Planning on deflation to me says that they were building a pump-n-dump scheme, and knew it. I am hoping that instead it was a result of a hopeless understanding of economics, and absolutely no clue about what strict limits on monetary supply does to trade growth and the viability of a currency.
You can tell they made an attempt at "solving" the deflation issue by making it minutely subdividable, which effectively solves the liquidity problem. (Though it does all kinds of wonderful things to the system's scalability.) But since it doesn't solve problems with hoarding BitC's as an "investment", it ultimately fails as a currency.
The "victims" of deflation are those that spend any kind of resource into accepting these things, but fail to actually collect very many due to it's doom as a viable option.
Deflation has victims because of the limits it places on trade, credit, and economic growth. Yes, the currency you have is "worth" more over time, but the opportunities to spend that money get more and more limited as the value goes up. Because if an economy is shrinking, why would I want to sell goods and services to you, deflating-currency holder, so I can get a slice of an ever-shrinking, pie?
Let's say I sell a cart of groceries for ten BitCoins. Now, I spy a shiny new gadget in the window and want to buy it, and for unfathomable reasons, the merchant accepts BitCoins. However, because of the deflation I'm going to wait a few months while my BitCoins are worth more money before I buy said electronic doodad. Geeks 'r us isn't going to receive any BitCoins and will eventually drop them as a payment method.
Those merchants are going to sell my groceries, services, gas, oil, etc. in trade for, say, Dollars instead. And you are stuck with a BitCoin you can't actually buy what you want with...
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. BitCoins have a (dubious) value as an investment. As a currency, they are completely broken.
The BitCoin system has guaranteed deflation because lost hashes disppear from the monetary system forever. (Lost, destroyed or hoarded US currency can be replaced by the Federal reserve with a few keystrokes.) In addition, the current total value of the BitCoin currency (expessed in any normal monetary unit you'd care to name) is far too small to be a viable currency. It would have to deflate by several thousand percent to be any more than a niche currency. Since no one would volunteer to be the victims of such deflation, BitC's are doomed to irrelevancy.
WTF? BitCoins are like PayPal? At least PayPal (unreliably) collects the local currency, the value of which is internally consistent. PayPal does NOT collect "PayPal Bucks" which are then worth widely varying amounts of currency you can actually carry out non-niche transactions in.
If you don't understand what I just said, let me know, because I'd like to dig up some Flooz to sell you.
I don't know what the optimum curve for the increase in the BitCoin supply would have been, but an asymptotic curve isn't it. They were not thinking very well at all. The asymptotic curve limits the total size of the "BitCoin economy" because of guaranteed massive deflation if the economy increases in size at all. This renders it quite useless as a viable currency. (The current value of all currency in circulation is currently far too small to be viable, and the deflation required to get the BitCoin economy to a size where it would be a viable currency is far too high, leading to hoarding that would exacerbate the problem.) At the very least, it should have at least leveled out to a linear slope to account for increase in gross economic output.
So yes, this is a tulip craze, and I wish Slashdot would stop wasting their time on these things. (I also have serious doubts about scalability... once you start subdividing the BitC's down to make them usefully liquid, the amount of tracking required quickly becomes ridiculous and makes BitC's no more non-trackable than my Visa card due to issues with data and bandwidth portability.)
It's sort of an interesting idea, and the concept of a non-trackable currency is an interesting one which raises far-reaching economic and social questions, but this particular currency isn't going to answer them.
I think this is a case of looking on the past with rose-colored glasses. Of course it seems that the industry used to produce more interesting and innovative games, as the innovative and interesting ones are the only ones you remember; the rest have long been forgotten/sold/thrown away, etc. Trust me, shovelware mass-produced crap has always been a large part of the computer gaming industry. I really don't think the problem is getting any worse.
This is a requirement to enforce existing sales tax on merchandise shipped in from out of state.
Yes, it will primarily effect internet retailers (but will also affect mail and phone-order.) But it is not a tax on the internet itself, internet access, network traffic, or any other such thing.
I'll not get into a discussion in this comment as to if this is a good thing or not, but it pisses me off to see it referred to as an "internet tax."
