Someone can tell me if life has changed, but this is the way I recall authorship. The first author is ideally the person who did at least the broad development work(came up with the idea, worked out the general design, got funding) and hopefully wrote a rough draft of the paper. The second to n-1 author probably worked on the details and did the nitty gritty lab work, or equivalent. They probably expanded on the draft and created graphs to make almost a complete paper. The last author is often a high ranking administrator, often with great skill, that probably helped flesh out the original idea, helped overcome some problems, provided invaluable feedback on the paper, but is given authorship mostly because he or she runs the lab or is just nice to have on the paper.
I don't want to minimize the contributions of Dr. Chu, he probably provided highly valuable technical assistance that allowed the success of the project. At that level, though, the value is the insight, not necessarily the day to day work. If I can cal someone like Dr. Chu to help me overcome a experimental issue, and he can help me out, that is value beyond a price tag.
From my point of view, this is the issue with the cell phone market in general, at least in the US. Years ago I wanted a Nokia Communicator. Couldn't get it. Settled for a Razr. Wasn't happy because it was limited, presumably to carrier pressure.
Blackberry created a phone for the business user, not the carriers. Apple created a phone for the consumer user, not the carriers. We will see if Android is a phone for the user or for the carrier. What is clear is that Nokia is still producing phones that satisfy the needs of carriers, not the user. That time is over.
Accountants are there to minimize profit that is shown externally. External profits are always bad. They require taxes and other payouts to external entities. Just as an example because they have the highest gross profits I know about, MS earned about 14 million the latest quarter, of which 11 million was gross profit. About two million of that was spent on research and 4 million on admin expenses and marketing. This is about 33% of gross profits on marketing and admin. As a percent of gross profit this is not excessive, but as percent of revenue it is highly excessive. Other companies might spend 10-20% of revenue. It is arguable that MS maximizes admin expenses to minimize profit. They put perks in minimize taxes and make them look less profitable. They do the same with research money that leads nowhere, i.e. the kin.
On the other hand, the overfishing has stopped. Many species, such as sea turtles were doomed anyway, not because we eat them as food, but because they are killed in the fishing proces. This is not to mention the number of species that die because their land now has a hotel on it.
If BP would not have caved and paid off the fishing and tourist industry, then many problems would go away. Again, if there were fewer hotels, and few more careful fishing crews, turtles might survive. As it is, the oil is just more nail in the coffin. Really irrelevant in the grand context.
So how does one make a profit in this model. I understand that the likea of HP and Dell and Apple might use these fake recycling services as all they need to get material out of the country and have it end up in someone else's landfill. There is no expectation of profit, just minimization of the cost needed to generate good will. But to make a profit?
I pay for a truck. I pay someone or personally recruit legitimate firms to provide cover. I or one of my agents are at the collection site. Packing costs money. Shipping costs money. Unpacking and disposal costs money. These are a lot of expenses, and I don't see any receivables, unless the parties receiving the product are actually paying for the computers, in which case we can also assume that some level of recycling is going on.
The question is if enough of the computer is recycled to justify the effort and resources consumed, presumably mostly fuel. I would say the best way to deal with this question is not to pass regulation that adress symptoms, but rather to pass regulations so that resources are not undervalued.
Ten years ago I noticed the confluence of MS pushing firms to fully license software, including invasive and expensive audits, and the use of OSS. For the longest time companies were able to manage costs by strategically licensing software. This provided an advantage to MS that did exist to Unix providers that tended to sell expensive stuff.
The fact that MS still wants to charge for basic development tools points to the fact that it not going give up profits, even if means a loss of marketshare. One thing that Apple did with OS X, which was a very good decision, was to offer xCode. It killed Code Warrior, which is bad, but Code Warrior was also an impediment to Apple development as it was an not an inexpensive development suite, though really worth every penny at the time.
I know people whose sole development expense is a Macbook. Everything else is free. I don't know many kids who feel they need to pay for basic software. They torrent it. Companies that want kids to learn their software beter not alienate them by calling them thieves. They will learn software that is available. For instance, Sketchup is free, and can do many of the things Inventor and Solid Works. Invetor tries to compete but the student licensing is year to year and does not work with all educational management software. If they don't get it together, they will also lose market share.
I doubt others would want the Apple design as it provides a continuity that limits profits. For instance, the inputs to the brick are all the same. Therefore if I lose a power cord, I can just use one of the input adaptors from another apple product. This includes the iPad, the Airport express, most everything. For products that do no use this design, a simple two prong cord is used that can be picked up anywhere. Compare this to my HP power supply which uses this weird cord that means I will probably have to replace the whole thing if I lose a $2 cord. In other words, if other manufacturers wanted to, they could already at least standardize the inputs. They haven't, which means the lack of standards provides some benefit.
