Pretty much. For most people biased means that the opinion does not match their own. Few people have the emotional maturity to have a fair balanced discussion, or tolerate things that are different. Lets take the perennial hot button issue of abortion. A balanced discussion might include topics of abstinence, and how abstinence program have been proven to be ineffective, the delay of the first sexual intercourse, a full discussion on methods to reduce the chances of pregnancy when a person does start to have sex, the fact that those methods are imperfect, and that abortion would be the correct decision for some. While such a discussion might be balanced for a mature adult, many people believe the only balanced discussion involved the so-called pregnancy crisis centers, where venerable girls are told they will go to hell if they get an abortion, and the doctors are murders. The response to this is that hyperbole is a dangerous thing, and there are many an evangelical megachurch, that have been built on tax deductible contributions, that contribute to the death of many children by reducing the funds available for child care, and leads to the US having the second worst infant mortality rate in the developed world. Obviously building are more important than children.
You see, that last bit was immature and unbalanced. Something like that would be unreasonable on a balanced abortion website, just like saying suicide is absolutely a sin and should never be done would be unreasonable on a balanced suicide web site. But, as I said, the people who complain the most about balance and bias are those that want it the least.
The reason why MS computers are so popular, and I know this from my own coding practice, is that MS attempts to make coding as trivial as possible. IN the process they encourage any number of worst practices. For the most part is does not matter as the OS, over powered computers, and generally faulty hardware makes it either unimportant or unclear that the software is the problem.
This is not a derogatory remark. The MS philosophy has lead to a golden age of cheap computer and cheap software. Say what you wish, but 15 years ago $500-$1000 for software that could handle all office tasks was cheap. Now such software is commonplace, and charging $500 for it is like charging $500 for an MP3 player with only a gig of memory, but that has to do with the MS inability to innovate, not bad software.
What it going to be the problem is if MS makes it as difficult to write software for MS OS as for say, Mac OS, given that writing for the later, at least in theory, could be easier to port to other *nix, while writing for MS locks you into arbitrary legally contract of which you have no control. Which is to say MS has no real incentive to force developers to write more secure or more stable programs, as such a shift would force MS developers to learn new skills. Most developers don't know how to deal with these issues, and most OEMs don't want to pay those that do. For instance, to scan I have to scan from root because the developers did not create a program that could work from a limited account. Clearly infection from the MS world, in which minimizing initial cost is of the paramount importance.
I know the whole thing is a joke, but I do run the full OS X 10.4 on a 400mhz machine with about 256MB of ram. My 10.5 most runs on a gig or less. OTOH, Vista minimum is a 1GHZ system with 1GB of memory. I don't know how well it runs on this system. I also don't know if if Vista has a kernel in the way that OS X does that could be run on quite less, or could be rewritten to run on quite less while letting the top layer stay in tact.
The point is well taken, but given that Gates has traditionally been the all encompassing monster sent to this plant to devour all extra gates we can afford to buy, it is unlikely that anything out of MS is going to be considered efficient, interesting, or innovative. Just cost effective.
Pretty much. If you asked the average middle school kid if they would learn more if they had cute, preferably naked, teachers, they would probably say yes as well. If you asked primary school kids if they would learn more if they were taught by santa clause, they would probably say yes.
What kids want are not always possible or practical. That is why important things are handled by competent adults, when possible. This is not to say that kids are always wrong, or games are always bad, just that a survey like this is pretty much a pile of crap.
BTW, games are the way that most kids learned basic skills, be it following rules of a board game or spin the bottle. Furthermore, toys are often the best way to test technology. We see this with toy robots. What most people is that toys and games get more complex as the player becomes more sophisticated. I might have been happy with a toy car when I was a kid, but know I want a real car. In high school my favorite toy was my computers. I took them apart, put them together, programmed them, made them do what I wanted. If you had made me play with pre determined educational toys I would have balked. The games we played were created new games and new toys. Even in primary school there was a mix of formal games and informal games. Recall that history is full of kids creating their own play, and there is little evidence that adults enforcing their play rules as the primary play option on kids is of any real value.
Suppose one has never trusted the equipment that came from the telco, and have never connected anything but a single firewall/router to the telco DSL box. Does the vulnerability still matter? I assume that the telco is giving us the cheapest crap it can, and should not be trusted beyond the limits of liability to the telco.
It sounds like one of these vague cases where everyone is fighting over the money, even though there is more than enough money to go around. It is why the term "Hollywood accounting" exists, and why so many thinks that the average hollywood executive makes the average investment banker look like mother teresa.
In any case, the article makes it appear that Lucas just bought several dozen of the costumes, and did not in fact commission the design nor purchase the rights. OTOH, the designer sold the costumes knowing full well what they were to be used for.If this is hte fact pattern, then Lucas asking for money would be like UA asking BMW to pay a royalty for right to produce cars.
In the end I hope that Lucas has to pay a gob of cash for wasting the time of court to satisfy his greed.
I agree. Pretty much the AP course are gimmicks to give certain students a higher GPA than otherwise equivalent students. On one hand there are few standards to insure that the extra point is earned, while on the other hand more schools are being forced to implement "AP" level courses to those who may not be able to do the work and as a result inflate grades. If a school has no AP courses the school is rated inferior, even if the instruction is of high level. If the school implements "AP" course, the students are able to compete based on GPA, and the school is rated better, even if the instruction is inferior.In fact, from my experience, 90% of the "AP" benefit is the test taking strategies, the ability to write an answer in the form that the grader will give a "5', but which I have not seen any proven relation to the mastery of college level work. At most a "5" means well prepared for college.
