I really disagree. That is about a $10/hr rate. At the peak of the.com boom I made $14/hr as an intern. There are also many internships done through schools that pay nada. Zero. If you are lucky, you get 3 credits. The money alone may not attract the best of the best, but having google and open source work on your resume will. Even when I was in college (during the.com boom) pay was really a small factor in deciding an internship. It was all about experience and the likelihood of getting hired full time afterwards at a quality company.
You are correct. The FAA ensures that there is no market since they will not let you carry out commercial (or even private) aviation unless you follow very strict standards. Ever notice how much a jet costs though? Would you be willing to pay ten times the amount you currently do for software if it used formal verification methods to ensure that it was bug free?
I would agree with you, but you are leaving out a very important piece of the picture- Musicians themselves make very little money off of their records if they make any money at all, unless they are huge stars. Even for the megastars, album sales usually make up a small percentage of their income. The real source of income is from doing shows. This is how they put food on the table, or gas in their ferrari's. I forget the exact numbers, but I do remember the break even points for most albums is around the 1 million mark.
So what Harvey Danger and others are doing by putting their music directly on the internet for free is cutting the record label out of the equation. While record labels are an important part of the industry since they front the necessary money to undiscovered bands to record their records, they are in no way irreplaceable. I could very easily see contracts being shifted towards the labels getting x% of live show proceeds. The labels would still shoulder the risk, but their bands get far more exposure since people could hear the music without having to pay $15 for a CD or pay radio station's extortion money to get on its playlists. Speaking of which, this model would also reduce or eliminate the payola system currently in place for radio stations since they won't be needed to get their bands exposure.
Mp3's have already created "grass roots" stars, even though I am confident the labels will deny that mp3's had any part. Howie Day and John Mayer were well known among my friends in college well (about a year) before they were signed, and these were top 40 types, not the types that like to impress people by naming some shitty obscure band. We listened to them by trading mp3's of their live performances and then going to their shows (which in those times were at small cheap venues).
So no I really don't believe that a musician having their work available for free is going to hurt them.
I don't really understand why people get so hung up about having TA's teach classes, particularly lower level undergrad classes. The typical professor at my college had a minimal grasp of effectively communicating even if English was his first language, and even if they did, they often had few teaching skills or an ability to identify where students were having problems. I mean with professors, I must have heard the phrase "obviously this is trivial" about 100 times over the course of my 4 years in undergrad, and there were scant few times that I agreed with them. I only had one TA teach a course that did not have a firm grasp of the material, and ironically enough that was for a course called "statistics in psychology" I took for fun that was taught by the psych department.
A case from personal experience: I was a TA for an intro to CS class that had a 400+ person lecture and then a lab section with about 20 or so students. It was in C++, and was intended for CS majors, but also fulfilled one of the requirements for business majors. Many of the students had never done any programming, aside from some web work. Some of the students were only bascially competent using a computer. Having only recently (within 2 years) learned C++, I remembered well where I had the most trouble applying concepts. Compiler messages can be pretty daunting to a beginner (wtf is a parse error, a syntax error, symbol not found?!). I explained these to the class. When classes and oop was introduced, they understood the basic concepts but the professor only glossed over "trivial" things such as how to seperate code into.h and.cpp files and how to use the objects themselves. Several students thanked me after the class and said they would have flunked the course had I not explained to them the practical things they needed to know.
Professors are almost always very smart people, but they are rarely good teachers.
If youre using any encyclopedia for "detailed academic research" and not just as a starting point to get a general overview of a subject, I have to wonder if you have any place doing academic research at all.
I agree with you on some levels, but I feel that current phones are really just stepping stones allowing development of the technology that will allow you to have a good all in one device. I think we are still 5-10 years off from this "good" device, but considering moore's law and the ever increasing densities of removable storage, and we will be there soon. The big laggards seem to be battery capacity and wireless speeds. And of course there will probably always be tradeoffs between phone size (small = optimal) and display size (large = optimal). I am pretty sure most consumers would trade off size for the ability to surf the web easily and cheaply, and also be able to play decent games.
Then again, why phone manufacturers don't have different lines of phones to cater to those who just want to make friggen calls on their phones and those who want the kitchen sink thrown in is a good question. I get the feeling that the phone companies want to throw all the goodies down our throat so that we get used to them and will eventually cough up money every time we want to use every little thing on our phone.
