The reason given by AMD is that they want to offset some shares coming on the market through an employee equity incentive plan. However, could this be a cover for a plan to do a stock swap with Transmeta?
Optical SETI plans to look for messages encoded using a laser... meaning that the message would have to be beamed directly at Earth (even directly at the telescope itself) for it to be seen? Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the laser beam (being unidirectional) would have to be specifically intended for us to before we'd know it was there. At least the radio waves that the original SETI was looking for were omnidirectional (ie: an alien intelligence could have blasted a message to no one in particular and we could have picked it up).
So now we've got plans to look for intelligent life that sent a message directly to us, to a precise location in the cosmos (that wasn't blocked by a star, planet, gas cloud, etc), during a certain period of time, using a given range of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum, and in a format that we could decipher. Ya right. I'm holding my breath for this one.
Seriously, how many really good TV shows are there on TV now?
There are a few, and they're all on HBO.:-)
The Sopranos (drama about a present-day Mafia organization) is my favorite show on TV right now. Oz (prison drama) is pretty cool too. A lot of people like Sex in the City, and there are other HBO-only shows that are at least as good as anything on broadcast.
Seriously, these shows blow everything else in the mainstream of TV away... good writing/ plot lines, great acting (without the multimillion dollar actor egos), and an edginess (ie: sex, profanity, and violence) that you can't find on regular TV. There's no commercials to boot, although you do have to pay extra (maybe the cost of 2 movie tickets per month).
And. to top it all off, HBO already has an HDTV channel, which shows the same stuff as the regular ones. What more could you ask for?:-)
If we argue like this, well, we shouldn't have funded rocket programs, because now we have ICBMs.
Actually, you've got the motivations reversed; the use of rockets for space exploration/ launching satellites was predated by the use of rockets as weapon delivery systems. Sputnik said to the world that if the USSR could put a basketball into space, they could send a nuclear bomb (a slightly larger device) to the US.
Interestingly, in the late 40s and 50s, the US paid more attention to making their nukes smaller and lighter, rather than making their rockets more powerful. The Soviets did the opposite, meaning that they had a big advantage over the US when trying to orbit satellites, then people.
As I'm sure many people will point out, there's already lots of software that will filter out both banner ads and these new style beasts.
The thing is, as ads become more annoying and obtrusinve, more people will start using this software, thus decreasing the advertisement's effectiveness. "Effectiveness" (ie: click-through rates) is generally what the sponsor pays for. Ad companies (DoubleClick et al) are already under fire for not delivering real revenue for their advertisers; with these new ads they could be putting the last nail in their own coffins.
I wish everyone would stop making bad comparisons with Internet advertising and TV/radio advertising. A TV or radio is a whole lot more difficult to ignore, especially since the broadcasters often schedule them at the same times, thus foiling the channel flippers. Because of the nature of the Web, it's difficult (if not impossible) to create some sort of advertisement that can't be filtered either by proxy software or by the user's eyes themselves.
Make no mistake, companies that make the bulk of their money from selling advertising space are going to die off in droves over the next few years, as they have been doing already.
As someone, I am ashamed to admit in such a forum, who has not seen the 1984 (?) movie, nor read the actual book (go lazy bums! yeah!), I thought the first part last night was very very cool.
Please don't be ashamed... I for one am very interested in the opinions of a Dune "virgin" who can judge the series in itself without comparing it to the book or movie. I've seen both, so I can't. Like many here, I'm disappointed with the series, because it didn't flesh out a LOT of the background details. I find it interesting (and encouraging) that you were able to keep up with the plot, considering the ommissions.
Modern weapons (presumably) give a human a greater potential to destroy something. The target has generally been another human, but it also may be the human's weapons (like a tank) or the means of producing those weapons.
If you take that weapon away from the human, he becomes a much less effective destroyer. Consider a soldier without a gun, a tank crew without their vehicle, a pilot without his plane; they all weild much less power without their hardware.
Now if you can destroy the hardware without harming the human that weilds it (hopefully making him as ineffective at fighting as if he was dead), you've maybe taken a step towards making war a little less cruel. You've certainly eased the conscience of the person pulling the trigger. Destroying the weaponry (which cost lots of money and hard labor) is wasteful, but probably preferable to wasting a life.