Speaking to the AP exam in particular, I have taken many computer science courses, and have done much coding. I would have a very hard time making a good grade on test, mostly as the questions appear to be trivia. Missing is the kind of questions that a first year programmer needs to know, about strong functions and data structures, about flow, about form. The kind of low level questions on the test are a far cry from what were expected to do in high school, much less college. I will also say that the math exams focus way too much on trivia and formalism, and way too little on the symbolic manipulation and theorems needed to succeed in calculus.
It seems that like most things, the AP system has degraded into a another means to extract funds from the direct education of children to the support of non-classroom personnel. To be fair, when i was in school the AP course did provide a framework to help the advanced student. They were there to provide rigorous content for those that probably should be in college, but were stuck in high school. Now in our everyone must go to college world, the AP courses has been expanded beyond reason, and probably without complaint of those that are making a bundle off it.
Here is the thing about nuclear missiles. They are mass manufactured and never meant to be used. So how reliable are they? I mean if you were making something, and the product was never going to be tested, and if they ever were used the last of your problem was getting sued over a faulty product, how reliable would you make? The unfounded assumption we make will most nuclear warhead is that they work at all. Remember that every nuclear warhead used so far has been custom manufactured and custom built and custom checked for the test. I doubt any general warhead or launch vehicle has been real world tested. I mean in the way that other products are test. A random missile is pulled out a batch and used.
Many will sy we manufacture many complex things, like planes and cars, but these have real world legal consequences if they do not work. What about the launch vehicle? How many launch vehicle blow up on the pad during launch? And those has been carefully build and tested. How many components on space shuttle fail? How many caps or resisters are put in wrong? How many space craft, built we assume with more care than warheads, have failed immediately after deployment due to failure of compenents?
Without RTFA, I don't know what the threat is, but the greatest threat is upon launch some significant percentage of out nukes will just blow up over the US, or in the silos, leeching fissionable material across the heartland. I think the trigger mechanism are reliable enough that once detonated, most will work, and there is little risk of unintented detonation.
As far as the risk of others making nukes, I don't know. The fissionable material has been quite available for 15-20 years, and most parties do not seem interested. There are just so many other safer and more reliable ways to massacre huge number of people. A nuclear missile is a weapon of war, not a weapon of terror, and mostly even the first world countries seem to prefer the violence of the later to the relative order of the former. No one likes to be regulated, i guess. Then there is the sheer technical difficulty. There is a reason why we use conventional bombs rather than biological agents, nuclear materal, or magical binary liquid bombs. Because other than being useful in writing fantasy novels to start and continue offensives that bankrupt countries, anything else than conventional weapons are really more complicate they need be.
The problem with all of these arguments is they ignore all practicality and morality. If children are sacred, and are to be created and protected at all costs, then birth control and abortion should be illegal. Likewise, there should be no bitching about the costs to society about caring for children or teen age pregnancy or welfare moms. There is nothing sacred about the family unit, and the contrivance is just a way to maintain the fiction of the value of a child without having to put our money where our mouth is.
A middle ground may to promote abstinence as an option, various forms of birth control to allow people to have sex without overloading the social payments system, disallow abortion, accept that occasional mother is going to terminate the child after the birth as happened maybe twice in texas last week, and fund childcare as much as needed. This values the child at a level asserted by most people in the United States. However, seeing how we can't even get 100% health care for children, and conservatives love to bash those very people that carry pregnancy to term no matter what, and the EPA will not regulate the environment to keep children healthy, preferring instead to sacrifice some children for the sake of economic growth, I am not holding my breath for the middle ground.
So we have the current system in which infants are allowed by terminated pre-birth rather than have the situation where a mother kills a baby in desperation, or a baby is allowed to die slowly due to lack of funds. IN both cases we say the mother should not have gotten pregnant, but the government is forgiving in other cases, as shown by the repetitive bailout of fraudster, so why not mothers who provide society with the most precious resource? But we do not, and history says no society have every been that generous, so abortion is the compromise. Sometimes this discriminate against children that do not match our expectations, but so does society. I do not know of any school or hospital or anywhere that really has the funding to adequately care for these children. Rhetorically the question could be asked how many of us would write our congressperson to end the war on terror and divert the funds to provide 100% care for such children in need. Certainly conservatives might be expected to fund such projects, as there would then be no reason for evil lawyers to sue the good hearted doctors for malpractice just so the family can pay other doctors to care for the child.
In the end, like most things, people tend to simplify the issue so they can be proven correct, rather than engaging a full exploration that ends with a practical, but less palatable, solution.
It takes a while for old stock to clear out. This is especially true for things like real estate and other perceived high value property. This is why we are approaching a year inventory of housing, and for the most part owners are not dropping prices to reduce the supply as demand and financing plummets.
In any case, the article states nothing of the actual asking price. It could be that the even in a bubble, the asking price was too high, and the owner, seeing a recession, lowered the price. Or it could be that in a recession, in which everyone is losing their homes, and few people know how to cook, pizza delivery is a good compromise food for the small apartments many families will move to. Pizza.com could be success story of the recession.
The reason that we fund public universities, the reason that we fund public education, is to promote the creation and distribution of knowledge. To distribute such information efficiently, there has to be a minimum of regulation to hinder the efficiency. Likewise, persons nibbling at the public purse cannot be allowed to misuse such funding for personal gain.
This professor is paid to deliver effective lectures to the students. The students and the country has already paid for that service. The action of this professor does not seem to indicate that he is fulfilling this function. First he has created a conflict of interest. He has set up a situation in which he will profit from doing his job badly. If he gives a bad lecture, students will be forced to buy the notes. The professor profit at the expense of the taxpayer and the student money.
