In fairness, the cost of sales for many industries is on the order of 45% to 55%, especially anything related to high tech. Actual manufacturing costs are generally around 20% - if not, the company is likely to lose money. The major exceptions are commodity items, and extremely competitive markets. Even in the highest of high tech the cost of R&D plus engineering is rarely more than 2-3%.
When I went through sales training at a company that then 'owned' the computer graphics market and much of the higher-end test equipment market, when evaluating a new product they first worked out what the supply/demand curve for the product was - what price point would maximize profits on that product. Then, if they couldn't manufacture the product for less than 20% of that, they didn't build it - there was no profit in it.
Note that the price does not depend on the cost - almost no sane business does that. The price depends on the market, the decision to build it depends on the relation between price and cost.
Here's how the equation generally works out, for most tech industries: 50% of retail = cost of sales; 20-25% profit; 5-10% admin; 10-20% insurance, manufacturing, operations, engineering, everything else including mowing the lawn outside the building.
One modern difference - using contract manufacturers like Foxconn means that the company can force the cost of manufacturing down to the point where only the leanest survive. So contract builders run on much smaller margins, but hopefully make it up on volume.
This is analogous to how grocery stores work - a grocery store's margin on most items is quite small, generally 2% or 3%. But cash flow through the store is immense - a typical grocery store may clear $1 million per week - not bad for 30 mostly low-paid employees. So while return on cash flow is small, return on equity is good. 30 employees times, (guessing) $40,000 fully loaded annual cost is $1,200,000 per year. Add the amortized cost of the store and inventory - say $5 million per year, which is all part of the base cost. Finally 3% of $52 million (annual revenues) is $1.5 million profit per year. So while profit on the books looks like 3%, profit of interest to the investors is more like $1.5 million / $7.5 million or 20% on equity. The biggest risk in this model is that efficiency and waste become hugely important - a small drop in efficiency or increase in costs acts as leverage to cause a huge drop in return on equity. [It's been a while since I've looked at this stuff but I think this is more or less useful, if not technically completely correct.]
Thanks! That was an illuminating article, and it led me further to the discussion of corporate personhood. I think it's worthwhile for all to learn more about what is, and what isn't, included in this notion. As the latter article notes,
The basis for allowing corporations to assert protection under the U.S. Constitution is that they are organizations of people, and that people should not be deprived of their constitutional rights when they act collectively.[5] In this view, treating corporations as "persons" is a convenient legal fiction that allows corporations to sue and to be sued, provides a single entity for easier taxation and regulation, simplifies complex transactions that would otherwise involve, in the case of large corporations, thousands of people, and that protects the individual rights of the shareholders as well as the right of association.
Generally, corporations are not able to claim constitutional protections that would not otherwise be available to persons acting as a group. For example, the Supreme Court has not recognized a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination for a corporation, since that right can be exercised only on an individual basis. In United States v. Sourapas and Crest Beverage Company, "[a]ppellants [suggested] that the use of the word "taxpayer" several times in the regulations requires that the fifth-amendment self-incrimination warning be given to a corporation." The Court did not agree.[6]
Since the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, upholding the rights of corporations to make political expenditures under the First Amendment, there have been several calls for a US Constitutional amendment to abolish Corporate Personhood. [7] The Citizens United majority opinion makes no reference to corporate personhood or to the Fourteenth Amendment.
As I alluded in my blathering, I think at this point that they would just adopt the viewpoint that it would be too disruptive and would be a threat to the country to make such a substantial change. I forget what the actual phrasing is, but they've used it in defense-related cases and espionage cases before. I'm not sure if it's been used in economic or civil cases before. But everyone from your local grade school (does it have an associated non-profit?) to literally every college and university, every one of the 30,000 publicly held companies and the thousands of other entities from unions to the United Way would be lobbying against changing it now regardless of its theoretical status.
Consider this scenario: you, I and Jack down the street decide to set up a neighborhood association that would, among other things, work with the City to get street lights put in on our block. Under present law, that neighborhood association is most likely a corporate entity within the meaning of the precedent. If the association were to lose its personhood, it would have no right to talk to the City. All such attempts to organize in order to make the political process more efficient would be illegal - we would be restricted to individually sending letters without formal coordination. It's arguable that even an individual buying political ads on the radio would be illegal, because the radio company would no longer have any free speech rights to broadcast those ads (that would be an interesting court case!) So beyond the sheer improbability of this ever being changed in a significant way, it's not at all obvious that it's a good idea.
While most of the attention has been on how the 'evil corporations' will be able to spend unlimited money to promote their evil schemes, we must recall that everyone (whether 'human' or 'person') is not on the same side. Given almost any issue, there are people/entities at all wealth status on both sides. George Soros has been spending millions if not billions to support his particular political viewpoint, which is not at all congruent with the viewpoint of, say, Donald Trump - so much of their respective $zillions effectively cancel out. What goes away is the continually changing, sleazy structure of shady money that has been shuffling through the system via a plethora of hidden, often illegal, schemes (see Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall control of New York politics for most of a century.) So I think things will all level out fairly quickly. the question will be whether the vast majority of us will be willing to put money into their particular causes.
