...
- considering that most people who currently pay this tax can afford it very well,
- considering that most heirs do not deserve their good fate, and that many of them have already received a very significant heritage under the guise of privileged conditions at the beginning of their life (address book, healthy food and home, education, free housing, cars, etc... during 50 years...)
- considering that I just paid some inheritance fees, mind you, and that Mr. Sarkozy will waste them in gifts to his really wealthy pals who escape most taxes thanks to numerous and cunningly designed-for-them fiscal holes,
- I am all _against_ any suppression of the inheritance tax.
The sole question as for me relates to enterprises being sold for cheap because the owner has died and the heirs cannot afford to pay the related taxes. Most of the time, it has not been properly prepared, but this should be addressed... This doesn't really address the pros and cons of inheritance tax. You're against suppressing this tax (which I guess in American means "reducing" the tax), and you gladly pay it because you feel it is for the betterment of society.
This is an idealistic attitude, but the unfortunate side effect is that a business owner cannot pass his or her business on to designated heirs without their paying a crippling penalty. This affects small family run businesses like retail stores, and is a major reason why so few survive after the owner's death. It's hard enough to make a living in a small retail business without all the confiscatory taxes and fees sucking every available penny out of the budget, but then to have to have it all taken away on one's deathbed is the final blow.
On a philosophical note, one is also presupposing that the State has the right to confiscate someone's wealth at time of death, a right which is highly debatable. If you believe, as many on the Left would, that wealth is an evil thing that is usually obtained through dishonest means, then inheritance tax is merely justice. If you believe, as most on the Right would, that wealth is the fruits of one's labor (or one's ancestors' labor) and one's heirs have a duty to maintain and grow that wealth, then inheritance tax is merely another form of confiscation.
Here's a much better article. That blog submitted by the op was cut and pasted rather poorly.
Innervation is the key to making this stuff work right. If they can hook up enough sensory and motor nerves to these prosthetic limbs, they will come to feel like a part of the body, though the nervous system may need to adjust itself a bit.
I would expect that the ultimate solution will be a biological limb grown from the patient's own stem cells. Nerve hook-up will still be a major issue, because we don't yet know how to repair severed axons, but perhaps stem cells will take care of that issue as well. Goodbye, paralysis and multiple sclerosis and Lou Gehrig's Disease!
fyngyrz: "And before the pharma trolls come out of the woodwork, just take most of the damned legislation and regulation off pharma companies, and they'd be fine. We'd get new drugs at a much higher rate, and yes, just as happens now, sometimes there would be problems, despite testing"
If only that were the case. Patents are the least of pharma's issues. Liability is the number one reason that new drugs are not being developed or released. There is a whole industry of class action lawyers constantly searching for the next company to attack, and a drug's purported side effect can result in jury-awarded damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Get pretty Sally on the stand tearfully describing how this heart drug killed her poor papa. One contaminated batch is enough to put a company out of business.
This is the reason why U.S. pharmaceutical companies stopped manufacturing flu vaccines, resulting in a major shortage a couple of years ago.
Is it right that an entire company should be punished because of one technician's error, or because of a bad executive decision regarding test results? Legally, it it, because human life is assigned a very high monetary value in the U.S. and companies are legal entities with collective responsibility for their mistakes (inadvertent though they may be).
Is it generally good for society that this kind of liability is assumed? Probably not, because the marginal diseases end up not getting cures. Companies just can't assume the risks for drugs that have a tiny end market. Even major drugs are almost prohibitively risky today.
I think patents are absolutely necessary to keep drug development going, but liability has got to be limited in some way or no one's going to be doing the R&D regardless of patent reform.
The other major reform is for the Federal Government to get off its Christian anti-science kick and start funding basic scientific research again the way we did back in the '50s and '60s, when the U.S. left everyone else in the dust. Double the budget or triple it, create a market for science Ph.D.s and get the research going. The life changing innovations that come out of basic research will far outweigh any patent shenanigans we have to deal with.
As a musician, I disagree. There's no law chiseled in stone that proclaims a musician's right to live off album sales. Musicians historically have lived by the largesse of wealthy patrons. Selling sheet music, performances, and recordings yield a certain level of income but for the average musician who is not a star, it needs to be supplemented by teaching, whoring (i.e., playing for weddings/birthdays/bar mitzvahs), building and repairing instruments, or a part- or full-time job washing dishes, working at a music store, etc.
There's also no law that says a CD which cost about $0.50 to stamp out has to sell for $15. Cut the prices back to $5 or $8 per disk and you'll see sales go up. Record albums used to sell for $4 or $5 back in the day, then tapes came along and bumped the price up to about $10 or $12, and then CDs went through the roof. OK already, a CD *player* costs $20 so why are disks still so expensive?
The amount of money musicians see from a CD sale is vanishingly small, especially when a middle man has done the production work. Do you honestly believe that out of that $15 (or $12 or $18) the musician is receiving more than $0.25 or $0.50? Typically not. If you self-produce, as less well-known musicians are forced to do, you have to front about $20,000 in studio time, design, copying and printing expenses, and it takes a long time to make that kind of money back from sales, let alone start to turn a profit. Disks are really a calling card, a way of getting your name out there and popularizing your music rather than some kind of bread-and-butter solid income that RIAA makes it out to be. Sure, a nationally known act with a dozen recordings out is going to be making some income from record sales but the lion's share is still going to the record producer.
Because of this situation, I think it makes more sense to simply upload your music and get the public listening to it, then ask them to pay to hear you play live. People have demonstrated that they will pay for great music either live or recorded. There are people who were making thousands of dollars a month on mp3.com, though of course most of the musicians there were amateurs. Yet, mp3.com had an interesting business model and I'm very sorry it got bought out.
The RIAA is living in a time warp. It's no longer possible to monopolize sound waves. Even twenty-five years ago, we used to constantly tape each other's records and tape albums played on the radio. No one was rich enough or crazy enough to purchase every single must-have album out there, though we all wanted to of course. Now we have a much better music delivery system that will very quickly get music out to millions of people all over the world--let's take advantage of it and the money will follow. Apple, CDBaby, mp3.com--they were thinking creatively and sooner or later a business model will emerge that leverages the current technology and gives musicians back some remuneration for their efforts.
