Sorry, but I just had to comment on this one. In a mixed OS office like the one I work in (ie: Mac and PC laptops across the board - 8 people), it can have problems. The first is it takes Windows machines forever log into it. And then after there are dropped connections, setting up printers can be a nighmare, and the Samba shares are hard to keep online. All these problems on the Windows side granted. We switched to a Linksys with Tomato and haven't had a problem since on either Mac or PC.
Wow. You must be insanely naive. Every PhD level candidate (successful or not) has more or less the same story these days -- they work far harder than their counterparts in "private sector". The main reason is competition and the pressure to publish and teach. Its not easy getting your PhD, and its even harder to get tenure and be successful. If anything most of these qualified people are quitting early at the Masters level to find jobs, or after being a PhD level prof for a while, leaving universities to get things that are more lucrative. Science in particular is a great road to poverty when it comes to university research....
..every word coming out of the US these days that applies to particular challenges HAVE to be war related? Why are the "combating" this problem? Really guys lighten up?
...for all those that say -- "Na, na, you have no expectation to privacy on the net" -- lets get a few things straight. The first is, Facebook actually gives the impression that privacy will be shared only with those who you invite into your social circle. That means in fact that there IS an expectation of privacy, just a rather loose one (amongst your 238 friends). However the problem here is that there is a very strong suggestion that the FBI had access to Facebook accounts that they were not "invited to", and thus, under the definition and general understanding of the Facebook privacy model, were not "authorized to" view. The key concept here is the idea of "scanning software" that picked up a "combination of words". There is no mention of a person (officer, agent, etc). Had someone reported the person (say one of the friends in the guy's social network), and the FBI had pretended to be "someone" - a living person say - and then captured the tip off as part of an investigation, then I'm sure it would have been reported much differently. In this case it would seem that somehow the FBI has an automated system that has access to accounts it hasn't been invited to, and thus there are serious privacy concerns in fact.
Second thing is, how come the FBI is doing this on behalf of the UK? Isn't the FBI's juristiction only in the US? Aren't there certain laws that cover this sort of thing? Are the US and England playing a little game of bend the rules, by having the FBI spy on their citizens, so as to bypass local laws that prevent UK law enforcement from doing the same? And then the next logical step -- is England doing the same on behalf of the US -- spying on their citizens?
Finally, for all those really negative people that go on and on about the bleeding obvious -- that there is no expectation of privacy on the net -- stop it. REALLY. We can dream of a better world were we do have accountable law enforcement, strict privacy laws, and the universal expectation of free speach. Impossible you say? Well I'd counter that if you don't even bother imagining it, then for sure it definately IS impossible, because you'll never even lift a finger to try.
Do you realize how stupid you sound to people that are not from the US? Like really?
It is NOT an acceptable response in most Western 1st world nations to shoot and kill someone for a B&E under any circumstances. And if you're going to mention that they might be armed and its better to shoot first -- my point still stands -- its just symptomatic of very deep problems in the US.
As far as I'm concerned this is just a fox news tactic -- you're karma whoring for attention. I can also just randomly make stuff up as needed to make myself feel better and or win an argument or prove a point. Citation needed, please. Thanks.
Well in addition I might point out that the world wide view of Americans is that they hijack any thread or topic, even on an international discussion about Chernobyl to go on and on about their petty insecurities about their government, history and or reasons for being "American".
....it is largely simply a later version of NeXTStep. The interesting thing about this, is that NeXT WAS an open company. IIRC there were two salary bands only $50K and $70K. There was little if any heirarchy, and according to wikipedia anyways, any employee at any time could go to HR and see what anyone else was making at any given moment. And even before that at Apple, under Steve Jobs, programmers were credited directly in "About" screens in applications, and there is of course the famous "signatures" of all the people who worked on the original Mac. These practices are largely non-existant now at the big A. The change to extreme level of secrecy that came later, seems to be a logical byproduct of the "Oh yeah, and just one more thing" that Steve Jobs has honned over the years to near perfection.
While I thought your post was logically sound, and the conclusions followed the premisen pretty well, please tell me, using whatver magical lab you have to test out different economic hypoethesis, why this wouldn't happen in a "Free Market" where the linoleum companies hadn't been regulated. It seems to me that you're making the tired old Liberterian argument that "Government Bad" and "Free Market Good", and chosing a nice fantasy tale to tell us about how this works out. However if we actually look at your text, its kind of cute, but amaturish how you go about this:
"Here is an example of how it works. I am a linoleum floor manufacturer in the midwest, whose business scope is the entire US. There are about 4 other manufacturers that make linoleum with whom I compete. One day, one of my competitors makes a product using too much of a particular chemical and his floors poison house-pets; someone figures out that it is the floors, and "pop!", a new regulatory body comes into existence to regulate my industry."
