Huge portions of the planet would starve to death without it. And if we tried to shift just the first world over to it, costs would inflate so high that you probably couldn't afford to eat that way either. Even in the first world, the majority of our calories come from carbs. We simply couldn't feed billions of people on anything else.
Carbs are cheap. We can produce them in bulk at low cost. They can be stored in some cases for years very easily. Carbs feed the world and have fed the world for thousands of years.
It isn't carbs that makes people fat. It's the lack of exercise. Just move every so often. Take up a sport. Something. And then you can eat mash potatoes every night and chase it with gravy. Just burn some calories.
First, I object to the philosophy on all platforms including the apple airports. It's not the lack or presence of open source code. That's not really required. What is required is that the system be laid bare and tools be made avaliable to interact with not just the OS but to explore what the machine can be made to do limited only by the whim of the user.
Second, I hear what you're saying about OSX and that's fair to a point. The problem is that rather then make the OS itself simpler and more intuitive in it's actual structure they're simply making it APPEAR that way. MS is guilty of this as well recently with Windows 8 which might well turn out to be ME/Vista all over again. Why they can't release two consecutive OS's without making the same mistake every time is beyond me.
I remember the way macs used to work prior to OSX and that whole OS could have been updated without ruining it. By basically slapping some lipstick on linux and calling it OSX they gained a very powerful OS what is very flexible but it also will always have many of the issues that linux has always had. And sadly that means the OS has to either be confusing and console heavy or the nature of the environment has to be hidden behind layers of abstraction and misdirection.
maybe I'm being unfair... the whole thing feels like Windows 98 to me in that the real engine remained DOS and the GUI was just an application running on top of the same old text based OS. It wasn't until NT that windows had a truly Graphic based OS. There are a lot of things you simply can't do in OSX unless you bring up a console. This is typical of linux and occasionally still an issue in windows but it's rare that it's actually required unless you're scripting something.
I just feel that apple lost something and I'm not sure that they got anything in return that was worth the sacrifice.
That's not what I mean. The point is that your protest is generally irrelevant unless it actually matters to a large portion of the society.
Most of the EU's actions against major corporations are generally disguised protectionism. That is, they like to go after successful corporations outside the EU and slap them around with fines and fees. It's rare to see the EU treat any corporation within the EU in that fashion. It would be naive to believe no company within the EU behaves that way.
So, the EU really doesn't care about your protest. They're just trying to give EU businesses a competitive advantage through regulation and legal shenanigans. I don't judge them for that. The US does affirmative protectionism in that we give big contracts worth billions every year to US corporations and exclude companies outside the US from those contracts. The EU does this as well but I'm sure if it's done to the same extent.
Japan and practices what I could only call customs or quota based protectionism in that they're big on coming up with reasons to forbid the actual import of goods into the country. And even the goods do get into the country, the japanese consumer is fairly loyal to japanese products. Again this is not uncommon throughout the world but it's more extreme in Japan.
Etc.
So the EU is less interested in leveling the playing field unless the EU would benefit from it. How many times have the EU sniffed around BMW or Fiat?
I don't use apple products because I don't believe in their "walled garden" philosophy. I was a big fan of apple back in the old hypercard and basic days when apple wanted to bring their users CLOSER to the computing experience and really make their users more powerful.
But apple has done a complete 180 on that and won't ever come back to it. so for that reason, I won't buy their products. It isn't a boycott.
People need to stop thinking anyone gives a damn what they think about anything. Because the reality is that in the real world people just don't care. Corporations don't care. Politicians don't care. Your next door neighbor doesn't care. And they have every right to not care.
That said, you have the same right. So rather then trying to get some frothy public action thing together with promises to buy again if they change their ways. Just quietly buy what you believe in and let the marketing people figure out why sales dropped. Nothing preachy or pretentious. Just buy what you believe.
Apple products make lots of people happy. Good for them. They're welcome to it. I won't be one of them and wish one and all well.
