That sounds about right. I got an unsolicited inquiry like this once. I responded that I'd sell it for $500, they counter offered $50. I said no thanks, that isn't worth my time to reconfigure everything and that was the end of it.
Criminy with the fundie VP candidate's part Eskimo daughter showing up preggers and landfall of a cat 3 hurricane yesterday this is the best slashdot could come up with?
People have been working later ever since medicine has figured out a way to increase people's average lifespan.
It's an attempt at a bit of humor - to us Americans people from the UK often are hard to understand because of the pronunciation differences. So if you want to be a state you will need to speak English (American style).
The UL without the backing of government regulators is useless. Their certifications are nice but there are classes of electrical devices sold today with impunity that are not physically able to be certified because they are knowingly built outside UL standards. The fact is that consumers are not paying attention to UL certification. And that is when the manufacturer doesn't just place counterfeit UL markings on the equipment.
Any statements that private certifications like UL can take the place of regulatory agencies is total nonsense.
Without something like the CPSC to back up UL we would be flooded with dangerous electrical equipment and have no idea what is real and what is not.
When challenged on the fact or fiction of "The Jungle" by the Beef Cartel, Sinclair provided an article title "The Condemned Meat Industry" complete with affidavits detailing the practices described in The Jungle. Teddy Roosevelt also commissioned an investigation that found all of the practices but one (selling workers who fell into rendering vats for their lard content) described in the Jungle were factual. The Jungle may have been a work of fiction, but the practices described in it were very real.
I am sure that you realize from the news the number of drugs removed from the market after approval and wide use has increased dramatically in the past ten years. I was being treated by one of these myself (Baycol) and as a result suffered from rhabdomyolysis, fortunately only bad enough to cause some kidney damage, not total failure. I still suffer from a fair amount of chronic muscle and joint pain.
As far as I am concerned the FDA has been too lax in letting drugs like Baycol and Vioxx on to the market BY FAR.
I can see an argument that certain things like say a pancreatic cancer treatment be given fast approval because of the nature of the disease and lack of effective treatment. But there is no way that drugs like Vioxx or Baycol should have been approved so quickly. The FDA is doing a lousy job in keeping unsafe drugs off the market.
Creationism in schools is a total non-starter for me in a candidate for national office. There is no way anyone with this in their background would get my vote.
The idea that decreasing prices will decrease revenue doesn't account for the idea that the number of customers will change depending on price in a competitive situation.
How do you think Wal Mart got to be the biggest corporation in the world?
It seems to me that Comcast is looking at the long tail guys and thinking we have 5% of our users consuming 90% of out bandwidth. (Or some such thing).
This sort of thing always happens when you sell something as "all you can eat for a dollar". Works fine when Aunt Minnie and the Canasta Club got to lunch, but not so good when the Ohio State offensive line shows up.
Also Comcast is being hit with the prospect of having to compete with FIOS. To do so means that either have to invest lots in physical plant to achieve the same service levels as FIOS, (which is what Cablevision seems to be doing) or cut prices.
So they think think cutting prices makes a lot of sense - most people don't need FIOS service levels. Most people will be happier with the lower price. But to cut prices they need to get rid of the long tail customers.
I know! Let's put a use limit in place. This will piss off the long tail guys and they will move to FIOS. BRILLIANT we have just unloaded our unprofitable customers to our competition! What could be sweeter!
1. Incremental research is the antithesis of fundamental research. It is what companies do today. It does not result in things like the invention of Information Theory that occurred at Bell Labs.
2. What counts is results. If business schools teach a certain methodology then that is generally what business managers do, Libertarian theory non-withstanding.
3. Privately held companies doing fundamental R&D.. that is an interesting theory, but it hasn't happened yet. The goal of a privately held company is almost always to go public as quickly as possible so the individual investors can profit on their initial capital investment. That is fundamentally incompatible with a long term fundamental R&D program. Plus these are the same people that run publicly held companies. They evaluate R&D on the same basis.
Oh, because the other parties have it all figured out? Libertarianism has issues addressing externalities? The credit crunch is rife with examples of what not to do already. Those decisions have come from both parties too. If Libertarian economic theory has holes in its argument, that is fine, but you cannot neglect the fact that both the Republican and Democrats economic theories resemble a sponge for the amount of holes it has in comparison to the L's.
