Odd, that's not what Al Gore said in "An Inconvenient Truth", and I thought for sure that everything in that movie was completely true. (Well, except for the bunk about the pine beetles. And the diseases that are caused by global warming. But everything else has to be 100% true, right?)
Seriously, though, I know it isn't expected to recover fully for a long time to come, but everything I had read up until this point led me to believe that it began recovering much more quickly than anyone expected, and that it had already improved substantially from what it was 20 years ago.
Also, if you note, the price is supposed to come out to about $300 per flight over the course of the life of the plane. Or, about $1 to $2 per passenger per flight. I think a human life is worth more than that, how about you?
Numbers that are completely meaningless. If these billions of dollars ultimately save less than 100 lives, are they still worth it? What about when you consider how those billions of dollars could be used to save far more lives in other areas of research? For $300 per flight we could probably train monkeys with BB guns to patrol the airport runways looking for terrorists with shoulder launched missiles. Would that be a worthwhile investment?
I think he was talking about browser updates, not extension updates. In which case, he should be unchecking "Firefox", not "Installed Add-ons".
And while we are talking about intelligent defaults, in a sane OS setup, the user running the browser wouldn't have permission to update it. While we know this isn't always the case, it seems to me that the 'smart' default would be to not try and perform the auto-update if the permissions necessary to do so aren't present.
oddly, I haven't heard much about that in the Global Warming blurbs I see on Slashdot daily
That's because the ozone hole isn't actually related to global warming. It might also have to do with the fact that CFCs were phased out of use something like 15 years ago, and the ozone hole mostly disappeared within a decade after that.
) Do you have your PC in the living room connected to a big screen? Does anybody you know?
Several people, actually(*). Just because my parents haven't done it yet doesn't mean it's not widespread enough to build a service around it.
(*) Of course, everyone who I can think of off the top of my head has done it with a Mac, as I probably will do, as well. I haven't decided yet whether I want to get a Mac Mini, or wait for Apple TV.
There are very few countries where large numbers of people are starving to death due to lack of food. The problem comes from a lack of distribution. And even in places where other countries have stepped in to give food to those who are starving, we still have starving people because the who control the distribution channels in those countries prefer to use it to their own ends. We have enough food to feed the whole world, and more. What we don't have is a way of getting it to them.
While your point is valid, your math is downright awful.
In reality, the labor costs of manufacturing that DVD player on about on the same order of magnitude as value of the raw materials going into it. The real costs in a DVD player are more along the lines of 1) international transport 2) distribution within in the US 3) retail store markup 4) licensing fees to the DVD consortium 5) recouping advertising and R+D costs 6) (hopefully) making a profit for the manufacturer
When it comes down to it, I'd be really surprised if the unit cost to manufacture one $40 DVD player reaches even $10 for raw materials and labor combined. Even at your 20:1 scale, you're probably looking at something like a $120 price point to sell a US manufactured $40 DVD player.
All that said, your economic points are valid, particularly the last one. Another point that I wish more people would realize is that the salaries in these other countries is not going to stay low forever. As their experience, skillsets and economies grow, their salary demands will go up as well. They probably won't ever reach the level that IT workers in the US are currently paid (although IMO we're probably overpaid anyway) but there are also inherent costs in outsourcing and offshoring that will add to that balance.
So, IOW, while we aren't actively replacing American workers, there are jobs that would otherwise have gone to American workers had they not offshored.
In economics, this is called opportunity cost.
The bottom line is the same, though: Instead of hiring American workers, they are paying foreign contractors
Is that like when the MPAA/RIAA claim that a downloaded song or movie is one sale lost to piracy?
I know that Slashdot isn't one entity, and people here don't all share the same opinion, but it does seem quite popular here to decry the RIAA, MPAA, and many others as organizations who feel that they are "entitled" to their revenues even though technology is making them obsolete, and we like to bitch and moan about how they should compete or give up, and compare them to the buggy whip manufacturers when the automobile was introduced.