I really don't understand why dupes really get under people's skin so much. I mean yeah its a minor inconvenience when youre sitting there jonesing after an hour and compulsively hitting refresh waiting for that next story, and youve already read it, but.... Remember. Slashcode (http://www.slashcode.com/) is open source. This is an open source community. If it really gets to you so damn bad, add a feature to slashcode that works so well that all the editor has to do is click a button that says "check for dupes!" and poof it finds all the likely dupes.
Anything less, and youre really just being a hypocrite imho. Do it, and you will forever have slashdot bragging rights that you saved the dupes.
I agree. Every time I read one of those "cluck-cluck-cluck, The sky is falling!" articles about how the US is falling behind in technology, I wonder if the problem lies not in the US education system, but in the fact that there is far less corporate training available. It used to be that you could start at the bottom and work (train) your way up based not on skills already posessed, but on your ability to work hard. It seems to be a very rare thing these days. The risk and cost of training for a better position has been passed on to the worker, and I would say to the detriment of all.
I find it interesting that people can be so enthralled by something that instead of seeing something as flawed and throwing it out, they just rearrange their view on it (IE "its not literal, its metaphorical and a guide to live your life"). Don't think you the message is just wrong at that point? I am not knocking using religion to try and guide your morals and a vehicle to being a better person, but I find it very difficult to accept the fact that there is this book, it is in many senses handed to us from God and is the holiest of holy documents in common posession, yet we can pick and choose what we want to get out of it and accept. What is going to happen when we find other forms of life, maybe even civilizations? When does the Bible become completely obsolete and we finally realize the mistake we made in revolving civilizations around it?
To me, its almost like looking at a business that failed because it kept making obsolete parts, but looking back on it and saying "they made the best damn buggy whips out there!" Of course in this case, religion is still alive and kicking.
Im not sure if you are being serious or not... but I'll bite either way.
He is speaking from a business/enterprise perspective and is talking about web applications (IE google maps, database search tools, etc.). Roll the clock back 10 years. Client/Server was the major buzzword in organizations. You have a database of customers, and a salesforce that wants the data in it. So you create a gui front end that can access it. The only problem is, how do you deploy this across the company? If you have hundreds of users, getting them all to install the executable is something of a nightmare (especially if its a required upgrade). Even if it is not required, if a user has a problem with the application, you have to track down what version they are using and reproduce it, and probably tell them its fixed in version X.
So now back to today... We have a web app that accesses this DB. When we want to roll out a new version, we update it on the server and... we're done. Thats it. All the user needs to do is access the url like they have always done. No installation, no more support hassles, and nothing needs to be done on the users end. That is the big problem that is solved. The apps that he is talking about are web apps, not browsers and similar programs.
To some extent, I think I have to say youre speaking for yourself. There are some jobs out there. You just have to compete for them, and be good at what you do. I went to a state school in NY, few of my classmates were good at what they did. Most of them either could not find jobs, or did some menial stuff for awhile. However, my smarter friends all got decent jobs and are doing well now.
You know, if you have a 2.7 gpa with a business degree, its not so easy to find a decent job either, in any "normal" economy.
You have known vulnerabilities in your house that are wide open for everyone to see, yet they are not "patched". Your windows are wide open to having a brick smash through them, your locks may be easily picked. You may slip and leave your door open on occasion. I disagree that just having a port open with a service running that has a known vulnerability (and patch) is the same thing as leaving the door open. They have to connect to your machine, they have to interact with your machine in an unintended way to exploit a vulnerability. To me, "leaving the door open" would be something on the level of running a webserver on port 80 and leaving your root password on your default webpage.
Even using your criteria, if I walk out of my front door and leave it open, its my fault that someone came and robbed me? I do accept the fact that it is stupid to leave your posessions in an openly unsecured state, but at the same time how do you transfer blame from the attacker who broke the law to the person who was made a victim.
So if I create a really crude device to steal and rob your neighborhoods houses en mass (say a lockpick made out of a piece of wire), then its your fault for implementing poor security right?
Or is it maybe the lock manufacturers for implementing a poor device? Or maybe the window manufacturers for not using breakproof glass?
Do you see the absurdity of this argument? If not, do you have bars on all your windows and windowless steel doors with sophisticated locks at your house?