Yeah, I agree with the idea that major US parties have made a hash of the economics of this country. Probably more from the injection of politics into the process of making economic decisions than any other reason. Aided mightily by an ignorant electorate. And a lot of nonsensical dogma like reduction of taxes while also increasing spending is a good thing.
BUT.. you think Libertarianism will reduce the number of boom and bust cycles in an economy? Seems pretty unlikely. Economies are fundamentally non-linear, full of time lags, instabilities and positive feedback loops. It is critical to realize that the idea that economics is not zero-sum means that the sums can be negative. The idea that zero structure will work seems very naive to me.
That is a very pretty concept, but it has some very severe issues.
1. Business schools teach that individual companies rarely benefit from the fundamental research they undertake. Fundamental research takes too long; company business goals and external economic pressures change much faster than the to-market time of fundamental R&D. It worked for the old AT&T because their position as a regulated monopoly let them plan much further into the future and assured a rate of return.
2. Companies that undertake R&D programs often apply a discounted cash flow analysis which values the R&D only as it applies to the company's bottom line, discounted by some interest rate. None of this places ANY value to other uses of the technology.
3. Companies dance to the beat of the quarterly report and the business cycle. Guess what gets cut first when the CEO's job / bonus is on the line. I'd bet that the recession on Europe is exactly the reason these programs are being cut.
Any reasonable economic theory takes into account externalities and game theory ideas like the prisoner's dilemma. To me this is where Libertarianism has some work to do.
Laffer's curve is not really attributable to Laffer - the knowledge that tax rates can be ruinous is as old as taxes themselves. Genghis Khan knew that if he taxed his peasants to starvation his tax revenues would go down. Laffer's theory is that the inflection point is much further to the right than had been previously believed. The problem is that it is not.
If you haven't noticed tax collection in Europe is a far higher percentage of GDP than it is in the US. If the Laffer curve inflection point were to the left of the US taxation rate increasing taxes in Europe would reduce revenue. Hasn't happened. Nor has Bush's tax cuts increased US revenues.
Lower corporate taxes has nothing to do with currency exchange rates. The US has been running lower interest rates, higher budget deficits and larger foreign exchange deficits for a considerable period of time. This leads to growth of money supply and inflation. This has caused owning Euros to be more attractive than owning dollars. Recently the trend in exchange rate has reversed. Why? Certainly corporate taxes haven't changed. It is because the economy right now in Europe is worse off than in the US and people are anticipating that European central banks will lower interest rates to stimulate their economies. The US on the other hand is further along in the economic cycle and the next move by the Fed is likely to increase interest rates.
People get tied up in all of these side shows and forget the fundamental principle of capitalism - investment of capital increases the productivity of workers and the economy as a whole. When a government borrows money it competes with private sector companies who wish to invest capital. This competition drives up the cost of capital making projects have to have higher returns to be attractive. This reduces economic growth.
Thus large government deficits are very destructive to economic growth. Another way of looking at it is that your taxes are equal to what government spends. Not what the tax rate is.
During the Clinton administration we saw a long term effort to reduce government deficits by controlling spending and keeping taxes at a level needed to pay for spending. There were even some years where a surplus was run.
It may be an accident (correlation does not equal causation) that this was also the longest peace time economic expansion in US history. In my book it is the way to go until it stops working.
CD-R's have been around for 20 years now. I think a company that has been manufacturing these for a while would have a good idea if they would retain data for 25 years.
I'd burn duplicate 5 copies on MAM-A archival gold.
There was a proposal by a consortium of states to put forth legislation that would establish an global sales tax rate which would ease the pain of implementation. I wonder what happened to that?
If you are any kind of economicist you would realize that no functioning economy in the world today taxes at a rate that exceeds the Laffer curve inflection point. Regeanomics is a ridiculous idea.
According to Nobel prize laureate James Tobin, "[t]he 'Laffer Curve' idea that tax cuts would actually increase revenues turned out to deserve the ridicule with which sober economists had greeted it in 1981."
Slashdot Mirror
We'll just stop selling you guys Zamboni machine parts. In 3 months you will cave.
That sounds about right. I got an unsolicited inquiry like this once. I responded that I'd sell it for $500, they counter offered $50. I said no thanks, that isn't worth my time to reconfigure everything and that was the end of it.
Criminy with the fundie VP candidate's part Eskimo daughter showing up preggers and landfall of a cat 3 hurricane yesterday this is the best slashdot could come up with?