I haven't noticed the usability decline that you cite. I used to pay for the premium Yahoo mail, then stopped paying when Google competition forced Yahoo to offer more storage. With Firefox and Flashblock, I don't notice any in-my-face flash ads, and the new beta interface is actually pretty good, with drag-n-drop capability which is actually rather cool. I don't understand why people in this forum are so negative about Yahoo; it's free, it works, and it ties in nicely with their many other services.
A while back I switched to gmail.com for my web-based mail simply because gmail offers free pop3 services while Yahoo was still charging for pop access. Perhaps that's changed. I miss Yahoo mail though because I prefer the folder paradigm to gmail's label approach, and Yahoo has superior filtering for my purposes. But, it's all just eye candy to me anyway; I still use a Linux shell account and trusty old Emacs as my primary mail system.
You make some good points, but I think your assertion that cameras can't be shoe-horned into a phone may be a bit off. For example, Canon has some amazingly compact little consumer market cameras that surely could be grafted onto a cellphone. If you glue an ELPH onto, say, a RAZR, you'll get something about as bulky as a standard old style Nokia.
Regarding cell phone contracts, I think the biggest problem will be the cellular provider's reluctance to let you put free music on your phone when they have this huge incentive to make it a profitable extra monthly charge. Quite likely, they'll try to market their own music download service to complement the iPhone and its competitors--$1/megabyte to connect to iTune Store over a cellular data link, or $30/month for unlimited connectivity--that sort of thing. I can just see these bean counters specifying that the iPhones come without an SD card slot or an easy way to load music by USB. But, hopefully Apple will have the clout to preserve the iPod interface.
Actually, the iPhone may be just a bit more consumer friendly than cellular providers would prefer. That may be why they're not falling all over each other to take it up, and that alone may cause the price to stay high--without a high margin, they'll have little incentive to offer it, and without a lot of competition, there will be little reason for Apple to ramp up production and lower the price.
I would love to replace my Palm, Nokia, iPod, and camera with one uber device and I'm willing to pay for it. But I don't know exactly how many non-geeks out there feel the same way. Hopefully it'll be the hot gift for Christmas '07.
I suspect NASA is actually playing brinksmanship games here. Cut external programs that cause maximum pain to the loudest voices in the scientific community and somehow this convinces Congress to restore funding allowances. Loudly threaten that we won't have any manned space flight capability for 5 years while the Chinese, Indians, and Europeans ramp up their programs.
No member of Congress is going to begrudge $4 million. It's a drop in the bucket. The average Senator and congressman earmarks more than that for their many pet local projects.
This is a pale shadow of what NASA used to represent: the scientific might of the world's most advanced country, boldly striding into space while the world watched in awe.
Today NASA just exists to keep its patchy old 1970s era shuttles flying, pouring billions into dead end maintenance efforts while the truly innovative efforts are moving to the private sector if not completely to other countries.
Frankly I think the U.S. has lost its will to explore space. Now everything needs to be justified by short term gain. The can-do, beat-the-Soviets mentality that drove us into orbit in the '50s and 60s seems to have been replaced by crass (and ignorant) focus on the bottom line. Of course, those early efforts resulted in massive technological advances, but today everything has to be directly and obviously profitable to even the stupidest politician before it gets any funding.
Let's vote out the war and vote in a $1 trillion increase in science budgets. That's my pet solution to the whole NASA problem.
It's more like 1,000,000 writes, but your point is taken. Perhaps the driver takes this into account--store many small and frequent temporary files such as browser cache files into RAM rather than flash, then dump them all to flash or disk rarely, but this implies a lot of intelligence on the part of the driver.
According to PC Mag link from the article, only Vista has the correct driver to use this drive.
It sounds like a nice innovation. Now to get from hybrid drives to biofuel laptops that run 8 hours on a thimble of ethanol;)
I was in the "Home" section of Dell.com. No XP was offered there, only Vista. I called Dell's sales line and was given the same story--no XP available on any laptops.
However you are correct--the small business section is still offering XP. I guess I should have thought to try that. But I believed what the salesperson told me, gave up, and went to HP.
HP's stock is up--take a look at their chart (HPQ). They have a market capitalization of $109 billion, they have surpassed Dell as a supplier of desktops, and they have new stable management (post-Fiorella) in place.
It takes clout to stand up to Microsoft. Smaller companies have little choice but to toe the Microsoft line and act as Windows pimps for their Redmond masters, but the huge players--IBM, HP, and Dell (if Dell had any backbone) can push back a bit, even though they still have to continue to sit at Microsoft's table.
Microsoft stumbled with Vista; they have insisted on replacing XP on all new machines. I couldn't even buy a Dell laptop with XP a couple of weeks ago--have some specialized software that still doesn't run on Vista--had to find one from HP. Vista is late and has problems and Linux is looking better and better.
In the end, it is a combination of market demand, linux readiness, and corporate clout that will break the Microsoft hold on the PC market.
You do agree that residential power needs could be met by solar, averaged across the sunny and cloudy regions. By the way, proper rooftop solar systems gather energy even on cloudy days.
This frees up energy for two other purposes: commercial/industrial power consumption and electric cars. So in fact, all those solar roof panels on houses and office buildings will be indirectly supplying power for our spiffy new rechargeable hybrid cars that get 80-100 mpg.
That will dramatically reduce demand for gasoline, allowing the cost of air travel to drop, and industrial processes that use oil (for power, for plastics production, for polyesters etc.) will all have more plentiful supplies, hence lower prices. The economy as a whole will profit, with the possible exception of the Big Oil corps who obviously should be diversifying into alternative energy. There will also be the huge new job market for solar manufacturers and installers. Let's not forget the reduced need to patrol the Persian Gulf and fight an occasional war over there; a couple of trillion saved right there. Of course it would help to get all the other big players to implement the same policies. But nothing succeeds like success.