When I was in school, professor notes and solutions were in the reserve stack at the library. Some profs were writing books and we were given pre press copies. Some profs had completed books, and we were required to buy, which was perfectly legitimate. What never happened was a prof tying to con me for more money on top of what he had already agreed to be paid as part of his or her contract with the university.
A lot of people talk about the fall of the US educational system. Perhaps the most scary thing is profs being no longer concerned about the education of students, but the pure extraction of profit from the public and private coffers.
This is exactly what the BSA is pushing with it's turn you boss in bounty. Just like witch trials and Hitler youth, it is a terror technique used force businesses in a competitive market to cave into protection rackets. I saw this in several places, where huge amounts of company resources were used to acquire, install, and maintain auditing software.
Of course a businesses should not be under such uncertainty. I mean, in the US the congress is constantly trying to halt the uncertainty that consumer litigation causes though unmanaged risk, but has done nothing to halt such uncertainty on the B2B side. One can only imagine that this is because protection rackets are somehow critical to the economy.
In any case this is of note, and not hypocritical at all, because if Sony had proper auditing software installed, in the same way that they wanted to install auditing software as a way to manage the consumers of their entertainment product, then this would not have happened. The auditing software would have flagged the product, and Sony could have paid the licensing fees. As it is, Sony chose not to follow the rules that it set for others, and an innocent call has exposed it to whole pot full of pain. Of course, it is hard to feel sorry for them because Sony, through the RIAA, has not problem in causing parents a whole of pain for the acts of their children, even to the point of asking for a large chunk of year revenue. If we value software at the inflated rate that music is valued, I think that BMG should fork over at least 50% of the 1 billion dollars it made last year.
Why vigilantes do what they do is mostly unknown. Certainly most vigilante groups start with noble causes, at least in their minds. For instance, it is cool to hate scientologist, so those who want an excuse to commit arguably illegal acts use the notion that the scientologist somehow deserve it, in the same way that some people who say they believe 'thou shalt not kill' created extensive justifications why some people deserve to die.
The problem is that they then get used to the power of committing these illegal acts, or not getting caught, of having their metaphorical face on TV.
Justifications for hate are seldom logical. Many they just believe that inclusion is dooming regular kids to mediocrity and hurting epileptics is one way to get back.
Honestly, domains are dirt cheap, and $9 a domain is a far cry from $50 a year that we paid 15 years ago, but certainly more than when they could theoretically be had for free. Of course a cautions business will gather up every conceivable domain in every conceivable TLD. This means that where where one might buy a domain or two for $100 every two years, now even a small business might buy tens times that may, at a cost of perhaps a few hundred dollars per year. Of course, in the scheme of rolling out a domain, what is a few hundred dollars.
I have a few domains, nothing serious, and i would not be unwilling to pay more under certain conditions. Mostly these would have to with transfer and the amount of time a registrar can sit on a domain without releasing it. I appreciate having a 30 day waiting period to repurchase a domain, but I have seen 90 days+ where the register is allowed to hold the domain hostage. Clearly this a revenue generating tactic, and if it is to end must be replaced with other revenue.
IMHO, brand power is the premium that consumer is willing to pay for the use of the brand. This premium is the result of real and perceived value. A common example is gas. Many people will pay more for Shell or Chevron rather than the minor or no name gas.
Another common example is the sharp loss brand for home products with the advent of the power of Walmart. Consumer seem much less willing to pay more for laundry detergent just because it is advertised on TV. Such brands are now must differentiate based on claims such as actual cost or functionality(specially formulated to keep colors brighter!).
I wonder if the conclusion is based on the unwillingness to pay the suggested retail price for MS products and the generic PC, and their relative willingness to pay the famed 20% markup on Macs.
How else can a geek hope to get embroiled in a international conspiracy which takes him to Germany, where he loses his virginity to a women who is only using him, and, though sheer heroics, proves himself to the woman he lost his virginity to as more than a convenient pigeon. Take away the nerf guns, and you condemn an entire generation to their parents basement, alone and loveless.
Can you imagine what will happen if there if free wifi downtown. As son as the PHB and the like hit the downtown area, they will boot up their computers and begin to work! Not only will they eating, preening themselves, talking on the phone, but now they will be emailing, surfing the web, and who knows what else. The fact that they are supposed to driving a car, already oblivious to most of them, will seem an even less important distraction. The Chaos of downtown will escalate!
Seriously though, new technology always has unintended consequences, and even those of us who instinctively embrace every new thing, must admit that a taking a thoughtful moment before jumping into the volcano might be wise. Given that such general WiFi has not been done indicates that there may be good business, as well as hippie, reasons for it not to be.
I would trust this breakdown as must as any Hollywood accountings. Off the top things I see missing are costs taken out of the artist royalty to cover label costs, market promotion costs that are paid to shell company owned by the labels, and details on the fluff and powder added to label overhead.
As far as Wal Mart losing money on CDs, I always too this as a myth. I am sure Wal Mart is losing potential money on the potential sales they potentially might have if the could sell the CDs at a higher cost, but this is not losing money. What I suspect is happening is that CDs are covering some fixed costs. One thing about Wal Mart is that they have huge overheads, and they need probably need a relatively high value of minimum sales to cover the huger overhead. CDs and the like probably play a huge role in paying those huge fixed costs. They can complain all they want about how they are making no money on certain products, but the reality is that they probably would not be in business without those products.
Unfortunately, this is not as much subjecting the music bussiness to torment as much as an unholy dyad. Wal Mart continues to be able to cover fixed costs and attracting customer by selling very low price CDs, and RIAA gets to keep the illusion the product is of real value, which helps in the litigation. As the poster observed, the value is not in the product, or the value added to the product, but in the fact that the product can be priced high enough to cover overhead. There is nothing wrong with this, except that such things tend to be more associated with snake oil than legitimate commerce.