People have been working later ever since medicine has figured out a way to increase people's average lifespan.
Unfortunately Java is included in nearly every programming ad
Dice search -
C# Java - 1807 hits.
Apparently NOT.
Dice.com -
Search Java - 14480 hits
Search C# - 7146 hits
Primary Examiner: Campbell; Joshua D
It's an attempt at a bit of humor - to us Americans people from the UK often are hard to understand because of the pronunciation differences. So if you want to be a state you will need to speak English (American style).
I had a similar experience on a trip to Korea - I could not use any of my credit cards to purchase merchandise in department stores there.
See you in the water board room at Gitmo.
The UL without the backing of government regulators is useless. Their certifications are nice but there are classes of electrical devices sold today with impunity that are not physically able to be certified because they are knowingly built outside UL standards. The fact is that consumers are not paying attention to UL certification. And that is when the manufacturer doesn't just place counterfeit UL markings on the equipment.
Any statements that private certifications like UL can take the place of regulatory agencies is total nonsense.
Without something like the CPSC to back up UL we would be flooded with dangerous electrical equipment and have no idea what is real and what is not.
http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml07/07185.html
When challenged on the fact or fiction of "The Jungle" by the Beef Cartel, Sinclair provided an article title "The Condemned Meat Industry" complete with affidavits detailing the practices described in The Jungle. Teddy Roosevelt also commissioned an investigation that found all of the practices but one (selling workers who fell into rendering vats for their lard content) described in the Jungle were factual. The Jungle may have been a work of fiction, but the practices described in it were very real.
I am sure that you realize from the news the number of drugs removed from the market after approval and wide use has increased dramatically in the past ten years. I was being treated by one of these myself (Baycol) and as a result suffered from rhabdomyolysis, fortunately only bad enough to cause some kidney damage, not total failure. I still suffer from a fair amount of chronic muscle and joint pain.
As far as I am concerned the FDA has been too lax in letting drugs like Baycol and Vioxx on to the market BY FAR.
I can see an argument that certain things like say a pancreatic cancer treatment be given fast approval because of the nature of the disease and lack of effective treatment. But there is no way that drugs like Vioxx or Baycol should have been approved so quickly. The FDA is doing a lousy job in keeping unsafe drugs off the market.
Here and here.
Creationism in schools is a total non-starter for me in a candidate for national office. There is no way anyone with this in their background would get my vote.
The idea that decreasing prices will decrease revenue doesn't account for the idea that the number of customers will change depending on price in a competitive situation.
How do you think Wal Mart got to be the biggest corporation in the world?
You'd have to learn how to speak English first.
It seems to me that Comcast is looking at the long tail guys and thinking we have 5% of our users consuming 90% of out bandwidth. (Or some such thing).
This sort of thing always happens when you sell something as "all you can eat for a dollar". Works fine when Aunt Minnie and the Canasta Club got to lunch, but not so good when the Ohio State offensive line shows up.
Also Comcast is being hit with the prospect of having to compete with FIOS. To do so means that either have to invest lots in physical plant to achieve the same service levels as FIOS, (which is what Cablevision seems to be doing) or cut prices.
So they think think cutting prices makes a lot of sense - most people don't need FIOS service levels. Most people will be happier with the lower price. But to cut prices they need to get rid of the long tail customers.
I know! Let's put a use limit in place. This will piss off the long tail guys and they will move to FIOS. BRILLIANT we have just unloaded our unprofitable customers to our competition! What could be sweeter!
PROFIT!!!
Your analogy isn't very good because you pay per watt for your electrical consumption.
1. Incremental research is the antithesis of fundamental research. It is what companies do today. It does not result in things like the invention of Information Theory that occurred at Bell Labs.
2. What counts is results. If business schools teach a certain methodology then that is generally what business managers do, Libertarian theory non-withstanding.
3. Privately held companies doing fundamental R&D.. that is an interesting theory, but it hasn't happened yet. The goal of a privately held company is almost always to go public as quickly as possible so the individual investors can profit on their initial capital investment. That is fundamentally incompatible with a long term fundamental R&D program. Plus these are the same people that run publicly held companies. They evaluate R&D on the same basis.
Oh, because the other parties have it all figured out? Libertarianism has issues addressing externalities? The credit crunch is rife with examples of what not to do already. Those decisions have come from both parties too. If Libertarian economic theory has holes in its argument, that is fine, but you cannot neglect the fact that both the Republican and Democrats economic theories resemble a sponge for the amount of holes it has in comparison to the L's.