Regarding the fellow who questions the asteroid idea.... "mod it funny", he said... well, there were people who laughed at Christopher Columbus for his folly as well--sailing off into the unknown in search of treasure. It will be equivalently expensive and risky to fly to the asteroid belt and retrieve valuable rocks... yet we have the technology today to accomplish it. It's just a matter of investing the money to jump-start the business.
Put a couple thousand square miles of solar cells out in the desert, and for every megawatt they generate, reduce coal/gas/oil energy production by that much.
Install wind generators up and down the coast, and similarly replace coal.
Use some of this energy to create hydrogen from coal, and use that to power automotive fuel cells.
Mandate (and pay for) bicycle lanes on every thoroughfare in every city. Offer health insurance discounts to people who bike to work most of the time. Make biking a safe, cheap, and convenient way to travel and people will use it.
Implement modern, safer nuclear technology. Rocket the waste into the Sun, or maybe dump it on the Moon or a passing asteroid.
Create solar powered ozone production plants with 5-mile-high smokestacks to replenish the earth's O3 layer.
How do we pay for all this? Halt the war in Iraq, and use the hundreds of billions we save from that. Also, exploit space; send robot mining ships to obtain 10000-ton platinum and gold asteroids and the like; one or two of these will pay for everything.
It's probably different for each individual, but I can say that going back to school at 38 is quite do-able and not uncommon these days.
I would suggest the OP take a couple of night courses and see how it goes. It might take him a while to get in the swing of things and then make a more educated decision as to his next step.
I went back to school at 45 to take premedical science courses; now I'm 48 and about to begin medical school. I find that my memory is not so great, but then it never was too good. I just have to work very hard to memorize stuff while for the younger ones it seems to come easier, at least for the ones who self-select into these challenging courses.
On the other hand, I have done much better in science than I did the first time around when I barely passed general chemistry and calculus during freshman year and decided science was not in the cards. I find science intrinsically interesting and it's been a mind-expanding experience to study this stuff. Go for it!
Is there anything anyone here can actually do to help rescue Jim Gray? I'd say almost certainly not.
So what are we to do? Those who have a connection with the man (knew him, worked with him, admire his work, etc.) will have serious and informative comments to make. But for the rest who've never heard of him, there's just nothing to discuss -- the story's not about technology in any way, it's just about a human being who happens to be related to technology. And death is easiest thing in the world to come up with jokes about -- "I bet he died because [a common failure in whatever area of technology he is related to]...ha,ha". Yes, the Microsoft/bluescreen jokes are pretty lame, but the SQL/database ones get a chuckle out of me.
What's the harm?
The harm is that, supposing he survives, he may come across this puerile discussion and his regard for Slashdot will go down (assuming that accomplished professionals in high tech still have any regard for Slashdot). Supposing he is never found, the secondary harm would be to grieving friends and next of kin who may come across this site.
The fact that moderators are modding up what another poster described as "sickening" jokes about a possible death demonstrates that the majority of the Slashdot community is, well, kind of childish. I would be in favor of more aggressive moderation from the editorial staff, especially in this type of case as well as the occasional ethnic epithets that get posted, but that's been debated into the ground long ago. The comments here are reflective of the user base and that user base is immature and rude, which is a typical lowest common denominator population that dominates almost every internet forum while the mature people retreat to private listserves and paid subscriber-only forums.
Why make printers so "smart" to begin with? Used to be, a man was a man and a printer was a printer. It did what its master told it. The things had just enough internal logic to interpret the voltage differences on the RS232 pins, and maybe a few K of RAM (hah!) to buffer the jobs.
Now they have minds of their own. *Grumble* visions of departmental HP printers that never seemed to be configured properly, always displaying bizarre diagnostic messages Even a $150 Brother all-in-one machine at the office is screwed up, won't print and says "end of toner life" though a reboot and shake the cartridge convinces it to print for a few pages.
Focus on building a great company with a compelling vision and people will flock to you.
As for Google, they did build some buzz but among techies it was obviously a cool place to work from day one. And the pay is very, very good. Probably most of the original hires there are millionaires. Even the secretary in the front office who got 500 shares of stock options would be worth $240,000 or so.
You the business are not in the business of making potential hires excited; your job is to make the best company you can, the best products, the happiest employees, the most loyal customers, etc., and people will flock to apply for employment. Google, for example.
The original poster was correct--there is zero reason to bother with a failed applicant. The proper, truthful, and polite response to their application is, "Sorry but you don't completely meet our requirements for this position. Good luck with your job search."
Now, if the applicant is a member of an underrepresented but litigious ethnic minority, you'd better be able to document your reasons very clearly. But a well run company will keep good records and its decisions will be defensible in a court of law.
Thanks for the information. Damn, I'm still on (heavily updated) FC5 and have downloaded the FC6 dvd. I wonder if I should just skip this one and take FC7 when it comes out in April.
These upgrades are always painful and it takes about 2-3 weeks to shake out the problems and get my system working nicely again. However, it's always cool to see how much they've improved stuff.
Yes, I actually know someone who opens spam and even has spent money on it. She (sorry ladies but it's a she) signed on to this legal advice service for $19/month and hasn't yet used it at all, even after several months. When I advised her to NEVER open unsolicited email but delete it instead, she said "But some of it's interesting!"
Never underestimate the stupidity of the average nontechnical person. They may be too well trained to be scammed in a retail store, but put them in front of a computer and they completely suspend all their inhibitions and common sense.
As long as money--big money--is to be made, this problem will persist. The only solution is to take away the financial benefits. It would also help to get rid of all those damn compromised Windows boxes, maybe replace the crappy OS with Vista or Linux, but that's going to take years.
I'm almost thinking we should create a second internet, for those who pay a certain fee and can prove their client machines are not compromised. If your machine passes muster, you can join. Linux/Mac clients will be preferred.
Eventually, it will be the nightmare so many politicians have ranted about--the Digital Divide come true. The haves and have nots. The haves with a nice clean safe system where you can publish your email address fearlessly like back in the '80s, and the have-nots down there in the gutter with muggers and rapists in every alleyway.