In your first sentence you establish your credibility as a market player in a particular industry, in this case linoleum. What should follow logically is a story about your direct experience which shows your point (specifically about regulators and the "Free Market"), however, after, what you ACTUALLY do is switch to some kind of hypoethical tale in the present tense about something that might happen, leading to consequences that you believe are bad. But which is really unprovable.
Two questions arise from this it seems to me:
1) Is this a TRUE story, based on your experience, or are you just making anything up to try and convince people of your point? 2) If it IS a true story about your industry and regulation, can you prove that the samething WOULDN'T have happened if your industry had been left alone (ie: unregulated)?
It seems to me that point two is always what Liberterians nievely believe is the problem with the world: that somehow -- like a perfect vacuume -- darn gone it, there just isn't a perfect market -- BUT IF THERE WAS, then obviously market forces (whatever they are), would keep everyone happy and balanced through competition and the informed choice of the consumer.
However its impossible to prove, and whats more, your scenario of more linoleum mergers, acquisitions and concentration of power in just a few large companies is not only perfectly possible, BUT ACTUALLY HIGHLY LIKELY anyways in a perfect "Free Market", due to human nature and tendancy. By definition capitalism is about growth and expansion, and so any market sector is no doubt going to experience players trying to get bigger, consolidations and so on and so forth. And some will eventually succeed, and we will end up exactly where we would have anyways in your little story. Regulators or no regulators.
Also, just to note, in your idea of how things play out, the regulators come in and force terrible "unfree market things" on the industry, and prices go up and bad things happen. But also lets not forget that most likely employment conditions have gone up, fluffy's are no longer dying due to unscrupulous regulators, and most likely environmental nastyness has been avoided (as companies are forced to comply with local and or international treaties on the environment and hazardous waste). Sure the consumer pays a little more (but do they really? Everyone can just go and buy from China anyways, the situation is really just bad for you personally, and if you go bankrupt, well sorry for you, but that's the "market system" and you deserved to go bankrupt according to that because you couldn't compete), but overall there are huge benefits across several important dimentions.
Of course your other point that once in power, businesses use regulatory bodies to stifle competition is another issue all together, and is not the fault of regulators per say, but rather of how the bodies of regulators are implemented, or not properly isolated from this kind of capitalistic interfearance.
Gaming on a phone is awful. Unless that is properly addressed, then the likes of the Nintendo DS won't have to worry and I'm sure Nintendo isn't seeing how many DS units they're selling.
You obviously have never owned an iPhone. Games are alot more fun on that than on the DS, graphics are way better (about that of a PSP), and games are a hell of a lot cheaper too. Anyone that says otherwise, just doesn't like mobile gaming, or then hasn't spent any time trying it out. Or then just hates the iPhone so much they're willing to lie about their experience on it, to bash it.
And btw: Gaming on the Android looks to be great too -- assuming the appropriate hardware is present in the target phone (mostly graphics). Some great games are on their way. Check out a game called RADIANT by Hexage.
Ah. The Palm appologist fanboys are already out in force. Jump all over Apple sure, but if its Palm then "Noooes, Palm is just working out kinks", despite strong evidence that internally the whole Pre developer program is riddled (and I mean riddled) with schitzoid internal behaviour from executives and others within Palm. And I haven't seen any sign that its improving.
But this is the point actually. It COULD be nuclear. It COULD be solar. It COULD be a number of things. It most likely will be a mix of them. Once you've got every one switched over to electric cars, 80% of the battle is won there. At least on that side of things (the other side, industrial / manufacturing is another issue). On the consumer side, most housing I would hazard is electrically heated and or air conditioned these days (I know there are oil and coal(?) hold outs), so the electric vehicle is the last real poluting source in the general public during daily use. Since it turns not NOT EVERYONE BURNS COAL OR OIL AMERICA, to make their energy (hint, hint, I'm just above your boarder), it means that demanding more energy, because of your electric car, doesn't mean more coal or oil is burned up in the process. It might mean that those of us that have lots of Hydro Power or whatever might have less to sell to other people south of us. And then those people south of us might have to start making some serious choices about how to generate capacity finally in an economical and environmentally friendly way. I don't see any of these things as a bad thing.