Yeah, I agree with the idea that major US parties have made a hash of the economics of this country. Probably more from the injection of politics into the process of making economic decisions than any other reason. Aided mightily by an ignorant electorate. And a lot of nonsensical dogma like reduction of taxes while also increasing spending is a good thing.
BUT.. you think Libertarianism will reduce the number of boom and bust cycles in an economy? Seems pretty unlikely. Economies are fundamentally non-linear, full of time lags, instabilities and positive feedback loops. It is critical to realize that the idea that economics is not zero-sum means that the sums can be negative. The idea that zero structure will work seems very naive to me.
That is a very pretty concept, but it has some very severe issues.
1. Business schools teach that individual companies rarely benefit from the fundamental research they undertake. Fundamental research takes too long; company business goals and external economic pressures change much faster than the to-market time of fundamental R&D. It worked for the old AT&T because their position as a regulated monopoly let them plan much further into the future and assured a rate of return.
2. Companies that undertake R&D programs often apply a discounted cash flow analysis which values the R&D only as it applies to the company's bottom line, discounted by some interest rate. None of this places ANY value to other uses of the technology.
3. Companies dance to the beat of the quarterly report and the business cycle. Guess what gets cut first when the CEO's job / bonus is on the line. I'd bet that the recession on Europe is exactly the reason these programs are being cut.
Any reasonable economic theory takes into account externalities and game theory ideas like the prisoner's dilemma. To me this is where Libertarianism has some work to do.
Laffer's curve is not really attributable to Laffer - the knowledge that tax rates can be ruinous is as old as taxes themselves. Genghis Khan knew that if he taxed his peasants to starvation his tax revenues would go down. Laffer's theory is that the inflection point is much further to the right than had been previously believed. The problem is that it is not.
If you haven't noticed tax collection in Europe is a far higher percentage of GDP than it is in the US. If the Laffer curve inflection point were to the left of the US taxation rate increasing taxes in Europe would reduce revenue. Hasn't happened. Nor has Bush's tax cuts increased US revenues.
Lower corporate taxes has nothing to do with currency exchange rates. The US has been running lower interest rates, higher budget deficits and larger foreign exchange deficits for a considerable period of time. This leads to growth of money supply and inflation. This has caused owning Euros to be more attractive than owning dollars. Recently the trend in exchange rate has reversed. Why? Certainly corporate taxes haven't changed. It is because the economy right now in Europe is worse off than in the US and people are anticipating that European central banks will lower interest rates to stimulate their economies. The US on the other hand is further along in the economic cycle and the next move by the Fed is likely to increase interest rates.
People get tied up in all of these side shows and forget the fundamental principle of capitalism - investment of capital increases the productivity of workers and the economy as a whole. When a government borrows money it competes with private sector companies who wish to invest capital. This competition drives up the cost of capital making projects have to have higher returns to be attractive. This reduces economic growth.
Thus large government deficits are very destructive to economic growth. Another way of looking at it is that your taxes are equal to what government spends. Not what the tax rate is.
During the Clinton administration we saw a long term effort to reduce government deficits by controlling spending and keeping taxes at a level needed to pay for spending. There were even some years where a surplus was run.
It may be an accident (correlation does not equal causation) that this was also the longest peace time economic expansion in US history. In my book it is the way to go until it stops working.
CD-R's have been around for 20 years now. I think a company that has been manufacturing these for a while would have a good idea if they would retain data for 25 years.
I'd burn duplicate 5 copies on MAM-A archival gold.
Kodak got out of selling CD-Rs a few years ago.
Unfortunately they still seem to be perfectly happy to collect NJ sales tax. They need to move their NJ warehouse to a state like Delaware.
There was a proposal by a consortium of states to put forth legislation that would establish an global sales tax rate which would ease the pain of implementation. I wonder what happened to that?
If you are any kind of economicist you would realize that no functioning economy in the world today taxes at a rate that exceeds the Laffer curve inflection point. Regeanomics is a ridiculous idea.
According to Nobel prize laureate James Tobin, "[t]he 'Laffer Curve' idea that tax cuts would actually increase revenues turned out to deserve the ridicule with which sober economists had greeted it in 1981."
Lest we forget, it was RM Nixon who took us off the gold standard and applied price and wage controls.