Most of these people can't even read. These are true barbarians. And the real threat to them is the modern world in any form. They make a point of ruining infrastructure and keeping people simple.
If there's any place that could use the one laptop per child program it would be Afghanistan. If only because more people might actually learn to read.
I thought their madrases taught the children how to read while teaching the Koran but apparently not. They just sit there and recite/chant whatever the teacher says.
Obviously science should be able to exchange papers and ideas. But try to have some tact about it. Indifferent to this specific incident we don't want making super plagues to become any easier then it already is right now. Just keep private enough of the information that the report will not aid or inspire one of the various blood thirsty dictators or mad dog terrorist organizations to replicate it.
If this isn't something people feel like taking seriously then fine.
I'm going back to my bunker on the moon to make myself a banana smoothy. So long suckers.
First, your space mission will probably be done entirely by robots if you're going fully for believability.
Second, something the aerospace industry and now NASA are playing with is additive manufacturing. Google it if you don't know. But that's the future of space exploration right now because it completely changes what is possible. Rather then sending a probe or a mission to a given location and then waiting for it to die only to send a replacement years later. We can instead repair, upgrade, and replace sophisticated machinery with little more then a radio signal given that the machine has the on-board capability to recycle/refine, manufacture, and assemble it's own parts. It's still early days for this technology but it's already working. They can make aerospace parts with the sophistication of human bone. Lighter, stronger, cheaper. There is also the ability to print circuits on paper using metallic ink. I don't know how that would be recycled and reused in space but possibly the circuits could be scraped off the material when not needed and new circuits printed as needed. Finally, we're starting to play with truly programmable chips that will allow you to change the internal nature of their circuits with programming. This could allow for on the fly changes to chips. A full upgrade might not be possible but you could re purpose just about any chip that uses this technology.
3. Bacterial engineering will likely be the future of low energy refining technology. If a robot needs to break down minerals on another world it probably doesn't have the luxury of a blast furnace or huge vats of chemicals. Instead all it might have is a little packet with specially engineered bacteria, a little heat, some water, some oxygen, and time. The process seems slow to us but the energy investment is so low that for the same energy it would take to run a tiny furnace you could instead farm tons bacteria working on breaking down a given mineral. It's vastly more efficient. At intervals the robot can harvest the processed mineral, feed in more material, and give the bacteria whatever they need to survive. Even if the robot has to leave the system for a time and most of the bacteria dies. It's unlikely that it will all die so it can be restarted rather easily. And even if they do all die, all it takes is a few more cells added from storage to get hte process going again.
I don't know what you intend with your space story. But that's what comes to my mind.
I rent the shows through netflix or something if they're worth it but otherwise I'd rather do almost anything else.
This is the twenty first century. Get with the program. DVRs are just the start. Really, DVRs are a stop gap between what we have now and full video on demand service.
And that's really where it needs to go. Television stations as they exist need to go away entirely. We don't need them. Instead, the shows can stand on their own as video on demand streams that can be pulled down at any time. The stations then would be more like movie studios in that they make the television shows but you don't really think about the studio when you go to see the movie. You think about the writers, the actors, or the story. But the station is irrelevant.
So there you go... that's just off the top of my head. TV as it stands right now is tragically antiquated and needs to go fully digital and fully asynchronous. Once that happens they won't feel the need to fill 24 hours of programming every day. Instead, they'll focus on creating shows people ACTUALLY want to watch. That doesn't mean they'll be good but people will actually want to see them. And shows no one wants to watch will suffer the same fate as movies that no one wants to watch. They'll die and good riddance.
About the only stations that make sense outside of this context are 24 hour news stations, live sports, and C-Span. Everything else should be chopped up into video on demand streams and sold/packaged individually with no link to anything else.