With suggested answers, for those who do not wish to think.
Do you want to be engineer? If the answer is not hell yes, with all my heart and soul, and I know that is more work than any other major, and I have building robots since I was 5, and I love basements, then run away, quickly. College is not high school where the students smell fear on a teacher and then bully grades out of them. Professor smell fear on freshmen, then fail them before the first week is out. This is reality. In general there are many more qualified engineering students than are needed, and no prof wants to waste time with a dumkompf. Especially those students who think that engineering to too hard should choose another major.
Did you get in a state school with automatic admission? If you did not get into the school though a competitive process, if you are not at the to 20% of the exams, if you think that you are hot stuff just because you managed to eek at the top 10% of you little pond does not mean you are qualified for the privilege of engineering school, or at least not a real one.
Do you like to read and do math? Again, if the answer is not yes, with all my heart, that is all I ever do, then run away fast. This does not mean that you can't drink and party and be a college kid. Some one the highest educational areas also sell the greatest amount of alcohol. But there must be a balance. I recall our class complaining to an engineering teacher who came into our midterm wearing a t-shirt from a concert held the previous night. We all complained why he got to go and we had to study. He said we could have gone if we had not waited to the last minute to study.
Can you do work without supervision? This is not high school. No one is going to beg you to do work. No one wants to hear your excuses that you use to not do work. The prof is not going to do all the work for you. You might need to do all the learning yourself if you get a bad prof. That is life. Class time is at most 20% of the time you will spend learning the subject, so the prof is at most a guide to the important bits. The textbook is one resource. Motivated students who will become engineers are able to find other resources, and copy each others homework to help understand important topics.
Are you, or have you ever been, a whiner. No engineering firm wants a whiner. No intelligent person who has a choice of where to work wants to work with whiners. Nearly every other social malady is acceptable. Be arrogant, rude, or even borderline psychotic. Be a managed druggy. By if you are whiner, don't waste you time in engineering. No one cares.
And one more thing. A Ti Silver Edition is not a real calculator. It is a toy given to kids who can't do math to keep them busy during math class. I know the 'plus' makes it seem like a real calculator, but it is not. It is most useful for passing notes. Get and HP.
When I bough a record I had the 'right' to copy that record onto tape and other medium, and, normally, I kept the record as a backup. I could in fact sell the original item, under the assumption, not always true, that I did not keep the copies The same is true for CDs. I do not think anything in the constitution or copyright law gives me the right to sell the copies and keep the original or vis versa, though I know many people did. Likewise giving copies to friends was not protected behavior, but it happened.
With the VHS tape, we are not so lucky. Though VHS was relatively easy to copy, people want to put you in jail for ripping a DVD. Madness. Waste of police enforcement resources. But people are happy because frankly, in inflation adjusted terms, movies are comparatively cheap now, unless you pay the early adopter fee. In addition, studios add original content to DVDs so it not just the same old stale product.
What I can't understand is how they expect to move towards downloaded movies, that cost more than a DVD and has less content, or ebooks that have nothing but restrictions. It is not that first sale doctrine should necessarily apply. We are not buying a physical product, at least not in most cases. But If I the lowly consumer must give up some flexibility, then so should the publisher
And herein, I believe is the problem. We see overall that publishers are not making equal sacrifices. We here that studios are still charging packaging and return product percentages when there are not packaging or physical product. Likewise newspaper prices have been going up, allegedly, because of the increasing price of paper, ink, and transportation, yet many publishers refuse to leave those expensive relics behind. Evidently those items are not so expensive when compared to the loss of physical ad revenue. The NYT Times want $15 a month for the electronic edition.
So here is the issue we are going to see with E-Books. Cost of a paperback, $8. Cost of an E-Book, $10. Fine, there is a connivence fee, but if I can't resell it, if I can't put it on whatever device I want to use a the moment, I can;t return it the next day, then why the hell am I a paying the same amount for a book? To maintain the luxury corporate offices in New York, Paris, and London. I don't think so. Just like iTMS, Just like the DVD, if you are going to restrict use, give me something in return. For books the logical thing is price. No paper costs, no overstock costs, no shipping costs. I know the publishers are saying, well, a hardback is $30, so we are giving you a 60% discount. But you are not. I could wait a month or two and buy that hardback second hand for $10. Now I can't. The publisher will be getting all the money for every sales. So compromise and don't be the greedy bastards that never learn and put this country on the brink of financial crisis every 40 years of so. Sell the ebooks for $5-8 and I bet that all this will go away. If you are going to create a market where you control everything, be a compassionate fascist and give your peasants a break.
The article did state the light source under discussion is an order of magnitude more efficient than a incandescent bulb. It is unclear if they are talking about color temperature or surface temperature, i will agree that it was probably surface temperature. I don't know how this will be scaled down, as the key here is high temperature plasma. How little material can you have and still have a viable plasma?
Fundamentally, this appears to be an arc vapor type bulb, like in projectors. While such a bulb is relatively efficient and is an excellent light sources, it has drawback for even some commercial use, and certainly home use. For example, even with insulating layer of vacuum, the surface gets very hot and makes the room hot. This is not only a safety issue, but also is an issue in cooling the room. What you no longer pay for in light, you pay for in air conditioning. This is one are where fluorescents are superior.
I can't see this as a long term solution. The overhead to using these lamps have always made them a niche player. For instance, the insulating layers and radiation protection. Fluorescents, even with the mercury issue, are probably still the better solution. LEDs are going to suffer the same fate of Fluorescents. Not really enough money in it to develop the product. Until LEDs are mandated, which won't happen until someone figures our how to make money off it, we will be using fluorescents. Incandescent will likely be banned in 5 years.