This is just a part of language evolution. You are defending a standard that tries define something that is fluid at best. You are fighting the equivalent of the drug war, language does not want to stay static, it wants to be free and pick up new additions, and lose old usages, and the most comfortable spellings and pronunciations will prevail. Most people concatenate "a lot" in their speech, to the point where it is one word. So they do this when writing too. I have never read the word "alot" or "definately" and spent an iota of extra brain power deciphering it. By my definition, they have still communicated clearly and coherently to me.
The english language changes. Trying to constrain the language by putting a bunch of rules on what is and what is not proper is about as effective as trying to get a kitten to stay in one spot all day.
Here is a stat I found from 1924 listing the components of the DJIA Index (its not 100 years ago, but its only 20 or so companies so it proves the point).
American Can American Car & Foundry American Locomotive American Smelting American Sugar American Telephone & Telegraph - still here. American Tobacco Anaconda Copper - still around Baldwin Locomotive Du Pont - still here General Electric -still here and kicking ass Mack Trucks -still here Republic Iron & Steel Sears Roebuck & Co. -still here. Studebaker U.S. Rubber U.S. Steel -still here Utah Copper Western Union -still here Westinghouse -still here
I see 7 that I fully recognize. This list somehow does not even include some I would think would be on there like standard oil (exxon), and union pacific and I am fairly certain that if you looked into the backgrounds of some of these companies they just have morphed into something else.
I am not saying they are all thriving today, but they are all around and are all still billion dollar corporations.
Yikes... still not getting it. Cash means... cash in the bank. Like you have X dollars in your account, we shall use $100 in the example.
Now lets say you sold yourself, and issued shares of yourself to others. Lets say you have 10 shares outstanding that the market is willing to pay $1000 each for. Your market capitalization is $10,000. presumably the market has accounted for the fact that you have $100 in assets in your account. So this year, you spent $3 more than you took in. Your account still has $97 in it. The investors in you panic and sell your shares all the way down to $.01. This sucks, but you still have $97 in your account. if someone comes along and buys those 10 shares, he has essentially bought $97 for 10 cents. Theoretically, the share price should not have dropped below $9.70.
This is why many old giant companies that have gone out of business (Grumman comes to mind, Kmart more recently) never had their share price go to 0 or anywhere close. Their assets (real estate, facilities, patents, useful technology and machinery, etc) were in summation worth many billions of dollars and therefore the price of the stock floated at the (Worth of assets)/(#Shares outstanding) mark.
The stock price, which makes Bill and the shareholders happy, has no real effect on the operation of the company. They have so much cash in reserve that it is not necessary for them to sell new shares into the market to stay afloat. If MS stock goes to 0, they still have $56 billion (or whatever the figure is) in the bank to play with.
No, I think you are mistaking cash for net worth. MS has (last I heard, though before the big dividend) $56 Billion in cash, where cash is defined as literal money in the bank and short term low risk investments (T-bills, etc). MS's net worth is far higher.
Unlike other respondents I will even challenge the idea that "popular" "hero" professions like policeman and firefighters are understaffed, underpaid and overworked. Police departments love to toss around that they are understaffed. Look at the amount of overtime that any sizable police force pays out. It is friggen ridiculous. The amount of time spent filling out paperwork is ridiculous- it is designed to be inefficient and keep more officers doing busy work. For example, I was in the central building where they process and test DWI arrests. There was about 20 terminals from 1997 in there each with a phone line hooked up to them using what appeared to be a 28.8 modem. They ran some kind of terminal application on those systems that was slow as molasses. The cost savings they could have achieved by scrapping all those phone lines, installing a local area network with ethernet and then sharing a broadband connection would be enough that the cost of the network would probably pay for itself in a month. This is not even including the reduced time spent by each officer just sitting there and waiting for the application to get the data over the line. Then lets also talk about the ungodly amount of paperwork, most of which is entirely repetitive. If they converted those forms to pdf, and then just created a simple web application that any php monkey could create to populate these forms with the common information and then allow you to print them all out, you would again be talking about huge gains in productivity. And these guys are not "underpaid" by any means. They are one of the highest paid forces in the nation (nassau county) and most will never pull a gun in their entire careers. Even a NYC police officer gets to retire with a full pension after 20 years. Their "salary" may be low, but the benefits certainly make up for it.
Underpaid? Understaffed. pfffft. You're drinking all the kool-aid they are giving you.
