Finland has a much higher personal income tax rate that Ireland. If the income of Rovio employees is above average, they're financially much better off having a lower income tax rate and paying for the services they used to get from the government themselves.
Sorry, but government services don't come from the tooth fairy.It doesn't matter whether you use corporate income taxes or personal income taxes, ultimately, the only entity that pays for them is the real people living in that country.
Yeah, I've been to a U.S. school too, and while the quality of education was way better than what I had in Europe, the social side of it was a disaster. I tried to stay on campus only for the classes and library time.
Well, it's obvious you're incapable of articulating any aspect of it that was actually worse. We'll take your comment for what it's worth--nothing.
Google needs a big patent portfolio to beat down Apple and Microsoft; they should buy both Nokia and RIM. Microsoft has done a great job depressing the Nokia stock price. And if Google buys them, they can really kick Windows 8 Phone down, given that Microsoft has bet on Nokia. Oh, and they can fire Elop too.
It has nothing to do with "imagination". Apple has a customer base that is willing to pay a steep premium for the latest specs. I'm not willing to pay more than $1000 for a laptop or desktop, and I'm not willing to pay more than $300 for a monitor. People like me just wait until the price comes down, mostly driven by the early adopters willing to pay that premium.
About 10 years ago, you used to get a small range of high-end monitors, and they cost around $1000. That really hasn't changed much. Back then, consumer and TV displays just weren't usable for a lot of computer desktop use. What has changed is that there is a glut of HD displays because of their use in consumer electronics. That has caused computer monitors that happen to have the same specs as consumer displays to fall in price dramatically. But the high end $1000 displays are still there if you want them, and there really are almost as many devices at the high end of the market as there used to be (meaning, maybe a handful). It's just that your expectations have changed and you don't consider them a good deal anymore because HD displays for less than $200 are actually quite good. There's also diminishing returns: a 30" 2560x1440 monitor just isn't a lot better than one (or two!) 1920x1080 monitors, whereas a 1920x1080 is a lot better than a 1280x800 monitor.
There is nothing wrong with people who have learning problems going to special schools that cost $50K/yr and everyone else goes to the $50/yr school. The purpose of higher ed is not to hold your hand like a kindergartner anyway, its to teach you how to teach yourself. Look at the environment you'll be in when you graduate.
That's a nice theory and it applied 100 years ago. Today, 40% of the US population has completed degrees. Do you really think those 40% are capable of figuring out calculus, mechanics, or history by themselves? Do you really think they will be in jobs where that ability is even valued?
The people that are easy to educate and don't need hand-holding are the core 1-2% that have always gone to university. The more you expand enrollment beyond that, the more help and the more money each new student needs.
No, technically they are wrong. iOS is a hacked version of Mach and BSD, Objective-C, and NeXTStep libraries. Apple has done a good job on the engineering side, improving both the user experience and the quality of the code. But in no sense of the word is iOS "advanced". And even when it come to features, they have been a generation or two behind Android release on features like multitasking, notifications, background operations, and APIs.
iOS is pretty well engineered and has a good user experience. But "most advanced"? Its technology (Objective-C, Xcode, many of the libraries) come from the 1980's and haven't changed much. Technically, the "most advanced" is probably Windows phone, with its JIT compilers, C# 4.0, and all the other stuff. But "most advanced" rarely results in a good user experience.
"Progressives" are for practical purposes "socialists", and there are a lot of those in the Democratic party. They're advocating a lot of the same kinds of policies that socialist parties in Europe advocate.
The case against Kim Dotcom hinges on the DMCA. The DMCA generally gives content providers the right to handle data without knowing its contents, just like Fedex can ship boxes without knowing their contents. Megaupload was shut down because they apparently did know that they were dealing with illegal contents but didn't do anything about it. That also would get Fedex into trouble.
Of course, we can automate education this way. Many students don't give a damn about one-on-one human instruction and prefer reading and watching at their own pace.
However, if you do care about personal instruction (and there do seem to be a lot of students that do), it's going to cost you.
Well, if you chose not to participate in university social life, then what is your complaint about "the social side" of your US university experience being a "disaster"?
Well, that's what the DMCA safe harbor provision is for. Apparently, they failed to comply with that to such a degree that at least an indictment was warranted. But they can still establish in court that they did comply with the law.
Yes, strangely enough, police and government have powers that "private individuals" do not have. Both conservatives and liberals love giving such special powers to government (although they differ on which special powers they want to grant).
