AARP, NEA, AFL/CIO, and NAACP are all non-profit corporations with a specific focus or cause. If I give money to the NAACP I know that is going to go towards advancing African-American causes. Groups like this are openly supported by the electorate and could be seen as amplifying the voices of their individual donors. For profit corporate donation is completely different. If you bought Stainmaster carpet for your house the Koch brothers have profited and some percentage of that money has now gone to support the Tea Party whether you agree with them or not. For-profit corporate donations are spent only for the benefit and advancement of the corporation, non-profit corporate donations are spent for the benefit of their interest/donor group.
Are you really telling me you believe members of the AARP or NEA or AFL/CIO or NAACP don't expect to profit from the efforts of these corporations that represent them? The AARP wants higher benefit payments to seniors. The NEA wants higher pay for teachers. The AFL/CIO wants more money for union workers. The NAACP wants governments to make a greater effort to purchase more goods and services from black men and women. All these groups want to help their members to profit in some way from their efforts.
And your complaint about corporate profits going to causes you oppose equally applies AARP, NEA, AFL/CIO, and NAACP. Members of those groups got their money from other people, too. Should we complain that some portion of the money spent on automobiles winds up in the hands of the AFL/CIO and is used to campaign for Democrats? Or that social security money, obtained through taxation from others, goes to support the AARP? Or that taxpayers pay teachers so that those teachers can contribute some of that money to organizations that aim to take more money from those same taxpayers?
Did you read the same Citizens United ruling that I did? Did you read then Solicitor General Kagan's argument that basically said "Yeah, this legislation gives the Feds the power to ban books, but that's irrelevant because we would never do such a thing."? The 1st amendment says plainly enough that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. The old law prohibited Citizens United from publishing a film about a political candidate within a certain timeframe preceding a Federal election. Such a law is not compatible with the 1st amendment if free speech is to have any meaning.
I laughed when I learned that Micheal Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11M was used to attack the old law. Under the old law, Fahrenheit could have been banned during the 30 days before the 2004 election as a form of electioneering.
It wasn't banned, of course, and that made arguing against the old law even easier because it suggested that the state could pick and choose what speech to ban and what speed to allow and that created a fear that the state under the old law would manipulate the political conversation.
This ruling will ensure that individual citizens are forevermore completely and totally drowned out in our government by corporate interests and their puppet foundations/non-profits.
The individual citizen is always going to be drowned out in a democracy. The biggest gang wins. That what Democracy is.
Very few people have won elections without the help of large groups. People must form large groups to get anywhere. As a legal convenience, these groups become corporations by incorporating.
The AARP is a corporation. The NEA is a corporation. The AFL/CIO is a corporation. The NAACP is a corporation. They're all groups of like-minded people that would be nothing if they couldn't act together (and spend together) as a unit.
Unrealistic? What exactly does that word mean? All of the car manufacturers managed to meet the fuel efficiency goals: all of them. And, it turns out, it wasn't even really very hard. The pollution goals as well.
But they managed to meet those goals by using gasoline. Diesel makers had a much harder time satisfying pollution regulations. In Europe, pollution regulations were less challenging than in the US which is one reason why you see more diesels in Europe.
Secondly, fuel efficiency goals are much less important for a car that can run on many different liquid fuels including renewable liquid fuels. A car that can burn bio-diesel, alcohol from fermentation, and animal fat, shouldn't be prohibited from being sold simply because someone might burn gasoline at 17 mpg. If a turbine-engined car is unable to meet the government's 30+ mpg ecnomy regulation, should it be prohibited if it can burn renewable fuels?
Third, why must strict pollution regulations apply absolutely everywhere? These turbine-engine cars would have been great for rural people capable of making their own fuel. And the relative lack of people means less pollution overall. A small town might be perfectly capable of tolerating a small amount of nitrogen oxide pollution. Sure, in a city like LA NOx pollution is a problem. But plenty of us don't live in LA.
Under fixed prices, they could worry less about lowering prices and instead concentrate on quality and eliminating dead pixels.
But what we see instead is cut-throat competition on price that lowers quality. The same thing happened to the airlines after deregulation. Under regulation, prices were fixed. They now compete on price only and quality has suffered.
Sometimes competition on price can be destructive. Jobs are lost, quality suffers, and ultimately monopolies emerge after competitors have been driven out of business.
That's a good lesson for anyone with a business that's considering getting involved with investors and partners.
There have been deals where a person sells 51% of his stake in some business to an investor/partner, then discovers that his new partner with majority control of the business is taking every last cent from the partnership to pay his salary as CEO of another company that does business with the partnership.
You'd think the founder, with 49% ownership of the company, would get 49% of something. Not usually.