Beyond this is the expense of the power supply. While Apple has the ability to absorbs such costs, and MS based computer mostly does not have such leeway. People expect such computers to be cheap, and MS as shown a lack of willingness to lower prices to reflect that need, preferring the OEMs to bear the brunt. A universal power supply is going to be expensive. If people are going to use it everywhere, then it must be able to meet a range of power requirements, otherwise people are going to fry their laptops. While this is not a severe technical issue, just include some circuitry in the laptop and a communication channel to the power supply, it will add costs to the laptop and power supply.
Right now Apple can charge more per watt for an power brick than most others, so they can supply a descent power brick. Also, for equal performance, the power brick has to supply less power, so the brick is actually cheaper than most others. A universal brick will cost more. Unless we get away from MS, which wants $90 for OEM retail Windows 7 Home, for a computer that costs $100 to build, I doubt we will be spending a great deal of money improving the brick.
But all this might be moot. The UBS port seems to working as they de facto standard for any device that requires less than 15W of power. Give the direction of the market, we may see more of these devices, and manufacturers that do not charge over USB will be identified as outliers.
So once again we see that science is iterative. Scientist are always reviewing other scientists work trying to show that they in some way invalid. Hypothesis get revised and revisted, leading to better formulations of how the world appears to work.
But, if we are honest, most of this is not about the science buy about the policy decisions. We are still reeling from the bad science that meant we could no longer increase yields by spraying crops with DDT just because a few radical scientists created massive birds deaths, like liberals caused the gulf oil spill to stop oil drilling. Or overstating the effects of lead on children, or asbestos, to destroy those industries and destroy capitalism. We all know that scientist don't really do science, but spend all their time trying to destroy democracy and all that is good.
Which is absolutely besides the point. This is not a college. These people are not being paid to form an opinion. These people are largely being paid to complete a task.
Here is the problem. The TSA has contributed greatly to the US deficit, so we have to make sure it serves some purpose. We got along without for 200 years, and then all of the sudden we had to become a socialist state as we entered the 21st century. While I know that people have to work, and I have no issue with job programs, especially those like the TSA that really don't cost that much money in real terms(the indirect costs, however, are astronomical), I don't really see that the jobs in these jobs programs are reading the news blog. We already have people in the FBI and CIA that are paid to do that.
Much of the power of US comes from the fact that it is vicious, but more or less fair. In the revolutionary war,captured redcoats were often left to travel to the POW camp after promising to lay down arms. In the revolutionary war, the loser confederates were not, overall, made the subject of vengeful attacks, but rather reintegration through reconstruction.
As far as nuclear weapons are concerned, they certainly solidified the US repetition as vicious. The US is the only country that has used nuclear weapons on a civilian population. What this means is that other countries have be nuclear states, but how many would really use it. Only the US has proven it.
The ban on nuclear weapons is not a US thing. The NPT is a united nations issue. The US is a position to help enforce it. The treaty between the US and Russia is meant to reduce the stockpiles and help reach a nuclear free world. The NPT is separate and meant to minimize the number of nuclear powers, given that most of the civilized world has reached a consensus in that we cannot use these weapons.
It is true that the US has become particularly more vicious in the past 10 years, mostly due to religious fanatics taking over the US, much as they are taking over in other parts of the world. This is changing to the point where many extreme right conservative think our mix of nuclear weapons will be insufficient to defend against the modern random aggressors.
I would say looking for this problem in an operating system that has been running SSD for 30 months is the silly thing. Apple is a system designer. When something happens, we don't get a run around with the OEM blaming MS and MS blaming the OEM. It is pretty clear it is Apples fault. So if there was a problem we would have heard about it.
OTOH, MS Windows is designed to be flexible enough to run whatever hardware is thrown at it. The downside is that a driver has to written for every single piece of hardware, and complex routine procedures sometimes have to implemented at the driver level instead of being nicely encapsulated at some other well known location.
More useful, I would like to see what happens when one places an SDD in a a Macbook pro. I susepct 10.6 can handle it. Even more interesting would be how a Powerbook running 10.5 rates. It should work, and I bet it would be ok.
Exactly, physical games have a resale value. Imagine how hard it would be charge $30,000 for a car that had no resale value. Sure it loses 50% when you drive it off the lot, but that means there is 50% that can be recouped at any time.
This is also why I don't think a book an ebook is worth more than $10, as long as it is released on the day of the hardback, and on $4 if it is more than a year old. With a physical book there is some inherent value. It can be sold, lent, given away. Many people can read it, and the cost of the book has to include that a certain number of sales are lost due to this. But an e-book kils the secondary market, so it does not have the value. This may mean that some people make less. So be it. There is no inherent right to profit.
These 'debates' end basically when the people who are used to profiting off the old ways die, and new stakeholders have the opportunity to recast their position in a new light. For instance, cigarette smoking was known to cause cancer in the late 1800's. It was relatively well established by the 1950's. The only reason the debate went on another generation or two was to give the corporations time to restructure the business model. Now smoking is bad, and some people still choose to do it.