But when you change that to individual jobs, man does the prevailing opinion change fast. No one is entitled to their salary. Can I let you in on a little secret? Despite all of the talk about off shoring, H1-B's, bubbles collapsing, and who knows what else, people in our industry are remarkably overpaid. I'm probably in the middle to low end of salary range for someone in my position, but compared to a lot of people I know in other fields who have as much experience as I do (or more), as much education as I do (or more) and have worked just as hard at developing the skillset they use from day to day in their job, I'm doing damn well. Am I grateful for that? Hell, yes! Would I be disappointed if the demand for my skillset (and the salary I could ask for) dropped due to increased commoditization of the work I do? Yes, but I also like to think that I would be grateful for the good run that I have had so far, and go on with my life. If things got bad enough, I might even have to look into changing my career. (And while I could still be classified as "young-ish", I have also had some of this "stuff" happen to me before.) I know some people still like the idea of working for 30 years or more at the same company, but it's just not reality anymore here in the US, and I won't lament those that are disappointed by that fact. If that's what you really want from your job, maybe you should work for the government, or work in a place where that is still the norm. (I hear France is having a great time with that lately.) Otherwise, it's no ones responsibility but your own to make yourself competitive in the job market.
Humans can't tell at casual sight or smell whether a human female is fertile. The study indicates that there's a relatively subtle behavioral giveaway here.
That's actually not true. I've known men who can tell by the smell of a woman's breath (even one that they just met) whether she is ovulating or menstruating (or sick). It's not as obvious in humans as many other animals, but it's still there if you know what your looking (or, sniffing?) for. Personally, I never could figure it out - my sense of smell is awful, but even I can tell that my wife's breath changes at different points of her cycle, even if I can't identify the difference.
SACD never got off the ground because of the price of discs vs the perceived benefits (if you play SACD on an average system, the sound quality is really no better than CD)
Which is different from Blu-ray/HD-DVD on an average TV, how?
8, last I tried, although if you are starting with an SP2 install disk, it should be less.
0) once at end of the install 1) video and other drivers 2) some minor updates that it made me install before I could install SP2 (WTF?) 3) SP2 3) newest version of windows update 4) newest version of media player 5) newest version of directX 6) couple dozen critical and optional updates 7) about half a dozen updates to the updates that I installed in #6
I haven't heard this before, but if it's true, that alone would be reason enough for me to get Vista on my next computer instead of XP. Otherwise I've been leaning towards trying to get a new XP laptop while I still can. If I'm going to be stuck with a necessary evil (At home, I pretty much use Windows only for games anymore, and one or two programs that my wife uses that I can't get to work on Linux.) I'd prefer it to be one that I know...
Possibly, but not necessarily. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but just because you have an OEM CD and an OEM CD key, does not necessarily mean that they will work together, unless the key is actually the one that came with the CD. Your chances are better if it's from the same OEM, but even then it's not guaranteed it will work.
Well, we've only been writing it down for the last hundred years, but the earth has been kind enough to keep track of the last half million years or so for us.
That's because the big dude up in the sky got disoriented this year and dropped it all here in Colorado by accident. Didn't you hear?
My wife put "An Inconvenient Truth" on our NetFlix list, and while it was interesting, it was a little weird watching it with a foot of snow outside our front window. (And yes, I know that's not how Global Warming works, but it was still odd.)
Interesting, I live in Colorado too, and while we've replaced most of our inside lights with CFLs (pretty much anything that uses a standard bulb- a few of our nicer fixtures can only use halogen bulbs) all of our outside lights are still standard bulbs because we've found that CFLs work very poorly in the cold. We do have one outside light that we replaced with a CFL, but the wiring in that fixture is bad, and it doesn't work at all when it's too cold outside, so we figured it was irrelevant. If I ever get the wiring in there fixed, we'll probably go back to a regular bulb there too.
Loyalty still has a place in the work force, regardless of your capitalist dogma. If I were in the job market right now, and all of my previous bosses/clients made me an offer, I can tell you right now which ones I would take, and which ones I wouldn't. There are two that I would accept any reasonable offer from (but one of them only if he wasn't responsible for business decisions in the company- good guy, good boss, lousy businessman) The rest I wouldn't take a job from even if they offered me double what I am making now. They screwed me in the past, I would fully expect them to screw me again in the future, and i want nothing to do with them. (Maybe if they paid me triple, I'd take a job and just keep my eyes open for a way to screw them before they screw me, but even then I'm not sure it would be worth it.) For an employer it makes sense, too, for many of the same reasons. If you treat your employees well, it will pay off for you.
You just have to keep in mind that there is a line between loyalty and stupidity.
Sometimes I have to wonder whether this was really such a great step forward as people like to think it is. After all, when was the last time that you had a reason to embed an image in a spreadsheet in a document in your calendar? Other than just to show somebody that you could?
