It's time for a new mission. The next leap forward.
There are many regions around the world, particularly in India and Africa that are desperate for fresh water. Why not send a tanker up there with a legion of laborers to harvest these icebergs? Instead of just letting it melt into the ocean.
People may not know this, but before modern refrigeration, workers used to manually harvest big blocks of ice out of lakes with saws. Then your local Ice-guy would walk up to the side of your house, open a little door and stick a smaller block of ice through your wall, and into your icebox. This was how you kept food relatively cool.
I hate interviews, so I started up my own company. Half the time you work for someone else you're thinking you could do their job much better anyhow if only you were in charge. Great thing about having your own company, you get to be in charge, and you get to do whatever the eff you want to do, exactly how you believe it should be done.
When you register a trademark, you have to select which class(es) of service the goods or services your company sells should cover. This seems to imply to me that a trademark only covers those classes of service, so unless Apple Inc registered their trademark for selling actual fruit, I don't understand how this works under the law. Why even have classes of service if company's are going to claim trademark infringement willy nilly on any classes of service, even ones they don't offer?
I signed this one right away. There's also another petition I like to abolish the TSA.
Your logic, as is current drug policy, is foolishness. Your contention is this substance is harmful, therefore it should be illegal. Your contention is people should be arrested, processed through our courts, and jailed and/or imprisoned. Over a plant. What makes this foolish, is your assumption that making something illegal makes it unavailable. In fact, the opposite is true. The only thing prohibition policy does is creates a black market. That's it. Black market profiteers don't fear getting their 7-11 shut down, so they have no incentive to follow the prohibition law. You can only control availability when it is legal, but regulated. Like tobacco. Prohibition, making something illegal, merely determines who profits from the substance.
But what's worse, is your ignorance behind the statement this issue is not worthy of the President's time. Make no mistake, drug prohibition is one of the most significant social justice issues of our generation. Over 50,000 Mexican citizens have been murdered in the last 5 years. We only lost 3,000 on 9/11 in America. Over 750,000 Americans are arrested every year for possession of a plant. Over $1 Trillion dollars has been wasted over the last 40 years on the failed war on drugs, which is really a war on its own citizens.
Just because a substance is not healthy, does not mean it should be criminalized. In fact, as we learned in the 20's, the consequences of prohibition are far more disastrous.
Bottom line, the CSA (Controlled Substances Act), or at least the criminalizing prohibition pieces, must be repealed, just as the 18th Amendment was repealed.
“Prohibition goes beyond the bounds of reason in that it attempts to control a man’s appetite by legislation, and makes a crime out of things that are not crimes.”
— Abraham Lincoln
I like your standardized units. Just to add, he talks about slashing military spending more seriously than any other candidate. In every debate, he is a strong proponent of closing bases and bring troops home from around the world, ending wars, etc...
Marked as Troll??? Are you kidding me?? What kind of moron moderators do we have on here?
This is cool from an engineering perspective, but solar panel tech is a drop in the energy density bucket. We need revolutionary leaps forward in science here. You can help, add your name to the White House petition. There are several other petitions you might find of interest as well...
Direct NASA/DARPA-E to begin the next Manhattan project to invent a new domestic energy source that gets a 1,000 MPGE.
http://wh.gov/ghD
Abolish the TSA, and use its monstrous budget to fund more sophisticated, less intrusive counter-terrorism intelligence.
http://wh.gov/gRT
Direct the Patent Office to Cease Issuing Software Patents
http://wh.gov/gEm
Legalize and Regulate Marijuana in a Manner Similar to Alcohol.
http://wh.gov/gDQ
I do.
I run Windows 7 in one of my MacBook Pro OSX Spaces through VMWare Fusion every day. It's the best of both worlds. There are several significant features in OSX (like Spaces) that aren't in Windows, as well as OSX being required for iOS programming. And there is a lot of software I need for Windows based programming that only runs on Windows. On top of that, the MacBook Pro has tremendous battery life and is lightweight for a full laptop.
I love it. I need it. I can't imagine living without it.
Exactly. Moreover, when it comes to budgeting, one thing you don't have to worry about with contractors is the rising cost of health care benefits. With perm employees, many people lose out on seeing an increase in wages, because their employer is picking up the rising cost of their health care. Which is why that "benefit" should be decoupled from employment. After all, your company doesn't pay for your car insurance.
"The real kicker is that as a contractor you have an incentive to not really fix things, but to just patch them. "
As a contractor, I take offense with this. Being a contractor or not has no bearing on the quality you produce. Quality of work is determined by quality of the worker, it's that simple. To suggest an IT contractor would even need to create more work for himself is out of touch with the reality of IT itself. There is always more work. There is always some new requirement, new feature, new technology, or list of bugs that needs attention. In fact, most contractors do good work, so they can get the next contract.
Personally, I am committed to quality, because I take great pride in my work. It upsets me greatly if someone manages to somehow find a bug in what I produce. But we're all human, contractor or perm.
