As far as I can tell, Ford will warranty things like this for three years. While some drive manufacturers still give a three year warranty, segate and western digital are in some cases reducing the warranty period to one year. Furthermore, while desktop drives are up to terabytes, it is still common to see mobile drives at the half terabyte level.
This is a silly complaint, again imposing some sort of conspiracy that keeps our birthright technology out of out hands. It is why my 2005 still has a CD player. Not because the car is built for reliability, not gizmo, but because the greedy corporations are keeping stuff away from us. Which is true in a sense, but really it is our expectation for cars to just work. Which given our need to connect is increasingly not working.
Are you telling me you can't acquire 80's pr0n, run it through this algorithm, and then make a bundle reselling it. Recent reports say this is more profitable that Netflix and prime. This should give enough funding to do whatever else is wanted.
Pretty much. Arthur Anderson, Enron accountants, were toast because they were dumb. They did not have a policy for data retention. If they, for instance, had a policy for deleting email every year, then they would have been able to continue to delete even when rumors of a federal investigation reached them until that investigation became formal. As it was they panicked.
But really this has nothing to do with that. It has to do with people treating email like phone conversations, which are generally not subject to anything beyond traffic analysis, and often have significant privacy differentials. Phone calls are generally not recorded, and if they are they are not as easily mined. So it is may be useful to screen the emails on the assumption that the text will be mined. In fact I have seen products like this before, and given legal liability, am surprised they are not in use more.
The issue may be a 50% failure rate after the fact is acceptable, but if one is rejected 50% of outgoing email as inappropriate, and users do not see the point, then they will just circumvent the system. It is better just to train, monitor, discipline, and delete, as in done with other communications.
YMMV, but I find none of this to be true. All fuel I use has ethanol. While I may not be typical, I don't put cheap tires on my car, I drive with reasonable accelerations(though I do accelerate rapidly), this is nothing everyone could do. I generally keep my car maintained.
One of my cars is rated for 16/23. There are days when I am only on surface roads and get somewhere between 15-18. There are days when I am only on the freeway, and I get 24. On long trips I have achieved as high as 25. My other car is 20/26. Again, when I check it is very average.
It is the way one drives the car that determines the fuel consumption. Plain and simple.
I have had vettes accelerate from the stop light, up the spur, and then have to break sharply to manage a curve. I end up basically the same place they are when we enter the freeway, but I did it by accelerating reasonably, achieving speed, and continuing at the speed around the curve to the entrance. No energy wasted on excessive acceleration, breaking, and then accelerating again. Efficient good driving according to the law of physics.
Then we have these bozos driving F250s who think they are in the grand prix. Let me tell all those people something. A lound noise coming out of your engine is not good. As we learn from the newton cradle, noise is energy, eneergy that is pushing your vihicle. So when you floor it and trying to catch up to the porche that passed you, you are wasting most of that gas. You are not driving a porche. You can't blame some vast government conspiracy for the fact that you can't afford gas. It is you choice. For the vehicle you drive. For the way you drive if. Maybe for high insurance costs because you drive badly.
Which is what this article is saying. On one hand, yes, the rating are not realistic if you drive like a bat out of hell. But the rating are realistic if you drive the car according to the way it was meant to be driven.
I've never argued against any technology being used when you have an imminent threat, an active crime going on," Paul said. "If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and fifty dollars in cash. I don't care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him."
It matters because it shows that alleged free market companies cannot really survive in a free market. This bus company took this guys money and then apparently treated him differently than other people and then apparently tried to shut down free debate on what they did. It is important because we must educate people that at least in America they have the right, at least until rand Paul shoots them with a drone because they walk out of a liquor store suspiciously, to equal service for pay and to express themselves both online and the public square.
And remember this is same Paul that had a problem with Obama using drones to kill his friends, but had no problems with using drones to kill a suspect fleeing a liquor store that had been robbed of $10. His opinion is unknown when both are the same.
Another issue is mass and vibration. The resolution of these printers is less than 500 micrometers. As mentioned they print in layers. Therefore the layers have to line up, perhaps to a resolution of 100 micrometers of less. This means not only does the head have to line up to that precision, but vibration has to kept to a minimum. On way to to that is to keep the machine heavy, and in particular the base on which the object is being build well attached to the machine and very heavy.