Also, if I was the NZ government, I would be asking FedEx some pretty hard questions. Like: "Considering that you helped a foreign power conspire to break NZ law, why should we allow you to continue to work in our country?"
RTFA: "Crown lawyer John Pike, for the attorney-general, said the material stored on the hard drives could be shipped overseas". Hence, the NZ authorities do not believe NZ law was broken. The only people who get their knickers in a knot over this are those who simply don't like US law enforcement to do anything overseas, even with the consent of foreign governments.
Furthermore, what kind of idiotic idea is it to hold FedEx responsible even if the FBI had broken NZ law? How in the world is FedEx supposed to determine whether a hard drive shipped by the FBI (which was probably encrypted anyway) contained information that may or may not have a bearing on a court case in NZ? Do you even stop to think for a second before you write?
The reason Americans get less out of university and get into greater debt isn't a problem with universities. Americans complete university at twice the rate (30%) of Germany or France (15%). You can't expect 30% of your population to go to college and do as well as when only the top 15% of your students go to college. The high demand for college education has caused prices to skyrocket, fueled by the fact that due to cheap student loans, students can actually pay. And a huge number of those degrees are in fields that are basically useless from the point of view of getting a job, including visual arts, psychology, and journalism.
Yes, major reform is needed, and it's fairly simple: get rid of student loans for anything other than STEM fields. As a tax payer, I see no reason why I should subsidize people getting a college degree that amounts to little more than a personal hobby.
In a roundabout way, online classes do fix this problem, because while the class may only cost $100, you still need to live. And online universities aren't going to waste a lot of money on football fields and other facilities that universities needs to get their non-academically inclined students to part with more money.
US schools place a lot of emphasis on social interaction, networking and extracurricular activities. Did you join a sports or drama club? Did you participate in a public service society? Did you join a social club?
The business case here is that it is expensive (time-wise) to develop content for 100 students, but becomes much cheaper to do so for 200,000.
But many other costs of education, grading, feedback, etc., are proportional to the number of students. The amount of personal time you get from instructors for $100 is at most a few hours. For some students, that's enough. For most, it isn't.
Somehow the market seems to be a rather late noticing when platforms die. It was clear in the early 2000's that PalmOS was a dying platform and Palm should have started moving to Linux right away.
Sure students can verify the heliocentric model of the solar system. It's just hard to do so. As you point out, it would take quite a bit of work.
It may be work to actually do it, but the math and physics involved are high-school level and are being taught in high school. The math and physics involved in establishing the existence of climate change are graduate level.
you say I'm wrong about something but can't say what is wrong or what the correct information is. It's not very convincing to me at all.
Yes, you are wrong about your statement that "the evidence is ridiculously easy to understand!", since you obviously don't understand it yourself. For example, you point to experiments that are irrelevant to climate change and you can't define your terms, what the various climate variables mean, or how they are determined. The correct information is that understanding climate science requires graduate-level mathematics, statistics, physics, and earth science.
but the fact that you cannot list even one specific measurement shows just how hard it is to produce the actual evidence when asked.
Sorry, I've been too busy to point out the other errors in your arguments. Since you ask, experiments that you can do in high school include: observations of planetary motions and moons, direct observations of planets through a telescope, spectrographic measurements of the sun, torsion balance measurements of gravity, tides and their relations to the moon, approximate distance from the sun via parallax measurements, observations of the moon relative to the sun, falling objects in a vacuum, among many others. Students can verify that observed orbits follow predicted orbits closely when using the right masses, which no other model of planetary motion does (in particular, none of the proposed geocentric models). Students can verify that the sun is made mostly from hydrogen and its approximate size, which lets them place bounds on its mass. For the size and composition of earth, simple travel reports, plus direct gravitational measurements suffice to get good bounds. Etc. So, even if students trust no published results, they can verify the heliocentric model of the solar system.
How do you know we have spacecraft in orbit around the sun? Aren't you just believing what you've been told?
Yes, scientists believe that others aren't lying about experiments and raw measurements, and in the case of planetary and the heliocentric system, they have tens of thousands of independent sources of measurements that each individually are consistent with the theory; not so in the case of climate change. Furthermore, even stipulating that the reported results are correct, in the case of planetary motion, students can verify the consistency precisely with basic math and physics, while for climate change, they cannot.
The greenhouse effect was first demonstrated on a tabletop.