No. They can sell it but the revenue would be taxable income. Broadly similarly if you own a computer for your consulting business you can 'depreciate' it (mark down the value) a certain amount each year as its value in the real world declines, and take that amount off your income for the year. Then if you sell it, the income from selling it, minus the remaining un-depreciated value, is income that you have to pay taxes on. If you sell it for less than the depreciated value then you can take the difference off your income for tax purposes.
It's concerning how unpopular this idea is and yet it still remains policy. Is it political suicide to speak out against corporate personhood, or would a law limiting personhood to individual citizens be unconstitutional?
It should be noted that this was not the result of political (i.e., congressional, etc.) action but a Supreme Court decision in the mid-late 1800s (1870-something?) - I'm too lazy to look up the date. So reversing it at this time would require the Supreme Court reversing itself on a decision that has been in place for 140 years or so, thereby completely disrupting a vast body of law that is based on it and underpins the entire economic, political and legal system of the US, or a constitutional amendment. I can not think offhand of any institution whether governmental or commercial or other that does not now intimately depend on that structure. Therefore all those institutions would oppose any significant change as disruptive to their business model and/or worldview. So right or wrong and no matter how romantically attractive the notion, it's pretty much not going to change in any drastic way.
It may be possible to tweak the way in which such things are handled - fiddling around the edges, so to speak. While the Citizens United case seems to be huge, it's really just one of those 'around the edges' things - the impact in the long run will be much less than it appears now - I think the major impact will be much greater transparency of where the money actually comes from, since there's little legal reason to hide the money trail as has been done for many decades. (Look up 'walking around money', or 'soft money' - vast sums of cash used to get handed out by gangs, unions and corporations to operatives who would hand it out on the street to people who agreed to vote a certain way.) With regard to the corporate-person structure itself, that horse left the barn a long, long time ago. And reading a synopsis of the original decision (or the CU decision that derives from the original), it's hard to argue with it on legal grounds (IANAL). Sometimes we just have to deal with things as they are.
I like C. I also drive a car with a manual transmission, and change my own oil, spark plugs, and brake pads.
Regrinding transmission gears or building carburetors is like programming in assembler (or maybe even writing machine code with a hex editor).
However, that's not to say that I don't also like high-level languages. I especially like C# for the clean object-orientation, plus the syntactic sugar (e.g. accessor methods) and operator overloading that Java doesn't have (not a fan of the Microsoftness, though). MATLAB/Octave is really convenient for mathematical stuff, too.
I still like my analogy. For most of the programming I do, the problem I am solving can best be viewed as exploring an unknown space (the logical space within which the problem resides), looking for a reasonably efficient, reliable and repeatable path to the desired solution locus. I may incorporate a wide variety of mechanisms, even sometimes including running shell programs or database queries via ssh on remote machines. This could all be theoretically done by writing everything in C, but there is no reason - especially considering that the environments that I am working with may change radically without notice, so the entire application has to be restructured as fast as possible. Using dynamic languages is certainly in this case the correct solution (I won't go into which one is best.)
So for me, the mechanicing is just part of the navigational problem - deciding which wrench to use and so forth.
Having been in this business now since the days when most computer graphics programs were written in FORTRAN, (my very first language was ALGOL 68) IMHO even such things as device drivers are also easily viewed in this navigational paradigm. As an interesting example, the old Burroughs mainframes and operating systems were first built (together) entirely in software, using mostly formal methods. Then the parts of the system that required the most speed were implemented in hardware. Thus the 'mechanicing' was really just part of the navigation. (However there is the black art of micro-coding, where the timing idiosyncracies require a bit of 'creative destruction' on the formal model.)
The mostly-dynamic languages I use, in fairness, are all largely themselves written in C so could be considered mere C applications, in the purest sense - the compilers or interpreters of few modern languages are themselves written in the target language as the original C was. But regardless, for nearly all programming tasks, even so-called 'bare iron' problems of interfacing to strange hardware, a well-defined model of the hardware and of the problem should be enough for a smart 'compiler' (for lack of a better term) should be able to figure out how to build the driver with little or no 'memory pokery' by a programmer. The fact that C programming is still widespread is a testament to the insufficiency of our tools.
So, do you build your own carburetors? How often do you regrind the gears in your car's transmission?
The above may seem silly (and not meaning to incite), but your argument is essentially that anyone who can't build a model T in their garage is incompetent to drive a car.
Considering that a modern microprocessor has on the order of 2 billion transistors with many capabilities that used to defined by simple compilers and operating systems such as memory management, multiprocessor scheduling, programming for such machinery is a far cry from programming a 6800 - itself a bit past the usual assemblage of 7400-series chips. Compilers, linkers and future program generation systems must handle the complexities, which are already well beyond any individual programmer's capabilities to write optimal code for, just as modern fuel injection systems provide much better engine control than any carburetor, much less any manual spark-gap and fuel mixture control. It might be fun and entertaining to adjust the fuel mixture on your Model T as you drive in the parade, but it is not appropriate for driving a car with maximum efficiency on the freeway and in town.