Who wants to bet they spend about.0 seconds figuring out how to secure this data? For the love of god, if we have no hard copies and these digital copies stand as good as the paper record... protect them. Keep the sensitive stuff offline. If someone wants the file, they can make a phone call, get authorization, and get it patched over.
Please tell me the government learned something from wikileaks.
Look, it's one thing to fix bugs or add features. But when you suddenly move everything around it's like buying a new car and finding that rather then give you steering wheel they put in a joystick. I really don't care why they did it. It's not what I'm used to and I don't like being force to use controls I have never used before.
It would be one thing if they made it optional. Let the user decide what they want to use. Hell, I don't even mind if they default the system to their new controls. Go for it. But ALWAYS leave me the option of turning them off.
Screw with me on this and I start looking for GUI replacements like I did with Windows 7 after it became clear that the new version of Explorer would not allow me to rearrange icons within windows. Most people probably don't use that feature but it's been standard in windows since version 3 and I've grown accustomed to it. Finally, I found a registry hack that added the feature back into windows 7 but I never should have had to do that.
I have no experience with this new ribbon system they're talking about and maybe it's great. I don't care. If it is great, then I will voluntarily prefer it. Forcing me to use it... giving me no choice... it makes me angry.
I have been a long time MS windows user but stuff like this is making me consider a move to linux if only because I'll have more control over the GUI.
Add to that the loss of backward compatibility for 16 bit programs and MS is really killing a huge reason it was so popular for so long.
The thing with Windows is that it was a standard. It wasn't particularly good but it was consistent. Disrupting that and ruining backward compatibility... it's poisoning their brand.
The feds can't just go rifling through sealed letters without some kind of warrant. By the same token, their man in the middle attack is like having a fake postman pick letters up, read them, then seal them, then drop them off at the real post office. They can't do that without a warrant and likewise they shouldn't be able to do it to data.
The justices need to get real about enforcing some basic principles that were implicit in American legal code for centuries.
The really sick thing is that this could be a lie.
After all... what better way to make people stop asking questions then to make them believe you first.
I don't really care what their rules are... what we need are independent investigators that how the power to go through records.
We used to have these... they were fired after they refused to play ball. They need to be reengaged. People that are able to see everything... full clearance and no investment in protecting the careers of the guilty.
1. You can fire a contractor. 2. Contractors can fire unproductive employees. 3. Contractors frequently have specialty skills that are not held by standard employees. 4. When estimating the cost of federal employees you must include the cost of pension and other perks. These perks along with the job security are likely more costly then the actual salary.
1. Student loans are so far as I know the only loans that cannot be nullified by a bankruptcy. A problem around the founding of this country in England were Debtors Prisons... if someone didn't pay their debts they were thrown in jail and had to be ransomed by their families to get them out again. This practice was explicitly made illegal in the US. The means by which it was made illegal is that anyone can simply declare bankruptcy, and all debts are wiped clean. There are exceptions to this and student loans are amongst them. They shouldn't be amongst them though.
2. I'm not sure, but I think parents or guardians of a college student can be liable for the loan even if they don't explicitly co-sign it. I could be wrong there. If they co-sign then they've agreed to guarantee the loan. But if it's possible for parents to become liable even if they signed no such agreement then that practice must be stopped.
3. The federal government needs to stop pumping money into general college admission. There is value in offering military vets scholarships or offering special scholarships for achievement, ability, or willingness to enter high demand fields. But the blanket funding of universities probably should be ended in favor of a more targeted approach.
If this happens the universities will have to change the way they operate to both old and new ways. They'll have to regress in that they'll be more focused on tuition of students that can actually pay. And they might well come up with new ways to fund themselves unlinked from federal funding.
If states want to pump money into them then that's their own business. But the feds should get out of it unless they're trying to encourage people to become a certain type of scientist or engineer that is in high demand. And in that case, the scholarships should be targeted at people that are actually studying those subjects.
This is much better then dumping venture capital money in solar firms. The government has a good track record of encouraging innovation through research grants. It has a horrible track record with playing the venture capital game.