1) Can you say deflation? That's bad, and it's built into a system that has a fixed number of units (that also experiences breakage.) Since the number of units in circulation does not rise with the size of the economy utilizing them, the price of anything bought with it MUST drop over time. This discourages their actual use. Economists do not universally refer to "deflationary spirals" with horror because they are all equally brainwashed. 2) They want to replace credit cards, but the supply is limited to 21M over the next 130 years? That's like an economy where the only transaction unit is shares of Berkshire Hathaway. And people think a $5 minimum credit card purchase is a gross violation of civil rights...
This is broken in so many ways, I don't think the governments of the world are exactly quaking in their shoes and/or writing laws to stop this.
Why does it matter how much it has melted, as long as it stays in the reactor vessel? We weren't calling damaged reactor fuel sitting in the bottom a "meltdown" before... why is it one now?
I thought they already knew the reactor fuel rods were completely borked to at least some degree. When I think of "meltdown" I think "puddle of molten nuclear fuel sitting on the floor of the reactor building." Not "reactor vessel really borked and leaking water" (Which was already suspected and were not calling a meltdown.)
I'm pretty sure it would be illegal to build a house that only had 50A service, and has been for some time. (You'd never pass electrical inspection.) Current code calls for at least 100A 220V split-phase, and most will have 150A and up. I think even my grandmother's house (built in '45) has better than 50A service. Likewise with the non-polarized and/or ungrounded sockets. (Again, not code-compliant for a very long time.) And rolling blackouts are quite rare; they are largely confined to California during only the most extreme heat waves. They aren't "yearly."
Ok, you can't run a 3kW power tool in your kitchen. That's hardly "dismal." (And getting a split-phase outlet installed for that purpose is a cheap job that can be done by any electrician.)
Once iTunes was available for Windows, it was all over. (Prior to this, MP3 players were still a competitive market.) When I replaced my first MP3 player (a discman-shaped Nomad), I first replaced it with another Nomad. Nasty hardware problem, so back to the store it went. Next attempt was an iRiver unit. Absolutely fantastic hardware, a remote with a display, great battery life; absolutely crap software. No ripping program, no organizing software, strange filename limitations, limited tagging support, no progressive-speed scrolling. At that point, I just gave up and bought an iPod and haven't looked back since.
The teller doesn't have to guess if you are good
on
Tech That Failed To Fail
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Tellers (or phone customer service reps) don't have to guess if you are a profitable customer; the computer tells them this outright. Many years ago, I was reading about a shift at a FirstUSA (now Chase) call center, and every rep had a "traffic light" appear when the customer's file came up. That light would tell them if it was a "good" customer (and therefore deserving of obsequious (and time consuming) service, fee waivers, etc.) or a "poor" customer (and deserving the bare minimum of efficient service, no waivers for anything, etc.)
Naturally, "good" was either high-volume pay-every-month (and therefore a source of fee income), or maxed out (and paying on time.) "Bad" was small-volume, paid every month (and therefore expensive due to account overhead) or an erratic payer (and therefore likely stuck no matter how ruthless the bank was with fees.)
1) This would help in surprisingly few crashes. Most crashes take place during "normal" takeoffs and landings. 2) Over the ocean, you'd need a parachute AND a life raft. (A dinky little inflatable life jacket isn't going to cut the mustard on the open ocean where hundreds of your fellow passengers are spread over miles and miles of (likely rough) water with NO floating aircraft bits to hold on to. And that's if you survive to get in the raft. Good luck having more than a few untrained people successfully ditch the parachute, swim to the surface, and find their life raft (while fully clothed) before they drown. 3) Over land, there is usually plenty of time to glide to an alternate airport (or smooth patch of ground.) If you have land smooth (and soft) enough to land untrained people in a parachute, it should be good enough to land the plane. 4) If the plane starts to break up, stall due to icing, etc., it would be in no condition to evacuate via parachute, as it almost certainly is not in smooth controlled flight at the time. 5) The plane is going too fast. 6) You can only evac through exits where your tumbling body isn't going to hit anything like the wing or tail. 7) You can't start the evac until the plane hits 10,000 ft or so. Before that the doors can't even open because of the pressure difference, and even if they could, you'd pass out due to hypoxia. (Bad Hollywood movies notwithstanding.) 8) Parachutes are HEAVY. You'd chop the passenger capacity of the aircraft by quite a bit by supplying everybody with a parachute.
It'll reduce the number of loans granted, yes. And that means that without a corresponding massive increase in federal aid, lots of people would be completely unable to go to college. Professional graduate school (medical, dental, legal, etc.) would be completely out of reach for all but a few, decimating the future ranks of those professions. (Okay, we don't need so many lawyers, but we don't exactly have an excess of dentists out there.)