Continuing to use what has been described as a 'structured PDP-11 macro-assembler' for general purpose applications programming is like driving a Model T on the turnpike. And it's arguable that even for embedded use an AI-based program generator should by now be able to optimize better than almost every human programmer in nearly every case. If not, then that area of research is overdue for deeper study.
All those measures are based on the meter, which is some fraction of the earth's diameter or some such foolishness.:) Plus, of course, the number of digits on one's hand, which makes no sense. Either a pure binary system (used as hexadecimal), or base 12, which has many more opportunities for fractions, would be better. And I'm sure I could come up with a better measure than Celcius - I recently read an interesting analysis of why Fahrenheit had its own pretty good justifications but I don't recall what they were.
When we start populating space, I'm going to lobby for creation of an entirely new system of units, not based on any Earth measure (the meter was originally based on something like the distance from the equator to the pole - just as silly as the length of the king's foot!) And it will be completely incompatible with any of those ancient measures the groundlubbers depended on. I think we'll start with a certain round number of wavelengths of a particular frequency of light in free space - like the frequency of a particular electron transition of cesium. The time it takes for this many wavelengths to pass a certain point would be the fundamental time unit. And it will all be in either base 12 or 16 - none of this foolish base-10 nonsense.
Mass - that's already a problem. I propose basing mass on a physical reaction involving a Bose-Einstein condensate containing precisely 1000 atoms - perhaps based on a relative measure of repulsion or attraction for two different size condensates. Ideally, it would be something that can only be measured outside of significant localized gravitational fields - just to make it difficult for non-Spacers.
Ahh, the good old days - 12 inch 10 MB hard drives, and if you forgot to 'park' the head before shutdown, bad things would happen. And before that, the 'washing machine' Winchester - 5 HP stepping motors to move the heads, the drive could walk across the floor if the heads moved back and forth in resonance. And the IBM 1130, whose 1 MB 14 inch(?) removable drive had a one second mean seek time.... I know I had a lawn somewhere. Now where did I put it?
You just reminded me of the Lifter Project. There is some cool video of these things, which generate lift from electrostatic effects on the air. Almost totally silent (some hum is apparently sometimes noticeable), no moving parts. One of the experiments even flew a mouse. Lift is apparently on the order of one gram per watt (if I recall from looking into this about five years ago). Contrary to the strong beliefs of some of the experimenters, there is no evidence that it works in space - i.e., it is not what drives flying saucers. But I still think that the method might be usable to drive an airship.
Not only that, this test isn't very realistic as far as helicopters are concerned: they're not far enough away from the ground. Close to the ground, you get the in-ground hover effect, which reduces the amount of power you need to stay aloft. Over 10 feet or so, you go into out-of-ground effect, and then your power requirements increase significantly. In-ground effect is only useful for taxiing to your runway or helipad; if you want to hover anywhere else, you're generally doing it out-of-ground. So even a fit human will have a much harder time keeping that up for long, even with a zero-mass machine. There's a reason birds have hollow bones, and why even hummingbirds (which hover rather than glide) have very limited flight durations, despite their tiny size and mass.
Yes, this is what I was going to mention. Anyone who flies small planes knows about ground effect (or see 'Ekranoplan' for a large-scale Russian version and some interesting video.) The rotor blades in this test never got more than about a foot off the fIoor. IIRC ground effect applies decreasingly with height up to about the wingspan. Even the 10 foot criteria is still well within the blade diameter, but I wouldn't argue at that point. Of course, it's still a very cool achievement of both technology and human effort.
One thing I've wondered - it seems to me that a rowing motion would enlist more of a body's muscular resources - why use hand and foot pedals?
I don't know about any statutes, but there is a long standing body of civil litigation regarding the fiduciary responsibility of corporate management, primarily to shareholders but also to others, to a lesser extent. Companies are sued very often for failing to maximize shareholder value either in the short term (such as agreeing to sell the company at too low a price) or longer term (following ineffective strategies that result in a drop, or even too small an increase, in share price.)
So while there may be no 'law' on the books, there is plenty of legal muscle behind it. As one SCOTUS justice put it over 100 years ago, (paraphrasing another common sentiment from, IIRC, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence), the corporate management should pledge its wealth, its life and its holy honor to protect the shareholders.
I personally think that the managementhave a wider responsibility as well (perhaps not as strongly) to the other stakeholders - workers, community, environment, etc. But bottom line - any organization (whether for-profit or not-for-profit, or even governmental) has to 'make a profit' (even if it's only 1c), as if an organization loses money each year it can not survive to do whatever its mission is. If a policeperson is not paid enough to eat to sustain him/herself and starves to death, how much policework can he/she do?
I suppose it's worth noting that back in the days of the original Mac, the rounded rectangles for windows on the screen were completely new. In fact this generated a big argument between Steve Jobs and the head designer, whose name I forget just now. The designer said, "WTF do we need rounded corners on the windows - nobody does that", and Jobs took him outside to look at all the road signs and other uses. And he insisted. So Macs had rounded rectangles. This really was the first time any window-based OS (there were a few by then - I worked on one workstation called the Perq) had rounded rectangles.