I think this research idea is great... keep it up... money well spent. Stay the hell out of venture capital.
Have 20 governments cease the property of billions of investors so the assets of 147 companies reside ultimately in even fewer hands? Hands that didn't work for any of that wealth. Hands that only claim it because they put a gun in the face of the corporation and said "your money or your life?"
I don't know what the point of this article is in the first place.
To what end? Yes, the world isn't equal... thanks for the news flash. There are reasons for that that have nothing to do with corruption however. And I've seen no solution to fix it lately that wouldn't make any corruption worse as well as introduce entirely new problems such as competence.
Say what you will about the corporations but most of them know their business. They know what they're doing and how to do it and how to keep doing it.
If the government took any of their businesses over how confident are we that quality, productivity, and cost wouldn't slip as well as innovation die? I'm not confident at all. Politicians make poor business people, engineers, prospectors, investors, traders, and really everything beyond politicians. They're frequently not even very good lawyers despite that often being their only other qualification.
I don't know... I'm not claiming the world isn't messed up... I just don't see how this observation helps anything and I see no rational suggestions as to how to fix it. First idea that isn't crazy I'll back... but so far everyone is either offering no solutions or insane solutions.
What you want to know is "what is the company looking for in an employee"... well... ask them. I'm sure their HR department would be happy to respond to an email.
All the companies are complaining about US regulations. Even Steve Jobs recently was reported to have complained about it. I say that only because he has a good reputation.
Businesses have been telling us the problem with the US economy for years. No one is going to know better then them.
I don't say that like I actually know. I'm just saying that clearly one nation or another should benefit more then others especially when you trace how this is used. That nation that benefits is almost certainly responsible. After all why would a third party try to protect a different nation's image? Seems improbably. So it should be fairly easy to guess who is up to no good.
Were it similar then we wouldn't use oil for peak plants. We do because they're not.
Obviously solar needs day light and it also needs clear skies and it also needs to be in specific parts of the world. That means it's not able to take over for a gas peak plant that could be needed anywhere and have unpredictable needs.
Solar is a great idea and at some point we'll get most of our power from it. But so far I haven't seen any way to use the power on a municiple level with any efficiency. The biggest issue is storage. Because power is inconsistent we'll need to store huge amounts of power on site in much the way a dam stores water. And then we'll have to release the power in an even flow or at least build up a reserve so we can kick out a lot of extra power at any time.
I've seen some kinetic ideas that seem practical. Such as pumping water up a hill with solar power and then letting it flow down to generate power. Short of efficient and sizable storage options solar likely won't be usable.
You're not arguing with me, dew drop. You're arguing with basic economics, politics, and human psychology.
If you want to get certain things then you have to go about it a certain way. And if you do certain things a given way there are going to be certain consequences.
Undermine the economy and the environmental stuff WILL be sidelined. You'll lose political and economic backing for it.
Again, look at the third world. How much energy to they put towards environmental protection? Not much. They have bigger priorities like what's for dinner.
And that's how it is all over the world. Why are the chinese so bad with environmental policy? Because it's expensive and they're poor. If the chinese were richer they'd have better environmental policy.
Make the US poor and our environmental policy will be terminated.
This is not a negotiation. This is me telling you what will happen. You can't bargain this away. This is like supply and demand. It's going to put pressure on everything and be generally indifferent to your arguments.
If you can't grasp the concept then you should really stay out of political conversations because politics is "the art of the possible." It means being deeply anchored in reality and what is and is not a possibility at a given point.
Slashdot Mirror
Human civilization was built on carbs.
Wheat.
Rice.
Potatoes.
Maize.
Huge portions of the planet would starve to death without it. And if we tried to shift just the first world over to it, costs would inflate so high that you probably couldn't afford to eat that way either. Even in the first world, the majority of our calories come from carbs. We simply couldn't feed billions of people on anything else.