Go further back to the way blood circulates in the heart. In 1533 Michael Servetus published a paper saying the heart pumped the blood, as opposed to previous western belief that blood flowed like the tides, which some religious people put mythical significance to, and made part of their superstitions. If blood was pumped, then it would in some way continue to assert the superiority of science in furthering the human quality of life. By the early to mid 1600's William Harvery showed that the heart pumped blood. Here is the interesting debate. In the very early years of the Common Era, many philosophers though that the heart had an active role in pumping blood, but if you read the history, it seems like there never any consensus prior to Harvey, and that the tide theory was a valid conjecture.
The point is that as advance as we think we are, we are only a few hundred years out of the supertitious muck in which we tortured and drowned little girls to prove they were not witches. In which we would not wash our hands to save children. Some us may see it as 500 years since Galileo saved us from the myths, but in practical terms it has not been nearly that long.
The RIAA is asking for exactly the same thing as all the parents who post their babies dancing to unlicensed songs. The RIAA wants google to spend unlimited funds on armies of workers to vet every submission. The parents wants google to spend unlimited funds on armies of lawyers to protect a perceived fair use right.
I think in this case the court did exactly what congress intended, and it is constitutional. Service providers like YouTube cannot be liable for posted content and stay solvent, so to allow the business to grow they made it so. No one is going to suffer irreparable damage by having a video pulled for a free posting service, so there is no reason not to have the service provider pulled. A user can also post it on their own dime or use another service, or fight the right to have it posted. Stakeholders are not going suffer irrevocable harm by having unlicensed content up for a short while, so there we go.
The only thing I would like to see are stiff penalties for parties who use the DMCA to harrass people, but this is no different from SLAPP laws, which have helped some, but there is still a huge problem with big corporation limited free speech of the average person.
Here is my take. MS makes a profit by controlling the computer market. They mark up products in such a way, and provide strategic discounts, so most of the profits in the desktop computer industry goes to them. This is why Dell has a gross profit of around 10% and MS has a gross profit of 80%. Apple, who manufacturers computer but does not pay the MS tax has a gross profit of around 40%. Obviously any computer manufacturer would want to have a gross profit more in line with Apple. MS would hate that because assuming the price of the computer is fixed, and profit to the OEM will cut into the MS profit. In this screwed up market, it is a zero sum game, which is the death of any free market.
The web would have resulted in the loss of MS profit if it had been allowed to grow freely. At that time many production machines were still using very simple systems that could be implemented on web based interface. Companies like Compaq were still competing hard and had non-MS offering that were less complex and more reliable than the PC. MS Office was not quite everywhere, and options existed. The fight was going over who controlled the application front end. If the application front end was platform independent, then people could run software on MS servers, but the desktop could be anything for the average worker drone.
This could not happen. So MS made IE into a application front end that would only run on windows. This meant that the servers and desktop had to run MS software. OEM could not develop intelligent terminals that would have saved huge amounts of administrative costs. OEM could not sell this intelligent terminal for the same price as a MS PC and pocket the profit.
In reality what happened, the lie that MS could make people believe, no matter who much they said it, is that there is a real benefit to having the server run the same software as the desktop. So people continued to use MS desktops, but many switched to linux servers. This meant the bombs that MS put in IE to connect it to MS Windows became a liability. They tried to stop *nix with ad campiagns, in the courts, but with IE 8, even if the propaganda continues, the effect is clear.
Which is also why there is so much activities over phones and tablets. The OEM is nevery going to make a fair profit with MS, neither are developers. That is why most of the cool stuff have been developed in places outside of the US. Google is sharing profits, and, no matter what any says, so is Apple. The App store has made it possible to make money. MS is now where Unix was in the 80's. An expensive albeit still relevant dinosaur. It is a matter of time until people look on our old desktop like we looked at IBM 360 of VAX. A little nostalgic, but happy we have something bette.
I would lay the unethical implications on the school more than the business. The purpose of writing essays or doing any of homework is to develop the skills taught in the class. No home work or interimim pracitce work should be worth major amounts of point as there is no way to know how did it. For instance, when I was in school many of us would only do a couple problems then copy off everything else. It didn't matter as we learned the methods.
As we promote college as a way to make more money rather than a way to have a better more well rounded life, we shoudl expect people to treat it as a business rather than an opportunity to learn. The question is how do we counteract that force so that college is stil relevant? It simply requires requiring colleges to be ethical and maintain high standards. I can tell you this is hard. One gets a student with a high SAT score, and that student fails, parents will blame the instructor. It is not the indstructor fault the student copied or bought papers and didn't learn anything. It is the parents fault for not instilling ethical values. But if the instructor is blamed, and not allowed to run an ethical class, then bussineses like this will flourish.
If the professor is allowed to run an ethical class then making these companies irrelevant is simple. Mid term and final count 75% of the grade. Done in class, writing done in blue books. Subject of writing is not given prior to the test, or five to ten topics are provided for study, but randomly given to students. Tests are graded very harshly. In the case of writing, graded at the level of a student that has practiced writting one or two essays a week. If the strudents complain, copies of essays have been kept and if a student complains it should be clear that the style does not match.