"Availibility Zones", "Failure Domains", etc. must be done with absolute perfection if you do them at all. If your gargantuan application has some single tiny side-feature that is not replicated across domains, your whole app is going down.
True Story: I was doing some consulting work for a large bank after they had a bunch of problems. Their main website had all the super-available trimmings: Oracle RAC, mutli-site server clustering, storage mirroring, all the fancy, expensive, highly-available crap you could ask for. This is all well and good except... some dinky stylesheet (or something like that) for the bank's homepage resided on some dinky 1U non-clustered fileserver. When it went down, the pages simply would not display. Whoops! All that grand effort was for nought because there was one "leakage" that killed the whole app.
I don't like Cisco's bugfix policy either, but that said, it is not unheard of for enterprise HW/SW vendors to only provide fixes to customers with a current contract. If you haven't paid for a warranty, you aren't entitled to HW fixes, why should you be entitled to SW fixes?
If you want to pursue anti-trust violations because you think this is unfair, fine, but the WRONG way to go about it is to violate their policies (prior to the change) and then get caught.
It sounds like this guy's entire business model (providing aftermarket service) is built around getting those fixes. If they were downloaded in the absence of a valid service contract, then I can guess this could be a valid criminal charge.
These folks are in the same boat as professional photographers that endlessly bitch and moan about "amateurs" selling stock photos for ten bucks that they would have charged thousands for, or journalists that are seeing their profession decimated by free news sources. I don't own pro photographers, journalists, game designers, etc. a living. Yeah, it sucks they are going to lose their jobs and/or make less money, but that's how progress works.
Elaborate games are an art form all their own, and one that is quite different from $1 games. But if it turns out the market for those $60 games is perfectly satisfied with the entertainment they get from the cheap ones, then the market for expensive games will die. Is this something that needs "fixing"? I'd say no.
The books (and the check-out system) are being supplied by an existing ePub-based libary book lender, OverDrive. One can guess that libraries will not have to buy Kindle-specific books separate from the ePub-lendable copies of the books they already get from the same vendor. As long as the number of copies outstanding at any one time is consistent, I can't imagine the publishers really care which format they are in.
This article was nothing more than verbal diarrhea by yet another self-appointed "expert" (interchangeable with "consultant" or "analyst".)
Biggest bank? Errr... no. That would be BNP Paribas, with $36B in capital and $3T in assets. While I could see Facebook setting up some kind of money transfer service (ala PayPal), that's a very long stretch from being an actual bank
And what is this crap about credit ratings based on non-existent facebook profiles? Web 3.0? An organization that "launches" 1,000 companies a year?
I had a friend that was showing off Enlightenment to me nearly fifteen years ago. Why is anyone still holding out for a real usable release? It's been in development as long as Duke Nukem Forever...
For far too many PowerPoint presentations, the presenter has apologized with "sorry this is an eye chart." If you have to apologize for it being too small, you are doing something very wrong. If there is any supplemental detail you'd like to provide, stick it in either a report or slide notes. (I routinely deliver 15-slide presentations backed by a 40-60 page report stuffed with the relevant technical detail; it works WAY better than a 60-slide presentation with the details right there in the slides.)
My general rule of thumb is to go to the next slide if PP has to shrink the font size.
Also, don't use complete sentences; complete sentences means that either your audience will either be reading the slides and not listen to you, or if you are a really lousy speaker, you'll start reading the slides. Nothing makes me tune out a presenter faster than one who reads his/her slides. I can read WAY faster than you can talk, and it means that I'm simply going to read your slide, and then ignore the words rambling out of your mouth until the slide changes.
And for goodness sake: Dump animations and slide transitions. They usually add nothing other than a lousy presenter waiting for them to finish before speaking again.
Lastly, Death to Clip Art and Stock Photography! It's usually easy to spot a mile away, and again adds nothing to your presentation.
The guy that fixes your car at the Ford dealership doesn't work for Ford; he works for the dealer, who is nothing more than a franchisee. And if they DO have to call Ford HQ for help, the people that work the techline back at HQ ALSO did not design or build the car; they are troubleshooting specialists, not design engineers.
Slashdot Mirror
Planning on deflation to me says that they were building a pump-n-dump scheme, and knew it. I am hoping that instead it was a result of a hopeless understanding of economics, and absolutely no clue about what strict limits on monetary supply does to trade growth and the viability of a currency.