Carbs are cheap. We can produce them in bulk at low cost. They can be stored in some cases for years very easily. Carbs feed the world and have fed the world for thousands of years.
It isn't carbs that makes people fat. It's the lack of exercise. Just move every so often. Take up a sport. Something. And then you can eat mash potatoes every night and chase it with gravy. Just burn some calories.
First, I object to the philosophy on all platforms including the apple airports. It's not the lack or presence of open source code. That's not really required. What is required is that the system be laid bare and tools be made avaliable to interact with not just the OS but to explore what the machine can be made to do limited only by the whim of the user.
Second, I hear what you're saying about OSX and that's fair to a point. The problem is that rather then make the OS itself simpler and more intuitive in it's actual structure they're simply making it APPEAR that way. MS is guilty of this as well recently with Windows 8 which might well turn out to be ME/Vista all over again. Why they can't release two consecutive OS's without making the same mistake every time is beyond me.
I remember the way macs used to work prior to OSX and that whole OS could have been updated without ruining it. By basically slapping some lipstick on linux and calling it OSX they gained a very powerful OS what is very flexible but it also will always have many of the issues that linux has always had. And sadly that means the OS has to either be confusing and console heavy or the nature of the environment has to be hidden behind layers of abstraction and misdirection.
maybe I'm being unfair... the whole thing feels like Windows 98 to me in that the real engine remained DOS and the GUI was just an application running on top of the same old text based OS. It wasn't until NT that windows had a truly Graphic based OS. There are a lot of things you simply can't do in OSX unless you bring up a console. This is typical of linux and occasionally still an issue in windows but it's rare that it's actually required unless you're scripting something.
I just feel that apple lost something and I'm not sure that they got anything in return that was worth the sacrifice.
That's not what I mean. The point is that your protest is generally irrelevant unless it actually matters to a large portion of the society.
Most of the EU's actions against major corporations are generally disguised protectionism. That is, they like to go after successful corporations outside the EU and slap them around with fines and fees. It's rare to see the EU treat any corporation within the EU in that fashion. It would be naive to believe no company within the EU behaves that way.
So, the EU really doesn't care about your protest. They're just trying to give EU businesses a competitive advantage through regulation and legal shenanigans. I don't judge them for that. The US does affirmative protectionism in that we give big contracts worth billions every year to US corporations and exclude companies outside the US from those contracts. The EU does this as well but I'm sure if it's done to the same extent.
Japan and practices what I could only call customs or quota based protectionism in that they're big on coming up with reasons to forbid the actual import of goods into the country. And even the goods do get into the country, the japanese consumer is fairly loyal to japanese products. Again this is not uncommon throughout the world but it's more extreme in Japan.
Etc.
So the EU is less interested in leveling the playing field unless the EU would benefit from it. How many times have the EU sniffed around BMW or Fiat?
I don't use apple products because I don't believe in their "walled garden" philosophy. I was a big fan of apple back in the old hypercard and basic days when apple wanted to bring their users CLOSER to the computing experience and really make their users more powerful.
But apple has done a complete 180 on that and won't ever come back to it. so for that reason, I won't buy their products. It isn't a boycott.
People need to stop thinking anyone gives a damn what they think about anything. Because the reality is that in the real world people just don't care. Corporations don't care. Politicians don't care. Your next door neighbor doesn't care. And they have every right to not care.
That said, you have the same right. So rather then trying to get some frothy public action thing together with promises to buy again if they change their ways. Just quietly buy what you believe in and let the marketing people figure out why sales dropped. Nothing preachy or pretentious. Just buy what you believe.
Apple products make lots of people happy. Good for them. They're welcome to it. I won't be one of them and wish one and all well.
Most of these people can't even read. These are true barbarians. And the real threat to them is the modern world in any form. They make a point of ruining infrastructure and keeping people simple.
If there's any place that could use the one laptop per child program it would be Afghanistan. If only because more people might actually learn to read.