This is hard to implement, especially when administration wants instructors to do everything to help a student pass, and instructors are blamed for killing a students GPA. But if a instructor is not allowed to teach an ethical class, we can hardly blame the firms that take advantage of it.
When I saw the ads I thought the Kin was something that MS did right. I am surprised that they did not succeed. The massive ad campaign should have been enough to make a dent. What I did no realize is that to use the phone the way it is intended, with unlimited texting and such, the recurring billing from Verizon would be well over $100 a month.
This is a phone for kids and young adult. How many of these are able to afford more than $100 a month for a phone. My first mobile phone was $50 a month, and that was when I was working at higher than minimum wage. Sure the ads depict kids with unlimited resources who can afford to take cabs around the city and fly all over the country, but that is like a TV where people with no visible means of income can afford spacious NYC apartments. No one takes it seriously, or maybe they did.
I think this is another case of people worshiping verizon no matter how little sense it makes, thinking that if they can cut a deal they wil automatically become successful. I keep asking if one wants to sell phones to a market that does not already have smart phone saturation, why not go for Cricket or Boost? They could keep the recurring to something a young adult could have a chance of keeping up with.
Not to put forth pyschobable, but such things such as websites, preceded by talk shows, preceded by letters to the editor, give the public a means to process information. Much of it is just people being angry or irrationally dogmatic but that has value as well. Giving angry people a venue will often calm them down, and we must hope that an open communication in which dogmatic people are allowed to speak can only help society overall. Eventually the people who hold to superstitions in the face of overwhelming practical evidence will be worn down.
All things we consider previously moral change through this process. Just look at how marriage has decayed in the face of practicalities. Ronald Reagan abandoned his wife for no apparent reason, and he was deemed one of the greatest moral and conservative men who lived. Newt Gringrich abondoned his wife and children, and claimed he could not pay child support, he then cheated on his second wife. Again, the man is promoted as the as the man who brought values back to America. The same goes for McCain who left his wife for someone who made more money. The fact that christian conservatives would sanctify these men who consider marriage to be worthless just shows how the process crates an evolution of values.
One of the main things that one might say about the crowd is that it leads to groupthink, in which false statements are allowed to be pushed as true because no one has the ethical or moral ability to deny them as true. No matter one's political persuasion, one cannot say this of America Speaking Out. On the healthcare page, the listing show that people are overwhelming against limiting abortions, though not so much for the absolute legalization of abortion. This shows that people are thinking for themselves. The idea to make english the official language is also way down. When I first say the site I thought it would be a joke, but it has been kind of interesting to review. One of the first ideas to make it to the top was the taxing of churches.
I think if we did do what the people wanted, the crowd, we might be ok. The problem is that what the people wants tend to be a weighted average in which the amount of money one has plays a significant role. This is not necessarily bad, but if we want to do what the people want, then it should be all people, not just the rich. Look at the oil spill. It was said that we all want cheap oil at any cost, but it turns out people want fresh seafood as well. People make more money off oil, so that is priority of the rich. The common person though likes affordable food as well.
On a tech site like/., I am amazed at how many people will interpret data based on what they want to be true rather than what data and observation indicates is true. In this case well over 40% have no problem with the ITMS approval proces, and another well over 40% think it is only a minor issue. This can hardly be said to a majority having a problem with ITMS, meaning that such an approval process significantly negative impacts there experience. Using the same criteria, a majority of users are not totally satisfied with their purchase, even though only perhaps 25% have any significant dissatisfaction.
There are people are going to be philosophically opposed to the way Apple does business, and for those people they should buy other products. To mislead people into thinking the way you do, as some religious people mislead people into thinking latex condoms provide no protection, is the lowest form of immorality. One's beliefs should not depend on everyone agreeing with you. I have no problem not buying MS products because they are too expensive, and even if 80% of the world disagrees, it does not matter. I don't do it.
So maybe I slightly more reliable service, but I am going to nickel and dimed to death with minor charges, and if I die my loved ones are going to have an early termination fee. I am just an average person, with no PR department to make them reverse the charges. As bad as ATT is, at least my bills are very predictable.
Then they still charge $30 for data. I only use 200 megabytes so why pay more than 15? And what is this crap about $45 is i check corporate email? I do check work email on my phone? If I do so and only pay for the $30 data plan are they going to arrest me? This is the kind of silly nickel and dime BS that keeps me away from verizon. They only thing they are good at is finding sneaky ways to maximize the recurring.
To with, charging for voice mail. I have never had to pay for that. And pay to recieve a PDF of a detailed bill? What is this, Cricket?
Here is an article from bloomberg that pretty much sums up the fate of Hulu.
Here are a few high points
Viacom did not feel that Hulu made any financial sense, so left. Maybe 10% of the viewer left as well.