If the plate were moved, this would lead to bad effects. The plate would not be able to be as securely attached to the machine so there would be vibration. Every time the plate were moved, and stopped, to allow the medium to be placed and allowed to dry before the next motion, there would be vibrations. The medium would have to be allowed to dry before the plate were moved again.
Think about an old manual typewriter, or maybe we haven't seen one. In any case the heavy platten moved and then the keys hit the paper. Lots of vibration and if the typewriter was not very well built the text would be uneven. Compared to the 'modern' typewriter where the only motion was a very light ball and the text was much more aligned. Compared to the modern laser printer where all that moves is a rotating planten, the back and forth motion is optical.
In any case, the size is really determined by the amount that can be spent on the metal and stepper motors and precision tracks. Remember that the print head has to be repositioned exactly every time. Assuming a 500 micrometer resolution, each addition inch in three dimensions result in another 100,000 positions.
I agree. First, let me be blunt and say it is not your job to make other people work the way you did or the way you learned in college. There are many different ways to get a job done, and often we benefit by adjusting and learning different ways of doing things.
Second, if you are refactoring simply to make it look like you want it, and those documents are not being put into general use("I spent a lot of time refactoring some of it, but as soon as he makes any changes it needs doing again") then you may be wasting firm resources. If you can't get the work done without reworking everything, there are really only two options available. Realize that you are doing to have to some of this on your own time, or learn to read what is clearly company standard documents. These are after all what you have been given.
Third, identify if there are actually any real issues with the current system. Base change on improvement that will result in significant efficiency, not just 'the way it should be done'. There has been many occasions where I have come in as the junior person and was allowed to make changes because those changes would result in real savings. There were other times where I was just trying to be clever or controlling. Know the difference.
Isn't Google Play a walled garden, just with a lower wall. There are policies and agreements that a APP must honor. A unwalled garden would allow any APP or book or music to be uploaded, and then let the users moderate quality.
Also, is this an issue with BN or with Google. It is my understanding that Google Play is one of the closed source features that Google uses to keep control over the Android platform. An OEM either does what Google says or it is not allowed to play all the reindeer games.
I have Kindle Fire and have had no issues getting the Apps I want from Amazon. Unlike my other devices, I mostly have free Apps on the Fire, and have filled it up to the point where I have to delete the Apps I never use.I dare say that the my issue with Nook is merely that I got fire refurbished for a much lower price. Access to content did also play a role, but it was Amazon content not Google.
In terms of reading for school, the curriculum needs tobe updated. Old books, for instance the scarlet letter, might fall off and other books, red mars might go on. The problem is that teachers have to read these books, and red mars is no sense and sensibility.
OTOH, there is no reason to take pop books and make kids read them. There simply needs to be more of an push in the upper grades to find books the student can tolerate and encourage them to read. Then we can also ask if the novel is the end all of writing. Yes sustained reading is important, but is it a skill we need in this time of blogs and SMS.
This is what I was thinking. The assumption is that at some point we would become so intellegent that would no longer have social differences, or breed excessively, or be curious to meet other people.
What we know is that when travel is difficult, few people do it. What we also know is that even when travel is near impossible, and even deadly, a few want to do it anyway. So we know, at least from the human point of view, if space travel every become a real possibility, meaning more than a few people to a satellite or neighboring planets, we will have people who will jump at the chance. If it ever becomes easy, people will pay for it. This wil happen because of curiosity or because their options are limited.
What we don't know is if any space faring life that might exist outside Earth is anything like, thinks anything like us, is recognizable.
This post just makes me sad, because it means even if we don't otherwise perish, in 5 billion years, whoosh, we will be gone because we have become too smart and lazy to care.
There is another point that is not addressed in at least the version of the summary that I read. In the version I read, it was stated that many, if not most, of the STEM graduates in the US were not being hired to stem jobs. This statistic is used, and has been used, to say that this indicates that there are more than enough people in the US for the jobs, and no immigration is necessary. If there were a deficit, then why would so many not have jobs.
One reason of course is employability. We live in a competitive free market, and just because one presents oneself for a job with proper credentials does not mean anyone is obligated to give you a job. This is exactly in line with a consumer not being obligated to pay they asking price on a microwave, or not being obligated to buy encyclopedias from a random stranger appearing on thier stoop(I know that this does not happen anymore and I am dating myself, but the point remains).