Yes, de Saussure and Fourier suggested that the greenhouse effect is responsible for elevating temperature on the earth's surface; a good thing too because without that, we'd be living in a frozen wasteland. They didn't demonstrate the effect that is causing climate change, didn't relate this quantitatively to first principles, and certainly didn't show, or even provide a basis for showing, that a small elevation in CO2 concentration could lead to catastrophic warming.
It seems like you don't even understand the mechanisms that climate change is based on.
Slashdot Mirror
Finland has a much higher personal income tax rate that Ireland. If the income of Rovio employees is above average, they're financially much better off having a lower income tax rate and paying for the services they used to get from the government themselves.
Sorry, but government services don't come from the tooth fairy.It doesn't matter whether you use corporate income taxes or personal income taxes, ultimately, the only entity that pays for them is the real people living in that country.
Well, it's obvious you're incapable of articulating any aspect of it that was actually worse. We'll take your comment for what it's worth--nothing.
If we're lucky, history will remember both of them only for their sleazy business practices and the harm they did to the industry.
Google needs a big patent portfolio to beat down Apple and Microsoft; they should buy both Nokia and RIM. Microsoft has done a great job depressing the Nokia stock price. And if Google buys them, they can really kick Windows 8 Phone down, given that Microsoft has bet on Nokia. Oh, and they can fire Elop too.
It has nothing to do with "imagination". Apple has a customer base that is willing to pay a steep premium for the latest specs. I'm not willing to pay more than $1000 for a laptop or desktop, and I'm not willing to pay more than $300 for a monitor. People like me just wait until the price comes down, mostly driven by the early adopters willing to pay that premium.
About 10 years ago, you used to get a small range of high-end monitors, and they cost around $1000. That really hasn't changed much. Back then, consumer and TV displays just weren't usable for a lot of computer desktop use. What has changed is that there is a glut of HD displays because of their use in consumer electronics. That has caused computer monitors that happen to have the same specs as consumer displays to fall in price dramatically. But the high end $1000 displays are still there if you want them, and there really are almost as many devices at the high end of the market as there used to be (meaning, maybe a handful). It's just that your expectations have changed and you don't consider them a good deal anymore because HD displays for less than $200 are actually quite good. There's also diminishing returns: a 30" 2560x1440 monitor just isn't a lot better than one (or two!) 1920x1080 monitors, whereas a 1920x1080 is a lot better than a 1280x800 monitor.
That's a nice theory and it applied 100 years ago. Today, 40% of the US population has completed degrees. Do you really think those 40% are capable of figuring out calculus, mechanics, or history by themselves? Do you really think they will be in jobs where that ability is even valued?
The people that are easy to educate and don't need hand-holding are the core 1-2% that have always gone to university. The more you expand enrollment beyond that, the more help and the more money each new student needs.
No, technically they are wrong. iOS is a hacked version of Mach and BSD, Objective-C, and NeXTStep libraries. Apple has done a good job on the engineering side, improving both the user experience and the quality of the code. But in no sense of the word is iOS "advanced". And even when it come to features, they have been a generation or two behind Android release on features like multitasking, notifications, background operations, and APIs.
iOS is pretty well engineered and has a good user experience. But "most advanced"? Its technology (Objective-C, Xcode, many of the libraries) come from the 1980's and haven't changed much. Technically, the "most advanced" is probably Windows phone, with its JIT compilers, C# 4.0, and all the other stuff. But "most advanced" rarely results in a good user experience.
"Progressives" are for practical purposes "socialists", and there are a lot of those in the Democratic party. They're advocating a lot of the same kinds of policies that socialist parties in Europe advocate.
The case against Kim Dotcom hinges on the DMCA. The DMCA generally gives content providers the right to handle data without knowing its contents, just like Fedex can ship boxes without knowing their contents. Megaupload was shut down because they apparently did know that they were dealing with illegal contents but didn't do anything about it. That also would get Fedex into trouble.
Of course, we can automate education this way. Many students don't give a damn about one-on-one human instruction and prefer reading and watching at their own pace.
However, if you do care about personal instruction (and there do seem to be a lot of students that do), it's going to cost you.
Well, if you chose not to participate in university social life, then what is your complaint about "the social side" of your US university experience being a "disaster"?
The NZ prosecutor said it was OK.
No, not when it comes to police investigations and evidence in court.
Well, that's what the DMCA safe harbor provision is for. Apparently, they failed to comply with that to such a degree that at least an indictment was warranted. But they can still establish in court that they did comply with the law.