Who ever was saying before, DIE ELECTRIC CAR DIE, clearly understands little of the benefit. I think that internal combustion engines will still be infinitely useful where there isn't alot of infrastructure around (read: harsh environments, remote locations, etc), but in terms of city and near city driving, its the future for sure.
Dude, you didn't even READ the X-33 article did you? The numbers in it state:
"NASA had invested $912 million in the project before cancellation and Lockheed Martin a further $357 million."
thats around around 1/8th of what NASA has spent so far on this new 40 billion dollar jaunt. Considering that the prototype was over 80% complete, with aerospike engines tested and everything, I would *hardly* call that nothing to show for.
Not only that but the X-33 project was prototyping some very advanced, and very useful technologies that were not about using just standard dumb old rockets into space. This was the so called "Space Truck" that everyone thinks might be the solution to cheap access to LEO. And the program cancellation was controversial (and in my mind stupid) considering that they were well over 80% of the way there. There were a number of problems, but oddly the Areospike engines was not one of them. The special fuel tanks were considered a problem, but most likely was just a materials problem that could have been solved. From further down the article:
"After the cancellation, engineers were able to make a working liquid oxygen tank out of carbon fiber composite."
And yes the X-33 was just supposed to go up to an altitude of 100kms, and yes it was not a true orbital vehicle, but as a technology demonstrator it was exactly on the right track. It would have had a reliability of at least a couple of orders of magnitude more than the Space Shuttle.
WRONGO. Setting up a Hackintosh these days on a "PC" is trivial these days. SIK (someone I know) does tonnes of iPhone development on his Acer laptop, and has a Dell and HP at his place running OS X. Just to make that CLEAR.
Of course this is totally retarded thinking. If you happen to know how long you've got before the impact, then you can evaluate your options and see what is possible. And certainly SOMETHING might well be possible. It seems reasonable to me that advanced warning is important in this scenario. Unless you know something the rest of us don't, in which case please share.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, but I just had to comment on this one. In a mixed OS office like the one I work in (ie: Mac and PC laptops across the board - 8 people), it can have problems. The first is it takes Windows machines forever log into it. And then after there are dropped connections, setting up printers can be a nighmare, and the Samba shares are hard to keep online. All these problems on the Windows side granted. We switched to a Linksys with Tomato and haven't had a problem since on either Mac or PC.
Wow. You must be insanely naive. Every PhD level candidate (successful or not) has more or less the same story these days -- they work far harder than their counterparts in "private sector". The main reason is competition and the pressure to publish and teach. Its not easy getting your PhD, and its even harder to get tenure and be successful. If anything most of these qualified people are quitting early at the Masters level to find jobs, or after being a PhD level prof for a while, leaving universities to get things that are more lucrative. Science in particular is a great road to poverty when it comes to university research....
..every word coming out of the US these days that applies to particular challenges HAVE to be war related? Why are the "combating" this problem? Really guys lighten up?
...for all those that say -- "Na, na, you have no expectation to privacy on the net" -- lets get a few things straight. The first is, Facebook actually gives the impression that privacy will be shared only with those who you invite into your social circle. That means in fact that there IS an expectation of privacy, just a rather loose one (amongst your 238 friends). However the problem here is that there is a very strong suggestion that the FBI had access to Facebook accounts that they were not "invited to", and thus, under the definition and general understanding of the Facebook privacy model, were not "authorized to" view. The key concept here is the idea of "scanning software" that picked up a "combination of words". There is no mention of a person (officer, agent, etc). Had someone reported the person (say one of the friends in the guy's social network), and the FBI had pretended to be "someone" - a living person say - and then captured the tip off as part of an investigation, then I'm sure it would have been reported much differently. In this case it would seem that somehow the FBI has an automated system that has access to accounts it hasn't been invited to, and thus there are serious privacy concerns in fact.
Second thing is, how come the FBI is doing this on behalf of the UK? Isn't the FBI's juristiction only in the US? Aren't there certain laws that cover this sort of thing? Are the US and England playing a little game of bend the rules, by having the FBI spy on their citizens, so as to bypass local laws that prevent UK law enforcement from doing the same? And then the next logical step -- is England doing the same on behalf of the US -- spying on their citizens?
Finally, for all those really negative people that go on and on about the bleeding obvious -- that there is no expectation of privacy on the net -- stop it. REALLY. We can dream of a better world were we do have accountable law enforcement, strict privacy laws, and the universal expectation of free speach. Impossible you say? Well I'd counter that if you don't even bother imagining it, then for sure it definately IS impossible, because you'll never even lift a finger to try.
is not geeky, but awareness of a mainstream hollywood kids action movie is?