Most companies are pure democracies. Those with 51% of the vote (or shares, or board members) get to spend 100% of the money, just like most democratic governments.
While Bluetooth certainly has its issues and took a while to address all the early security concerns, I really wish wireless device creators would stop rolling their own protocols.
Yeah, but then the maker would have to licence the technology and that adds cost. The chip used in the device doesn't come with Bluetooth. It's a very simple chip.
I suspect that the problem here is that the engineer just didn't think about security.
A two trillion dollar budget, and still they miss this.
It used to be that public safety was the number one purpose and concern of the government. I guess poisoning children is less important now than making sure those with political power get bailed out. Children don't vote, after all. Well, except maybe in Chicago.
Isn't the point of governments to provide for their citizens according to Communism?
That's only the second half of, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Historically, communist governments have put plenty of emphasis on the first part, too.
Well at least, they seem to start to realize that perpetual growth is impossible to achieve in a finite universe.
Not so fast:
Suppose an economy has a size at time t of (5-1/t). The derivative is always positive but never exceeds 5. Thus growth is perpetual but the size of the economy never equals or exceeds an obviously finite 5.
It's interesting; the evolution of PC audio was mostly bottlenecked by storage.
That's not it at all. An Amiga in 1985 with 512k could run Deluxe Music Construction Set using digitized instruments. If you wanted to know what Bach's little Fugue in G-minor with a banjo sounds like, you'd just change instruments and a sampled banjo would be used to play the music.
With just 512k the key obviously wasn't memory.
The key for the Amiga was to have multiple DMA channels, one for each instrument, all fetching audio samples from memory at the same time and each driving a DAC at a variable rate depending on a programmable divisor and combining the results. By playing with the divisor for each DMA channel, you could change the pitch and produce many notes from one sample stored in memory. And with multiple DMA channels available, polyphonic sound was possible. Oh, and because it was DMA driven, very little CPU time was consumed.
The real reason PC audio suffered early on because the PC wasn't meant to play much more than "beep". And early sound cards simply followed the tradition of using synthesis instead of digitization to construct noises.
With RGB pixels on an LCD, yellow is shown by allowing light to pass through neighboring red and green subpixels. For the red subpixel, blue and green are filtered out. For the green subpixel, blue and red are filtered out. Then the eye fuses the neighboring pixels together to get yellow from two sources that have already filtered out much of the spectrum. But with a single yellow subpixel, only blue light is filtered out and more light reaches the viewer. I'm sure the effect is to make certain colors more vivid.
Additionally, the use of these yellow subpixels is also to somewhat increase the effective resolution.
...they could start with A. not making PC games that crash when you do anything
That's much more difficult than you realize and that was part of the Game Dev's point. There isn't enough consistency in the PC as a platform. There is such a vast variety of hardware and OSes that's it's next to impossible to make fast responsive game that works well on every platform. So why bother?
In order for it to interfere with a digital circuit, it first has to be radiation of the "ionizing" category
Neutron radiation isn't considered ionizing, yet interactions between the neutrons and the silicon in a typical chip will create charged particles that cause current surges. These current surges can interfere with the correct operation of a circuit and that includes individual transistors, not just bits in memory.
So they speculate that code they wrote had an interrupt routine that was not bracketed with PUSHF/POPF instructions!!! Which is like Assembly 101.
You're not reading that correctly. They didn't have and interrupt routine. They had a simple process. The problem was that the interrupt handler of the operating system wasn't saving the state of the carry bit. No one should have to block interrupts just to do an addition in a process that has no shared state.
So you expect a big company to develop brand new technology, which would imply a lot of research money, building new plants (or completely revamping the current ones), expending loads and loads of money to finally release a product that they would be forced to sell for the same price as the old one? They would much rather put bows and whistles to the old stuff until they ran out of adhesive tape.
Why should they be forced to charge the same price? If anything, the stability of a market with price fixing might actually make it easier to develop new technologies. The uncertainty that comes with wild price swings and price wars makes it much more difficult to plan for the future. Present day survival tends to trump such planning.
I also want to point out that I used the word "allowed". If companies what to battle it out on price, then that's up to them. Nothing says they have to cooperate and mostly they don't.
And deprive the middle class of services? You've got to be kidding me. It sounds like you don't want poor people to be able to fly. If you really want that "first class" experience, stop being a Scrooge and buy a first class ticket!
Price fixing doesn't necessarily mean that all charge the same price. It might also allow the market to segment itself into high, medium, and low-end carriers that agree to prices for each segment.