I agree with you. I would also like to add that I think with this generation of consoles, we are going to get more of a feeling that console hardware has reached a "good enough" state that the next next generation is not going to be so highly anticipated. I already have this feeling about this upcoming generation- I am looking forward to it, but I am not sitting on the edge of my seat nor do I forsee buying one for at least a year after it releases.
Personally, the PS2 is almost "good enough" for me. Aside from the late 90's era "jaggies" that you see in games, I think the graphics are damn good. I have never on any PS2 game said to myself "ugh, that looks like crap". Considering the level of photorealism now achieved, I just do not see how I am going to be completely wowed by this generation of consoles like I have previously. I am hoping to be pleasantly surprised though.
First, I think you might be surprised at how many newspapers get stuff straight off the AP wire and put it in their papers. Almost all local papers that cover national news do this.
Second, I am going to go under the assumption that the previous study was accurate. If this is true, the story selection the WSJ does is what makes it outstanding. You didn't see the relentless tabloid coverage of Terry Schiavo like you did on every newschannel and other newspaper. If they did cover it, it was a small article, discussing the underlying issues involved, not the back and forth volleying between the family and the husband. The articles are always intelligent, relevant, and informative. I often judge any non-financial articles based on whether or not they would be worth reading a day, a week, a month, a year, or many years from now and still have useful information. And in almost all cases, the full length articles to me have worth in the year-many year range.
You did not cite the study, so I am going to put some potential refutations here. First, how did they count "80%" of the articles? The wsj is comprised of what I call a good number of "full length" articles and then many many blurbs (IE: IBM beat, GM missed, oil was up, the dow was down, etc...). If you are talking article count, I wouldn't be all that surprised if 80% were off the wires. If we are talking word count, I would find that unbelievably difficult to believe.
I was always an avid NYtimes reader, and only started reading the WSJ after I got a job in finance two years ago. The NYTimes does some things better, and is often a lighter more enjoyable read, but the WSJ is far more informative and concise. The WSJ has the same quality of articles of the Sunday NYTimes Week in Review section, all week. If you want a "cut the crap and tell me whats really going on and important in the world" it just doesnt get better than the Wall Street Journal.
This is a big large engineering project which at this point has costs approaching the development of the space shuttle. They are attempting to fundamentally transform the city of Boston, and while this is a very honorable intention, have made the project into a mockery. It is years and billions of dollars overdue, and if you couldnt actually see the snail's pace of progress they are making, would be up there with Duke Nukem for vaporware awards.
While not as revolutionary as something like the tunnel between France and England, it is nonetheless very a large undertaking that is attempting to transform a city. It has a very interesting history, as Boston's traffic problems in many ways stem from its attempt to be a "city of the future" and building highways/skyways cutting through the city before the federal government started building/funding interstates.
In summary, if large engineering projects, urban planning and traffic engineering, local politics interacting with national politics, project management, and case studies in how projects grossly overrun their projected costs interest you, this should interest you even if you were not previously aware of the Big Dig.
(Note: I find this quite interesting and I live over 500 miles away)
If you have an HD box, generally you have the option of composite, component, and DVI outputs. Possibly a coax one too. There are also optical and/or coax digital audio outputs too.
You plug one of the outputs into your tv, which on high end sets there are usually a plethora of (IMHO too many because its more convenient to plug these devices into a reciever which then has one output to the TV.
On an HDTV ready set, again you just use one of the many inputs other than the coax input.
Remove the possibility of recording? I don't know where you got that idea from, but as long as you have a recording device that can accept one of the inputs on your cable box, you can record.
Well, I have experienced four different providers in the past year (time warner in upstate ny, cablevision on LI, comcast in NJ, and RCN in NJ) and to get cable HDTV, each service needed you to use one of their boxes which have the tuner built in. This is not to say that you can't get it over the air, but presumably if youre buying a high end tv, you are going to be getting digital cable. For the low end market I agree with including tuners, but on high end HDTV's 40" and over, I would rather save the space, weight, and price and have the speakers and tuners left out. Its just a completely different market.