You must be new here!
Do you realize how stupid you sound to people that are not from the US? Like really?
It is NOT an acceptable response in most Western 1st world nations to shoot and kill someone for a B&E under any circumstances. And if you're going to mention that they might be armed and its better to shoot first -- my point still stands -- its just symptomatic of very deep problems in the US.
And your point is?
And yet you still keep coming back, again and again, after all these years. ;)
As far as I'm concerned this is just a fox news tactic -- you're karma whoring for attention. I can also just randomly make stuff up as needed to make myself feel better and or win an argument or prove a point. Citation needed, please. Thanks.
And what if you choose to be childless because you don't agree with the current system and self righteous ass hats such as yourself?
Well in addition I might point out that the world wide view of Americans is that they hijack any thread or topic, even on an international discussion about Chernobyl to go on and on about their petty insecurities about their government, history and or reasons for being "American".
Just stop it.
Thanks.
....it is largely simply a later version of NeXTStep. The interesting thing about this, is that NeXT WAS an open company. IIRC there were two salary bands only $50K and $70K. There was little if any heirarchy, and according to wikipedia anyways, any employee at any time could go to HR and see what anyone else was making at any given moment. And even before that at Apple, under Steve Jobs, programmers were credited directly in "About" screens in applications, and there is of course the famous "signatures" of all the people who worked on the original Mac. These practices are largely non-existant now at the big A. The change to extreme level of secrecy that came later, seems to be a logical byproduct of the "Oh yeah, and just one more thing" that Steve Jobs has honned over the years to near perfection.
:)
Of course. Because Nokia has 34 billion dollars in the bank just like Apple.
Good luck with that Nokia fanboi.
Dear Mister Linoleum Guy,
While I thought your post was logically sound, and the conclusions followed the premisen pretty well, please tell me, using whatver magical lab you have to test out different economic hypoethesis, why this wouldn't happen in a "Free Market" where the linoleum companies hadn't been regulated. It seems to me that you're making the tired old Liberterian argument that "Government Bad" and "Free Market Good", and chosing a nice fantasy tale to tell us about how this works out. However if we actually look at your text, its kind of cute, but amaturish how you go about this:
"Here is an example of how it works. I am a linoleum floor manufacturer in the midwest, whose business scope is the entire US. There are about 4 other manufacturers that make linoleum with whom I compete. One day, one of my competitors makes a product using too much of a particular chemical and his floors poison house-pets; someone figures out that it is the floors, and "pop!", a new regulatory body comes into existence to regulate my industry."
In your first sentence you establish your credibility as a market player in a particular industry, in this case linoleum. What should follow logically is a story about your direct experience which shows your point (specifically about regulators and the "Free Market"), however, after, what you ACTUALLY do is switch to some kind of hypoethical tale in the present tense about something that might happen, leading to consequences that you believe are bad. But which is really unprovable.
Two questions arise from this it seems to me:
1) Is this a TRUE story, based on your experience, or are you just making anything up to try and convince people of your point?
2) If it IS a true story about your industry and regulation, can you prove that the samething WOULDN'T have happened if your industry had been left alone (ie: unregulated)?
It seems to me that point two is always what Liberterians nievely believe is the problem with the world: that somehow -- like a perfect vacuume -- darn gone it, there just isn't a perfect market -- BUT IF THERE WAS, then obviously market forces (whatever they are), would keep everyone happy and balanced through competition and the informed choice of the consumer.
However its impossible to prove, and whats more, your scenario of more linoleum mergers, acquisitions and concentration of power in just a few large companies is not only perfectly possible, BUT ACTUALLY HIGHLY LIKELY anyways in a perfect "Free Market", due to human nature and tendancy. By definition capitalism is about growth and expansion, and so any market sector is no doubt going to experience players trying to get bigger, consolidations and so on and so forth. And some will eventually succeed, and we will end up exactly where we would have anyways in your little story. Regulators or no regulators.
Also, just to note, in your idea of how things play out, the regulators come in and force terrible "unfree market things" on the industry, and prices go up and bad things happen. But also lets not forget that most likely employment conditions have gone up, fluffy's are no longer dying due to unscrupulous regulators, and most likely environmental nastyness has been avoided (as companies are forced to comply with local and or international treaties on the environment and hazardous waste). Sure the consumer pays a little more (but do they really? Everyone can just go and buy from China anyways, the situation is really just bad for you personally, and if you go bankrupt, well sorry for you, but that's the "market system" and you deserved to go bankrupt according to that because you couldn't compete), but overall there are huge benefits across several important dimentions.