The other issue is maybe many, if not most, of these students actually do not know anything. Maybe they cheated their way through their classes. Maybe when asked to ping a server, the could not do it. Maybe they could not put up a web page, use a screwdriver, look up a part, or do one of the many tasks that might be asked on an interview. I have gotten my coding jobs because I was able to go the interview and code. I would not be surprised if 50% of the STEM college graduates are employable but fundamentally unskilled.
So here is the fallacy I see. Usually when policy makers talk about STEM, they talk about increasing the numbers in STEM. OTOH, I believe we have too many people in STEM. Look at engineering programs. Half the people leave within the first year. In sciences, many, even the qualified, can't find a job. No, what we need is a more selective process that identifies better people. More importantly, we need K-12 education initiatives that will move students toward a critical think, production, and dare I say, maker, mentality. This needs to be done by leveraging our comprehensive educational system, which is our greatest asset, to provide the opportunity to all our students.
Of course this is orders of magnitude more expensive that just pushes all minimally qualified people through college and then having employers say, upon graduation, oops, you are not good enough. And we will still have the reality that, in a world economy that isn't going to go away, being in the top 20% is no longer good enough. Now with the labor free market world wide, we have to be in the top 5%. Which is why, if the US is going to compete, we can't just throw away kids because they live in the wrong neighborhood.
This happened to me with two 'freeium' games. I happened to like the model. I would buy stuff to decorate so as to support the developers. But then ads started appearing everywhere. I can understand that for people who did not buy stuff the ads would be necessary. But for users who were contributing? Still having ads? It was insane.
I know in some ways it is like cable. You pay for the cable, but still have ads. But then that is why I think that you might as well pay for Hulu and watch when you want. Much cheaper. Unless you are into sports, which some analysis has shown is why cable rates are so high. To subsidize the cost of paying the NFL. In any case, those companies lost me. Too bad, the games were fun.
Good to know that xbox is just as bad. I was thinking about buying the console, since I was going to get live anyway. I am not going to buy a Sony since they have shown no remorse for anything they have done. Maybe get a nintendo. It was always my favorite. Wish Sega was still around.
Even the World Wrestling Federation eventually caved in to the world wildlife fund. It may have been for tax purposes, entertainment is treated differently than sport, but one does not win against the earth people.
What Bezos needs to do buy and fund a TLD for the amazon. Obviously it is not going to be amazon. On the webpages have a link redirecting to the new domain. It will likely avoid huge legal costs and generate a good deal of good will.
Originally HTML was just to mark up bits of text which the browser would render in any way it deemed appropriate. So we would have level of headers, different identifiers for test we might want to emphasis, quote, etc. A bit of test might be marked a an adress to picture or whatever else we want, and if the browser knew what to do with it, could display it or whatever. This is to say the standard did not specify how anything might look, only what it is. This separated the presentation from the content, which was largely the style in the pre desktop publishing era.
While this was useful, it was not what many people wanted. The first sign that all was not well was the blink tag which specified behavior. The everyone started using tables to position content, which was an effective but inelegant kludge. Then MS made a browser that was not intended to render generic HTML but was instead a application front end designed to allow integration between it's MS Windows platforms which had various levels of incompatibility. While many who wanted profitable business on the web designed for HTML, some did target MS IE, which lead to a great schism in the web. After much tumultuous transformations, we ended up with HTML and CSS.
Really this is ideal. HTML needs to go back to just being a mark up language without a presentation component. For those who want or need to define the presentation that the browser will use, CSS allows that to happen. One thing that HTML anticipated, and CSS allows, is the variation in screen size. With proper markup and CSS, there is no reason why a page cannot be displayed on a 20' screen of 5' screen. Of course this is real victim of the legacy of control freaks killing the beauty of HTML. There are too many web pages that do not render well in any window size. Elements do not scale, do not fall off the edge. Some pages are even designed for only resolution. Madness.
While the term 'too cheap to meter' was not originally strictly applied to the first generations of nuclear power, they were certainly marketed as such. Of course, as mentioned, they became much more expensive as each incident required huge taxpayer bailouts.