Who knows if it would work like that in real life... but isn't it worth considering?
... in the sequel to JP, The Lost World (the book, not the horrible movie "based" on it), Chrichton talks about the same topic. If I recall, he (through his characters) claims that the whole point of a long neck was to counterbalance the long whiplike tail, which was a very effective weapon against attackers.
you're forgetting that all aolers are soon to be switched to netscape 6.0. That'll even it out soon enough.
Who said anything about AOLers switching to Netscape 6? AOL has been based on IE for some time now (including the recently released AOL 6 client), and I haven't heard a word about that changing anytime in the future.
Netscape cares a lot more about... things that bring immediate profit to the Netscape Corporation but absolutely no value to the user.
When will companies realize that anything that does not bring value to the user (and detracts in terms of program overhead and development costs) only serve to hurt the product (and therefore the company)? Netscape certainly isn't the only one at fault here. No one seems to realize that the best advertisement is useless if no one pays attention to it.
Oh my GOD! Imagine! Being paid for how good you are at your job and for how much you know, rather than how desperate for anyone the company was when they hired you! Canadians are savages, I tell you!
My point exactly. In Canada, a lot of companies will hire anyone with X years of experience (X depends on what the company believes is appropriate), rather than someone with Y skills. In the US, the situation is reversed. Good or bad, the situation makes working in the US a much more attractive for newcomers to the industry; hence the "brain drain" that's happening now in Canada.
In my "experience", the number of years someone has in the industry, while somewhat valueable, is not the best indicator of how any given employee will perform. Any company that uses it as their primary (if not only) criteria for hiring is doing themselves a disservice.
There's about 3 posts in various ends of the thread that deal with the differences in US/Canada salaries and currency. Here's my response on the subject.
The US dollar (worth about 50% more than the Canadian one) is definitly a plus, but not as big as one as you'd think. In my experience, cost-of-living is generally higher in the US, especially when it comes to rent (by far my biggest expenditure). Something that costs $20 in USD often costs $20 CD as well, erasing a lot of the currency differences. Of course, this depends a lot on where you live, and things imported from other countries may not follow this rule. Your results may very.:-)
Where the currency difference helps a LOT is when you send US$ back to Canada, as I am doing making student loan payments... HUGE help there.
The salary difference is a much bigger story. American companies trip all over themselves giving skilled Canadians fat paychecks, and often stock. Canadians in the US tend to be well-educated, hard-working, and have good attitudes (all the benefits of foreign labor without the "disadvantages" of foreign languages, sad but true). If you can perform a task, they'll pay for it. In contrast, a lot of the companies in Canada tie their payscales to "experience" (number of years worked). If you're new to the industry, expect to be making a lot less compared to your American counterparts. This is starting to change somewhat, but it's still prevalent.
This means that for a young recent grad like myself, the US is a much better place to work in, financially speaking. As my student loans shrink with the weak C$ and my number of years of experience in the industry increase, the option of coming back to Canada to work looks ever more attractive. I'll have to take a pay cut when I come back, but I'll live with it.:-)
Wow, no provincial income tax? I hadn't heard about this one. I'm a Canadian (who lived in Calgary for 3 years) working as a software engineer in the US right now. Day by day I'm seeing the financial advantages of working in the US disappear... health costs are lower, sales taxes (in AB) are comparable, and now with the federal income tax cut, the fed income tax brackets are very close too. I should probably start thinking about moving back.
Of course, the weather in AB blows, but then the personality of the people here almost offsets that.:-)
I'd say everyone working on Wall Street doesn't produce anything directly.
The "produce" a service which allows people (bigtime and smalltime investors alike) to invest their money in all sorts of companies and other vehicles. The demand for their services is such that they can be paid a very high fee for performing this service. Like I said in my original post, they may not be the ones actually hammering the nail, but they do have a part to play in building the house.
As far as the little peons that can invest. I'd say thats a very bad idea.