Of course your other point that once in power, businesses use regulatory bodies to stifle competition is another issue all together, and is not the fault of regulators per say, but rather of how the bodies of regulators are implemented, or not properly isolated from this kind of capitalistic interfearance.
Gaming on a phone is awful. Unless that is properly addressed, then the likes of the Nintendo DS won't have to worry and I'm sure Nintendo isn't seeing how many DS units they're selling.
You obviously have never owned an iPhone. Games are alot more fun on that than on the DS, graphics are way better (about that of a PSP), and games are a hell of a lot cheaper too. Anyone that says otherwise, just doesn't like mobile gaming, or then hasn't spent any time trying it out. Or then just hates the iPhone so much they're willing to lie about their experience on it, to bash it.
And btw: Gaming on the Android looks to be great too -- assuming the appropriate hardware is present in the target phone (mostly graphics). Some great games are on their way. Check out a game called RADIANT by Hexage.
Ah. The Palm appologist fanboys are already out in force. Jump all over Apple sure, but if its Palm then "Noooes, Palm is just working out kinks", despite strong evidence that internally the whole Pre developer program is riddled (and I mean riddled) with schitzoid internal behaviour from executives and others within Palm. And I haven't seen any sign that its improving.
But this is the point actually. It COULD be nuclear. It COULD be solar. It COULD be a number of things. It most likely will be a mix of them. Once you've got every one switched over to electric cars, 80% of the battle is won there. At least on that side of things (the other side, industrial / manufacturing is another issue). On the consumer side, most housing I would hazard is electrically heated and or air conditioned these days (I know there are oil and coal(?) hold outs), so the electric vehicle is the last real poluting source in the general public during daily use. Since it turns not NOT EVERYONE BURNS COAL OR OIL AMERICA, to make their energy (hint, hint, I'm just above your boarder), it means that demanding more energy, because of your electric car, doesn't mean more coal or oil is burned up in the process. It might mean that those of us that have lots of Hydro Power or whatever might have less to sell to other people south of us. And then those people south of us might have to start making some serious choices about how to generate capacity finally in an economical and environmentally friendly way. I don't see any of these things as a bad thing.
Who ever was saying before, DIE ELECTRIC CAR DIE, clearly understands little of the benefit. I think that internal combustion engines will still be infinitely useful where there isn't alot of infrastructure around (read: harsh environments, remote locations, etc), but in terms of city and near city driving, its the future for sure.
Oh really? And could you provide us with some examples? And this is for which country(ies)?
Thanks Mister Snarky. You've *really* convinced me to switch there. :)
Thanks for your statistically irrelevant anecdote from One Person in General. Sounds very convincing. Please don't repeat over and over. Thanks.
(Currently written from my netbook, which I love dearly)
Dude, you didn't even READ the X-33 article did you? The numbers in it state:
"NASA had invested $912 million in the project before cancellation and Lockheed Martin a further $357 million."
thats around around 1/8th of what NASA has spent so far on this new 40 billion dollar jaunt. Considering that the prototype was over 80% complete, with aerospike engines tested and everything, I would *hardly* call that nothing to show for.
Not only that but the X-33 project was prototyping some very advanced, and very useful technologies that were not about using just standard dumb old rockets into space. This was the so called "Space Truck" that everyone thinks might be the solution to cheap access to LEO. And the program cancellation was controversial (and in my mind stupid) considering that they were well over 80% of the way there. There were a number of problems, but oddly the Areospike engines was not one of them. The special fuel tanks were considered a problem, but most likely was just a materials problem that could have been solved. From further down the article:
"After the cancellation, engineers were able to make a working liquid oxygen tank out of carbon fiber composite."
And yes the X-33 was just supposed to go up to an altitude of 100kms, and yes it was not a true orbital vehicle, but as a technology demonstrator it was exactly on the right track. It would have had a reliability of at least a couple of orders of magnitude more than the Space Shuttle.
Its a shame it never continued.
You may have no choice. The God may not be too cooperative, and you'll be back to studying the universe because of no other recourse.
WRONGO. Setting up a Hackintosh these days on a "PC" is trivial these days. SIK (someone I know) does tonnes of iPhone development on his Acer laptop, and has a Dell and HP at his place running OS X. Just to make that CLEAR.
Of course this is totally retarded thinking. If you happen to know how long you've got before the impact, then you can evaluate your options and see what is possible. And certainly SOMETHING might well be possible. It seems reasonable to me that advanced warning is important in this scenario. Unless you know something the rest of us don't, in which case please share.