OTOH, who know how much coal is going to cost us in the end. The superfund is no longer being paid by industry, and every day our atmosphere is being treated like a sewer. We have enough sense to know that indoor plumbing is worth the investment, beyond just connivence, so why is requiring a coal plant, or car, to deal with it's own sewage any different. No we are going to have deal with it at much greater expense later.
So here are the three things we know. First, it is going to cost some sum of money to remediate every ton we poop into the atmosphere. Second, no one is building nuclear reactors without significant taxpayer funding. For instance Westinghouse is looking at part of $400 million of taxpayer money to fund the it's current generation of reactors. Third, there is no politically feasible technology to deal with nuclear waste. One would think the Nevada, who sold itself out for infinite easy cash, would have no problem storing waste, but it does.
Which is why I say just spend the money on renewables. Sure it may cost more upfront and take a while to get up and running, but we won't have guaranteed problems on the backend. We may have new problems on the backend, but that always happens when on innovate. If innovation is worth it, then we accept this.
I have seen large complex data sets on racks of cheap microcomputers in places wehre i work. We see this in Google, for example. What characterizes these data sets is that are easily replicated, or there is little liability if there is loss. Think about data loss on google and then think about a bank misplacing a deposit. Do we think that Google keeps many of it's algorithms secret for no reason? No, they do it so they are not held accountable.
For servers facing the internet, load balancers, like those made by compaq in the late 90's, do a very good job treating those servers as a RAID. The question is how much is the data changing behind the servers, the liability is data is compromised, and as mentioned how complex managing the data is. The question is also how complex it is to manage a hundred thousand machines instead of one big machine.
A professor of mine told us why he thought baseball was so frustrating. He was at a bar and a batter was just getting up to base. He went home, turned on the TV, and the same batter us still up.
I see your point, and the issue is partially terrorism. Note that Boston was not locked down until the terrorists surfaced again, and until there was a realization that they had additional bombs
I will just make two statements here. FIrst, if people had been roaming around as normal, then there would have a chance that that a person with a bomb could have taken many hostages and, theoretically, escaped or caused much more damage. Two, by not keeping everyone at home, it became easy to check on those who were not in their homes. Therefore a heat signature in a backyard under a tarp became a suspect. There was no need to check thousands of suspicious heat signatures, if this was in fact the way the suspect was found.
In the case where people are shooting just to be shooting, staying inside is note really a defense. And in such case, where the gang is part of neighborhood, locking it down serves no purpose.
OTOH, when there is single or couple individuals, and the rest are known innocents, locking down a neighborhood is not unheard of. For instance in a few weeks ago a neighborhood when the police were in a standoff. People were not allowed to leave or go home, students were not allowed to go to school. One kid said he did not eat for the whole day. Lives were saved, and the suspect detained(or maybe killed, I don't remember).
In fact this is taken quite seriously in trades. At the high school level, where the trades are going to recruit, there is quite an effort in literature to represent gender equality, often even more than race or other background. With a trade, the results are pretty quickly apparent, so a quick learner and responsible person will succeed even if they are not traditional.
Of course there is a difference between a tradesperson and a professional engineer. Though both are in principle licensed, the pay and work environment are different. I see many people who have never done anything but push paper complain how they with were in a trade so they could make better money. Well, why don't you? Probably because of lack of skill of love of being in a nice air conditioned office with snacks and television. Which is to say the trades require skill, hard work, and endurance. Al for about what you would make in an office job where you are just sitting around all day playing on the computer. So most will choose the office chair.
Engineering on the other hand can be less work than a tradesperson, and also double the money or more. If you are sent into the field to do real work, you get paid more.
Here is the thing. We don't need more technical people, we need better technical people. We have technical people coming out the colleges at a huge rate. The problem is that they often do not work at the required level. Part of the problem is we are not getting the best of best to go into technical fields, and one of the issues is that large parts of the population are being encouraged to go into other fields. Back in the 80's I saw female technical people, who were brilliant top of their class, leave for other fields because they could not get a job. While the good old boys from the local A&M, who didn't even know how to put in a fuse of operate a computer, were hired at 6 figures.
When the skilled jobs are all held by immigrants because we don't want to employ the locals who can do the work because of gender or background, maybe we will learn the error of our ways.