First, let me say that when using a product, it is reasonable to download all components needed for the upgrade. In the OSS which obsesses on the user knowing every minute detail of every process, all ancilarly downloads are listed and approved. Such approval is often just a formality, as the upgrade will not work without the ancillary components. To be fair, however, such notices are useful for sophisticated users as it tell such users, who might have developed against the components, that something they depend on is about to break.
In the more realistic home market, things are different. If one chooses use MS products, for example, one needs to accept all the bloat IE components built into the OS. The upgrades will be downloaded automagically, and since no one should be developing at a low level against the code, it should not be a problem. Likewise, If one chooses to use iTunes, then there are some of the ancillary components will also be upgraded. Does the OSS style warning make sense? Well, some components of Safari on the PC might be developed against at a low level, but for the sophitication of the average iTunes user, the ne3ed to keep iTunes running is probably the greater issue.
But this issue is greater. One wants iTunes, but not safari. Well, like most things, it is a choice. I want a cheap machine, but not MS. I want a big house, but can't afford the city prices. When someone else gives us a solution, there are compromises, and in this market there is competition. For instance, could not Mozilla team with Amazon to create an iPod friendly interface to their store? Right now the iTunes advantage is that there is not jukebox software that manages iPod music and works with Amazon.
But lets not let Apple get of free and clear. They do misbehave because they want to control the users experience. They have in the past linked security updates to other DRM features they wanted to push. They do install flash as part of Safari, even after it is removed. They do push upgrade for software they sell, without telling the user the upgrade will only be usable with further payments. These are things that make them less of a trusted source.
But Mozilla is not to be let free either. Mozilla has over 70 million dollars is assets, and will receive tens of millions of dollars a year from Google. Even with higher spending, the money from Google will far exceed the expenses of this non profit organization. Safari is not a great browser, I don't use it. We do not have a non-MS corporate calendaring program. As mentioned, we do not have a OS jukebox. These are all things that Mozilla should be competent in, and things that will help the average user, much more than Firefox. I use a mozilla browser, and I appreciate it, but I wonder why they are complaining that apple is giving the users choices, while mozilla is not. It seems that Mozilla is still fighting a long forgotten war, in which they could be only one victor, instead of embracing the benefits of competition. I have always had a problem with the idea of the Art of War as a business manual, at least in a nominally capitalist society.
Not really, because people will still buy based on initial cost. If I charge $50 for a bulb and state it will last, on average, 10 years, and my competitor charges $15 for a bulb and guarantees it will last exactly one year, I will lose a huge number of customers. I cannot guarantee the long lifetime of an LED, but it is easy to guarantee the short lifetime, and easy to refuse the guarantee if the bulb comes back in 6 months fried.
LEDs will change the market, but not for a very long time. People will still be buying the cheap incandescent bulbs for a very long time, even if they become less economical. Just like the cheap inkjet printer, we seem to be happier with a low initial cost to just paying for a quality product in the first place.
The negative generalizations are of little use, and often such things are not the fault of the worker, but broad based specific items can help.
For instance, it is very true that kids are being educated in a much more targeted fashion, and many are being taught that if education is not interesting, it is not worthwhile. The impact of this is that for entry level workers, the methods of training are going to have to change to match the methods used in secondary school. Such is a specific challenge for the average colleges, as some methods use in secondary school are too expensive or inappropriate for college. This, along with more students pushed to college, is part of what leads to the high rate of freshman failure seen at more colleges.
There are other issues. For instance, for the past 20 years of so we have been in an economic expansion in the US, driven by increasingly easy credit and increasingly cheap imports. The result of this is business managers who do not know who to be conservative to survive, even thrive, in the normal business cycle, and kids who have grown up with relatively little rationing of resources. In an area where nearly everyone is lower class or below the poverty line, almost everyone has a music player, a video game console, and a TV, a level of luxury that did not exist 30 years ago. Hungry people work harder than the sated.
Of course, as others have mentioned there are changes in the priorities of the old people. Baby boomers, concerned about their paycheck, are resorting to hiring contract workers, then complaining when the work does not get done. If they hire a worker, it is often under long and difficult probation conditions, which gives the new worker no incentive to stay. Though most universities are full of money, their professorial staff is contract and without tenure, and the boomers in washington are wondering no one wants to go into research or university teaching? In fact, if I were as condescending as the old people who write these books, I would say all our problems is the result of the boomer generation, those that railed and connived to get out of their duty, but has no problem sending other people children into the same fight. Fortunately, I am not so simplistic.
Slashdot Mirror
You see, that last bit was immature and unbalanced. Something like that would be unreasonable on a balanced abortion website, just like saying suicide is absolutely a sin and should never be done would be unreasonable on a balanced suicide web site. But, as I said, the people who complain the most about balance and bias are those that want it the least.
This is not a derogatory remark. The MS philosophy has lead to a golden age of cheap computer and cheap software. Say what you wish, but 15 years ago $500-$1000 for software that could handle all office tasks was cheap. Now such software is commonplace, and charging $500 for it is like charging $500 for an MP3 player with only a gig of memory, but that has to do with the MS inability to innovate, not bad software.
What it going to be the problem is if MS makes it as difficult to write software for MS OS as for say, Mac OS, given that writing for the later, at least in theory, could be easier to port to other *nix, while writing for MS locks you into arbitrary legally contract of which you have no control. Which is to say MS has no real incentive to force developers to write more secure or more stable programs, as such a shift would force MS developers to learn new skills. Most developers don't know how to deal with these issues, and most OEMs don't want to pay those that do. For instance, to scan I have to scan from root because the developers did not create a program that could work from a limited account. Clearly infection from the MS world, in which minimizing initial cost is of the paramount importance.