The only way that you're not in the game at some level is if you keep your money stashed under the bed, spend it all, or invest in some sort of collectible that does not have value in terms of production (like stamps or artwork).
Money you keep in a bank account is being used in a similar manner as money you put into stocks, except that the bank handles all the transactions, assumes most of the risks, and takes most of the profit. If you're ok with missing out on most of the gains, fine -- investing in stocks isn't for everyone, and you'd be much better off not playing the game at all than playing the game without knowing the rules.
However, those that wish to learn the rules (regardless of how much they want to invest) and are willing to trade some security for higher returns have the opportunity to do so. With a little bit of research (spend an evening reading The Motley Fool or any other good financial site instead of watching TV) you can learn how to earn several times the rate of a savings account without taking too much additional risk.
Also note that taking on "a mutual fund" can be just as bad as any day trading. A mutual fund just means that you pay someone else to invest your money for you; they don't necessarily know where to put it to get the best results. On average, any given mutual fund will perform worse than the market as a whole.
As for the dotcoms... the "geeks" your refer to are probably the ones who are still making money off the dotcoms, if they were the ones who got in early in the game, before the rest of the general populace started driving up the share prices.
This isn't as ludicrous as it sounds... although it is pretty funny.:-) People do actaully make "subterranean" jumps (from ground or air level down into sinkholes and caverns). It's generally considered much more dangerous (which is why people do it). I think you'd have to be insane to start 31 miles up and try to land (safely) several hundred feet below ground level.
You're correct... to keep the shuttle at the same altitude while simultaneously slowing its velocity relative to the surface of the earth, you'd have to burn a LOT of fuel (probably equivalent to take-off). As your lateral velocity decreases, you need to vector more and more of the thrust straight down (towards the center of the earth) to overcome Earth's gravity.
Remember that any orbiting body is always falling towards Earth; the reason it doesn't crash into the ground is that it's moving so fast at a tangent to the Earth that it "misses" the ground itself.
I agree that equity investment is by far more benficial to the economy than any individual person laboring.
I wouldn't say that either... they are two out of three equally important axes of any business: Means of production (people or things who make the product), investment (money and people who allow the means of production to function), and the consumer (who buys the product, which hopefully covers the cost of production and rewards the investor for putting her money at risk).
I was just trying to illustrate the bias in our tax code towards "things we like"...
I agree with you here... the concept of a "sin tax" is a little asinine to me... but remember that the country is run by politicians (who's job is to make popular decisions) and not economists (whose job is to make as much money as possible).
There is a chance that our hypothetical investor is not "producing" anything directly, although I tend to doubt it. How many bigwigs do you know that earn all their money from stock and do nothing but golf all day? While it's a popular stereotype, in my experience it's not true. Anyone with enough money in investments that can afford to live off the interest/dividends (and it would have to be a heck of a lot) is usually some sort of executive, management consultant, or board member. While these people are certainly not in the trenches shoveling with the rest of us peons, they are providing a service, and that service has some value (competitive advantage) for the company.
But let's say that we have a hotshot millionare who can afford to live off his dividends and play golf all day. He most likely has the bulk of his money tied up in stocks, which in one way or another were given to the company to get its operations rolling. That company can then hire people that DO produce things. There's no way that company could do so otherwise. You need cash to buy equipment and cover expenses (such as salaries) until you can sell enough product to pay the bills. It's not easy either... most businesses fold because they don't become profitable before exhausting their initial investment. Case in point: all the failed dotcoms that you read about these days.
So, even though our investor doesn't lift a finger, his money is helping some company to exist & produce. Sounds like an easy job, until you realize that that investor stands a fairly decent chance of seeing some (or all) of that money disappear. His only hope is that the company (which he probably has some hand in managing, see the first paragraph) does well enough that they make a profit, and either pay some of that profit to him (as a dividend) or keep it and use it to make more money in the future (retained earnings) and pay a higher dividend later.
Also note that you don't have to be a hotshot golf-playing millionare to make money off investments. A lot of us peons (who do the actual production) have money in some form of investment, be it stocks or a simple bank account. The Internet (through cheap & easy access to information, and tight competition between discount stock brokers) has made small-time investing totally viable. There's no reason why you can't have your own (albiet relatively tiny) piece of the pie.