So rounded rectangles were actually a new design concept at least for computer software in 1984. But Apple should have patented it then, in which case the patent would have run out long ago. Extending the concept to the physical device was arguably not a brilliant invention - most human-rated devices have rounded corners, for the practical reasons you mention. So I agree with your last statement - rounded rectangles as a device design are either old news, or trivial, or both. But I dunno what the actual patent says, this being/. and all.
- or your home Windows or Mac network - both of them also use NTP, by default using MS and Apple servers respectively. Or at least that's my recollection.
Oddly enough, inflammable is the originally correct term. It means 'able to be inflamed'. Flammable is a relatively recent colloquialism - I think the 1950s.
There are many English words that start with a modifying prefix, like 'engorged', 'emboldened', 'incensed', 'encouraged', etc. (I think this is all from Latin) The idea is to make a verb out of an adjective or noun. E.g., "I am bold, because he emboldened me." "He is flaming mad, because she inflamed the situation."
"The house is inflammable, as it can be inflamed" - correct, but confusing because of the common use of 'in' to mean 'not' (for example 'inaccessible' means 'not accessible'), so for the vast majority of people 'inflammable' at first glance means 'not flammable'. So 'flammable' has largely replaced 'inflammable' to prevent a dangerously ambiguous term.
Also, 'inflamed' itself has recently been getting replaced by 'flamed' - as in much Slashdot usage. (I think that to 'flame' somebody is to cause them to become 'inflamed'. But 'inflamed' still has its place - "George inflamed the situation by suggesting that Peter was a dork. So then Peter became inflamed with rage, and (!) flamed George on Facebook." (!) -> new usage.
For whatever reason, English speakers have a strong propensity for shortening things. (I don't know about other languages.) So flammable and its friends are going to replace inflammable, and in fact already have.
Funny thing, all their Windows and Mac desktops are already running NTP. By default, IIRC they automatically use servers at MS and Apple respectively. Linux boxes use the NTP Pool, which IMHO is better but may not be ideal for a hospital.
You apparently don't understand how NTP works. I've been using it in dozens of places for 20-odd years, and have NEVER had the server lose the time. For one thing, one never depends on a single server. The entire protocol is based on smartly balancing the information from multiple servers, ideally (but not necessarily) including multiple local servers on the LAN. If the network goes down, every machine running NTP uses its already-created drift factor to maintain the time as closely as it can, usually within a second every day or better. NTP also supports using one's own a hard-realtime physical clock which could be GPS, or one's own atomic clock, etc., either independently or in conjunction with remote servers, so it's not necessary to go outside the LAN. I think it's even possible to use the clock signals maintained by the US NIST, WWV, albeit less accurately than over the net.
So if done at least half-assedly correctly, the only way someone is going to inject wrong time is to get access to the internal NTP servers on the LAN. And if the time is changed too quickly on the server, all of the clients will reject the server as unreliable and maintain their own time until things get straightened out.
IOW, NTP is remarkably robust. All those issues that you or I could think of were worked out by the creators of the protocol, for use in situations including military requirements.
It's even possible to have a local server on the LAN periodically dial up a remote server and ask the time. This isn't very practical but it is doable.
And how do you go back in time and fix all existing machines, and who pays for it. Even in a new machine this is expensive in an era when everyone's trying to cut costs.
True dat. This is really the big problem. I worked on an ICU monitor system design many years ago (1978 IIRC). The design was cool, total cost of development and productizing back then would have been maybe $100K. But the company discovered that it would cost several $million to get through the various levels of certification and approval to allow hospitals to use it. And once it's developed, even a resistor change would have required the same process again. Based on the projected market, amortizing the cost of certification would almost triple the manufacturing cost. And the small company just didn't have a few $million to risk on this project.
Medical device manufacturing might as well be government contracting, as it requires the vendors to jump through the same hoops. Most companies just don't want to bother, and those who do amortize the excessive costs across the relatively small number of units. Then add on marketing and other costs, then some profit, and every device becomes like the medical equivalent of a custom Bugatti.
I went to a security conference back in 2000, where the keynote speaker (A Navy guy) discussed their tests of social engineering. They found that the average cost for getting a sysadmin to open up the data center and access to the systems was only $7000 - at Fortune 500 companies, not just the little companies. Of course security awareness and practice has been improved greatly since then (I hope).
+1. Most folks don't realize what a PITA it is to work on a government contract. It affects every element of your business, so for most companies it is just not worth doing. This becomes an effective 'barrier to entry', so those companies that are tuned and structured to work for the government can price things in a much less competitive way. And that tuning and structuring does have a significant cost, so things are more expensive to produce.
A decade or two ago I read about a guy who lived out in the boonies, and for some reason couldn't get or afford firewood one year. So he subscribed to every junk mail and catalog he could get, and used that in his wood stove. Stayed warm all winter, and helped support USPS!:D
Slashdot Mirror
In fairness, the cost of sales for many industries is on the order of 45% to 55%, especially anything related to high tech. Actual manufacturing costs are generally around 20% - if not, the company is likely to lose money. The major exceptions are commodity items, and extremely competitive markets. Even in the highest of high tech the cost of R&D plus engineering is rarely more than 2-3%.