You can tell they made an attempt at "solving" the deflation issue by making it minutely subdividable, which effectively solves the liquidity problem. (Though it does all kinds of wonderful things to the system's scalability.) But since it doesn't solve problems with hoarding BitC's as an "investment", it ultimately fails as a currency.
The "victims" of deflation are those that spend any kind of resource into accepting these things, but fail to actually collect very many due to it's doom as a viable option.
Deflation has victims because of the limits it places on trade, credit, and economic growth. Yes, the currency you have is "worth" more over time, but the opportunities to spend that money get more and more limited as the value goes up. Because if an economy is shrinking, why would I want to sell goods and services to you, deflating-currency holder, so I can get a slice of an ever-shrinking, pie?
Let's say I sell a cart of groceries for ten BitCoins. Now, I spy a shiny new gadget in the window and want to buy it, and for unfathomable reasons, the merchant accepts BitCoins. However, because of the deflation I'm going to wait a few months while my BitCoins are worth more money before I buy said electronic doodad. Geeks 'r us isn't going to receive any BitCoins and will eventually drop them as a payment method.
Those merchants are going to sell my groceries, services, gas, oil, etc. in trade for, say, Dollars instead. And you are stuck with a BitCoin you can't actually buy what you want with...
I've said it before, and I'll say it again. BitCoins have a (dubious) value as an investment. As a currency, they are completely broken.
The BitCoin system has guaranteed deflation because lost hashes disppear from the monetary system forever. (Lost, destroyed or hoarded US currency can be replaced by the Federal reserve with a few keystrokes.) In addition, the current total value of the BitCoin currency (expessed in any normal monetary unit you'd care to name) is far too small to be a viable currency. It would have to deflate by several thousand percent to be any more than a niche currency. Since no one would volunteer to be the victims of such deflation, BitC's are doomed to irrelevancy.
WTF? BitCoins are like PayPal? At least PayPal (unreliably) collects the local currency, the value of which is internally consistent. PayPal does NOT collect "PayPal Bucks" which are then worth widely varying amounts of currency you can actually carry out non-niche transactions in.
If you don't understand what I just said, let me know, because I'd like to dig up some Flooz to sell you.
I don't know what the optimum curve for the increase in the BitCoin supply would have been, but an asymptotic curve isn't it. They were not thinking very well at all. The asymptotic curve limits the total size of the "BitCoin economy" because of guaranteed massive deflation if the economy increases in size at all. This renders it quite useless as a viable currency. (The current value of all currency in circulation is currently far too small to be viable, and the deflation required to get the BitCoin economy to a size where it would be a viable currency is far too high, leading to hoarding that would exacerbate the problem.) At the very least, it should have at least leveled out to a linear slope to account for increase in gross economic output.
So yes, this is a tulip craze, and I wish Slashdot would stop wasting their time on these things. (I also have serious doubts about scalability... once you start subdividing the BitC's down to make them usefully liquid, the amount of tracking required quickly becomes ridiculous and makes BitC's no more non-trackable than my Visa card due to issues with data and bandwidth portability.)
It's sort of an interesting idea, and the concept of a non-trackable currency is an interesting one which raises far-reaching economic and social questions, but this particular currency isn't going to answer them.
I think this is a case of looking on the past with rose-colored glasses. Of course it seems that the industry used to produce more interesting and innovative games, as the innovative and interesting ones are the only ones you remember; the rest have long been forgotten/sold/thrown away, etc. Trust me, shovelware mass-produced crap has always been a large part of the computer gaming industry. I really don't think the problem is getting any worse.
This is a requirement to enforce existing sales tax on merchandise shipped in from out of state.
Yes, it will primarily effect internet retailers (but will also affect mail and phone-order.) But it is not a tax on the internet itself, internet access, network traffic, or any other such thing.
I'll not get into a discussion in this comment as to if this is a good thing or not, but it pisses me off to see it referred to as an "internet tax."
Obvious problems:
1) Can you say deflation? That's bad, and it's built into a system that has a fixed number of units (that also experiences breakage.) Since the number of units in circulation does not rise with the size of the economy utilizing them, the price of anything bought with it MUST drop over time. This discourages their actual use. Economists do not universally refer to "deflationary spirals" with horror because they are all equally brainwashed.