Slashdot Mirror
you didnt mention metroid in either list. Your geek license is removed.
to add a few more:
duckhunt
baseball stars
donkey kong jr.
cobra triangle
3d world runner
rad racer
rc pro-am
faxanadu
I really disagree. That is about a $10/hr rate. At the peak of the .com boom I made $14/hr as an intern. There are also many internships done through schools that pay nada. Zero. If you are lucky, you get 3 credits. The money alone may not attract the best of the best, but having google and open source work on your resume will. Even when I was in college (during the .com boom) pay was really a small factor in deciding an internship. It was all about experience and the likelihood of getting hired full time afterwards at a quality company.
You are correct. The FAA ensures that there is no market since they will not let you carry out commercial (or even private) aviation unless you follow very strict standards. Ever notice how much a jet costs though? Would you be willing to pay ten times the amount you currently do for software if it used formal verification methods to ensure that it was bug free?
I would agree with you, but you are leaving out a very important piece of the picture- Musicians themselves make very little money off of their records if they make any money at all, unless they are huge stars. Even for the megastars, album sales usually make up a small percentage of their income. The real source of income is from doing shows. This is how they put food on the table, or gas in their ferrari's. I forget the exact numbers, but I do remember the break even points for most albums is around the 1 million mark.
So what Harvey Danger and others are doing by putting their music directly on the internet for free is cutting the record label out of the equation. While record labels are an important part of the industry since they front the necessary money to undiscovered bands to record their records, they are in no way irreplaceable. I could very easily see contracts being shifted towards the labels getting x% of live show proceeds. The labels would still shoulder the risk, but their bands get far more exposure since people could hear the music without having to pay $15 for a CD or pay radio station's extortion money to get on its playlists. Speaking of which, this model would also reduce or eliminate the payola system currently in place for radio stations since they won't be needed to get their bands exposure.
Mp3's have already created "grass roots" stars, even though I am confident the labels will deny that mp3's had any part. Howie Day and John Mayer were well known among my friends in college well (about a year) before they were signed, and these were top 40 types, not the types that like to impress people by naming some shitty obscure band. We listened to them by trading mp3's of their live performances and then going to their shows (which in those times were at small cheap venues).
So no I really don't believe that a musician having their work available for free is going to hurt them.
Around here, we take pride in our 40%s, when the average is 20% -- numbers don't mean anything without context, after all.
Yeah, and its always a fun phone call home to mom trying to explain how awesome scoring 40% on a test is!
(my best antecdote on this is one class where the average was a 6, with a low of -3. The test was indeed out of 100).
I don't really understand why people get so hung up about having TA's teach classes, particularly lower level undergrad classes. The typical professor at my college had a minimal grasp of effectively communicating even if English was his first language, and even if they did, they often had few teaching skills or an ability to identify where students were having problems. I mean with professors, I must have heard the phrase "obviously this is trivial" about 100 times over the course of my 4 years in undergrad, and there were scant few times that I agreed with them. I only had one TA teach a course that did not have a firm grasp of the material, and ironically enough that was for a course called "statistics in psychology" I took for fun that was taught by the psych department.
.h and .cpp files and how to use the objects themselves. Several students thanked me after the class and said they would have flunked the course had I not explained to them the practical things they needed to know.
A case from personal experience:
I was a TA for an intro to CS class that had a 400+ person lecture and then a lab section with about 20 or so students. It was in C++, and was intended for CS majors, but also fulfilled one of the requirements for business majors. Many of the students had never done any programming, aside from some web work. Some of the students were only bascially competent using a computer. Having only recently (within 2 years) learned C++, I remembered well where I had the most trouble applying concepts. Compiler messages can be pretty daunting to a beginner (wtf is a parse error, a syntax error, symbol not found?!). I explained these to the class. When classes and oop was introduced, they understood the basic concepts but the professor only glossed over "trivial" things such as how to seperate code into
Professors are almost always very smart people, but they are rarely good teachers.
If youre using any encyclopedia for "detailed academic research" and not just as a starting point to get a general overview of a subject, I have to wonder if you have any place doing academic research at all.
I agree with you on some levels, but I feel that current phones are really just stepping stones allowing development of the technology that will allow you to have a good all in one device. I think we are still 5-10 years off from this "good" device, but considering moore's law and the ever increasing densities of removable storage, and we will be there soon. The big laggards seem to be battery capacity and wireless speeds. And of course there will probably always be tradeoffs between phone size (small = optimal) and display size (large = optimal). I am pretty sure most consumers would trade off size for the ability to surf the web easily and cheaply, and also be able to play decent games.