When I went through sales training at a company that then 'owned' the computer graphics market and much of the higher-end test equipment market, when evaluating a new product they first worked out what the supply/demand curve for the product was - what price point would maximize profits on that product. Then, if they couldn't manufacture the product for less than 20% of that, they didn't build it - there was no profit in it.
Note that the price does not depend on the cost - almost no sane business does that. The price depends on the market, the decision to build it depends on the relation between price and cost.
Here's how the equation generally works out, for most tech industries: 50% of retail = cost of sales; 20-25% profit; 5-10% admin; 10-20% insurance, manufacturing, operations, engineering, everything else including mowing the lawn outside the building.
One modern difference - using contract manufacturers like Foxconn means that the company can force the cost of manufacturing down to the point where only the leanest survive. So contract builders run on much smaller margins, but hopefully make it up on volume.
This is analogous to how grocery stores work - a grocery store's margin on most items is quite small, generally 2% or 3%. But cash flow through the store is immense - a typical grocery store may clear $1 million per week - not bad for 30 mostly low-paid employees. So while return on cash flow is small, return on equity is good. 30 employees times, (guessing) $40,000 fully loaded annual cost is $1,200,000 per year. Add the amortized cost of the store and inventory - say $5 million per year, which is all part of the base cost. Finally 3% of $52 million (annual revenues) is $1.5 million profit per year. So while profit on the books looks like 3%, profit of interest to the investors is more like $1.5 million / $7.5 million or 20% on equity. The biggest risk in this model is that efficiency and waste become hugely important - a small drop in efficiency or increase in costs acts as leverage to cause a huge drop in return on equity. [It's been a while since I've looked at this stuff but I think this is more or less useful, if not technically completely correct.]
Thanks! That was an illuminating article, and it led me further to the discussion of corporate personhood. I think it's worthwhile for all to learn more about what is, and what isn't, included in this notion. As the latter article notes,
The basis for allowing corporations to assert protection under the U.S. Constitution is that they are organizations of people, and that people should not be deprived of their constitutional rights when they act collectively.[5] In this view, treating corporations as "persons" is a convenient legal fiction that allows corporations to sue and to be sued, provides a single entity for easier taxation and regulation, simplifies complex transactions that would otherwise involve, in the case of large corporations, thousands of people, and that protects the individual rights of the shareholders as well as the right of association.
Generally, corporations are not able to claim constitutional protections that would not otherwise be available to persons acting as a group. For example, the Supreme Court has not recognized a Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination for a corporation, since that right can be exercised only on an individual basis. In United States v. Sourapas and Crest Beverage Company, "[a]ppellants [suggested] that the use of the word "taxpayer" several times in the regulations requires that the fifth-amendment self-incrimination warning be given to a corporation." The Court did not agree.[6]
Since the Supreme Court's ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission in 2010, upholding the rights of corporations to make political expenditures under the First Amendment, there have been several calls for a US Constitutional amendment to abolish Corporate Personhood. [7] The Citizens United majority opinion makes no reference to corporate personhood or to the Fourteenth Amendment.
As I alluded in my blathering, I think at this point that they would just adopt the viewpoint that it would be too disruptive and would be a threat to the country to make such a substantial change. I forget what the actual phrasing is, but they've used it in defense-related cases and espionage cases before. I'm not sure if it's been used in economic or civil cases before. But everyone from your local grade school (does it have an associated non-profit?) to literally every college and university, every one of the 30,000 publicly held companies and the thousands of other entities from unions to the United Way would be lobbying against changing it now regardless of its theoretical status.
Consider this scenario: you, I and Jack down the street decide to set up a neighborhood association that would, among other things, work with the City to get street lights put in on our block. Under present law, that neighborhood association is most likely a corporate entity within the meaning of the precedent. If the association were to lose its personhood, it would have no right to talk to the City. All such attempts to organize in order to make the political process more efficient would be illegal - we would be restricted to individually sending letters without formal coordination. It's arguable that even an individual buying political ads on the radio would be illegal, because the radio company would no longer have any free speech rights to broadcast those ads (that would be an interesting court case!) So beyond the sheer improbability of this ever being changed in a significant way, it's not at all obvious that it's a good idea.
While most of the attention has been on how the 'evil corporations' will be able to spend unlimited money to promote their evil schemes, we must recall that everyone (whether 'human' or 'person') is not on the same side. Given almost any issue, there are people/entities at all wealth status on both sides. George Soros has been spending millions if not billions to support his particular political viewpoint, which is not at all congruent with the viewpoint of, say, Donald Trump - so much of their respective $zillions effectively cancel out. What goes away is the continually changing, sleazy structure of shady money that has been shuffling through the system via a plethora of hidden, often illegal, schemes (see Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall control of New York politics for most of a century.) So I think things will all level out fairly quickly. the question will be whether the vast majority of us will be willing to put money into their particular causes.