After all, it's innovations like this that have led to an endless stream of clients sending me screenshots as Word documents.
Slashdot Mirror
Odd, that's not what Al Gore said in "An Inconvenient Truth", and I thought for sure that everything in that movie was completely true. (Well, except for the bunk about the pine beetles. And the diseases that are caused by global warming. But everything else has to be 100% true, right?)
Seriously, though, I know it isn't expected to recover fully for a long time to come, but everything I had read up until this point led me to believe that it began recovering much more quickly than anyone expected, and that it had already improved substantially from what it was 20 years ago.
125mph high speed trains? 200-300 people on each train?
Please. This is the United States we are talking about.
Numbers that are completely meaningless. If these billions of dollars ultimately save less than 100 lives, are they still worth it? What about when you consider how those billions of dollars could be used to save far more lives in other areas of research? For $300 per flight we could probably train monkeys with BB guns to patrol the airport runways looking for terrorists with shoulder launched missiles. Would that be a worthwhile investment?
Well, when your only other choice is to send out a different monkey that was right behind that first monkey cheering him on every step of the way...
I think he was talking about browser updates, not extension updates. In which case, he should be unchecking "Firefox", not "Installed Add-ons".
And while we are talking about intelligent defaults, in a sane OS setup, the user running the browser wouldn't have permission to update it. While we know this isn't always the case, it seems to me that the 'smart' default would be to not try and perform the auto-update if the permissions necessary to do so aren't present.
That's because the ozone hole isn't actually related to global warming. It might also have to do with the fact that CFCs were phased out of use something like 15 years ago, and the ozone hole mostly disappeared within a decade after that.
Several people, actually(*). Just because my parents haven't done it yet doesn't mean it's not widespread enough to build a service around it.
(*) Of course, everyone who I can think of off the top of my head has done it with a Mac, as I probably will do, as well. I haven't decided yet whether I want to get a Mac Mini, or wait for Apple TV.
There are very few countries where large numbers of people are starving to death due to lack of food. The problem comes from a lack of distribution. And even in places where other countries have stepped in to give food to those who are starving, we still have starving people because the who control the distribution channels in those countries prefer to use it to their own ends. We have enough food to feed the whole world, and more. What we don't have is a way of getting it to them.
While your point is valid, your math is downright awful.
In reality, the labor costs of manufacturing that DVD player on about on the same order of magnitude as value of the raw materials going into it. The real costs in a DVD player are more along the lines of
1) international transport
2) distribution within in the US
3) retail store markup
4) licensing fees to the DVD consortium
5) recouping advertising and R+D costs
6) (hopefully) making a profit for the manufacturer
When it comes down to it, I'd be really surprised if the unit cost to manufacture one $40 DVD player reaches even $10 for raw materials and labor combined. Even at your 20:1 scale, you're probably looking at something like a $120 price point to sell a US manufactured $40 DVD player.
All that said, your economic points are valid, particularly the last one. Another point that I wish more people would realize is that the salaries in these other countries is not going to stay low forever. As their experience, skillsets and economies grow, their salary demands will go up as well. They probably won't ever reach the level that IT workers in the US are currently paid (although IMO we're probably overpaid anyway) but there are also inherent costs in outsourcing and offshoring that will add to that balance.
Is that like when the MPAA/RIAA claim that a downloaded song or movie is one sale lost to piracy?
I know that Slashdot isn't one entity, and people here don't all share the same opinion, but it does seem quite popular here to decry the RIAA, MPAA, and many others as organizations who feel that they are "entitled" to their revenues even though technology is making them obsolete, and we like to bitch and moan about how they should compete or give up, and compare them to the buggy whip manufacturers when the automobile was introduced.
But when you change that to individual jobs, man does the prevailing opinion change fast. No one is entitled to their salary. Can I let you in on a little secret? Despite all of the talk about off shoring, H1-B's, bubbles collapsing, and who knows what else, people in our industry are remarkably overpaid. I'm probably in the middle to low end of salary range for someone in my position, but compared to a lot of people I know in other fields who have as much experience as I do (or more), as much education as I do (or more) and have worked just as hard at developing the skillset they use from day to day in their job, I'm doing damn well. Am I grateful for that? Hell, yes! Would I be disappointed if the demand for my skillset (and the salary I could ask for) dropped due to increased commoditization of the work I do? Yes, but I also like to think that I would be grateful for the good run that I have had so far, and go on with my life. If things got bad enough, I might even have to look into changing my career. (And while I could still be classified as "young-ish", I have also had some of this "stuff" happen to me before.) I know some people still like the idea of working for 30 years or more at the same company, but it's just not reality anymore here in the US, and I won't lament those that are disappointed by that fact. If that's what you really want from your job, maybe you should work for the government, or work in a place where that is still the norm. (I hear France is having a great time with that lately.) Otherwise, it's no ones responsibility but your own to make yourself competitive in the job market.