I thought their madrases taught the children how to read while teaching the Koran but apparently not. They just sit there and recite/chant whatever the teacher says.
The whole country is feral.
Obviously science should be able to exchange papers and ideas. But try to have some tact about it. Indifferent to this specific incident we don't want making super plagues to become any easier then it already is right now. Just keep private enough of the information that the report will not aid or inspire one of the various blood thirsty dictators or mad dog terrorist organizations to replicate it.
If this isn't something people feel like taking seriously then fine.
I'm going back to my bunker on the moon to make myself a banana smoothy. So long suckers.
First, your space mission will probably be done entirely by robots if you're going fully for believability.
Second, something the aerospace industry and now NASA are playing with is additive manufacturing. Google it if you don't know. But that's the future of space exploration right now because it completely changes what is possible. Rather then sending a probe or a mission to a given location and then waiting for it to die only to send a replacement years later. We can instead repair, upgrade, and replace sophisticated machinery with little more then a radio signal given that the machine has the on-board capability to recycle/refine, manufacture, and assemble it's own parts. It's still early days for this technology but it's already working. They can make aerospace parts with the sophistication of human bone. Lighter, stronger, cheaper. There is also the ability to print circuits on paper using metallic ink. I don't know how that would be recycled and reused in space but possibly the circuits could be scraped off the material when not needed and new circuits printed as needed. Finally, we're starting to play with truly programmable chips that will allow you to change the internal nature of their circuits with programming. This could allow for on the fly changes to chips. A full upgrade might not be possible but you could re purpose just about any chip that uses this technology.
3. Bacterial engineering will likely be the future of low energy refining technology. If a robot needs to break down minerals on another world it probably doesn't have the luxury of a blast furnace or huge vats of chemicals. Instead all it might have is a little packet with specially engineered bacteria, a little heat, some water, some oxygen, and time. The process seems slow to us but the energy investment is so low that for the same energy it would take to run a tiny furnace you could instead farm tons bacteria working on breaking down a given mineral. It's vastly more efficient. At intervals the robot can harvest the processed mineral, feed in more material, and give the bacteria whatever they need to survive. Even if the robot has to leave the system for a time and most of the bacteria dies. It's unlikely that it will all die so it can be restarted rather easily. And even if they do all die, all it takes is a few more cells added from storage to get hte process going again.
I don't know what you intend with your space story. But that's what comes to my mind.
MS's primary selling point is consistency. These OS's are breaking it.
I rent the shows through netflix or something if they're worth it but otherwise I'd rather do almost anything else.
This is the twenty first century. Get with the program. DVRs are just the start. Really, DVRs are a stop gap between what we have now and full video on demand service.
And that's really where it needs to go. Television stations as they exist need to go away entirely. We don't need them. Instead, the shows can stand on their own as video on demand streams that can be pulled down at any time. The stations then would be more like movie studios in that they make the television shows but you don't really think about the studio when you go to see the movie. You think about the writers, the actors, or the story. But the station is irrelevant.
So there you go... that's just off the top of my head. TV as it stands right now is tragically antiquated and needs to go fully digital and fully asynchronous. Once that happens they won't feel the need to fill 24 hours of programming every day. Instead, they'll focus on creating shows people ACTUALLY want to watch. That doesn't mean they'll be good but people will actually want to see them. And shows no one wants to watch will suffer the same fate as movies that no one wants to watch. They'll die and good riddance.
About the only stations that make sense outside of this context are 24 hour news stations, live sports, and C-Span. Everything else should be chopped up into video on demand streams and sold/packaged individually with no link to anything else.
Who wants to bet they spend about .0 seconds figuring out how to secure this data? For the love of god, if we have no hard copies and these digital copies stand as good as the paper record... protect them. Keep the sensitive stuff offline. If someone wants the file, they can make a phone call, get authorization, and get it patched over.
Please tell me the government learned something from wikileaks.