2) They want to replace credit cards, but the supply is limited to 21M over the next 130 years? That's like an economy where the only transaction unit is shares of Berkshire Hathaway. And people think a $5 minimum credit card purchase is a gross violation of civil rights...
This is broken in so many ways, I don't think the governments of the world are exactly quaking in their shoes and/or writing laws to stop this.
Why does it matter how much it has melted, as long as it stays in the reactor vessel? We weren't calling damaged reactor fuel sitting in the bottom a "meltdown" before... why is it one now?
I thought they already knew the reactor fuel rods were completely borked to at least some degree. When I think of "meltdown" I think "puddle of molten nuclear fuel sitting on the floor of the reactor building." Not "reactor vessel really borked and leaking water" (Which was already suspected and were not calling a meltdown.)
WoW is surprisingly low bandwidth; it's even less than simple music streaming, much less video streaming.
I'm pretty sure it would be illegal to build a house that only had 50A service, and has been for some time. (You'd never pass electrical inspection.) Current code calls for at least 100A 220V split-phase, and most will have 150A and up. I think even my grandmother's house (built in '45) has better than 50A service. Likewise with the non-polarized and/or ungrounded sockets. (Again, not code-compliant for a very long time.) And rolling blackouts are quite rare; they are largely confined to California during only the most extreme heat waves. They aren't "yearly."
Ok, you can't run a 3kW power tool in your kitchen. That's hardly "dismal." (And getting a split-phase outlet installed for that purpose is a cheap job that can be done by any electrician.)
Once iTunes was available for Windows, it was all over. (Prior to this, MP3 players were still a competitive market.) When I replaced my first MP3 player (a discman-shaped Nomad), I first replaced it with another Nomad. Nasty hardware problem, so back to the store it went. Next attempt was an iRiver unit. Absolutely fantastic hardware, a remote with a display, great battery life; absolutely crap software. No ripping program, no organizing software, strange filename limitations, limited tagging support, no progressive-speed scrolling. At that point, I just gave up and bought an iPod and haven't looked back since.
Tellers (or phone customer service reps) don't have to guess if you are a profitable customer; the computer tells them this outright. Many years ago, I was reading about a shift at a FirstUSA (now Chase) call center, and every rep had a "traffic light" appear when the customer's file came up. That light would tell them if it was a "good" customer (and therefore deserving of obsequious (and time consuming) service, fee waivers, etc.) or a "poor" customer (and deserving the bare minimum of efficient service, no waivers for anything, etc.)
Naturally, "good" was either high-volume pay-every-month (and therefore a source of fee income), or maxed out (and paying on time.) "Bad" was small-volume, paid every month (and therefore expensive due to account overhead) or an erratic payer (and therefore likely stuck no matter how ruthless the bank was with fees.)
1) This would help in surprisingly few crashes. Most crashes take place during "normal" takeoffs and landings.
2) Over the ocean, you'd need a parachute AND a life raft. (A dinky little inflatable life jacket isn't going to cut the mustard on the open ocean where hundreds of your fellow passengers are spread over miles and miles of (likely rough) water with NO floating aircraft bits to hold on to. And that's if you survive to get in the raft. Good luck having more than a few untrained people successfully ditch the parachute, swim to the surface, and find their life raft (while fully clothed) before they drown.
3) Over land, there is usually plenty of time to glide to an alternate airport (or smooth patch of ground.) If you have land smooth (and soft) enough to land untrained people in a parachute, it should be good enough to land the plane.
4) If the plane starts to break up, stall due to icing, etc., it would be in no condition to evacuate via parachute, as it almost certainly is not in smooth controlled flight at the time.
5) The plane is going too fast.
6) You can only evac through exits where your tumbling body isn't going to hit anything like the wing or tail.
7) You can't start the evac until the plane hits 10,000 ft or so. Before that the doors can't even open because of the pressure difference, and even if they could, you'd pass out due to hypoxia. (Bad Hollywood movies notwithstanding.)
8) Parachutes are HEAVY. You'd chop the passenger capacity of the aircraft by quite a bit by supplying everybody with a parachute.
SirWired
It'll reduce the number of loans granted, yes. And that means that without a corresponding massive increase in federal aid, lots of people would be completely unable to go to college. Professional graduate school (medical, dental, legal, etc.) would be completely out of reach for all but a few, decimating the future ranks of those professions. (Okay, we don't need so many lawyers, but we don't exactly have an excess of dentists out there.)