Hopefully I'll get this posted before someone else does...
Capital gains are taxed at less than the rate income is taxed...
That's true only if you hold the stock for less than a year. Sell it before a year is up (which, although IANABroker, is probably what most stock "speculators" are doing) and you pay full rates on it.
Am I going to work hard to increase my salary or to increase the returns on my portfolio?
Just because you're making your money from stock doesn't mean you're not doing anything productive. While your cash is tied up in stock, the company is using that money to finance their operations, buy capital equipment, etc. Without your money, most businesses could not operate with the efficiency that they do today -- or afford to hire you, for that matter.
Does anyone know what the chances of the GPS system shutting down or suffering some other massive failure are? I haven't heard of any major loss of GPS service (outside of intentional shutdowns by the US military), but I also haven't heard much news about the overall fault tolerance of the system. Seems to me like the chances of losing a satellite or two are reasonably high, what with micrometeoroids, space junk, solar flares, and an extremly difficult maintenance process. With everything being fitted with a GPS receiver these days, the ability of the system to withstand a catastrophic failure seems pretty important.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason given by AMD is that they want to offset some shares coming on the market through an employee equity incentive plan. However, could this be a cover for a plan to do a stock swap with Transmeta?
So now we've got plans to look for intelligent life that sent a message directly to us, to a precise location in the cosmos (that wasn't blocked by a star, planet, gas cloud, etc), during a certain period of time, using a given range of the electromagnetic radiation spectrum, and in a format that we could decipher. Ya right. I'm holding my breath for this one.
There are a few, and they're all on HBO. :-)
The Sopranos (drama about a present-day Mafia organization) is my favorite show on TV right now. Oz (prison drama) is pretty cool too. A lot of people like Sex in the City, and there are other HBO-only shows that are at least as good as anything on broadcast.
Seriously, these shows blow everything else in the mainstream of TV away... good writing/ plot lines, great acting (without the multimillion dollar actor egos), and an edginess (ie: sex, profanity, and violence) that you can't find on regular TV. There's no commercials to boot, although you do have to pay extra (maybe the cost of 2 movie tickets per month).
And. to top it all off, HBO already has an HDTV channel, which shows the same stuff as the regular ones. What more could you ask for? :-)
Actually, you've got the motivations reversed; the use of rockets for space exploration/ launching satellites was predated by the use of rockets as weapon delivery systems. Sputnik said to the world that if the USSR could put a basketball into space, they could send a nuclear bomb (a slightly larger device) to the US.
Interestingly, in the late 40s and 50s, the US paid more attention to making their nukes smaller and lighter, rather than making their rockets more powerful. The Soviets did the opposite, meaning that they had a big advantage over the US when trying to orbit satellites, then people.
The thing is, as ads become more annoying and obtrusinve, more people will start using this software, thus decreasing the advertisement's effectiveness. "Effectiveness" (ie: click-through rates) is generally what the sponsor pays for. Ad companies (DoubleClick et al) are already under fire for not delivering real revenue for their advertisers; with these new ads they could be putting the last nail in their own coffins.
I wish everyone would stop making bad comparisons with Internet advertising and TV/radio advertising. A TV or radio is a whole lot more difficult to ignore, especially since the broadcasters often schedule them at the same times, thus foiling the channel flippers. Because of the nature of the Web, it's difficult (if not impossible) to create some sort of advertisement that can't be filtered either by proxy software or by the user's eyes themselves.
Make no mistake, companies that make the bulk of their money from selling advertising space are going to die off in droves over the next few years, as they have been doing already.
Er, isn't 50% a whole lot less than 100%? I think you have youre prerequisites switched around here.
Please don't be ashamed... I for one am very interested in the opinions of a Dune "virgin" who can judge the series in itself without comparing it to the book or movie. I've seen both, so I can't. Like many here, I'm disappointed with the series, because it didn't flesh out a LOT of the background details. I find it interesting (and encouraging) that you were able to keep up with the plot, considering the ommissions.