It's similar to the Palm versus Pocket PC situation of a few years ago. At one time, Palm held 70% of the market for handheld PDAs, and Microsoft along with world leading manufacturers was able to slowly but surely whittle away Palm's advantage until today Palm is a has-been that is hanging on by its Treo thread and even sells Windows Mobile on some of its handhelds.
Palm could have and probably *should have* come out with a 30-gig PDA or Treo a year or two ago and would today at least have a foothold in the portable music player market. There are millions of Palm users out there who would probably like to have an iPod-like Palm in their pocket. I sure would. Instead, they have all but ignored the market, limping along with handhelds that can play MP3s on 2-gig memory cards.
Anyway, getting back to the point, Microsoft came out with a fairly cruddy OS "Windows CE" and incrementally improved it until today it's a fairly competent system, albeit still requiring lots of taps to get simple tasks done. Bottom line, I expect that Microsoft's strategy will be to improve the Zune incrementally until it's better in every way than the iPod.
However Apple is probably less of a static target than Palm was; they're every bit as nimble and clever as MS and I would expect them to counter this chess move with an improved line, more storage, more features, and of course more coolness factor which is one of their great advantages.
I believe the best solution would be human-like robots driving Humvees. The bombers won't be able to tell them from the real thing, and the cool part is that after the Humvee is blown up, the robot can calmly climb out of the wreckage, detect the heartbeat of the insurgent hiding in the bushes 50 meters away, and go rip him to shreds.
If that's not technically feasible yet, they can at least stick an insurgent prisoner in the back seat of every vehicle in the convoy, or maybe tied to the roof where he's nice and visible. They blow up a vehicle, they'll know they're taking out one of their own in the process.
The consensus in mainstream analytical circles is that a nuclear war is quite unlikely. Even Iran's mullahs aren't that crazy, their bluster about destroying Israel notwithstanding; Israel is rumored to have MIRVs with dozens of warheads on them; they could easily wipe out all life in Iran if they wanted to.
The real likelihood is that a terrorist might obtain a nuclear device and detonate it in the middle of a major city, or from a container ship floated into New York harbor.
Probably the main thing protecting us is not anti-missile technology, which of course is meaningless against a smuggled weapon, but rather the threat of nuclear annihilation against any foe (N. Korea, Iran) thought to have supplied the bomb to the perpetrators. Undoubtedly such threats have been made clear to those people behind the scenes.
He can take either job and do well. He's right out of school so will be learning a ton on the job wherever he goes. Both companies have great technology and treat their employees pretty well in terms of work lifestyle, equipment, food, etc. Both companies look good on the resume.
Microsoft will respect someone who has Google experience, and Google tries to hire Microsofties, so he could probably work at one place and then switch to the other later on.
After getting some solid experience in the real world, working on teams, learning lots of stuff, he may want to move to a smaller company to experience a more entrepreneurial flavor, and from there he can start his own company or get into a consulting venture of some sort.
Back when the ISS was first being designed, China had almost nothing to contribute except maybe some cheap labor. Today, they have a lot of bucks but not much space tech. They would love to collaborate with the U.S., obviously, to obtain its space tech. However China's government has painted the U.S. as an adversary power for so long now that it would appear hypocritical to suddenly become friends and allies. They need a huge outside enemy to continue justifying their existence as an unelected "communist" legacy government. It would be stupid for the U.S. to cooperatively give them a lot of juicy space tech that has obvious dual use applications such as better ICBMs and spy satellites. Let China develop its tech on its own, and meanwhile the U.S. can continue attempting to Americanize China to the point where war would be suicidal.
As for Russia, it is a has-been power that is limping along with oil exports as its primary international business. Frankly Russia is a useless partner on the ISS; its components have been delayed and lower quality. It does have a very reliable launcher in the Soyuz, however, while the space shuttle has proven to be very unreliable and expensive.
> Don't trust without question what you see on the news broadcast, they show you what > they want you to see, with the slant that they want it to have.
Hm, I don't watch TV but I do read a lot. The Israeli army, especially the reservists, has had its budgets cut a lot in recent years, and its equipment is old. There's a famous report of some reservists obtaining new backpacks from a wealthy American relative because the IDF expected them to go with whatever they had. The tanks were also running outdated equipment. The Israelis asked for an accelerated shipment of bunker busting bombs from the U.S. and undoubtedly other less public items, but it's a bit of a stretch to say they were completely up to date with their equipment. Here is where Ariel Sharon really fell down on the job, thinking that war with Lebanon was never going to happen.
Hezbollah would like us all to believe they beat the mighty Israeli army through sheer valour and righteousness, but in fact it was more like a combination of Hezbollah competence and preparedness and Israeli unpreparedness for their tactics. The rematch will be different, I think, because a competent Israeli leadership would not make the same mistakes again, and I strongly suspect that the current leadership is going to be booted out. Hezbollah, meanwhile, has shown every card in their hand and will have to go back to the drawing board and reinvent themselves in order to take the Israelis by surprise a second time.
As for Katyusha launchers, there are satellite and drone photographs of the things sitting in courtyards of buildings; Hezbollah certainly didn't avoid dwellings, and the Israelis certainly didn't go after buildings just to be vindictive; every civilian they hit becomes another martyr and propaganda point for the enemy.
The heavy rocket attacks by Hezbollah were undeniably a very visible, if largely ineffective, aspect of their arsenal. I'm sure it made for great TV footage. The Israeli air force destroyed most of them, but it only takes one launcher to send 100 rockets a day, and they apparently had thousands of rockets hidden in caves and caches, so it was going to be a long, slow slog to get rid of all of them. I think the Katyushas were more impressive as a propaganda thing than as a strategic weapon; they hardly hit any military targets, and mainly were able to hit Haifa, a religiously mixed city known for its relatively harmonious Jewish-Arab relations (ironically).