The point is well taken, but given that Gates has traditionally been the all encompassing monster sent to this plant to devour all extra gates we can afford to buy, it is unlikely that anything out of MS is going to be considered efficient, interesting, or innovative. Just cost effective.
What kids want are not always possible or practical. That is why important things are handled by competent adults, when possible. This is not to say that kids are always wrong, or games are always bad, just that a survey like this is pretty much a pile of crap.
BTW, games are the way that most kids learned basic skills, be it following rules of a board game or spin the bottle. Furthermore, toys are often the best way to test technology. We see this with toy robots. What most people is that toys and games get more complex as the player becomes more sophisticated. I might have been happy with a toy car when I was a kid, but know I want a real car. In high school my favorite toy was my computers. I took them apart, put them together, programmed them, made them do what I wanted. If you had made me play with pre determined educational toys I would have balked. The games we played were created new games and new toys. Even in primary school there was a mix of formal games and informal games. Recall that history is full of kids creating their own play, and there is little evidence that adults enforcing their play rules as the primary play option on kids is of any real value.
Suppose one has never trusted the equipment that came from the telco, and have never connected anything but a single firewall/router to the telco DSL box. Does the vulnerability still matter? I assume that the telco is giving us the cheapest crap it can, and should not be trusted beyond the limits of liability to the telco.
In any case, the article makes it appear that Lucas just bought several dozen of the costumes, and did not in fact commission the design nor purchase the rights. OTOH, the designer sold the costumes knowing full well what they were to be used for.If this is hte fact pattern, then Lucas asking for money would be like UA asking BMW to pay a royalty for right to produce cars.
In the end I hope that Lucas has to pay a gob of cash for wasting the time of court to satisfy his greed.
Speaking to the AP exam in particular, I have taken many computer science courses, and have done much coding. I would have a very hard time making a good grade on test, mostly as the questions appear to be trivia. Missing is the kind of questions that a first year programmer needs to know, about strong functions and data structures, about flow, about form. The kind of low level questions on the test are a far cry from what were expected to do in high school, much less college. I will also say that the math exams focus way too much on trivia and formalism, and way too little on the symbolic manipulation and theorems needed to succeed in calculus.
It seems that like most things, the AP system has degraded into a another means to extract funds from the direct education of children to the support of non-classroom personnel. To be fair, when i was in school the AP course did provide a framework to help the advanced student. They were there to provide rigorous content for those that probably should be in college, but were stuck in high school. Now in our everyone must go to college world, the AP courses has been expanded beyond reason, and probably without complaint of those that are making a bundle off it.
Many will sy we manufacture many complex things, like planes and cars, but these have real world legal consequences if they do not work. What about the launch vehicle? How many launch vehicle blow up on the pad during launch? And those has been carefully build and tested. How many components on space shuttle fail? How many caps or resisters are put in wrong? How many space craft, built we assume with more care than warheads, have failed immediately after deployment due to failure of compenents?
Without RTFA, I don't know what the threat is, but the greatest threat is upon launch some significant percentage of out nukes will just blow up over the US, or in the silos, leeching fissionable material across the heartland. I think the trigger mechanism are reliable enough that once detonated, most will work, and there is little risk of unintented detonation.
As far as the risk of others making nukes, I don't know. The fissionable material has been quite available for 15-20 years, and most parties do not seem interested. There are just so many other safer and more reliable ways to massacre huge number of people. A nuclear missile is a weapon of war, not a weapon of terror, and mostly even the first world countries seem to prefer the violence of the later to the relative order of the former. No one likes to be regulated, i guess. Then there is the sheer technical difficulty. There is a reason why we use conventional bombs rather than biological agents, nuclear materal, or magical binary liquid bombs. Because other than being useful in writing fantasy novels to start and continue offensives that bankrupt countries, anything else than conventional weapons are really more complicate they need be.
A middle ground may to promote abstinence as an option, various forms of birth control to allow people to have sex without overloading the social payments system, disallow abortion, accept that occasional mother is going to terminate the child after the birth as happened maybe twice in texas last week, and fund childcare as much as needed. This values the child at a level asserted by most people in the United States. However, seeing how we can't even get 100% health care for children, and conservatives love to bash those very people that carry pregnancy to term no matter what, and the EPA will not regulate the environment to keep children healthy, preferring instead to sacrifice some children for the sake of economic growth, I am not holding my breath for the middle ground.
So we have the current system in which infants are allowed by terminated pre-birth rather than have the situation where a mother kills a baby in desperation, or a baby is allowed to die slowly due to lack of funds. IN both cases we say the mother should not have gotten pregnant, but the government is forgiving in other cases, as shown by the repetitive bailout of fraudster, so why not mothers who provide society with the most precious resource? But we do not, and history says no society have every been that generous, so abortion is the compromise. Sometimes this discriminate against children that do not match our expectations, but so does society. I do not know of any school or hospital or anywhere that really has the funding to adequately care for these children. Rhetorically the question could be asked how many of us would write our congressperson to end the war on terror and divert the funds to provide 100% care for such children in need. Certainly conservatives might be expected to fund such projects, as there would then be no reason for evil lawyers to sue the good hearted doctors for malpractice just so the family can pay other doctors to care for the child.
In the end, like most things, people tend to simplify the issue so they can be proven correct, rather than engaging a full exploration that ends with a practical, but less palatable, solution.