Here's to hoping that the Dune miniseries doesn't turn out to be another Phantom Menace
Modern weapons (presumably) give a human a greater potential to destroy something. The target has generally been another human, but it also may be the human's weapons (like a tank) or the means of producing those weapons.
If you take that weapon away from the human, he becomes a much less effective destroyer. Consider a soldier without a gun, a tank crew without their vehicle, a pilot without his plane; they all weild much less power without their hardware.
Now if you can destroy the hardware without harming the human that weilds it (hopefully making him as ineffective at fighting as if he was dead), you've maybe taken a step towards making war a little less cruel. You've certainly eased the conscience of the person pulling the trigger. Destroying the weaponry (which cost lots of money and hard labor) is wasteful, but probably preferable to wasting a life.
Who knows if it would work like that in real life... but isn't it worth considering?
Am I the only one who laughed out loud over this one? :-)
... in the sequel to JP, The Lost World (the book, not the horrible movie "based" on it), Chrichton talks about the same topic. If I recall, he (through his characters) claims that the whole point of a long neck was to counterbalance the long whiplike tail, which was a very effective weapon against attackers.
Who said anything about AOLers switching to Netscape 6? AOL has been based on IE for some time now (including the recently released AOL 6 client), and I haven't heard a word about that changing anytime in the future.
When will companies realize that anything that does not bring value to the user (and detracts in terms of program overhead and development costs) only serve to hurt the product (and therefore the company)? Netscape certainly isn't the only one at fault here. No one seems to realize that the best advertisement is useless if no one pays attention to it.
My point exactly. In Canada, a lot of companies will hire anyone with X years of experience (X depends on what the company believes is appropriate), rather than someone with Y skills. In the US, the situation is reversed. Good or bad, the situation makes working in the US a much more attractive for newcomers to the industry; hence the "brain drain" that's happening now in Canada.
In my "experience", the number of years someone has in the industry, while somewhat valueable, is not the best indicator of how any given employee will perform. Any company that uses it as their primary (if not only) criteria for hiring is doing themselves a disservice.
Ok, fair enough... we don't get any Alberta headlines here in the US
The US dollar (worth about 50% more than the Canadian one) is definitly a plus, but not as big as one as you'd think. In my experience, cost-of-living is generally higher in the US, especially when it comes to rent (by far my biggest expenditure). Something that costs $20 in USD often costs $20 CD as well, erasing a lot of the currency differences. Of course, this depends a lot on where you live, and things imported from other countries may not follow this rule. Your results may very. :-)
Where the currency difference helps a LOT is when you send US$ back to Canada, as I am doing making student loan payments... HUGE help there.
The salary difference is a much bigger story. American companies trip all over themselves giving skilled Canadians fat paychecks, and often stock. Canadians in the US tend to be well-educated, hard-working, and have good attitudes (all the benefits of foreign labor without the "disadvantages" of foreign languages, sad but true). If you can perform a task, they'll pay for it. In contrast, a lot of the companies in Canada tie their payscales to "experience" (number of years worked). If you're new to the industry, expect to be making a lot less compared to your American counterparts. This is starting to change somewhat, but it's still prevalent.
This means that for a young recent grad like myself, the US is a much better place to work in, financially speaking. As my student loans shrink with the weak C$ and my number of years of experience in the industry increase, the option of coming back to Canada to work looks ever more attractive. I'll have to take a pay cut when I come back, but I'll live with it. :-)
Of course, the weather in AB blows, but then the personality of the people here almost offsets that. :-)
The election in Canada is federal, but this program is being set up by the provincial government. There is no involvement with the federal election.
The "produce" a service which allows people (bigtime and smalltime investors alike) to invest their money in all sorts of companies and other vehicles. The demand for their services is such that they can be paid a very high fee for performing this service. Like I said in my original post, they may not be the ones actually hammering the nail, but they do have a part to play in building the house.
As far as the little peons that can invest. I'd say thats a very bad idea.
The only way that you're not in the game at some level is if you keep your money stashed under the bed, spend it all, or invest in some sort of collectible that does not have value in terms of production (like stamps or artwork).