Despite its losses, Israel was steadily degrading Hezbollah, and a few more weeks would have forced Hezbollah to stop firing Katyushas in order to avoid losing its last remaining rocket launchers, and losing men at a rate of 100/week would have reduced Hez as a fighting force. Israel could have and probably should have stayed a few weeks longer, because now Syria and Iran are sending tons of new equipment to Lebanon and rearming Hez as quickly as they can. Israel is certainly watching all of this; they keep sending their drones over Lebanon and it's likely they know where Nasrallah is and what he had for breakfast, and wondering whether to take him out or not. This fight's not over yet.
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... - considering that most people who currently pay this tax can afford it very well, - considering that most heirs do not deserve their good fate, and that many of them have already received a very significant heritage under the guise of privileged conditions at the beginning of their life (address book, healthy food and home, education, free housing, cars, etc... during 50 years...) - considering that I just paid some inheritance fees, mind you, and that Mr. Sarkozy will waste them in gifts to his really wealthy pals who escape most taxes thanks to numerous and cunningly designed-for-them fiscal holes, - I am all _against_ any suppression of the inheritance tax. The sole question as for me relates to enterprises being sold for cheap because the owner has died and the heirs cannot afford to pay the related taxes. Most of the time, it has not been properly prepared, but this should be addressed... This doesn't really address the pros and cons of inheritance tax. You're against suppressing this tax (which I guess in American means "reducing" the tax), and you gladly pay it because you feel it is for the betterment of society.This is an idealistic attitude, but the unfortunate side effect is that a business owner cannot pass his or her business on to designated heirs without their paying a crippling penalty. This affects small family run businesses like retail stores, and is a major reason why so few survive after the owner's death. It's hard enough to make a living in a small retail business without all the confiscatory taxes and fees sucking every available penny out of the budget, but then to have to have it all taken away on one's deathbed is the final blow.
On a philosophical note, one is also presupposing that the State has the right to confiscate someone's wealth at time of death, a right which is highly debatable. If you believe, as many on the Left would, that wealth is an evil thing that is usually obtained through dishonest means, then inheritance tax is merely justice. If you believe, as most on the Right would, that wealth is the fruits of one's labor (or one's ancestors' labor) and one's heirs have a duty to maintain and grow that wealth, then inheritance tax is merely another form of confiscation.
Here's a much better article. That blog submitted by the op was cut and pasted rather poorly.
Innervation is the key to making this stuff work right. If they can hook up enough sensory and motor nerves to these prosthetic limbs, they will come to feel like a part of the body, though the nervous system may need to adjust itself a bit.
I would expect that the ultimate solution will be a biological limb grown from the patient's own stem cells. Nerve hook-up will still be a major issue, because we don't yet know how to repair severed axons, but perhaps stem cells will take care of that issue as well. Goodbye, paralysis and multiple sclerosis and Lou Gehrig's Disease!
fyngyrz: "And before the pharma trolls come out of the woodwork, just take most of the damned legislation and regulation off pharma companies, and they'd be fine. We'd get new drugs at a much higher rate, and yes, just as happens now, sometimes there would be problems, despite testing"
If only that were the case. Patents are the least of pharma's issues. Liability is the number one reason that new drugs are not being developed or released. There is a whole industry of class action lawyers constantly searching for the next company to attack, and a drug's purported side effect can result in jury-awarded damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Get pretty Sally on the stand tearfully describing how this heart drug killed her poor papa. One contaminated batch is enough to put a company out of business.
This is the reason why U.S. pharmaceutical companies stopped manufacturing flu vaccines, resulting in a major shortage a couple of years ago.
Is it right that an entire company should be punished because of one technician's error, or because of a bad executive decision regarding test results? Legally, it it, because human life is assigned a very high monetary value in the U.S. and companies are legal entities with collective responsibility for their mistakes (inadvertent though they may be).
Is it generally good for society that this kind of liability is assumed? Probably not, because the marginal diseases end up not getting cures. Companies just can't assume the risks for drugs that have a tiny end market. Even major drugs are almost prohibitively risky today.
I think patents are absolutely necessary to keep drug development going, but liability has got to be limited in some way or no one's going to be doing the R&D regardless of patent reform.
The other major reform is for the Federal Government to get off its Christian anti-science kick and start funding basic scientific research again the way we did back in the '50s and '60s, when the U.S. left everyone else in the dust. Double the budget or triple it, create a market for science Ph.D.s and get the research going. The life changing innovations that come out of basic research will far outweigh any patent shenanigans we have to deal with.
As a musician, I disagree. There's no law chiseled in stone that proclaims a musician's right to live off album sales. Musicians historically have lived by the largesse of wealthy patrons. Selling sheet music, performances, and recordings yield a certain level of income but for the average musician who is not a star, it needs to be supplemented by teaching, whoring (i.e., playing for weddings/birthdays/bar mitzvahs), building and repairing instruments, or a part- or full-time job washing dishes, working at a music store, etc.
There's also no law that says a CD which cost about $0.50 to stamp out has to sell for $15. Cut the prices back to $5 or $8 per disk and you'll see sales go up. Record albums used to sell for $4 or $5 back in the day, then tapes came along and bumped the price up to about $10 or $12, and then CDs went through the roof. OK already, a CD *player* costs $20 so why are disks still so expensive?
The amount of money musicians see from a CD sale is vanishingly small, especially when a middle man has done the production work. Do you honestly believe that out of that $15 (or $12 or $18) the musician is receiving more than $0.25 or $0.50? Typically not. If you self-produce, as less well-known musicians are forced to do, you have to front about $20,000 in studio time, design, copying and printing expenses, and it takes a long time to make that kind of money back from sales, let alone start to turn a profit. Disks are really a calling card, a way of getting your name out there and popularizing your music rather than some kind of bread-and-butter solid income that RIAA makes it out to be. Sure, a nationally known act with a dozen recordings out is going to be making some income from record sales but the lion's share is still going to the record producer.
Because of this situation, I think it makes more sense to simply upload your music and get the public listening to it, then ask them to pay to hear you play live. People have demonstrated that they will pay for great music either live or recorded. There are people who were making thousands of dollars a month on mp3.com, though of course most of the musicians there were amateurs. Yet, mp3.com had an interesting business model and I'm very sorry it got bought out.