Hulu is profitable on a cash flow basis, which means they are not, although some analysis say they might have a 3 profit.
According to the number in the article, hulu distributes less than $3 per view to the producers of the show per year.
CBS will only come on board for the subscription service
Hulu shows have four minutes of commercials per hour, compared with 16 on broadcast TV.
"Consumers should not be retrained that premium TV content is cheaper on any platform, especially the Internet," Martin wrote in a June 1 report.
Given this reality, if CBS and any other new joined in exchange for additional revenues from a subscription, it seems unlikely that everyone else would be willing to split $3 a year per view when there was an additional $100 a year per view to fight over. It would make sense that they would move everything but the current show, perhaps with a two week lag, to the free service. This plan is an experiment to see if a pay model will work. I think as few as 2-3 million subscribers would allow the feee service to terminate. Even if fixed costs rise a little, it might still increase produce network profits by an order of magnitude.
Unless they are going to pull the free service and make everyone pay 9.99, this is not really competitive with Netflix. Netflix is 8.99, has iPad support, and allows one disk at a time for the large amount of content, for instance Star Trek, which is not available for streaming.
Now, if for the $10 there are no commercials, and there is not silly wait time, and the full season is available, then that might be an incentive. But then Hulu Plus is going to have ads, will likely have the same time delay as now, and will likely limit the number of shows, so I wonder what the $10 buys? The ability to watch shows on the iPad? I suspect that once again these people have missed a grand opportunity to stop unlicensed file sharing. I think for $10 many people would give up downloading files they could get for free anyway with a DVR. It is incomprehensible why the broadcasters would not take advantage of such an opportunity.
This seems to be part of an industry wide problem. Out the 30 or so HPs I have, probably 25% have had some sort of minor issue in the first two year period. These are things that really should reliable, like the USB port of the cd drawer. Sure, some of it may be misuse, but if 75% of the machines can handle the abuse, then why not 90% or more? I believe it simply that cost pressure have caused manufactures to move a little lower on the bell curve with respect to what is acceptable.
Even Apple has done this. Prior to the Macbooks I have almost no trouble. I have Powerbooks that still run, even Performas from the 90's that were packed as tight as the MacBooks. Toward the end of the Powerbook lifetime the machines were getting dodgy, but still acceptable. I bought a refurbished and had issues, but those were fixed. Now everyone I know has to take these machines in to have main boards replaced. I had to replace the network card in one, and probably have the same issue in another. Give Apple credit, they will do warranty repairs, but it does require two days of downtown. This was not an issue when Apples never broke. Now it is.
Adultery is one of the two grounds for divorce from the christian bible, but you would be hard pressed to find a verse that required it. Adultery is a sin, but like so many sins it is forgiven, and does not appear to the biggest reason why people get divorced. Take the public officials in he US. Many of the men have multiple wives, and many got divorced just because they wanted a divorce. According to the christian bible, in a strict sense these men are adulterers because they are having sex with someone else while their real wives are still alive, yet they are forgiven and are seen as moral enough to hold public office. Therefore adultery is regularly forgiven as a sin, and divorce is likely caused by other problems of which adultery is symptom. In this case I suspect that one spouse is spending too much time playing on facebook and ignoring the other spouse.
In 100 years the Simpsons might still be the longest running scripted show. Someone might take a look at the structure and note the amazing similarities between shows. How certain transitions happen at certain times. How certain characters appear and disappear. How themes reemerge. They would likely ascribe meaning to these, beyond the real meaning, that, for instance, Kesley Grammer had scheduling conflicts or whatever. Or that acts had to break at certain places for commercials, or that to minimize writing costs a formula had to developed so that time wasn't wasted on developing a new structure 20 times a year.
My problem with this is that it is too optimistic. The first sentence says it all. The purpose is not explore possibilities, to discuss the evidence, or even to present results. It is advance a strong thesis. As such it is a persuasive paper not looking to discover a fact, but to pur forth an opinion, which is the authors right, but is one reason why some say that history and truth would never get along at a party.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't want to minimize the contributions of Dr. Chu, he probably provided highly valuable technical assistance that allowed the success of the project. At that level, though, the value is the insight, not necessarily the day to day work. If I can cal someone like Dr. Chu to help me overcome a experimental issue, and he can help me out, that is value beyond a price tag.
Blackberry created a phone for the business user, not the carriers. Apple created a phone for the consumer user, not the carriers. We will see if Android is a phone for the user or for the carrier. What is clear is that Nokia is still producing phones that satisfy the needs of carriers, not the user. That time is over.
Accountants are there to minimize profit that is shown externally. External profits are always bad. They require taxes and other payouts to external entities. Just as an example because they have the highest gross profits I know about, MS earned about 14 million the latest quarter, of which 11 million was gross profit. About two million of that was spent on research and 4 million on admin expenses and marketing. This is about 33% of gross profits on marketing and admin. As a percent of gross profit this is not excessive, but as percent of revenue it is highly excessive. Other companies might spend 10-20% of revenue. It is arguable that MS maximizes admin expenses to minimize profit. They put perks in minimize taxes and make them look less profitable. They do the same with research money that leads nowhere, i.e. the kin.