I still get and read some magazines, even in the physical form. The difference is I don't pay nearly as much as I used to. Last year I got a whole slew of subscriptions for $5-10. Mostly I leaf through these looking at ads, samples, reading one or two articles. Recently I subscribed to two magazines, but these were essentially free.
This is the interesting trend. How many actually pay real money for magazines. There was a time when I would pay 20 bucks for a year. But now 30 bucks for architectural digest just seems insane, especially since over half of it is ads.
One magazine I still pay for when I can in Granta. Another is Nature, since they have the iPad version for $40. Big savings over the $200 it used to cost.
To me the issue is the two year contract. I think the two year contract implies that the device I am buying is functional and secure during those two years. All that the law should say is that the phone should be able to run the latest software well during those two years.
Here is what I see will happen if such a law is passed. More expensive hardware, maybe one year contracts. The hardware will be more expensive because it will not longer be possible to build a phone that will just be current for the next six months. The hardware will now have to support the reasonable upgrades. This is the same thing with computers. For $300 you can get a computer to run the previous version of windows, and may be the current. For $700 you have a good possibility of running the next.
But really this is just a software engineering problem. At one time patches were very hard to apply because there were few or only bad ways to interface with the OS. Since then we have gotten better at writing API and companies have seen the follow of keeping 'secret' functions for themselves. Android as a mobile operating system is new and likely does not have the maturity to segregate low and high level functions among devices, nor do we likely have the clock cycles to waste to make that happen.
But really, we have to realize that basically these companies want to sell phones, and there is not incentive for them to upgrade old phones, so if we are going to have phones that can be kept current during the two year contract, there must be mandatory upgrade cycles.
On one hand, as google is doing nothing to stop this it may be that MS has some legitimate patents and the $5-1$15 they are being paid for every phone may be for valid IP. As everyone must agree, MS almost invented the smart phone, although the feature set they envisioned were not anything many people wanted. It is like Apple actually inventing the term PDA, but not the PDA iteself, or being able to bring it to the forefront. Palm probably did the most in that case.
OTOH, Apple has asked for royalty payments for technology it reasonably developed, and most have rightly said no. In terms of smart phones, Nokia was probably the first with actually working technology, followed by the Symbian phones. Windows phones were a gimmick. The fact that these are no longer viable due to other companies using their technologies.
No, in most cases these payments can be best classified as based on relationships, and their characterization would be described as good will. These companies have relationships with MS and the payments are clearly bribes to keep that relationship going. Unlike other patent trolls, the value to to great to be simple nuisance payments. No MS has probably gone and said either pay up, or no more relationship with MS.
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This is a silly complaint, again imposing some sort of conspiracy that keeps our birthright technology out of out hands. It is why my 2005 still has a CD player. Not because the car is built for reliability, not gizmo, but because the greedy corporations are keeping stuff away from us. Which is true in a sense, but really it is our expectation for cars to just work. Which given our need to connect is increasingly not working.
Are you telling me you can't acquire 80's pr0n, run it through this algorithm, and then make a bundle reselling it. Recent reports say this is more profitable that Netflix and prime. This should give enough funding to do whatever else is wanted.
But really this has nothing to do with that. It has to do with people treating email like phone conversations, which are generally not subject to anything beyond traffic analysis, and often have significant privacy differentials. Phone calls are generally not recorded, and if they are they are not as easily mined. So it is may be useful to screen the emails on the assumption that the text will be mined. In fact I have seen products like this before, and given legal liability, am surprised they are not in use more.
The issue may be a 50% failure rate after the fact is acceptable, but if one is rejected 50% of outgoing email as inappropriate, and users do not see the point, then they will just circumvent the system. It is better just to train, monitor, discipline, and delete, as in done with other communications.
One of my cars is rated for 16/23. There are days when I am only on surface roads and get somewhere between 15-18. There are days when I am only on the freeway, and I get 24. On long trips I have achieved as high as 25. My other car is 20/26. Again, when I check it is very average.
It is the way one drives the car that determines the fuel consumption. Plain and simple.
I have had vettes accelerate from the stop light, up the spur, and then have to break sharply to manage a curve. I end up basically the same place they are when we enter the freeway, but I did it by accelerating reasonably, achieving speed, and continuing at the speed around the curve to the entrance. No energy wasted on excessive acceleration, breaking, and then accelerating again. Efficient good driving according to the law of physics.