The RIAA is living in a time warp. It's no longer possible to monopolize sound waves. Even twenty-five years ago, we used to constantly tape each other's records and tape albums played on the radio. No one was rich enough or crazy enough to purchase every single must-have album out there, though we all wanted to of course. Now we have a much better music delivery system that will very quickly get music out to millions of people all over the world--let's take advantage of it and the money will follow. Apple, CDBaby, mp3.com--they were thinking creatively and sooner or later a business model will emerge that leverages the current technology and gives musicians back some remuneration for their efforts.
I haven't noticed the usability decline that you cite. I used to pay for the premium Yahoo mail, then stopped paying when Google competition forced Yahoo to offer more storage. With Firefox and Flashblock, I don't notice any in-my-face flash ads, and the new beta interface is actually pretty good, with drag-n-drop capability which is actually rather cool. I don't understand why people in this forum are so negative about Yahoo; it's free, it works, and it ties in nicely with their many other services.
A while back I switched to gmail.com for my web-based mail simply because gmail offers free pop3 services while Yahoo was still charging for pop access. Perhaps that's changed. I miss Yahoo mail though because I prefer the folder paradigm to gmail's label approach, and Yahoo has superior filtering for my purposes. But, it's all just eye candy to me anyway; I still use a Linux shell account and trusty old Emacs as my primary mail system.
You make some good points, but I think your assertion that cameras can't be shoe-horned into a phone may be a bit off. For example, Canon has some amazingly compact little consumer market cameras that surely could be grafted onto a cellphone. If you glue an ELPH onto, say, a RAZR, you'll get something about as bulky as a standard old style Nokia.
Regarding cell phone contracts, I think the biggest problem will be the cellular provider's reluctance to let you put free music on your phone when they have this huge incentive to make it a profitable extra monthly charge. Quite likely, they'll try to market their own music download service to complement the iPhone and its competitors--$1/megabyte to connect to iTune Store over a cellular data link, or $30/month for unlimited connectivity--that sort of thing. I can just see these bean counters specifying that the iPhones come without an SD card slot or an easy way to load music by USB. But, hopefully Apple will have the clout to preserve the iPod interface.
Actually, the iPhone may be just a bit more consumer friendly than cellular providers would prefer. That may be why they're not falling all over each other to take it up, and that alone may cause the price to stay high--without a high margin, they'll have little incentive to offer it, and without a lot of competition, there will be little reason for Apple to ramp up production and lower the price.
I would love to replace my Palm, Nokia, iPod, and camera with one uber device and I'm willing to pay for it. But I don't know exactly how many non-geeks out there feel the same way. Hopefully it'll be the hot gift for Christmas '07.
I suspect NASA is actually playing brinksmanship games here. Cut external programs that cause maximum pain to the loudest voices in the scientific community and somehow this convinces Congress to restore funding allowances. Loudly threaten that we won't have any manned space flight capability for 5 years while the Chinese, Indians, and Europeans ramp up their programs.
No member of Congress is going to begrudge $4 million. It's a drop in the bucket. The average Senator and congressman earmarks more than that for their many pet local projects.
This is a pale shadow of what NASA used to represent: the scientific might of the world's most advanced country, boldly striding into space while the world watched in awe.
Today NASA just exists to keep its patchy old 1970s era shuttles flying, pouring billions into dead end maintenance efforts while the truly innovative efforts are moving to the private sector if not completely to other countries.
Frankly I think the U.S. has lost its will to explore space. Now everything needs to be justified by short term gain. The can-do, beat-the-Soviets mentality that drove us into orbit in the '50s and 60s seems to have been replaced by crass (and ignorant) focus on the bottom line. Of course, those early efforts resulted in massive technological advances, but today everything has to be directly and obviously profitable to even the stupidest politician before it gets any funding.
Let's vote out the war and vote in a $1 trillion increase in science budgets. That's my pet solution to the whole NASA problem.
It's more like 1,000,000 writes, but your point is taken. Perhaps the driver takes this into account--store many small and frequent temporary files such as browser cache files into RAM rather than flash, then dump them all to flash or disk rarely, but this implies a lot of intelligence on the part of the driver.
;)
According to PC Mag link from the article, only Vista has the correct driver to use this drive.
It sounds like a nice innovation. Now to get from hybrid drives to biofuel laptops that run 8 hours on a thimble of ethanol
I was in the "Home" section of Dell.com. No XP was offered there, only Vista. I called Dell's sales line and was given the same story--no XP available on any laptops.
However you are correct--the small business section is still offering XP. I guess I should have thought to try that. But I believed what the salesperson told me, gave up, and went to HP.
HP's stock is up--take a look at their chart (HPQ). They have a market capitalization of $109 billion, they have surpassed Dell as a supplier of desktops, and they have new stable management (post-Fiorella) in place.
It takes clout to stand up to Microsoft. Smaller companies have little choice but to toe the Microsoft line and act as Windows pimps for their Redmond masters, but the huge players--IBM, HP, and Dell (if Dell had any backbone) can push back a bit, even though they still have to continue to sit at Microsoft's table.
Microsoft stumbled with Vista; they have insisted on replacing XP on all new machines. I couldn't even buy a Dell laptop with XP a couple of weeks ago--have some specialized software that still doesn't run on Vista--had to find one from HP. Vista is late and has problems and Linux is looking better and better.
In the end, it is a combination of market demand, linux readiness, and corporate clout that will break the Microsoft hold on the PC market.
You do agree that residential power needs could be met by solar, averaged across the sunny and cloudy regions. By the way, proper rooftop solar systems gather energy even on cloudy days.
This frees up energy for two other purposes: commercial/industrial power consumption and electric cars. So in fact, all those solar roof panels on houses and office buildings will be indirectly supplying power for our spiffy new rechargeable hybrid cars that get 80-100 mpg.