If BP would not have caved and paid off the fishing and tourist industry, then many problems would go away. Again, if there were fewer hotels, and few more careful fishing crews, turtles might survive. As it is, the oil is just more nail in the coffin. Really irrelevant in the grand context.
So how does one make a profit in this model. I understand that the likea of HP and Dell and Apple might use these fake recycling services as all they need to get material out of the country and have it end up in someone else's landfill. There is no expectation of profit, just minimization of the cost needed to generate good will. But to make a profit?
I pay for a truck. I pay someone or personally recruit legitimate firms to provide cover. I or one of my agents are at the collection site. Packing costs money. Shipping costs money. Unpacking and disposal costs money. These are a lot of expenses, and I don't see any receivables, unless the parties receiving the product are actually paying for the computers, in which case we can also assume that some level of recycling is going on.
The question is if enough of the computer is recycled to justify the effort and resources consumed, presumably mostly fuel. I would say the best way to deal with this question is not to pass regulation that adress symptoms, but rather to pass regulations so that resources are not undervalued.
The fact that MS still wants to charge for basic development tools points to the fact that it not going give up profits, even if means a loss of marketshare. One thing that Apple did with OS X, which was a very good decision, was to offer xCode. It killed Code Warrior, which is bad, but Code Warrior was also an impediment to Apple development as it was an not an inexpensive development suite, though really worth every penny at the time.
I know people whose sole development expense is a Macbook. Everything else is free. I don't know many kids who feel they need to pay for basic software. They torrent it. Companies that want kids to learn their software beter not alienate them by calling them thieves. They will learn software that is available. For instance, Sketchup is free, and can do many of the things Inventor and Solid Works. Invetor tries to compete but the student licensing is year to year and does not work with all educational management software. If they don't get it together, they will also lose market share.
Beyond this is the expense of the power supply. While Apple has the ability to absorbs such costs, and MS based computer mostly does not have such leeway. People expect such computers to be cheap, and MS as shown a lack of willingness to lower prices to reflect that need, preferring the OEMs to bear the brunt. A universal power supply is going to be expensive. If people are going to use it everywhere, then it must be able to meet a range of power requirements, otherwise people are going to fry their laptops. While this is not a severe technical issue, just include some circuitry in the laptop and a communication channel to the power supply, it will add costs to the laptop and power supply.
Right now Apple can charge more per watt for an power brick than most others, so they can supply a descent power brick. Also, for equal performance, the power brick has to supply less power, so the brick is actually cheaper than most others. A universal brick will cost more. Unless we get away from MS, which wants $90 for OEM retail Windows 7 Home, for a computer that costs $100 to build, I doubt we will be spending a great deal of money improving the brick.
But all this might be moot. The UBS port seems to working as they de facto standard for any device that requires less than 15W of power. Give the direction of the market, we may see more of these devices, and manufacturers that do not charge over USB will be identified as outliers.
But, if we are honest, most of this is not about the science buy about the policy decisions. We are still reeling from the bad science that meant we could no longer increase yields by spraying crops with DDT just because a few radical scientists created massive birds deaths, like liberals caused the gulf oil spill to stop oil drilling. Or overstating the effects of lead on children, or asbestos, to destroy those industries and destroy capitalism. We all know that scientist don't really do science, but spend all their time trying to destroy democracy and all that is good.
Here is the problem. The TSA has contributed greatly to the US deficit, so we have to make sure it serves some purpose. We got along without for 200 years, and then all of the sudden we had to become a socialist state as we entered the 21st century. While I know that people have to work, and I have no issue with job programs, especially those like the TSA that really don't cost that much money in real terms(the indirect costs, however, are astronomical), I don't really see that the jobs in these jobs programs are reading the news blog. We already have people in the FBI and CIA that are paid to do that.
As far as nuclear weapons are concerned, they certainly solidified the US repetition as vicious. The US is the only country that has used nuclear weapons on a civilian population. What this means is that other countries have be nuclear states, but how many would really use it. Only the US has proven it.
The ban on nuclear weapons is not a US thing. The NPT is a united nations issue. The US is a position to help enforce it. The treaty between the US and Russia is meant to reduce the stockpiles and help reach a nuclear free world. The NPT is separate and meant to minimize the number of nuclear powers, given that most of the civilized world has reached a consensus in that we cannot use these weapons.
It is true that the US has become particularly more vicious in the past 10 years, mostly due to religious fanatics taking over the US, much as they are taking over in other parts of the world. This is changing to the point where many extreme right conservative think our mix of nuclear weapons will be insufficient to defend against the modern random aggressors.
OTOH, MS Windows is designed to be flexible enough to run whatever hardware is thrown at it. The downside is that a driver has to written for every single piece of hardware, and complex routine procedures sometimes have to implemented at the driver level instead of being nicely encapsulated at some other well known location.