Then again, why phone manufacturers don't have different lines of phones to cater to those who just want to make friggen calls on their phones and those who want the kitchen sink thrown in is a good question. I get the feeling that the phone companies want to throw all the goodies down our throat so that we get used to them and will eventually cough up money every time we want to use every little thing on our phone.
I really don't understand why dupes really get under people's skin so much. I mean yeah its a minor inconvenience when youre sitting there jonesing after an hour and compulsively hitting refresh waiting for that next story, and youve already read it, but.... Remember. Slashcode (http://www.slashcode.com/) is open source. This is an open source community. If it really gets to you so damn bad, add a feature to slashcode that works so well that all the editor has to do is click a button that says "check for dupes!" and poof it finds all the likely dupes.
Anything less, and youre really just being a hypocrite imho. Do it, and you will forever have slashdot bragging rights that you saved the dupes.
I agree. Every time I read one of those "cluck-cluck-cluck, The sky is falling!" articles about how the US is falling behind in technology, I wonder if the problem lies not in the US education system, but in the fact that there is far less corporate training available. It used to be that you could start at the bottom and work (train) your way up based not on skills already posessed, but on your ability to work hard. It seems to be a very rare thing these days. The risk and cost of training for a better position has been passed on to the worker, and I would say to the detriment of all.
I find it interesting that people can be so enthralled by something that instead of seeing something as flawed and throwing it out, they just rearrange their view on it (IE "its not literal, its metaphorical and a guide to live your life"). Don't think you the message is just wrong at that point? I am not knocking using religion to try and guide your morals and a vehicle to being a better person, but I find it very difficult to accept the fact that there is this book, it is in many senses handed to us from God and is the holiest of holy documents in common posession, yet we can pick and choose what we want to get out of it and accept. What is going to happen when we find other forms of life, maybe even civilizations? When does the Bible become completely obsolete and we finally realize the mistake we made in revolving civilizations around it?
To me, its almost like looking at a business that failed because it kept making obsolete parts, but looking back on it and saying "they made the best damn buggy whips out there!" Of course in this case, religion is still alive and kicking.
Im not sure if you are being serious or not... but I'll bite either way.
He is speaking from a business/enterprise perspective and is talking about web applications (IE google maps, database search tools, etc.). Roll the clock back 10 years. Client/Server was the major buzzword in organizations. You have a database of customers, and a salesforce that wants the data in it. So you create a gui front end that can access it. The only problem is, how do you deploy this across the company? If you have hundreds of users, getting them all to install the executable is something of a nightmare (especially if its a required upgrade). Even if it is not required, if a user has a problem with the application, you have to track down what version they are using and reproduce it, and probably tell them its fixed in version X.
So now back to today... We have a web app that accesses this DB. When we want to roll out a new version, we update it on the server and... we're done. Thats it. All the user needs to do is access the url like they have always done. No installation, no more support hassles, and nothing needs to be done on the users end. That is the big problem that is solved. The apps that he is talking about are web apps, not browsers and similar programs.
To some extent, I think I have to say youre speaking for yourself. There are some jobs out there. You just have to compete for them, and be good at what you do. I went to a state school in NY, few of my classmates were good at what they did. Most of them either could not find jobs, or did some menial stuff for awhile. However, my smarter friends all got decent jobs and are doing well now.
You know, if you have a 2.7 gpa with a business degree, its not so easy to find a decent job either, in any "normal" economy.
I disagree on missing the point.
You have known vulnerabilities in your house that are wide open for everyone to see, yet they are not "patched". Your windows are wide open to having a brick smash through them, your locks may be easily picked. You may slip and leave your door open on occasion. I disagree that just having a port open with a service running that has a known vulnerability (and patch) is the same thing as leaving the door open. They have to connect to your machine, they have to interact with your machine in an unintended way to exploit a vulnerability. To me, "leaving the door open" would be something on the level of running a webserver on port 80 and leaving your root password on your default webpage.
Even using your criteria, if I walk out of my front door and leave it open, its my fault that someone came and robbed me? I do accept the fact that it is stupid to leave your posessions in an openly unsecured state, but at the same time how do you transfer blame from the attacker who broke the law to the person who was made a victim.
So if I create a really crude device to steal and rob your neighborhoods houses en mass (say a lockpick made out of a piece of wire), then its your fault for implementing poor security right?
Or is it maybe the lock manufacturers for implementing a poor device? Or maybe the window manufacturers for not using breakproof glass?