Then we have these bozos driving F250s who think they are in the grand prix. Let me tell all those people something. A lound noise coming out of your engine is not good. As we learn from the newton cradle, noise is energy, eneergy that is pushing your vihicle. So when you floor it and trying to catch up to the porche that passed you, you are wasting most of that gas. You are not driving a porche. You can't blame some vast government conspiracy for the fact that you can't afford gas. It is you choice. For the vehicle you drive. For the way you drive if. Maybe for high insurance costs because you drive badly.
Which is what this article is saying. On one hand, yes, the rating are not realistic if you drive like a bat out of hell. But the rating are realistic if you drive the car according to the way it was meant to be driven.
I've never argued against any technology being used when you have an imminent threat, an active crime going on," Paul said. "If someone comes out of a liquor store with a weapon and fifty dollars in cash. I don't care if a drone kills him or a policeman kills him."
It matters because it shows that alleged free market companies cannot really survive in a free market. This bus company took this guys money and then apparently treated him differently than other people and then apparently tried to shut down free debate on what they did. It is important because we must educate people that at least in America they have the right, at least until rand Paul shoots them with a drone because they walk out of a liquor store suspiciously, to equal service for pay and to express themselves both online and the public square.
And remember this is same Paul that had a problem with Obama using drones to kill his friends, but had no problems with using drones to kill a suspect fleeing a liquor store that had been robbed of $10. His opinion is unknown when both are the same.
If the plate were moved, this would lead to bad effects. The plate would not be able to be as securely attached to the machine so there would be vibration. Every time the plate were moved, and stopped, to allow the medium to be placed and allowed to dry before the next motion, there would be vibrations. The medium would have to be allowed to dry before the plate were moved again.
Think about an old manual typewriter, or maybe we haven't seen one. In any case the heavy platten moved and then the keys hit the paper. Lots of vibration and if the typewriter was not very well built the text would be uneven. Compared to the 'modern' typewriter where the only motion was a very light ball and the text was much more aligned. Compared to the modern laser printer where all that moves is a rotating planten, the back and forth motion is optical.
In any case, the size is really determined by the amount that can be spent on the metal and stepper motors and precision tracks. Remember that the print head has to be repositioned exactly every time. Assuming a 500 micrometer resolution, each addition inch in three dimensions result in another 100,000 positions.
Second, if you are refactoring simply to make it look like you want it, and those documents are not being put into general use("I spent a lot of time refactoring some of it, but as soon as he makes any changes it needs doing again") then you may be wasting firm resources. If you can't get the work done without reworking everything, there are really only two options available. Realize that you are doing to have to some of this on your own time, or learn to read what is clearly company standard documents. These are after all what you have been given.
Third, identify if there are actually any real issues with the current system. Base change on improvement that will result in significant efficiency, not just 'the way it should be done'. There has been many occasions where I have come in as the junior person and was allowed to make changes because those changes would result in real savings. There were other times where I was just trying to be clever or controlling. Know the difference.
Also, is this an issue with BN or with Google. It is my understanding that Google Play is one of the closed source features that Google uses to keep control over the Android platform. An OEM either does what Google says or it is not allowed to play all the reindeer games.
I have Kindle Fire and have had no issues getting the Apps I want from Amazon. Unlike my other devices, I mostly have free Apps on the Fire, and have filled it up to the point where I have to delete the Apps I never use.I dare say that the my issue with Nook is merely that I got fire refurbished for a much lower price. Access to content did also play a role, but it was Amazon content not Google.
OTOH, there is no reason to take pop books and make kids read them. There simply needs to be more of an push in the upper grades to find books the student can tolerate and encourage them to read. Then we can also ask if the novel is the end all of writing. Yes sustained reading is important, but is it a skill we need in this time of blogs and SMS.
What we know is that when travel is difficult, few people do it. What we also know is that even when travel is near impossible, and even deadly, a few want to do it anyway. So we know, at least from the human point of view, if space travel every become a real possibility, meaning more than a few people to a satellite or neighboring planets, we will have people who will jump at the chance. If it ever becomes easy, people will pay for it. This wil happen because of curiosity or because their options are limited.
What we don't know is if any space faring life that might exist outside Earth is anything like, thinks anything like us, is recognizable.