More useful, I would like to see what happens when one places an SDD in a a Macbook pro. I susepct 10.6 can handle it. Even more interesting would be how a Powerbook running 10.5 rates. It should work, and I bet it would be ok.
This is also why I don't think a book an ebook is worth more than $10, as long as it is released on the day of the hardback, and on $4 if it is more than a year old. With a physical book there is some inherent value. It can be sold, lent, given away. Many people can read it, and the cost of the book has to include that a certain number of sales are lost due to this. But an e-book kils the secondary market, so it does not have the value. This may mean that some people make less. So be it. There is no inherent right to profit.
Go further back to the way blood circulates in the heart. In 1533 Michael Servetus published a paper saying the heart pumped the blood, as opposed to previous western belief that blood flowed like the tides, which some religious people put mythical significance to, and made part of their superstitions. If blood was pumped, then it would in some way continue to assert the superiority of science in furthering the human quality of life. By the early to mid 1600's William Harvery showed that the heart pumped blood. Here is the interesting debate. In the very early years of the Common Era, many philosophers though that the heart had an active role in pumping blood, but if you read the history, it seems like there never any consensus prior to Harvey, and that the tide theory was a valid conjecture.
The point is that as advance as we think we are, we are only a few hundred years out of the supertitious muck in which we tortured and drowned little girls to prove they were not witches. In which we would not wash our hands to save children. Some us may see it as 500 years since Galileo saved us from the myths, but in practical terms it has not been nearly that long.
I think in this case the court did exactly what congress intended, and it is constitutional. Service providers like YouTube cannot be liable for posted content and stay solvent, so to allow the business to grow they made it so. No one is going to suffer irreparable damage by having a video pulled for a free posting service, so there is no reason not to have the service provider pulled. A user can also post it on their own dime or use another service, or fight the right to have it posted. Stakeholders are not going suffer irrevocable harm by having unlicensed content up for a short while, so there we go.
The only thing I would like to see are stiff penalties for parties who use the DMCA to harrass people, but this is no different from SLAPP laws, which have helped some, but there is still a huge problem with big corporation limited free speech of the average person.
The web would have resulted in the loss of MS profit if it had been allowed to grow freely. At that time many production machines were still using very simple systems that could be implemented on web based interface. Companies like Compaq were still competing hard and had non-MS offering that were less complex and more reliable than the PC. MS Office was not quite everywhere, and options existed. The fight was going over who controlled the application front end. If the application front end was platform independent, then people could run software on MS servers, but the desktop could be anything for the average worker drone.
This could not happen. So MS made IE into a application front end that would only run on windows. This meant that the servers and desktop had to run MS software. OEM could not develop intelligent terminals that would have saved huge amounts of administrative costs. OEM could not sell this intelligent terminal for the same price as a MS PC and pocket the profit.
In reality what happened, the lie that MS could make people believe, no matter who much they said it, is that there is a real benefit to having the server run the same software as the desktop. So people continued to use MS desktops, but many switched to linux servers. This meant the bombs that MS put in IE to connect it to MS Windows became a liability. They tried to stop *nix with ad campiagns, in the courts, but with IE 8, even if the propaganda continues, the effect is clear.
Which is also why there is so much activities over phones and tablets. The OEM is nevery going to make a fair profit with MS, neither are developers. That is why most of the cool stuff have been developed in places outside of the US. Google is sharing profits, and, no matter what any says, so is Apple. The App store has made it possible to make money. MS is now where Unix was in the 80's. An expensive albeit still relevant dinosaur. It is a matter of time until people look on our old desktop like we looked at IBM 360 of VAX. A little nostalgic, but happy we have something bette.
As we promote college as a way to make more money rather than a way to have a better more well rounded life, we shoudl expect people to treat it as a business rather than an opportunity to learn. The question is how do we counteract that force so that college is stil relevant? It simply requires requiring colleges to be ethical and maintain high standards. I can tell you this is hard. One gets a student with a high SAT score, and that student fails, parents will blame the instructor. It is not the indstructor fault the student copied or bought papers and didn't learn anything. It is the parents fault for not instilling ethical values. But if the instructor is blamed, and not allowed to run an ethical class, then bussineses like this will flourish.
If the professor is allowed to run an ethical class then making these companies irrelevant is simple. Mid term and final count 75% of the grade. Done in class, writing done in blue books. Subject of writing is not given prior to the test, or five to ten topics are provided for study, but randomly given to students. Tests are graded very harshly. In the case of writing, graded at the level of a student that has practiced writting one or two essays a week. If the strudents complain, copies of essays have been kept and if a student complains it should be clear that the style does not match.
This is hard to implement, especially when administration wants instructors to do everything to help a student pass, and instructors are blamed for killing a students GPA. But if a instructor is not allowed to teach an ethical class, we can hardly blame the firms that take advantage of it.