Do you see the absurdity of this argument? If not, do you have bars on all your windows and windowless steel doors with sophisticated locks at your house?
This is just a part of language evolution. You are defending a standard that tries define something that is fluid at best. You are fighting the equivalent of the drug war, language does not want to stay static, it wants to be free and pick up new additions, and lose old usages, and the most comfortable spellings and pronunciations will prevail. Most people concatenate "a lot" in their speech, to the point where it is one word. So they do this when writing too. I have never read the word "alot" or "definately" and spent an iota of extra brain power deciphering it. By my definition, they have still communicated clearly and coherently to me.
The english language changes. Trying to constrain the language by putting a bunch of rules on what is and what is not proper is about as effective as trying to get a kitten to stay in one spot all day.
Here is a stat I found from 1924 listing the components of the DJIA Index (its not 100 years ago, but its only 20 or so companies so it proves the point).
American Can
American Car & Foundry
American Locomotive
American Smelting
American Sugar
American Telephone & Telegraph - still here.
American Tobacco
Anaconda Copper - still around
Baldwin Locomotive
Du Pont - still here
General Electric -still here and kicking ass
Mack Trucks -still here
Republic Iron & Steel
Sears Roebuck & Co. -still here.
Studebaker
U.S. Rubber
U.S. Steel -still here
Utah Copper
Western Union -still here
Westinghouse -still here
I see 7 that I fully recognize. This list somehow does not even include some I would think would be on there like standard oil (exxon), and union pacific and I am fairly certain that if you looked into the backgrounds of some of these companies they just have morphed into something else.
I am not saying they are all thriving today, but they are all around and are all still billion dollar corporations.
Yikes... still not getting it.
Cash means... cash in the bank. Like you have X dollars in your account, we shall use $100 in the example.
Now lets say you sold yourself, and issued shares of yourself to others. Lets say you have 10 shares outstanding that the market is willing to pay $1000 each for. Your market capitalization is $10,000. presumably the market has accounted for the fact that you have $100 in assets in your account. So this year, you spent $3 more than you took in. Your account still has $97 in it. The investors in you panic and sell your shares all the way down to $.01. This sucks, but you still have $97 in your account. if someone comes along and buys those 10 shares, he has essentially bought $97 for 10 cents. Theoretically, the share price should not have dropped below $9.70.
This is why many old giant companies that have gone out of business (Grumman comes to mind, Kmart more recently) never had their share price go to 0 or anywhere close. Their assets (real estate, facilities, patents, useful technology and machinery, etc) were in summation worth many billions of dollars and therefore the price of the stock floated at the (Worth of assets)/(#Shares outstanding) mark.
The stock price, which makes Bill and the shareholders happy, has no real effect on the operation of the company. They have so much cash in reserve that it is not necessary for them to sell new shares into the market to stay afloat. If MS stock goes to 0, they still have $56 billion (or whatever the figure is) in the bank to play with.
No, I think you are mistaking cash for net worth. MS has (last I heard, though before the big dividend) $56 Billion in cash, where cash is defined as literal money in the bank and short term low risk investments (T-bills, etc). MS's net worth is far higher.
Unlike other respondents I will even challenge the idea that "popular" "hero" professions like policeman and firefighters are understaffed, underpaid and overworked. Police departments love to toss around that they are understaffed. Look at the amount of overtime that any sizable police force pays out. It is friggen ridiculous. The amount of time spent filling out paperwork is ridiculous- it is designed to be inefficient and keep more officers doing busy work. For example, I was in the central building where they process and test DWI arrests. There was about 20 terminals from 1997 in there each with a phone line hooked up to them using what appeared to be a 28.8 modem. They ran some kind of terminal application on those systems that was slow as molasses. The cost savings they could have achieved by scrapping all those phone lines, installing a local area network with ethernet and then sharing a broadband connection would be enough that the cost of the network would probably pay for itself in a month. This is not even including the reduced time spent by each officer just sitting there and waiting for the application to get the data over the line. Then lets also talk about the ungodly amount of paperwork, most of which is entirely repetitive. If they converted those forms to pdf, and then just created a simple web application that any php monkey could create to populate these forms with the common information and then allow you to print them all out, you would again be talking about huge gains in productivity. And these guys are not "underpaid" by any means. They are one of the highest paid forces in the nation (nassau county) and most will never pull a gun in their entire careers. Even a NYC police officer gets to retire with a full pension after 20 years. Their "salary" may be low, but the benefits certainly make up for it.