That will dramatically reduce demand for gasoline, allowing the cost of air travel to drop, and industrial processes that use oil (for power, for plastics production, for polyesters etc.) will all have more plentiful supplies, hence lower prices. The economy as a whole will profit, with the possible exception of the Big Oil corps who obviously should be diversifying into alternative energy. There will also be the huge new job market for solar manufacturers and installers. Let's not forget the reduced need to patrol the Persian Gulf and fight an occasional war over there; a couple of trillion saved right there. Of course it would help to get all the other big players to implement the same policies. But nothing succeeds like success.
Regarding the fellow who questions the asteroid idea.... "mod it funny", he said... well, there were people who laughed at Christopher Columbus for his folly as well--sailing off into the unknown in search of treasure. It will be equivalently expensive and risky to fly to the asteroid belt and retrieve valuable rocks... yet we have the technology today to accomplish it. It's just a matter of investing the money to jump-start the business.
Put a couple thousand square miles of solar cells out in the desert, and for every megawatt they generate, reduce coal/gas/oil energy production by that much.
Install wind generators up and down the coast, and similarly replace coal.
Use some of this energy to create hydrogen from coal, and use that to power automotive fuel cells.
Mandate (and pay for) bicycle lanes on every thoroughfare in every city. Offer health insurance discounts to people who bike to work most of the time. Make biking a safe, cheap, and convenient way to travel and people will use it.
Implement modern, safer nuclear technology. Rocket the waste into the Sun, or maybe dump it on the Moon or a passing asteroid.
Create solar powered ozone production plants with 5-mile-high smokestacks to replenish the earth's O3 layer.
How do we pay for all this? Halt the war in Iraq, and use the hundreds of billions we save from that. Also, exploit space; send robot mining ships to obtain 10000-ton platinum and gold asteroids and the like; one or two of these will pay for everything.
It's probably different for each individual, but I can say that going back to school at 38 is quite do-able and not uncommon these days.
I would suggest the OP take a couple of night courses and see how it goes. It might take him a while to get in the swing of things and then make a more educated decision as to his next step.
I went back to school at 45 to take premedical science courses; now I'm 48 and about to begin medical school. I find that my memory is not so great, but then it never was too good. I just have to work very hard to memorize stuff while for the younger ones it seems to come easier, at least for the ones who self-select into these challenging courses.
On the other hand, I have done much better in science than I did the first time around when I barely passed general chemistry and calculus during freshman year and decided science was not in the cards. I find science intrinsically interesting and it's been a mind-expanding experience to study this stuff. Go for it!
The fact that moderators are modding up what another poster described as "sickening" jokes about a possible death demonstrates that the majority of the Slashdot community is, well, kind of childish. I would be in favor of more aggressive moderation from the editorial staff, especially in this type of case as well as the occasional ethnic epithets that get posted, but that's been debated into the ground long ago. The comments here are reflective of the user base and that user base is immature and rude, which is a typical lowest common denominator population that dominates almost every internet forum while the mature people retreat to private listserves and paid subscriber-only forums.
Why make printers so "smart" to begin with? Used to be, a man was a man and a printer was a printer. It did what its master told it. The things had just enough internal logic to interpret the voltage differences on the RS232 pins, and maybe a few K of RAM (hah!) to buffer the jobs.
Now they have minds of their own. *Grumble* visions of departmental HP printers that never seemed to be configured properly, always displaying bizarre diagnostic messages
Even a $150 Brother all-in-one machine at the office is screwed up, won't print and says "end of toner life" though a reboot and shake the cartridge convinces it to print for a few pages.
But that's not what I said; go back and reread ;)
Focus on building a great company with a compelling vision and people will flock to you.
As for Google, they did build some buzz but among techies it was obviously a cool place to work from day one. And the pay is very, very good. Probably most of the original hires there are millionaires. Even the secretary in the front office who got 500 shares of stock options would be worth $240,000 or so.
You the business are not in the business of making potential hires excited; your job is to make the best company you can, the best products, the happiest employees, the most loyal customers, etc., and people will flock to apply for employment. Google, for example.
The original poster was correct--there is zero reason to bother with a failed applicant. The proper, truthful, and polite response to their application is, "Sorry but you don't completely meet our requirements for this position. Good luck with your job search."
Now, if the applicant is a member of an underrepresented but litigious ethnic minority, you'd better be able to document your reasons very clearly. But a well run company will keep good records and its decisions will be defensible in a court of law.
Thanks for the information. Damn, I'm still on (heavily updated) FC5 and have downloaded the FC6 dvd. I wonder if I should just skip this one and take FC7 when it comes out in April.
These upgrades are always painful and it takes about 2-3 weeks to shake out the problems and get my system working nicely again. However, it's always cool to see how much they've improved stuff.
Yes, I actually know someone who opens spam and even has spent money on it. She (sorry ladies but it's a she) signed on to this legal advice service for $19/month and hasn't yet used it at all, even after several months. When I advised her to NEVER open unsolicited email but delete it instead, she said "But some of it's interesting!"
Never underestimate the stupidity of the average nontechnical person. They may be too well trained to be scammed in a retail store, but put them in front of a computer and they completely suspend all their inhibitions and common sense.
As long as money--big money--is to be made, this problem will persist. The only solution is to take away the financial benefits. It would also help to get rid of all those damn compromised Windows boxes, maybe replace the crappy OS with Vista or Linux, but that's going to take years.
I'm almost thinking we should create a second internet, for those who pay a certain fee and can prove their client machines are not compromised. If your machine passes muster, you can join. Linux/Mac clients will be preferred.
Eventually, it will be the nightmare so many politicians have ranted about--the Digital Divide come true. The haves and have nots. The haves with a nice clean safe system where you can publish your email address fearlessly like back in the '80s, and the have-nots down there in the gutter with muggers and rapists in every alleyway.
It's similar to the Palm versus Pocket PC situation of a few years ago. At one time, Palm held 70% of the market for handheld PDAs, and Microsoft along with world leading manufacturers was able to slowly but surely whittle away Palm's advantage until today Palm is a has-been that is hanging on by its Treo thread and even sells Windows Mobile on some of its handhelds.