This is a phone for kids and young adult. How many of these are able to afford more than $100 a month for a phone. My first mobile phone was $50 a month, and that was when I was working at higher than minimum wage. Sure the ads depict kids with unlimited resources who can afford to take cabs around the city and fly all over the country, but that is like a TV where people with no visible means of income can afford spacious NYC apartments. No one takes it seriously, or maybe they did.
I think this is another case of people worshiping verizon no matter how little sense it makes, thinking that if they can cut a deal they wil automatically become successful. I keep asking if one wants to sell phones to a market that does not already have smart phone saturation, why not go for Cricket or Boost? They could keep the recurring to something a young adult could have a chance of keeping up with.
One of the main things that one might say about the crowd is that it leads to groupthink, in which false statements are allowed to be pushed as true because no one has the ethical or moral ability to deny them as true. No matter one's political persuasion, one cannot say this of America Speaking Out. On the healthcare page, the listing show that people are overwhelming against limiting abortions, though not so much for the absolute legalization of abortion. This shows that people are thinking for themselves. The idea to make english the official language is also way down. When I first say the site I thought it would be a joke, but it has been kind of interesting to review. One of the first ideas to make it to the top was the taxing of churches.
I think if we did do what the people wanted, the crowd, we might be ok. The problem is that what the people wants tend to be a weighted average in which the amount of money one has plays a significant role. This is not necessarily bad, but if we want to do what the people want, then it should be all people, not just the rich. Look at the oil spill. It was said that we all want cheap oil at any cost, but it turns out people want fresh seafood as well. People make more money off oil, so that is priority of the rich. The common person though likes affordable food as well.
There are people are going to be philosophically opposed to the way Apple does business, and for those people they should buy other products. To mislead people into thinking the way you do, as some religious people mislead people into thinking latex condoms provide no protection, is the lowest form of immorality. One's beliefs should not depend on everyone agreeing with you. I have no problem not buying MS products because they are too expensive, and even if 80% of the world disagrees, it does not matter. I don't do it.
Then they still charge $30 for data. I only use 200 megabytes so why pay more than 15? And what is this crap about $45 is i check corporate email? I do check work email on my phone? If I do so and only pay for the $30 data plan are they going to arrest me? This is the kind of silly nickel and dime BS that keeps me away from verizon. They only thing they are good at is finding sneaky ways to maximize the recurring.
To with, charging for voice mail. I have never had to pay for that. And pay to recieve a PDF of a detailed bill? What is this, Cricket?
Given this reality, if CBS and any other new joined in exchange for additional revenues from a subscription, it seems unlikely that everyone else would be willing to split $3 a year per view when there was an additional $100 a year per view to fight over. It would make sense that they would move everything but the current show, perhaps with a two week lag, to the free service. This plan is an experiment to see if a pay model will work. I think as few as 2-3 million subscribers would allow the feee service to terminate. Even if fixed costs rise a little, it might still increase produce network profits by an order of magnitude.
Now, if for the $10 there are no commercials, and there is not silly wait time, and the full season is available, then that might be an incentive. But then Hulu Plus is going to have ads, will likely have the same time delay as now, and will likely limit the number of shows, so I wonder what the $10 buys? The ability to watch shows on the iPad? I suspect that once again these people have missed a grand opportunity to stop unlicensed file sharing. I think for $10 many people would give up downloading files they could get for free anyway with a DVR. It is incomprehensible why the broadcasters would not take advantage of such an opportunity.
Even Apple has done this. Prior to the Macbooks I have almost no trouble. I have Powerbooks that still run, even Performas from the 90's that were packed as tight as the MacBooks. Toward the end of the Powerbook lifetime the machines were getting dodgy, but still acceptable. I bought a refurbished and had issues, but those were fixed. Now everyone I know has to take these machines in to have main boards replaced. I had to replace the network card in one, and probably have the same issue in another. Give Apple credit, they will do warranty repairs, but it does require two days of downtown. This was not an issue when Apples never broke. Now it is.
Adultery is one of the two grounds for divorce from the christian bible, but you would be hard pressed to find a verse that required it. Adultery is a sin, but like so many sins it is forgiven, and does not appear to the biggest reason why people get divorced. Take the public officials in he US. Many of the men have multiple wives, and many got divorced just because they wanted a divorce. According to the christian bible, in a strict sense these men are adulterers because they are having sex with someone else while their real wives are still alive, yet they are forgiven and are seen as moral enough to hold public office. Therefore adultery is regularly forgiven as a sin, and divorce is likely caused by other problems of which adultery is symptom. In this case I suspect that one spouse is spending too much time playing on facebook and ignoring the other spouse.
My problem with this is that it is too optimistic. The first sentence says it all. The purpose is not explore possibilities, to discuss the evidence, or even to present results. It is advance a strong thesis. As such it is a persuasive paper not looking to discover a fact, but to pur forth an opinion, which is the authors right, but is one reason why some say that history and truth would never get along at a party.