In any case, the article states nothing of the actual asking price. It could be that the even in a bubble, the asking price was too high, and the owner, seeing a recession, lowered the price. Or it could be that in a recession, in which everyone is losing their homes, and few people know how to cook, pizza delivery is a good compromise food for the small apartments many families will move to. Pizza.com could be success story of the recession.
This professor is paid to deliver effective lectures to the students. The students and the country has already paid for that service. The action of this professor does not seem to indicate that he is fulfilling this function. First he has created a conflict of interest. He has set up a situation in which he will profit from doing his job badly. If he gives a bad lecture, students will be forced to buy the notes. The professor profit at the expense of the taxpayer and the student money.
When I was in school, professor notes and solutions were in the reserve stack at the library. Some profs were writing books and we were given pre press copies. Some profs had completed books, and we were required to buy, which was perfectly legitimate. What never happened was a prof tying to con me for more money on top of what he had already agreed to be paid as part of his or her contract with the university.
A lot of people talk about the fall of the US educational system. Perhaps the most scary thing is profs being no longer concerned about the education of students, but the pure extraction of profit from the public and private coffers.
Of course a businesses should not be under such uncertainty. I mean, in the US the congress is constantly trying to halt the uncertainty that consumer litigation causes though unmanaged risk, but has done nothing to halt such uncertainty on the B2B side. One can only imagine that this is because protection rackets are somehow critical to the economy.
In any case this is of note, and not hypocritical at all, because if Sony had proper auditing software installed, in the same way that they wanted to install auditing software as a way to manage the consumers of their entertainment product, then this would not have happened. The auditing software would have flagged the product, and Sony could have paid the licensing fees. As it is, Sony chose not to follow the rules that it set for others, and an innocent call has exposed it to whole pot full of pain. Of course, it is hard to feel sorry for them because Sony, through the RIAA, has not problem in causing parents a whole of pain for the acts of their children, even to the point of asking for a large chunk of year revenue. If we value software at the inflated rate that music is valued, I think that BMG should fork over at least 50% of the 1 billion dollars it made last year.
The problem is that they then get used to the power of committing these illegal acts, or not getting caught, of having their metaphorical face on TV.
Justifications for hate are seldom logical. Many they just believe that inclusion is dooming regular kids to mediocrity and hurting epileptics is one way to get back.
I have a few domains, nothing serious, and i would not be unwilling to pay more under certain conditions. Mostly these would have to with transfer and the amount of time a registrar can sit on a domain without releasing it. I appreciate having a 30 day waiting period to repurchase a domain, but I have seen 90 days+ where the register is allowed to hold the domain hostage. Clearly this a revenue generating tactic, and if it is to end must be replaced with other revenue.
Another common example is the sharp loss brand for home products with the advent of the power of Walmart. Consumer seem much less willing to pay more for laundry detergent just because it is advertised on TV. Such brands are now must differentiate based on claims such as actual cost or functionality(specially formulated to keep colors brighter!).
I wonder if the conclusion is based on the unwillingness to pay the suggested retail price for MS products and the generic PC, and their relative willingness to pay the famed 20% markup on Macs.
Are they going to support PPC on the mac past 2.3.0. I note later version are Intel only...
How else can a geek hope to get embroiled in a international conspiracy which takes him to Germany, where he loses his virginity to a women who is only using him, and, though sheer heroics, proves himself to the woman he lost his virginity to as more than a convenient pigeon. Take away the nerf guns, and you condemn an entire generation to their parents basement, alone and loveless.
Seriously though, new technology always has unintended consequences, and even those of us who instinctively embrace every new thing, must admit that a taking a thoughtful moment before jumping into the volcano might be wise. Given that such general WiFi has not been done indicates that there may be good business, as well as hippie, reasons for it not to be.
As far as Wal Mart losing money on CDs, I always too this as a myth. I am sure Wal Mart is losing potential money on the potential sales they potentially might have if the could sell the CDs at a higher cost, but this is not losing money. What I suspect is happening is that CDs are covering some fixed costs. One thing about Wal Mart is that they have huge overheads, and they need probably need a relatively high value of minimum sales to cover the huger overhead. CDs and the like probably play a huge role in paying those huge fixed costs. They can complain all they want about how they are making no money on certain products, but the reality is that they probably would not be in business without those products.
Unfortunately, this is not as much subjecting the music bussiness to torment as much as an unholy dyad. Wal Mart continues to be able to cover fixed costs and attracting customer by selling very low price CDs, and RIAA gets to keep the illusion the product is of real value, which helps in the litigation. As the poster observed, the value is not in the product, or the value added to the product, but in the fact that the product can be priced high enough to cover overhead. There is nothing wrong with this, except that such things tend to be more associated with snake oil than legitimate commerce.
And one more thing. A Ti Silver Edition is not a real calculator. It is a toy given to kids who can't do math to keep them busy during math class. I know the 'plus' makes it seem like a real calculator, but it is not. It is most useful for passing notes. Get and HP.
With the VHS tape, we are not so lucky. Though VHS was relatively easy to copy, people want to put you in jail for ripping a DVD. Madness. Waste of police enforcement resources. But people are happy because frankly, in inflation adjusted terms, movies are comparatively cheap now, unless you pay the early adopter fee. In addition, studios add original content to DVDs so it not just the same old stale product.
What I can't understand is how they expect to move towards downloaded movies, that cost more than a DVD and has less content, or ebooks that have nothing but restrictions. It is not that first sale doctrine should necessarily apply. We are not buying a physical product, at least not in most cases. But If I the lowly consumer must give up some flexibility, then so should the publisher
And herein, I believe is the problem. We see overall that publishers are not making equal sacrifices. We here that studios are still charging packaging and return product percentages when there are not packaging or physical product. Likewise newspaper prices have been going up, allegedly, because of the increasing price of paper, ink, and transportation, yet many publishers refuse to leave those expensive relics behind. Evidently those items are not so expensive when compared to the loss of physical ad revenue. The NYT Times want $15 a month for the electronic edition.