This post just makes me sad, because it means even if we don't otherwise perish, in 5 billion years, whoosh, we will be gone because we have become too smart and lazy to care.
One reason of course is employability. We live in a competitive free market, and just because one presents oneself for a job with proper credentials does not mean anyone is obligated to give you a job. This is exactly in line with a consumer not being obligated to pay they asking price on a microwave, or not being obligated to buy encyclopedias from a random stranger appearing on thier stoop(I know that this does not happen anymore and I am dating myself, but the point remains).
The other issue is maybe many, if not most, of these students actually do not know anything. Maybe they cheated their way through their classes. Maybe when asked to ping a server, the could not do it. Maybe they could not put up a web page, use a screwdriver, look up a part, or do one of the many tasks that might be asked on an interview. I have gotten my coding jobs because I was able to go the interview and code. I would not be surprised if 50% of the STEM college graduates are employable but fundamentally unskilled.
So here is the fallacy I see. Usually when policy makers talk about STEM, they talk about increasing the numbers in STEM. OTOH, I believe we have too many people in STEM. Look at engineering programs. Half the people leave within the first year. In sciences, many, even the qualified, can't find a job. No, what we need is a more selective process that identifies better people. More importantly, we need K-12 education initiatives that will move students toward a critical think, production, and dare I say, maker, mentality. This needs to be done by leveraging our comprehensive educational system, which is our greatest asset, to provide the opportunity to all our students.
Of course this is orders of magnitude more expensive that just pushes all minimally qualified people through college and then having employers say, upon graduation, oops, you are not good enough. And we will still have the reality that, in a world economy that isn't going to go away, being in the top 20% is no longer good enough. Now with the labor free market world wide, we have to be in the top 5%. Which is why, if the US is going to compete, we can't just throw away kids because they live in the wrong neighborhood.
I know in some ways it is like cable. You pay for the cable, but still have ads. But then that is why I think that you might as well pay for Hulu and watch when you want. Much cheaper. Unless you are into sports, which some analysis has shown is why cable rates are so high. To subsidize the cost of paying the NFL. In any case, those companies lost me. Too bad, the games were fun.
Good to know that xbox is just as bad. I was thinking about buying the console, since I was going to get live anyway. I am not going to buy a Sony since they have shown no remorse for anything they have done. Maybe get a nintendo. It was always my favorite. Wish Sega was still around.
What Bezos needs to do buy and fund a TLD for the amazon. Obviously it is not going to be amazon. On the webpages have a link redirecting to the new domain. It will likely avoid huge legal costs and generate a good deal of good will.
Even if updating meant you did not blow your neighbors to smithereens.
While this was useful, it was not what many people wanted. The first sign that all was not well was the blink tag which specified behavior. The everyone started using tables to position content, which was an effective but inelegant kludge. Then MS made a browser that was not intended to render generic HTML but was instead a application front end designed to allow integration between it's MS Windows platforms which had various levels of incompatibility. While many who wanted profitable business on the web designed for HTML, some did target MS IE, which lead to a great schism in the web. After much tumultuous transformations, we ended up with HTML and CSS.
Really this is ideal. HTML needs to go back to just being a mark up language without a presentation component. For those who want or need to define the presentation that the browser will use, CSS allows that to happen. One thing that HTML anticipated, and CSS allows, is the variation in screen size. With proper markup and CSS, there is no reason why a page cannot be displayed on a 20' screen of 5' screen. Of course this is real victim of the legacy of control freaks killing the beauty of HTML. There are too many web pages that do not render well in any window size. Elements do not scale, do not fall off the edge. Some pages are even designed for only resolution. Madness.
So here are the three things we know. First, it is going to cost some sum of money to remediate every ton we poop into the atmosphere. Second, no one is building nuclear reactors without significant taxpayer funding. For instance Westinghouse is looking at part of $400 million of taxpayer money to fund the it's current generation of reactors. Third, there is no politically feasible technology to deal with nuclear waste. One would think the Nevada, who sold itself out for infinite easy cash, would have no problem storing waste, but it does.
Which is why I say just spend the money on renewables. Sure it may cost more upfront and take a while to get up and running, but we won't have guaranteed problems on the backend. We may have new problems on the backend, but that always happens when on innovate. If innovation is worth it, then we accept this.