Palm could have and probably *should have* come out with a 30-gig PDA or Treo a year or two ago and would today at least have a foothold in the portable music player market. There are millions of Palm users out there who would probably like to have an iPod-like Palm in their pocket. I sure would. Instead, they have all but ignored the market, limping along with handhelds that can play MP3s on 2-gig memory cards.
Anyway, getting back to the point, Microsoft came out with a fairly cruddy OS "Windows CE" and incrementally improved it until today it's a fairly competent system, albeit still requiring lots of taps to get simple tasks done. Bottom line, I expect that Microsoft's strategy will be to improve the Zune incrementally until it's better in every way than the iPod.
However Apple is probably less of a static target than Palm was; they're every bit as nimble and clever as MS and I would expect them to counter this chess move with an improved line, more storage, more features, and of course more coolness factor which is one of their great advantages.
I believe the best solution would be human-like robots driving Humvees. The bombers won't be able to tell them from the real thing, and the cool part is that after the Humvee is blown up, the robot can calmly climb out of the wreckage, detect the heartbeat of the insurgent hiding in the bushes 50 meters away, and go rip him to shreds.
If that's not technically feasible yet, they can at least stick an insurgent prisoner in the back seat of every vehicle in the convoy, or maybe tied to the roof where he's nice and visible. They blow up a vehicle, they'll know they're taking out one of their own in the process.
The consensus in mainstream analytical circles is that a nuclear war is quite unlikely. Even Iran's mullahs aren't that crazy, their bluster about destroying Israel notwithstanding; Israel is rumored to have MIRVs with dozens of warheads on them; they could easily wipe out all life in Iran if they wanted to.
The real likelihood is that a terrorist might obtain a nuclear device and detonate it in the middle of a major city, or from a container ship floated into New York harbor.
Probably the main thing protecting us is not anti-missile technology, which of course is meaningless against a smuggled weapon, but rather the threat of nuclear annihilation against any foe (N. Korea, Iran) thought to have supplied the bomb to the perpetrators. Undoubtedly such threats have been made clear to those people behind the scenes.
He can take either job and do well. He's right out of school so will be learning a ton on the job wherever he goes. Both companies have great technology and treat their employees pretty well in terms of work lifestyle, equipment, food, etc. Both companies look good on the resume.
Microsoft will respect someone who has Google experience, and Google tries to hire Microsofties, so he could probably work at one place and then switch to the other later on.
After getting some solid experience in the real world, working on teams, learning lots of stuff, he may want to move to a smaller company to experience a more entrepreneurial flavor, and from there he can start his own company or get into a consulting venture of some sort.
Ah, to be young and just starting out!
My thoughts:
Back when the ISS was first being designed, China had almost nothing to contribute except maybe some cheap labor. Today, they have a lot of bucks but not much space tech. They would love to collaborate with the U.S., obviously, to obtain its space tech. However China's government has painted the U.S. as an adversary power for so long now that it would appear hypocritical to suddenly become friends and allies.
They need a huge outside enemy to continue justifying their existence as an unelected "communist" legacy government. It would be stupid for the U.S. to cooperatively give them a lot of juicy space tech that has obvious dual use applications such as better ICBMs and spy satellites. Let China develop its tech on its own, and meanwhile the U.S. can continue attempting to Americanize China to the point where war would be suicidal.
As for Russia, it is a has-been power that is limping along with oil exports as its primary international business. Frankly Russia is a useless partner on the ISS; its components have been delayed and lower quality. It does have a very reliable launcher in the Soyuz, however, while the space shuttle has proven to be very unreliable and expensive.
> Don't trust without question what you see on the news broadcast, they show you what
> they want you to see, with the slant that they want it to have.
Hm, I don't watch TV but I do read a lot. The Israeli army, especially the reservists, has had its budgets cut a lot in recent years, and its equipment is old. There's a famous report of some reservists obtaining new backpacks from a wealthy American relative because the IDF expected them to go with whatever they had. The tanks were also running outdated equipment. The Israelis asked for an accelerated shipment of bunker busting bombs from the U.S. and undoubtedly other less public items, but it's a bit of a stretch to say they were completely up to date with their equipment. Here is where Ariel Sharon really fell down on the job, thinking that war with Lebanon was never going to happen.
Hezbollah would like us all to believe they beat the mighty Israeli army through sheer valour and righteousness, but in fact it was more like a combination of Hezbollah competence and preparedness and Israeli unpreparedness for their tactics. The rematch will be different, I think, because a competent Israeli leadership would not make the same mistakes again, and I strongly suspect that the current leadership is going to be booted out. Hezbollah, meanwhile, has shown every card in their hand and will have to go back to the drawing board and reinvent themselves in order to take the Israelis by surprise a second time.
As for Katyusha launchers, there are satellite and drone photographs of the things sitting in courtyards of buildings; Hezbollah certainly didn't avoid dwellings, and the Israelis certainly didn't go after buildings just to be vindictive; every civilian they hit becomes another martyr and propaganda point for the enemy.
The heavy rocket attacks by Hezbollah were undeniably a very visible, if largely ineffective, aspect of their arsenal. I'm sure it made for great TV footage. The Israeli air force destroyed most of them, but it only takes one launcher to send 100 rockets a day, and they apparently had thousands of rockets hidden in caves and caches, so it was going to be a long, slow slog to get rid of all of them. I think the Katyushas were more impressive as a propaganda thing than as a strategic weapon; they hardly hit any military targets, and mainly were able to hit Haifa, a religiously mixed city known for its relatively harmonious Jewish-Arab relations (ironically).
Despite its losses, Israel was steadily degrading Hezbollah, and a few more weeks would have forced Hezbollah to stop firing Katyushas in order to avoid losing its last remaining rocket launchers, and losing men at a rate of 100/week would have reduced Hez as a fighting force. Israel could have and probably should have stayed a few weeks longer, because now Syria and Iran are sending tons of new equipment to Lebanon and rearming Hez as quickly as they can. Israel is certainly watching all of this; they keep sending their drones over Lebanon and it's likely they know where Nasrallah is and what he had for breakfast, and wondering whether to take him out or not. This fight's not over yet.