Look, it's one thing to fix bugs or add features. But when you suddenly move everything around it's like buying a new car and finding that rather then give you steering wheel they put in a joystick. I really don't care why they did it. It's not what I'm used to and I don't like being force to use controls I have never used before.
It would be one thing if they made it optional. Let the user decide what they want to use. Hell, I don't even mind if they default the system to their new controls. Go for it. But ALWAYS leave me the option of turning them off.
Screw with me on this and I start looking for GUI replacements like I did with Windows 7 after it became clear that the new version of Explorer would not allow me to rearrange icons within windows. Most people probably don't use that feature but it's been standard in windows since version 3 and I've grown accustomed to it. Finally, I found a registry hack that added the feature back into windows 7 but I never should have had to do that.
I have no experience with this new ribbon system they're talking about and maybe it's great. I don't care. If it is great, then I will voluntarily prefer it. Forcing me to use it... giving me no choice... it makes me angry.
I have been a long time MS windows user but stuff like this is making me consider a move to linux if only because I'll have more control over the GUI.
Add to that the loss of backward compatibility for 16 bit programs and MS is really killing a huge reason it was so popular for so long.
The thing with Windows is that it was a standard. It wasn't particularly good but it was consistent. Disrupting that and ruining backward compatibility... it's poisoning their brand.
oh... and they can enjoy the bad press when some drunk guy decides to just pleasure himself in the isle.
This is a stupid idea... whatever money they make from it will be lost many times over by other factors.
The feds can't just go rifling through sealed letters without some kind of warrant. By the same token, their man in the middle attack is like having a fake postman pick letters up, read them, then seal them, then drop them off at the real post office. They can't do that without a warrant and likewise they shouldn't be able to do it to data.
The justices need to get real about enforcing some basic principles that were implicit in American legal code for centuries.
The really sick thing is that this could be a lie.
After all... what better way to make people stop asking questions then to make them believe you first.
I don't really care what their rules are... what we need are independent investigators that how the power to go through records.
We used to have these... they were fired after they refused to play ball. They need to be reengaged. People that are able to see everything... full clearance and no investment in protecting the careers of the guilty.
1. You can fire a contractor.
2. Contractors can fire unproductive employees.
3. Contractors frequently have specialty skills that are not held by standard employees.
4. When estimating the cost of federal employees you must include the cost of pension and other perks. These perks along with the job security are likely more costly then the actual salary.
1. Student loans are so far as I know the only loans that cannot be nullified by a bankruptcy. A problem around the founding of this country in England were Debtors Prisons... if someone didn't pay their debts they were thrown in jail and had to be ransomed by their families to get them out again. This practice was explicitly made illegal in the US. The means by which it was made illegal is that anyone can simply declare bankruptcy, and all debts are wiped clean. There are exceptions to this and student loans are amongst them. They shouldn't be amongst them though.
2. I'm not sure, but I think parents or guardians of a college student can be liable for the loan even if they don't explicitly co-sign it. I could be wrong there. If they co-sign then they've agreed to guarantee the loan. But if it's possible for parents to become liable even if they signed no such agreement then that practice must be stopped.
3. The federal government needs to stop pumping money into general college admission. There is value in offering military vets scholarships or offering special scholarships for achievement, ability, or willingness to enter high demand fields. But the blanket funding of universities probably should be ended in favor of a more targeted approach.
If this happens the universities will have to change the way they operate to both old and new ways. They'll have to regress in that they'll be more focused on tuition of students that can actually pay. And they might well come up with new ways to fund themselves unlinked from federal funding.
If states want to pump money into them then that's their own business. But the feds should get out of it unless they're trying to encourage people to become a certain type of scientist or engineer that is in high demand. And in that case, the scholarships should be targeted at people that are actually studying those subjects.
This is much better then dumping venture capital money in solar firms. The government has a good track record of encouraging innovation through research grants. It has a horrible track record with playing the venture capital game.