For servers facing the internet, load balancers, like those made by compaq in the late 90's, do a very good job treating those servers as a RAID. The question is how much is the data changing behind the servers, the liability is data is compromised, and as mentioned how complex managing the data is. The question is also how complex it is to manage a hundred thousand machines instead of one big machine.
A professor of mine told us why he thought baseball was so frustrating. He was at a bar and a batter was just getting up to base. He went home, turned on the TV, and the same batter us still up.
I will just make two statements here. FIrst, if people had been roaming around as normal, then there would have a chance that that a person with a bomb could have taken many hostages and, theoretically, escaped or caused much more damage. Two, by not keeping everyone at home, it became easy to check on those who were not in their homes. Therefore a heat signature in a backyard under a tarp became a suspect. There was no need to check thousands of suspicious heat signatures, if this was in fact the way the suspect was found.
In the case where people are shooting just to be shooting, staying inside is note really a defense. And in such case, where the gang is part of neighborhood, locking it down serves no purpose.
OTOH, when there is single or couple individuals, and the rest are known innocents, locking down a neighborhood is not unheard of. For instance in a few weeks ago a neighborhood when the police were in a standoff. People were not allowed to leave or go home, students were not allowed to go to school. One kid said he did not eat for the whole day. Lives were saved, and the suspect detained(or maybe killed, I don't remember).
Of course there is a difference between a tradesperson and a professional engineer. Though both are in principle licensed, the pay and work environment are different. I see many people who have never done anything but push paper complain how they with were in a trade so they could make better money. Well, why don't you? Probably because of lack of skill of love of being in a nice air conditioned office with snacks and television. Which is to say the trades require skill, hard work, and endurance. Al for about what you would make in an office job where you are just sitting around all day playing on the computer. So most will choose the office chair.
Engineering on the other hand can be less work than a tradesperson, and also double the money or more. If you are sent into the field to do real work, you get paid more.
Here is the thing. We don't need more technical people, we need better technical people. We have technical people coming out the colleges at a huge rate. The problem is that they often do not work at the required level. Part of the problem is we are not getting the best of best to go into technical fields, and one of the issues is that large parts of the population are being encouraged to go into other fields. Back in the 80's I saw female technical people, who were brilliant top of their class, leave for other fields because they could not get a job. While the good old boys from the local A&M, who didn't even know how to put in a fuse of operate a computer, were hired at 6 figures.
When the skilled jobs are all held by immigrants because we don't want to employ the locals who can do the work because of gender or background, maybe we will learn the error of our ways.
This is the interesting trend. How many actually pay real money for magazines. There was a time when I would pay 20 bucks for a year. But now 30 bucks for architectural digest just seems insane, especially since over half of it is ads.
One magazine I still pay for when I can in Granta. Another is Nature, since they have the iPad version for $40. Big savings over the $200 it used to cost.
Here is what I see will happen if such a law is passed. More expensive hardware, maybe one year contracts. The hardware will be more expensive because it will not longer be possible to build a phone that will just be current for the next six months. The hardware will now have to support the reasonable upgrades. This is the same thing with computers. For $300 you can get a computer to run the previous version of windows, and may be the current. For $700 you have a good possibility of running the next.
But really this is just a software engineering problem. At one time patches were very hard to apply because there were few or only bad ways to interface with the OS. Since then we have gotten better at writing API and companies have seen the follow of keeping 'secret' functions for themselves. Android as a mobile operating system is new and likely does not have the maturity to segregate low and high level functions among devices, nor do we likely have the clock cycles to waste to make that happen.
But really, we have to realize that basically these companies want to sell phones, and there is not incentive for them to upgrade old phones, so if we are going to have phones that can be kept current during the two year contract, there must be mandatory upgrade cycles.
OTOH, Apple has asked for royalty payments for technology it reasonably developed, and most have rightly said no. In terms of smart phones, Nokia was probably the first with actually working technology, followed by the Symbian phones. Windows phones were a gimmick. The fact that these are no longer viable due to other companies using their technologies.
No, in most cases these payments can be best classified as based on relationships, and their characterization would be described as good will. These companies have relationships with MS and the payments are clearly bribes to keep that relationship going. Unlike other patent trolls, the value to to great to be simple nuisance payments. No MS has probably gone and said either pay up, or no more relationship with MS.