No. They can sell it but the revenue would be taxable income. Broadly similarly if you own a computer for your consulting business you can 'depreciate' it (mark down the value) a certain amount each year as its value in the real world declines, and take that amount off your income for the year. Then if you sell it, the income from selling it, minus the remaining un-depreciated value, is income that you have to pay taxes on. If you sell it for less than the depreciated value then you can take the difference off your income for tax purposes.
It's concerning how unpopular this idea is and yet it still remains policy. Is it political suicide to speak out against corporate personhood, or would a law limiting personhood to individual citizens be unconstitutional?
It should be noted that this was not the result of political (i.e., congressional, etc.) action but a Supreme Court decision in the mid-late 1800s (1870-something?) - I'm too lazy to look up the date. So reversing it at this time would require the Supreme Court reversing itself on a decision that has been in place for 140 years or so, thereby completely disrupting a vast body of law that is based on it and underpins the entire economic, political and legal system of the US, or a constitutional amendment. I can not think offhand of any institution whether governmental or commercial or other that does not now intimately depend on that structure. Therefore all those institutions would oppose any significant change as disruptive to their business model and/or worldview. So right or wrong and no matter how romantically attractive the notion, it's pretty much not going to change in any drastic way.
It may be possible to tweak the way in which such things are handled - fiddling around the edges, so to speak. While the Citizens United case seems to be huge, it's really just one of those 'around the edges' things - the impact in the long run will be much less than it appears now - I think the major impact will be much greater transparency of where the money actually comes from, since there's little legal reason to hide the money trail as has been done for many decades. (Look up 'walking around money', or 'soft money' - vast sums of cash used to get handed out by gangs, unions and corporations to operatives who would hand it out on the street to people who agreed to vote a certain way.) With regard to the corporate-person structure itself, that horse left the barn a long, long time ago. And reading a synopsis of the original decision (or the CU decision that derives from the original), it's hard to argue with it on legal grounds (IANAL). Sometimes we just have to deal with things as they are.
I like C. I also drive a car with a manual transmission, and change my own oil, spark plugs, and brake pads.
Regrinding transmission gears or building carburetors is like programming in assembler (or maybe even writing machine code with a hex editor).
However, that's not to say that I don't also like high-level languages. I especially like C# for the clean object-orientation, plus the syntactic sugar (e.g. accessor methods) and operator overloading that Java doesn't have (not a fan of the Microsoftness, though). MATLAB/Octave is really convenient for mathematical stuff, too.
And I think that's a very good attitude. :)
I still like my analogy. For most of the programming I do, the problem I am solving can best be viewed as exploring an unknown space (the logical space within which the problem resides), looking for a reasonably efficient, reliable and repeatable path to the desired solution locus. I may incorporate a wide variety of mechanisms, even sometimes including running shell programs or database queries via ssh on remote machines. This could all be theoretically done by writing everything in C, but there is no reason - especially considering that the environments that I am working with may change radically without notice, so the entire application has to be restructured as fast as possible. Using dynamic languages is certainly in this case the correct solution (I won't go into which one is best.)
So for me, the mechanicing is just part of the navigational problem - deciding which wrench to use and so forth.
Having been in this business now since the days when most computer graphics programs were written in FORTRAN, (my very first language was ALGOL 68) IMHO even such things as device drivers are also easily viewed in this navigational paradigm. As an interesting example, the old Burroughs mainframes and operating systems were first built (together) entirely in software, using mostly formal methods. Then the parts of the system that required the most speed were implemented in hardware. Thus the 'mechanicing' was really just part of the navigation. (However there is the black art of micro-coding, where the timing idiosyncracies require a bit of 'creative destruction' on the formal model.)
The mostly-dynamic languages I use, in fairness, are all largely themselves written in C so could be considered mere C applications, in the purest sense - the compilers or interpreters of few modern languages are themselves written in the target language as the original C was. But regardless, for nearly all programming tasks, even so-called 'bare iron' problems of interfacing to strange hardware, a well-defined model of the hardware and of the problem should be enough for a smart 'compiler' (for lack of a better term) should be able to figure out how to build the driver with little or no 'memory pokery' by a programmer. The fact that C programming is still widespread is a testament to the insufficiency of our tools.
So, do you build your own carburetors? How often do you regrind the gears in your car's transmission?
The above may seem silly (and not meaning to incite), but your argument is essentially that anyone who can't build a model T in their garage is incompetent to drive a car.
Considering that a modern microprocessor has on the order of 2 billion transistors with many capabilities that used to defined by simple compilers and operating systems such as memory management, multiprocessor scheduling, programming for such machinery is a far cry from programming a 6800 - itself a bit past the usual assemblage of 7400-series chips. Compilers, linkers and future program generation systems must handle the complexities, which are already well beyond any individual programmer's capabilities to write optimal code for, just as modern fuel injection systems provide much better engine control than any carburetor, much less any manual spark-gap and fuel mixture control. It might be fun and entertaining to adjust the fuel mixture on your Model T as you drive in the parade, but it is not appropriate for driving a car with maximum efficiency on the freeway and in town.