Slashdot Mirror
AARP, NEA, AFL/CIO, and NAACP are all non-profit corporations with a specific focus or cause. If I give money to the NAACP I know that is going to go towards advancing African-American causes. Groups like this are openly supported by the electorate and could be seen as amplifying the voices of their individual donors. For profit corporate donation is completely different. If you bought Stainmaster carpet for your house the Koch brothers have profited and some percentage of that money has now gone to support the Tea Party whether you agree with them or not. For-profit corporate donations are spent only for the benefit and advancement of the corporation, non-profit corporate donations are spent for the benefit of their interest/donor group.
Are you really telling me you believe members of the AARP or NEA or AFL/CIO or NAACP don't expect to profit from the efforts of these corporations that represent them? The AARP wants higher benefit payments to seniors. The NEA wants higher pay for teachers. The AFL/CIO wants more money for union workers. The NAACP wants governments to make a greater effort to purchase more goods and services from black men and women. All these groups want to help their members to profit in some way from their efforts.
And your complaint about corporate profits going to causes you oppose equally applies AARP, NEA, AFL/CIO, and NAACP. Members of those groups got their money from other people, too. Should we complain that some portion of the money spent on automobiles winds up in the hands of the AFL/CIO and is used to campaign for Democrats? Or that social security money, obtained through taxation from others, goes to support the AARP? Or that taxpayers pay teachers so that those teachers can contribute some of that money to organizations that aim to take more money from those same taxpayers?
Did you read the same Citizens United ruling that I did? Did you read then Solicitor General Kagan's argument that basically said "Yeah, this legislation gives the Feds the power to ban books, but that's irrelevant because we would never do such a thing."? The 1st amendment says plainly enough that Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech. The old law prohibited Citizens United from publishing a film about a political candidate within a certain timeframe preceding a Federal election. Such a law is not compatible with the 1st amendment if free speech is to have any meaning.
I laughed when I learned that Micheal Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11M was used to attack the old law. Under the old law, Fahrenheit could have been banned during the 30 days before the 2004 election as a form of electioneering.
It wasn't banned, of course, and that made arguing against the old law even easier because it suggested that the state could pick and choose what speech to ban and what speed to allow and that created a fear that the state under the old law would manipulate the political conversation.
This ruling will ensure that individual citizens are forevermore completely and totally drowned out in our government by corporate interests and their puppet foundations/non-profits.
The individual citizen is always going to be drowned out in a democracy. The biggest gang wins. That what Democracy is.
Very few people have won elections without the help of large groups. People must form large groups to get anywhere. As a legal convenience, these groups become corporations by incorporating.
The AARP is a corporation. The NEA is a corporation. The AFL/CIO is a corporation. The NAACP is a corporation. They're all groups of like-minded people that would be nothing if they couldn't act together (and spend together) as a unit.
The problem is that "any flammable liquid" would cost more than gasoline (absent tax).
How do you know that? And how do you know people wouldn't have made their own fuel (farmers, for example)?
still refuse to discuss population control.
And so do the non religious, unfortunately. Worse, they seem intent on subsidizing the fecundity of the stupid at the expense of the responsible.
Unrealistic? What exactly does that word mean? All of the car manufacturers managed to meet the fuel efficiency goals: all of them. And, it turns out, it wasn't even really very hard. The pollution goals as well.
But they managed to meet those goals by using gasoline. Diesel makers had a much harder time satisfying pollution regulations. In Europe, pollution regulations were less challenging than in the US which is one reason why you see more diesels in Europe.
Secondly, fuel efficiency goals are much less important for a car that can run on many different liquid fuels including renewable liquid fuels. A car that can burn bio-diesel, alcohol from fermentation, and animal fat, shouldn't be prohibited from being sold simply because someone might burn gasoline at 17 mpg. If a turbine-engined car is unable to meet the government's 30+ mpg ecnomy regulation, should it be prohibited if it can burn renewable fuels?
Third, why must strict pollution regulations apply absolutely everywhere? These turbine-engine cars would have been great for rural people capable of making their own fuel. And the relative lack of people means less pollution overall. A small town might be perfectly capable of tolerating a small amount of nitrogen oxide pollution. Sure, in a city like LA NOx pollution is a problem. But plenty of us don't live in LA.
It's full of rocks!
Under fixed prices, they could worry less about lowering prices and instead concentrate on quality and eliminating dead pixels.
But what we see instead is cut-throat competition on price that lowers quality. The same thing happened to the airlines after deregulation. Under regulation, prices were fixed. They now compete on price only and quality has suffered.
Sometimes competition on price can be destructive. Jobs are lost, quality suffers, and ultimately monopolies emerge after competitors have been driven out of business.
That's a good lesson for anyone with a business that's considering getting involved with investors and partners.