At the end of the day, the saying goes: speed, quality, cost, pick 2.
And the cost to apply to Stage 1: $2,000.
How government defines the problem:
A backlog of 700,000 patent applications.
How government responds:
Add more resources; people, money. While incentivizing more patent applications with FTF, which will require more resources.
How government should have solved it:
Eliminate 90% of patent applications by limiting patents to actual, tangible innovations.
How exactly:
Apply for patents online. Stage 1: Inventor enters summary of invention and selects category. A panel of 5 experts in category, vote on whether summary is new, novel, not frivolous, not overly broad, not an abstract idea like software or business methods, and finally based on their expertise in the field, has no known prior art or current use in the marketplace. Stage 2: If majority of panel approves, allow inventor to submit details, and 2 examiners perform a comprehensive analysis on whether invention is worthy of awarding a patent.
Good points. Interesting discussion going here!
That's interesting, but after last night's cascading power outage that put millions in the dark, myself included, from one little glitch out in the middle of the Arizona desert, I say, get us off this grid.
I would like to see small, independent power stations installed with every home, about the size of an outdoor AC unit, that provides enough energy for that family, supplemented by additional stations installed next to every gas pump. This would eliminate the interdependent risk of the grid, and reduce the waste from power lost in today's long line transmission.
I am. Wheels are so horse and buggy. I grew up watching the Jetsons!
Whether "Climate Change", or "Global Warming" or "Global Cooling" or "Global Dimming" before it, are real or not, why does it matter?
If there is one issue everyone should be able to agree on, for different reasons, it's that we need a new energy source. The reasons seems secondary, as long as it gets done.
Instead of continuing wars to attempt to "preserve peace" in oil producing regions, why not take that money and devote it to a Manhattan style moonshot project for finding a new energy source with the necessary energy density, positive EROEI, portability, etc... that can begin to rebuild our petroleum-based economy.
It's going to take at least a decade to transform our national infrastructure. Why Mr. President, aren't we getting started on that now? After all, we've got some recently unemployed NASA folks who actually are rocket scientists.
"Slave-labor" wages are really a matter of perspective, based on your personal standard of living. The people filling these jobs, particularly in China, are from rural areas, who take them because they are a substantial increase in pay for their family from what they as farmers were making toiling over fields. As hard as the manufacturing work seems to us in America who comparatively have it pretty easy, isn't sitting in a chair putting electronics together somewhat less back-breaking work than bending over harvesting crops all day?
The House Republicans took a lot of heat for wanting to decrease spending so we can merely lower our planned and projected annual budget deficits. Meaning, we stop adding to the accumulated debt. I think that is the absolute LEAST we should be doing right now. Not only are they not even attempting to actually pay off the current accumulated national debt, but President Obama's current projections are that we will owe more than $20 trillion in 2020. And this assumes someone is willing to loan us that money so we can continue our deficit financing.
Last week, even before S&P lowered our rating, China's largest rating agency lowered our credit rating. Their evaluation of our fiscal situation is much more pessimistic than our own. That should say something, considering China is are largest lender.
China's Yuan is expected to become the world's reserve currency by 2020. Their monetary policy is much more strategically long term than our own. Also notice that China isn't wasting trillions of dollars on wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, and the so-called drug war from our failed drug prohibition policy. And while the President can fume about Congress pushing for real spending cuts, the truth is as the President, Obama can stop the wars immediately as Commander and Chief. If he did just this one thing alone, he could take those trillions being spent on all our wars and actually invest in rebuilding America for the 21st Century. More than a campaign slogan with pretty patriotic banners, but actual change. You'd think of all people, a Democrat would do that. He hasn't. We aren't. But China is.
since installing the 2 software updates Apple released to prep Snow Leopard before installing Lion. My VMWare Fusion freezes, and spits out an exception with log detail about video. So I've held off on Lion.
I have the Mid-2010 MBP with Nvidia.
Software, algorithms, and business methods should never be patentable. It violates the original intent of patents for real inventions by claiming the machine-or-transformation test applies just because it runs on hardware like a computer.
And it is a real problem for the future of not only America, but for the rest of the world, as noted in this recent article in the Economist.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/08/intellectual-property
Patents should be rare, and only awarded for tangible objects. And even then, only for their unique implementation. Edison and Tesla both invented light bulbs. Both are valid and necessary for progress. No one should have a monopoly on light bulbs in general, or products, or markets for that matter.
Because invention itself is almost always evolutionary, rather than revolutionary. Incremental improvements of ideas, and the next idea borrows from previous ideas. We all stand on shoulders of giants.
Actually, if you're born in the city, typically someone middle or upper class who doesn't work in a factory, you get free government healthcare. If you're born out in the rural areas, typically someone in poverty who takes a factory job (because it still pays better than what they would earn farming), then they don't get free government healthcare.
In China, they actually have two different classes of citizenship, and they intentionally segregate the people in order to keep a dirt cheap manufacturing labor pool going, which in turn drives their lucrative export economy.