Money you keep in a bank account is being used in a similar manner as money you put into stocks, except that the bank handles all the transactions, assumes most of the risks, and takes most of the profit. If you're ok with missing out on most of the gains, fine -- investing in stocks isn't for everyone, and you'd be much better off not playing the game at all than playing the game without knowing the rules.
However, those that wish to learn the rules (regardless of how much they want to invest) and are willing to trade some security for higher returns have the opportunity to do so. With a little bit of research (spend an evening reading The Motley Fool or any other good financial site instead of watching TV) you can learn how to earn several times the rate of a savings account without taking too much additional risk.
Also note that taking on "a mutual fund" can be just as bad as any day trading. A mutual fund just means that you pay someone else to invest your money for you; they don't necessarily know where to put it to get the best results. On average, any given mutual fund will perform worse than the market as a whole.
As for the dotcoms... the "geeks" your refer to are probably the ones who are still making money off the dotcoms, if they were the ones who got in early in the game, before the rest of the general populace started driving up the share prices.
This isn't as ludicrous as it sounds... although it is pretty funny. :-) People do actaully make "subterranean" jumps (from ground or air level down into sinkholes and caverns). It's generally considered much more dangerous (which is why people do it). I think you'd have to be insane to start 31 miles up and try to land (safely) several hundred feet below ground level.
Remember that any orbiting body is always falling towards Earth; the reason it doesn't crash into the ground is that it's moving so fast at a tangent to the Earth that it "misses" the ground itself.
I was just trying to illustrate the bias in our tax code towards "things we like"... I agree with you here... the concept of a "sin tax" is a little asinine to me... but remember that the country is run by politicians (who's job is to make popular decisions) and not economists (whose job is to make as much money as possible).
But let's say that we have a hotshot millionare who can afford to live off his dividends and play golf all day. He most likely has the bulk of his money tied up in stocks, which in one way or another were given to the company to get its operations rolling. That company can then hire people that DO produce things. There's no way that company could do so otherwise. You need cash to buy equipment and cover expenses (such as salaries) until you can sell enough product to pay the bills. It's not easy either... most businesses fold because they don't become profitable before exhausting their initial investment. Case in point: all the failed dotcoms that you read about these days.
So, even though our investor doesn't lift a finger, his money is helping some company to exist & produce. Sounds like an easy job, until you realize that that investor stands a fairly decent chance of seeing some (or all) of that money disappear. His only hope is that the company (which he probably has some hand in managing, see the first paragraph) does well enough that they make a profit, and either pay some of that profit to him (as a dividend) or keep it and use it to make more money in the future (retained earnings) and pay a higher dividend later.
Also note that you don't have to be a hotshot golf-playing millionare to make money off investments. A lot of us peons (who do the actual production) have money in some form of investment, be it stocks or a simple bank account. The Internet (through cheap & easy access to information, and tight competition between discount stock brokers) has made small-time investing totally viable. There's no reason why you can't have your own (albiet relatively tiny) piece of the pie.
Capital gains are taxed at less than the rate income is taxed...
That's true only if you hold the stock for less than a year. Sell it before a year is up (which, although IANABroker, is probably what most stock "speculators" are doing) and you pay full rates on it.
Am I going to work hard to increase my salary or to increase the returns on my portfolio?
Just because you're making your money from stock doesn't mean you're not doing anything productive. While your cash is tied up in stock, the company is using that money to finance their operations, buy capital equipment, etc. Without your money, most businesses could not operate with the efficiency that they do today -- or afford to hire you, for that matter.
Does anyone know what the chances of the GPS system shutting down or suffering some other massive failure are? I haven't heard of any major loss of GPS service (outside of intentional shutdowns by the US military), but I also haven't heard much news about the overall fault tolerance of the system. Seems to me like the chances of losing a satellite or two are reasonably high, what with micrometeoroids, space junk, solar flares, and an extremly difficult maintenance process. With everything being fitted with a GPS receiver these days, the ability of the system to withstand a catastrophic failure seems pretty important.