Underpaid? Understaffed. pfffft. You're drinking all the kool-aid they are giving you.
I agree with you. I would also like to add that I think with this generation of consoles, we are going to get more of a feeling that console hardware has reached a "good enough" state that the next next generation is not going to be so highly anticipated. I already have this feeling about this upcoming generation- I am looking forward to it, but I am not sitting on the edge of my seat nor do I forsee buying one for at least a year after it releases.
Personally, the PS2 is almost "good enough" for me. Aside from the late 90's era "jaggies" that you see in games, I think the graphics are damn good. I have never on any PS2 game said to myself "ugh, that looks like crap". Considering the level of photorealism now achieved, I just do not see how I am going to be completely wowed by this generation of consoles like I have previously. I am hoping to be pleasantly surprised though.
Two things:
First, I think you might be surprised at how many newspapers get stuff straight off the AP wire and put it in their papers. Almost all local papers that cover national news do this.
Second, I am going to go under the assumption that the previous study was accurate. If this is true, the story selection the WSJ does is what makes it outstanding. You didn't see the relentless tabloid coverage of Terry Schiavo like you did on every newschannel and other newspaper. If they did cover it, it was a small article, discussing the underlying issues involved, not the back and forth volleying between the family and the husband. The articles are always intelligent, relevant, and informative. I often judge any non-financial articles based on whether or not they would be worth reading a day, a week, a month, a year, or many years from now and still have useful information. And in almost all cases, the full length articles to me have worth in the year-many year range.
You did not cite the study, so I am going to put some potential refutations here. First, how did they count "80%" of the articles? The wsj is comprised of what I call a good number of "full length" articles and then many many blurbs (IE: IBM beat, GM missed, oil was up, the dow was down, etc...). If you are talking article count, I wouldn't be all that surprised if 80% were off the wires. If we are talking word count, I would find that unbelievably difficult to believe.
I was always an avid NYtimes reader, and only started reading the WSJ after I got a job in finance two years ago. The NYTimes does some things better, and is often a lighter more enjoyable read, but the WSJ is far more informative and concise. The WSJ has the same quality of articles of the Sunday NYTimes Week in Review section, all week. If you want a "cut the crap and tell me whats really going on and important in the world" it just doesnt get better than the Wall Street Journal.
This is a big large engineering project which at this point has costs approaching the development of the space shuttle. They are attempting to fundamentally transform the city of Boston, and while this is a very honorable intention, have made the project into a mockery. It is years and billions of dollars overdue, and if you couldnt actually see the snail's pace of progress they are making, would be up there with Duke Nukem for vaporware awards.
While not as revolutionary as something like the tunnel between France and England, it is nonetheless very a large undertaking that is attempting to transform a city. It has a very interesting history, as Boston's traffic problems in many ways stem from its attempt to be a "city of the future" and building highways/skyways cutting through the city before the federal government started building/funding interstates.
In summary, if large engineering projects, urban planning and traffic engineering, local politics interacting with national politics, project management, and case studies in how projects grossly overrun their projected costs interest you, this should interest you even if you were not previously aware of the Big Dig.
(Note: I find this quite interesting and I live over 500 miles away)
If you have an HD box, generally you have the option of composite, component, and DVI outputs. Possibly a coax one too. There are also optical and/or coax digital audio outputs too.
You plug one of the outputs into your tv, which on high end sets there are usually a plethora of (IMHO too many because its more convenient to plug these devices into a reciever which then has one output to the TV.
On an HDTV ready set, again you just use one of the many inputs other than the coax input.
Remove the possibility of recording? I don't know where you got that idea from, but as long as you have a recording device that can accept one of the inputs on your cable box, you can record.
Well, I have experienced four different providers in the past year (time warner in upstate ny, cablevision on LI, comcast in NJ, and RCN in NJ) and to get cable HDTV, each service needed you to use one of their boxes which have the tuner built in. This is not to say that you can't get it over the air, but presumably if youre buying a high end tv, you are going to be getting digital cable. For the low end market I agree with including tuners, but on high end HDTV's 40" and over, I would rather save the space, weight, and price and have the speakers and tuners left out. Its just a completely different market.