"Availibility Zones", "Failure Domains", etc. must be done with absolute perfection if you do them at all. If your gargantuan application has some single tiny side-feature that is not replicated across domains, your whole app is going down.
True Story: I was doing some consulting work for a large bank after they had a bunch of problems. Their main website had all the super-available trimmings: Oracle RAC, mutli-site server clustering, storage mirroring, all the fancy, expensive, highly-available crap you could ask for. This is all well and good except... some dinky stylesheet (or something like that) for the bank's homepage resided on some dinky 1U non-clustered fileserver. When it went down, the pages simply would not display. Whoops! All that grand effort was for nought because there was one "leakage" that killed the whole app.
I don't like Cisco's bugfix policy either, but that said, it is not unheard of for enterprise HW/SW vendors to only provide fixes to customers with a current contract. If you haven't paid for a warranty, you aren't entitled to HW fixes, why should you be entitled to SW fixes?
If you want to pursue anti-trust violations because you think this is unfair, fine, but the WRONG way to go about it is to violate their policies (prior to the change) and then get caught.
It sounds like this guy's entire business model (providing aftermarket service) is built around getting those fixes. If they were downloaded in the absence of a valid service contract, then I can guess this could be a valid criminal charge.
These folks are in the same boat as professional photographers that endlessly bitch and moan about "amateurs" selling stock photos for ten bucks that they would have charged thousands for, or journalists that are seeing their profession decimated by free news sources. I don't own pro photographers, journalists, game designers, etc. a living. Yeah, it sucks they are going to lose their jobs and/or make less money, but that's how progress works.
Elaborate games are an art form all their own, and one that is quite different from $1 games. But if it turns out the market for those $60 games is perfectly satisfied with the entertainment they get from the cheap ones, then the market for expensive games will die. Is this something that needs "fixing"? I'd say no.
These aren't free books; they are in-copyright books already supplied to libraries for limited-copy-checkout by an existing vendor, OverDrive.
The books (and the check-out system) are being supplied by an existing ePub-based libary book lender, OverDrive. One can guess that libraries will not have to buy Kindle-specific books separate from the ePub-lendable copies of the books they already get from the same vendor. As long as the number of copies outstanding at any one time is consistent, I can't imagine the publishers really care which format they are in.
This article was nothing more than verbal diarrhea by yet another self-appointed "expert" (interchangeable with "consultant" or "analyst".)
Biggest bank? Errr... no. That would be BNP Paribas, with $36B in capital and $3T in assets. While I could see Facebook setting up some kind of money transfer service (ala PayPal), that's a very long stretch from being an actual bank
And what is this crap about credit ratings based on non-existent facebook profiles? Web 3.0? An organization that "launches" 1,000 companies a year?
Maybe Rob Enderele will hire this clown!
I had a friend that was showing off Enlightenment to me nearly fifteen years ago. Why is anyone still holding out for a real usable release? It's been in development as long as Duke Nukem Forever...
For far too many PowerPoint presentations, the presenter has apologized with "sorry this is an eye chart." If you have to apologize for it being too small, you are doing something very wrong. If there is any supplemental detail you'd like to provide, stick it in either a report or slide notes. (I routinely deliver 15-slide presentations backed by a 40-60 page report stuffed with the relevant technical detail; it works WAY better than a 60-slide presentation with the details right there in the slides.)
My general rule of thumb is to go to the next slide if PP has to shrink the font size.
Also, don't use complete sentences; complete sentences means that either your audience will either be reading the slides and not listen to you, or if you are a really lousy speaker, you'll start reading the slides. Nothing makes me tune out a presenter faster than one who reads his/her slides. I can read WAY faster than you can talk, and it means that I'm simply going to read your slide, and then ignore the words rambling out of your mouth until the slide changes.
And for goodness sake: Dump animations and slide transitions. They usually add nothing other than a lousy presenter waiting for them to finish before speaking again.
Lastly, Death to Clip Art and Stock Photography! It's usually easy to spot a mile away, and again adds nothing to your presentation.
The guy that fixes your car at the Ford dealership doesn't work for Ford; he works for the dealer, who is nothing more than a franchisee. And if they DO have to call Ford HQ for help, the people that work the techline back at HQ ALSO did not design or build the car; they are troubleshooting specialists, not design engineers.