That's actually not true. I've known men who can tell by the smell of a woman's breath (even one that they just met) whether she is ovulating or menstruating (or sick). It's not as obvious in humans as many other animals, but it's still there if you know what your looking (or, sniffing?) for. Personally, I never could figure it out - my sense of smell is awful, but even I can tell that my wife's breath changes at different points of her cycle, even if I can't identify the difference.
Observer: What's that got to do with anything?
Doc: Back off, man, I'm a scientist.
Which is different from Blu-ray/HD-DVD on an average TV, how?
8, last I tried, although if you are starting with an SP2 install disk, it should be less.
0) once at end of the install
1) video and other drivers
2) some minor updates that it made me install before I could install SP2 (WTF?)
3) SP2
3) newest version of windows update
4) newest version of media player
5) newest version of directX
6) couple dozen critical and optional updates
7) about half a dozen updates to the updates that I installed in #6
I haven't heard this before, but if it's true, that alone would be reason enough for me to get Vista on my next computer instead of XP. Otherwise I've been leaning towards trying to get a new XP laptop while I still can. If I'm going to be stuck with a necessary evil (At home, I pretty much use Windows only for games anymore, and one or two programs that my wife uses that I can't get to work on Linux.) I'd prefer it to be one that I know...
Possibly, but not necessarily. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but just because you have an OEM CD and an OEM CD key, does not necessarily mean that they will work together, unless the key is actually the one that came with the CD. Your chances are better if it's from the same OEM, but even then it's not guaranteed it will work.
Try double that.
Well, we've only been writing it down for the last hundred years, but the earth has been kind enough to keep track of the last half million years or so for us.
That's because the big dude up in the sky got disoriented this year and dropped it all here in Colorado by accident. Didn't you hear?
My wife put "An Inconvenient Truth" on our NetFlix list, and while it was interesting, it was a little weird watching it with a foot of snow outside our front window. (And yes, I know that's not how Global Warming works, but it was still odd.)
Oops, you blew it!
Interesting, I live in Colorado too, and while we've replaced most of our inside lights with CFLs (pretty much anything that uses a standard bulb- a few of our nicer fixtures can only use halogen bulbs) all of our outside lights are still standard bulbs because we've found that CFLs work very poorly in the cold. We do have one outside light that we replaced with a CFL, but the wiring in that fixture is bad, and it doesn't work at all when it's too cold outside, so we figured it was irrelevant. If I ever get the wiring in there fixed, we'll probably go back to a regular bulb there too.
Loyalty still has a place in the work force, regardless of your capitalist dogma. If I were in the job market right now, and all of my previous bosses/clients made me an offer, I can tell you right now which ones I would take, and which ones I wouldn't. There are two that I would accept any reasonable offer from (but one of them only if he wasn't responsible for business decisions in the company- good guy, good boss, lousy businessman) The rest I wouldn't take a job from even if they offered me double what I am making now. They screwed me in the past, I would fully expect them to screw me again in the future, and i want nothing to do with them. (Maybe if they paid me triple, I'd take a job and just keep my eyes open for a way to screw them before they screw me, but even then I'm not sure it would be worth it.) For an employer it makes sense, too, for many of the same reasons. If you treat your employees well, it will pay off for you.
You just have to keep in mind that there is a line between loyalty and stupidity.
Sometimes I have to wonder whether this was really such a great step forward as people like to think it is. After all, when was the last time that you had a reason to embed an image in a spreadsheet in a document in your calendar? Other than just to show somebody that you could?
After all, it's innovations like this that have led to an endless stream of clients sending me screenshots as Word documents.
I'm talking about version 1.5 of the JavaScript language, a.k.a. ECMA-262 3rd edition. I don't know what browser Microsoft released in 1999 that supports it, but Internet Explorer 5.5, 6.0, and 7.0 do not.