Yes, strangely enough, police and government have powers that "private individuals" do not have. Both conservatives and liberals love giving such special powers to government (although they differ on which special powers they want to grant).
RTFA: "Crown lawyer John Pike, for the attorney-general, said the material stored on the hard drives could be shipped overseas". Hence, the NZ authorities do not believe NZ law was broken. The only people who get their knickers in a knot over this are those who simply don't like US law enforcement to do anything overseas, even with the consent of foreign governments.
Furthermore, what kind of idiotic idea is it to hold FedEx responsible even if the FBI had broken NZ law? How in the world is FedEx supposed to determine whether a hard drive shipped by the FBI (which was probably encrypted anyway) contained information that may or may not have a bearing on a court case in NZ? Do you even stop to think for a second before you write?
The reason Americans get less out of university and get into greater debt isn't a problem with universities. Americans complete university at twice the rate (30%) of Germany or France (15%). You can't expect 30% of your population to go to college and do as well as when only the top 15% of your students go to college. The high demand for college education has caused prices to skyrocket, fueled by the fact that due to cheap student loans, students can actually pay. And a huge number of those degrees are in fields that are basically useless from the point of view of getting a job, including visual arts, psychology, and journalism.
Yes, major reform is needed, and it's fairly simple: get rid of student loans for anything other than STEM fields. As a tax payer, I see no reason why I should subsidize people getting a college degree that amounts to little more than a personal hobby.
In a roundabout way, online classes do fix this problem, because while the class may only cost $100, you still need to live. And online universities aren't going to waste a lot of money on football fields and other facilities that universities needs to get their non-academically inclined students to part with more money.
US schools place a lot of emphasis on social interaction, networking and extracurricular activities. Did you join a sports or drama club? Did you participate in a public service society? Did you join a social club?
The opposite of "a social network makes finding a job easier" is not "no social network makes finding a job impossible".
Besides, immigrants tend to have very good social networks, composed of other immigrants from the same country of origin.
But many other costs of education, grading, feedback, etc., are proportional to the number of students. The amount of personal time you get from instructors for $100 is at most a few hours. For some students, that's enough. For most, it isn't.
Somehow the market seems to be a rather late noticing when platforms die. It was clear in the early 2000's that PalmOS was a dying platform and Palm should have started moving to Linux right away.
It may be work to actually do it, but the math and physics involved are high-school level and are being taught in high school. The math and physics involved in establishing the existence of climate change are graduate level.
Yes, you are wrong about your statement that "the evidence is ridiculously easy to understand!", since you obviously don't understand it yourself. For example, you point to experiments that are irrelevant to climate change and you can't define your terms, what the various climate variables mean, or how they are determined. The correct information is that understanding climate science requires graduate-level mathematics, statistics, physics, and earth science.
Sorry, I've been too busy to point out the other errors in your arguments. Since you ask, experiments that you can do in high school include: observations of planetary motions and moons, direct observations of planets through a telescope, spectrographic measurements of the sun, torsion balance measurements of gravity, tides and their relations to the moon, approximate distance from the sun via parallax measurements, observations of the moon relative to the sun, falling objects in a vacuum, among many others. Students can verify that observed orbits follow predicted orbits closely when using the right masses, which no other model of planetary motion does (in particular, none of the proposed geocentric models). Students can verify that the sun is made mostly from hydrogen and its approximate size, which lets them place bounds on its mass. For the size and composition of earth, simple travel reports, plus direct gravitational measurements suffice to get good bounds. Etc. So, even if students trust no published results, they can verify the heliocentric model of the solar system.
Yes, scientists believe that others aren't lying about experiments and raw measurements, and in the case of planetary and the heliocentric system, they have tens of thousands of independent sources of measurements that each individually are consistent with the theory; not so in the case of climate change. Furthermore, even stipulating that the reported results are correct, in the case of planetary motion, students can verify the consistency precisely with basic math and physics, while for climate change, they cannot.
Yes, de Saussure and Fourier suggested that the greenhouse effect is responsible for elevating temperature on the earth's surface; a good thing too because without that, we'd be living in a frozen wasteland. They didn't demonstrate the effect that is causing climate change, didn't relate this quantitatively to first principles, and certainly didn't show, or even provide a basis for showing, that a small elevation in CO2 concentration could lead to catastrophic warming.
It seems like you don't even understand the mechanisms that climate change is based on.