Continuing to use what has been described as a 'structured PDP-11 macro-assembler' for general purpose applications programming is like driving a Model T on the turnpike. And it's arguable that even for embedded use an AI-based program generator should by now be able to optimize better than almost every human programmer in nearly every case. If not, then that area of research is overdue for deeper study.
requires knowledge and measuring tools the average public doesn't have.
Well, that's the point, isn't it? :D
All those measures are based on the meter, which is some fraction of the earth's diameter or some such foolishness. :) Plus, of course, the number of digits on one's hand, which makes no sense. Either a pure binary system (used as hexadecimal), or base 12, which has many more opportunities for fractions, would be better. And I'm sure I could come up with a better measure than Celcius - I recently read an interesting analysis of why Fahrenheit had its own pretty good justifications but I don't recall what they were.
Of course one big difference - the fuel line for that 8cyl was a firehose compared to the straw going to the w16!
When we start populating space, I'm going to lobby for creation of an entirely new system of units, not based on any Earth measure (the meter was originally based on something like the distance from the equator to the pole - just as silly as the length of the king's foot!) And it will be completely incompatible with any of those ancient measures the groundlubbers depended on. I think we'll start with a certain round number of wavelengths of a particular frequency of light in free space - like the frequency of a particular electron transition of cesium. The time it takes for this many wavelengths to pass a certain point would be the fundamental time unit. And it will all be in either base 12 or 16 - none of this foolish base-10 nonsense.
Mass - that's already a problem. I propose basing mass on a physical reaction involving a Bose-Einstein condensate containing precisely 1000 atoms - perhaps based on a relative measure of repulsion or attraction for two different size condensates. Ideally, it would be something that can only be measured outside of significant localized gravitational fields - just to make it difficult for non-Spacers.
Ahh, the good old days - 12 inch 10 MB hard drives, and if you forgot to 'park' the head before shutdown, bad things would happen. And before that, the 'washing machine' Winchester - 5 HP stepping motors to move the heads, the drive could walk across the floor if the heads moved back and forth in resonance. And the IBM 1130, whose 1 MB 14 inch(?) removable drive had a one second mean seek time. ... I know I had a lawn somewhere. Now where did I put it?
You just reminded me of the Lifter Project. There is some cool video of these things, which generate lift from electrostatic effects on the air. Almost totally silent (some hum is apparently sometimes noticeable), no moving parts. One of the experiments even flew a mouse. Lift is apparently on the order of one gram per watt (if I recall from looking into this about five years ago). Contrary to the strong beliefs of some of the experimenters, there is no evidence that it works in space - i.e., it is not what drives flying saucers. But I still think that the method might be usable to drive an airship.
Not only that, this test isn't very realistic as far as helicopters are concerned: they're not far enough away from the ground. Close to the ground, you get the in-ground hover effect, which reduces the amount of power you need to stay aloft. Over 10 feet or so, you go into out-of-ground effect, and then your power requirements increase significantly. In-ground effect is only useful for taxiing to your runway or helipad; if you want to hover anywhere else, you're generally doing it out-of-ground. So even a fit human will have a much harder time keeping that up for long, even with a zero-mass machine. There's a reason birds have hollow bones, and why even hummingbirds (which hover rather than glide) have very limited flight durations, despite their tiny size and mass.
Yes, this is what I was going to mention. Anyone who flies small planes knows about ground effect (or see 'Ekranoplan' for a large-scale Russian version and some interesting video.) The rotor blades in this test never got more than about a foot off the fIoor. IIRC ground effect applies decreasingly with height up to about the wingspan. Even the 10 foot criteria is still well within the blade diameter, but I wouldn't argue at that point. Of course, it's still a very cool achievement of both technology and human effort.
One thing I've wondered - it seems to me that a rowing motion would enlist more of a body's muscular resources - why use hand and foot pedals?
I don't know about any statutes, but there is a long standing body of civil litigation regarding the fiduciary responsibility of corporate management, primarily to shareholders but also to others, to a lesser extent. Companies are sued very often for failing to maximize shareholder value either in the short term (such as agreeing to sell the company at too low a price) or longer term (following ineffective strategies that result in a drop, or even too small an increase, in share price.)
So while there may be no 'law' on the books, there is plenty of legal muscle behind it. As one SCOTUS justice put it over 100 years ago, (paraphrasing another common sentiment from, IIRC, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence), the corporate management should pledge its wealth, its life and its holy honor to protect the shareholders.
I personally think that the managementhave a wider responsibility as well (perhaps not as strongly) to the other stakeholders - workers, community, environment, etc. But bottom line - any organization (whether for-profit or not-for-profit, or even governmental) has to 'make a profit' (even if it's only 1c), as if an organization loses money each year it can not survive to do whatever its mission is. If a policeperson is not paid enough to eat to sustain him/herself and starves to death, how much policework can he/she do?
I suppose it's worth noting that back in the days of the original Mac, the rounded rectangles for windows on the screen were completely new. In fact this generated a big argument between Steve Jobs and the head designer, whose name I forget just now. The designer said, "WTF do we need rounded corners on the windows - nobody does that", and Jobs took him outside to look at all the road signs and other uses. And he insisted. So Macs had rounded rectangles. This really was the first time any window-based OS (there were a few by then - I worked on one workstation called the Perq) had rounded rectangles.