There have been deals where a person sells 51% of his stake in some business to an investor/partner, then discovers that his new partner with majority control of the business is taking every last cent from the partnership to pay his salary as CEO of another company that does business with the partnership.
You'd think the founder, with 49% ownership of the company, would get 49% of something. Not usually.
Most companies are pure democracies. Those with 51% of the vote (or shares, or board members) get to spend 100% of the money, just like most democratic governments.
While Bluetooth certainly has its issues and took a while to address all the early security concerns, I really wish wireless device creators would stop rolling their own protocols.
Yeah, but then the maker would have to licence the technology and that adds cost. The chip used in the device doesn't come with Bluetooth. It's a very simple chip.
I suspect that the problem here is that the engineer just didn't think about security.
Also remember where it says "all men" it meant not women and not blacks.
It did mean blacks -- free blacks.
And some of them, like William Ellison, were even free enough to own other blacks and fight for the confederacy during the civil war.
Subsidizing the fecundity of the stupid does.
A two trillion dollar budget, and still they miss this.
It used to be that public safety was the number one purpose and concern of the government. I guess poisoning children is less important now than making sure those with political power get bailed out. Children don't vote, after all. Well, except maybe in Chicago.
Isn't the point of governments to provide for their citizens according to Communism?
That's only the second half of, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Historically, communist governments have put plenty of emphasis on the first part, too.
Well at least, they seem to start to realize that perpetual growth is impossible to achieve in a finite universe.
Not so fast:
Suppose an economy has a size at time t of (5-1/t). The derivative is always positive but never exceeds 5. Thus growth is perpetual but the size of the economy never equals or exceeds an obviously finite 5.
It's interesting; the evolution of PC audio was mostly bottlenecked by storage.
That's not it at all. An Amiga in 1985 with 512k could run Deluxe Music Construction Set using digitized instruments. If you wanted to know what Bach's little Fugue in G-minor with a banjo sounds like, you'd just change instruments and a sampled banjo would be used to play the music.
With just 512k the key obviously wasn't memory.
The key for the Amiga was to have multiple DMA channels, one for each instrument, all fetching audio samples from memory at the same time and each driving a DAC at a variable rate depending on a programmable divisor and combining the results. By playing with the divisor for each DMA channel, you could change the pitch and produce many notes from one sample stored in memory. And with multiple DMA channels available, polyphonic sound was possible. Oh, and because it was DMA driven, very little CPU time was consumed.
The real reason PC audio suffered early on because the PC wasn't meant to play much more than "beep". And early sound cards simply followed the tradition of using synthesis instead of digitization to construct noises.
With RGB pixels on an LCD, yellow is shown by allowing light to pass through neighboring red and green subpixels. For the red subpixel, blue and green are filtered out. For the green subpixel, blue and red are filtered out. Then the eye fuses the neighboring pixels together to get yellow from two sources that have already filtered out much of the spectrum. But with a single yellow subpixel, only blue light is filtered out and more light reaches the viewer. I'm sure the effect is to make certain colors more vivid.
Additionally, the use of these yellow subpixels is also to somewhat increase the effective resolution.
...they could start with A. not making PC games that crash when you do anything
That's much more difficult than you realize and that was part of the Game Dev's point. There isn't enough consistency in the PC as a platform. There is such a vast variety of hardware and OSes that's it's next to impossible to make fast responsive game that works well on every platform. So why bother?
In order for it to interfere with a digital circuit, it first has to be radiation of the "ionizing" category
Neutron radiation isn't considered ionizing, yet interactions between the neutrons and the silicon in a typical chip will create charged particles that cause current surges. These current surges can interfere with the correct operation of a circuit and that includes individual transistors, not just bits in memory.
before the next crash.
The whole insurance industry for healthcare is based on a flawed premise that normal care need insurance.
No, the insurance industry is not based on that premise. That premise was forced by legislation and regulation on the industry.
There's a lesson there.
You're not reading that correctly. They didn't have and interrupt routine. They had a simple process. The problem was that the interrupt handler of the operating system wasn't saving the state of the carry bit. No one should have to block interrupts just to do an addition in a process that has no shared state.
Why should they be forced to charge the same price? If anything, the stability of a market with price fixing might actually make it easier to develop new technologies. The uncertainty that comes with wild price swings and price wars makes it much more difficult to plan for the future. Present day survival tends to trump such planning.
I also want to point out that I used the word "allowed". If companies what to battle it out on price, then that's up to them. Nothing says they have to cooperate and mostly they don't.
Price fixing doesn't necessarily mean that all charge the same price. It might also allow the market to segment itself into high, medium, and low-end carriers that agree to prices for each segment.