I think this research idea is great... keep it up... money well spent. Stay the hell out of venture capital.
Have 20 governments cease the property of billions of investors so the assets of 147 companies reside ultimately in even fewer hands? Hands that didn't work for any of that wealth. Hands that only claim it because they put a gun in the face of the corporation and said "your money or your life?"
I don't know what the point of this article is in the first place.
To what end? Yes, the world isn't equal... thanks for the news flash. There are reasons for that that have nothing to do with corruption however. And I've seen no solution to fix it lately that wouldn't make any corruption worse as well as introduce entirely new problems such as competence.
Say what you will about the corporations but most of them know their business. They know what they're doing and how to do it and how to keep doing it.
If the government took any of their businesses over how confident are we that quality, productivity, and cost wouldn't slip as well as innovation die? I'm not confident at all. Politicians make poor business people, engineers, prospectors, investors, traders, and really everything beyond politicians. They're frequently not even very good lawyers despite that often being their only other qualification.
I don't know... I'm not claiming the world isn't messed up... I just don't see how this observation helps anything and I see no rational suggestions as to how to fix it. First idea that isn't crazy I'll back... but so far everyone is either offering no solutions or insane solutions.
No one ever asks the blasted company. It's sad.
What you want to know is "what is the company looking for in an employee"... well... ask them. I'm sure their HR department would be happy to respond to an email.
All the companies are complaining about US regulations. Even Steve Jobs recently was reported to have complained about it. I say that only because he has a good reputation.
Businesses have been telling us the problem with the US economy for years. No one is going to know better then them.
Maybe it's time to listen?
I don't say that like I actually know. I'm just saying that clearly one nation or another should benefit more then others especially when you trace how this is used. That nation that benefits is almost certainly responsible. After all why would a third party try to protect a different nation's image? Seems improbably. So it should be fairly easy to guess who is up to no good.
well the carbon trading and capping programs won't happen. So if geo engineering is out as well then I'm out of ideas.
Were it similar then we wouldn't use oil for peak plants. We do because they're not.
Obviously solar needs day light and it also needs clear skies and it also needs to be in specific parts of the world. That means it's not able to take over for a gas peak plant that could be needed anywhere and have unpredictable needs.
Solar is a great idea and at some point we'll get most of our power from it. But so far I haven't seen any way to use the power on a municiple level with any efficiency. The biggest issue is storage. Because power is inconsistent we'll need to store huge amounts of power on site in much the way a dam stores water. And then we'll have to release the power in an even flow or at least build up a reserve so we can kick out a lot of extra power at any time.
I've seen some kinetic ideas that seem practical. Such as pumping water up a hill with solar power and then letting it flow down to generate power. Short of efficient and sizable storage options solar likely won't be usable.
You're not arguing with me, dew drop. You're arguing with basic economics, politics, and human psychology.
If you want to get certain things then you have to go about it a certain way. And if you do certain things a given way there are going to be certain consequences.
Undermine the economy and the environmental stuff WILL be sidelined. You'll lose political and economic backing for it.
Again, look at the third world. How much energy to they put towards environmental protection? Not much. They have bigger priorities like what's for dinner.
And that's how it is all over the world. Why are the chinese so bad with environmental policy? Because it's expensive and they're poor. If the chinese were richer they'd have better environmental policy.
Make the US poor and our environmental policy will be terminated.
This is not a negotiation. This is me telling you what will happen. You can't bargain this away. This is like supply and demand. It's going to put pressure on everything and be generally indifferent to your arguments.
If you can't grasp the concept then you should really stay out of political conversations because politics is "the art of the possible." It means being deeply anchored in reality and what is and is not a possibility at a given point.
If that were a rational response then the price of gas wouldn't be flirting with four dollars.
Sorry, but ask the oil companies. They're screaming bloody murder over it.
Furthermore, I rather doubt your mind was open in the first place.