So rounded rectangles were actually a new design concept at least for computer software in 1984. But Apple should have patented it then, in which case the patent would have run out long ago. Extending the concept to the physical device was arguably not a brilliant invention - most human-rated devices have rounded corners, for the practical reasons you mention. So I agree with your last statement - rounded rectangles as a device design are either old news, or trivial, or both. But I dunno what the actual patent says, this being /. and all.
go home and practice on your home Linux network
- or your home Windows or Mac network - both of them also use NTP, by default using MS and Apple servers respectively. Or at least that's my recollection.
Oddly enough, inflammable is the originally correct term. It means 'able to be inflamed'. Flammable is a relatively recent colloquialism - I think the 1950s.
There are many English words that start with a modifying prefix, like 'engorged', 'emboldened', 'incensed', 'encouraged', etc. (I think this is all from Latin) The idea is to make a verb out of an adjective or noun. E.g., "I am bold, because he emboldened me." "He is flaming mad, because she inflamed the situation."
"The house is inflammable, as it can be inflamed" - correct, but confusing because of the common use of 'in' to mean 'not' (for example 'inaccessible' means 'not accessible'), so for the vast majority of people 'inflammable' at first glance means 'not flammable'. So 'flammable' has largely replaced 'inflammable' to prevent a dangerously ambiguous term.
Also, 'inflamed' itself has recently been getting replaced by 'flamed' - as in much Slashdot usage. (I think that to 'flame' somebody is to cause them to become 'inflamed'. But 'inflamed' still has its place - "George inflamed the situation by suggesting that Peter was a dork. So then Peter became inflamed with rage, and (!) flamed George on Facebook." (!) -> new usage.
For whatever reason, English speakers have a strong propensity for shortening things. (I don't know about other languages.) So flammable and its friends are going to replace inflammable, and in fact already have.
Funny thing, all their Windows and Mac desktops are already running NTP. By default, IIRC they automatically use servers at MS and Apple respectively. Linux boxes use the NTP Pool, which IMHO is better but may not be ideal for a hospital.
You apparently don't understand how NTP works. I've been using it in dozens of places for 20-odd years, and have NEVER had the server lose the time. For one thing, one never depends on a single server. The entire protocol is based on smartly balancing the information from multiple servers, ideally (but not necessarily) including multiple local servers on the LAN. If the network goes down, every machine running NTP uses its already-created drift factor to maintain the time as closely as it can, usually within a second every day or better. NTP also supports using one's own a hard-realtime physical clock which could be GPS, or one's own atomic clock, etc., either independently or in conjunction with remote servers, so it's not necessary to go outside the LAN. I think it's even possible to use the clock signals maintained by the US NIST, WWV, albeit less accurately than over the net.
So if done at least half-assedly correctly, the only way someone is going to inject wrong time is to get access to the internal NTP servers on the LAN. And if the time is changed too quickly on the server, all of the clients will reject the server as unreliable and maintain their own time until things get straightened out.
IOW, NTP is remarkably robust. All those issues that you or I could think of were worked out by the creators of the protocol, for use in situations including military requirements.
It's even possible to have a local server on the LAN periodically dial up a remote server and ask the time. This isn't very practical but it is doable.
And how do you go back in time and fix all existing machines, and who pays for it. Even in a new machine this is expensive in an era when everyone's trying to cut costs.
True dat. This is really the big problem. I worked on an ICU monitor system design many years ago (1978 IIRC). The design was cool, total cost of development and productizing back then would have been maybe $100K. But the company discovered that it would cost several $million to get through the various levels of certification and approval to allow hospitals to use it. And once it's developed, even a resistor change would have required the same process again. Based on the projected market, amortizing the cost of certification would almost triple the manufacturing cost. And the small company just didn't have a few $million to risk on this project.
Medical device manufacturing might as well be government contracting, as it requires the vendors to jump through the same hoops. Most companies just don't want to bother, and those who do amortize the excessive costs across the relatively small number of units. Then add on marketing and other costs, then some profit, and every device becomes like the medical equivalent of a custom Bugatti.
I went to a security conference back in 2000, where the keynote speaker (A Navy guy) discussed their tests of social engineering. They found that the average cost for getting a sysadmin to open up the data center and access to the systems was only $7000 - at Fortune 500 companies, not just the little companies. Of course security awareness and practice has been improved greatly since then (I hope).
+1. Most folks don't realize what a PITA it is to work on a government contract. It affects every element of your business, so for most companies it is just not worth doing. This becomes an effective 'barrier to entry', so those companies that are tuned and structured to work for the government can price things in a much less competitive way. And that tuning and structuring does have a significant cost, so things are more expensive to produce.
A decade or two ago I read about a guy who lived out in the boonies, and for some reason couldn't get or afford firewood one year. So he subscribed to every junk mail and catalog he could get, and used that in his wood stove. Stayed warm all winter, and helped support USPS! :D