So here is the issue we are going to see with E-Books. Cost of a paperback, $8. Cost of an E-Book, $10. Fine, there is a connivence fee, but if I can't resell it, if I can't put it on whatever device I want to use a the moment, I can;t return it the next day, then why the hell am I a paying the same amount for a book? To maintain the luxury corporate offices in New York, Paris, and London. I don't think so. Just like iTMS, Just like the DVD, if you are going to restrict use, give me something in return. For books the logical thing is price. No paper costs, no overstock costs, no shipping costs. I know the publishers are saying, well, a hardback is $30, so we are giving you a 60% discount. But you are not. I could wait a month or two and buy that hardback second hand for $10. Now I can't. The publisher will be getting all the money for every sales. So compromise and don't be the greedy bastards that never learn and put this country on the brink of financial crisis every 40 years of so. Sell the ebooks for $5-8 and I bet that all this will go away. If you are going to create a market where you control everything, be a compassionate fascist and give your peasants a break.
Fundamentally, this appears to be an arc vapor type bulb, like in projectors. While such a bulb is relatively efficient and is an excellent light sources, it has drawback for even some commercial use, and certainly home use. For example, even with insulating layer of vacuum, the surface gets very hot and makes the room hot. This is not only a safety issue, but also is an issue in cooling the room. What you no longer pay for in light, you pay for in air conditioning. This is one are where fluorescents are superior.
I can't see this as a long term solution. The overhead to using these lamps have always made them a niche player. For instance, the insulating layers and radiation protection. Fluorescents, even with the mercury issue, are probably still the better solution. LEDs are going to suffer the same fate of Fluorescents. Not really enough money in it to develop the product. Until LEDs are mandated, which won't happen until someone figures our how to make money off it, we will be using fluorescents. Incandescent will likely be banned in 5 years.
In the more realistic home market, things are different. If one chooses use MS products, for example, one needs to accept all the bloat IE components built into the OS. The upgrades will be downloaded automagically, and since no one should be developing at a low level against the code, it should not be a problem. Likewise, If one chooses to use iTunes, then there are some of the ancillary components will also be upgraded. Does the OSS style warning make sense? Well, some components of Safari on the PC might be developed against at a low level, but for the sophitication of the average iTunes user, the ne3ed to keep iTunes running is probably the greater issue.
But this issue is greater. One wants iTunes, but not safari. Well, like most things, it is a choice. I want a cheap machine, but not MS. I want a big house, but can't afford the city prices. When someone else gives us a solution, there are compromises, and in this market there is competition. For instance, could not Mozilla team with Amazon to create an iPod friendly interface to their store? Right now the iTunes advantage is that there is not jukebox software that manages iPod music and works with Amazon.
But lets not let Apple get of free and clear. They do misbehave because they want to control the users experience. They have in the past linked security updates to other DRM features they wanted to push. They do install flash as part of Safari, even after it is removed. They do push upgrade for software they sell, without telling the user the upgrade will only be usable with further payments. These are things that make them less of a trusted source.
But Mozilla is not to be let free either. Mozilla has over 70 million dollars is assets, and will receive tens of millions of dollars a year from Google. Even with higher spending, the money from Google will far exceed the expenses of this non profit organization. Safari is not a great browser, I don't use it. We do not have a non-MS corporate calendaring program. As mentioned, we do not have a OS jukebox. These are all things that Mozilla should be competent in, and things that will help the average user, much more than Firefox. I use a mozilla browser, and I appreciate it, but I wonder why they are complaining that apple is giving the users choices, while mozilla is not. It seems that Mozilla is still fighting a long forgotten war, in which they could be only one victor, instead of embracing the benefits of competition. I have always had a problem with the idea of the Art of War as a business manual, at least in a nominally capitalist society.
LEDs will change the market, but not for a very long time. People will still be buying the cheap incandescent bulbs for a very long time, even if they become less economical. Just like the cheap inkjet printer, we seem to be happier with a low initial cost to just paying for a quality product in the first place.
For instance, it is very true that kids are being educated in a much more targeted fashion, and many are being taught that if education is not interesting, it is not worthwhile. The impact of this is that for entry level workers, the methods of training are going to have to change to match the methods used in secondary school. Such is a specific challenge for the average colleges, as some methods use in secondary school are too expensive or inappropriate for college. This, along with more students pushed to college, is part of what leads to the high rate of freshman failure seen at more colleges.
There are other issues. For instance, for the past 20 years of so we have been in an economic expansion in the US, driven by increasingly easy credit and increasingly cheap imports. The result of this is business managers who do not know who to be conservative to survive, even thrive, in the normal business cycle, and kids who have grown up with relatively little rationing of resources. In an area where nearly everyone is lower class or below the poverty line, almost everyone has a music player, a video game console, and a TV, a level of luxury that did not exist 30 years ago. Hungry people work harder than the sated.
Of course, as others have mentioned there are changes in the priorities of the old people. Baby boomers, concerned about their paycheck, are resorting to hiring contract workers, then complaining when the work does not get done. If they hire a worker, it is often under long and difficult probation conditions, which gives the new worker no incentive to stay. Though most universities are full of money, their professorial staff is contract and without tenure, and the boomers in washington are wondering no one wants to go into research or university teaching? In fact, if I were as condescending as the old people who write these books, I would say all our problems is the result of the boomer generation, those that railed and connived to get out of their duty, but has no problem sending other people children into the same fight. Fortunately, I am not so simplistic.