People that think responsibly about the environment want that people make small choices that save energy and that governments encourage people to make those choices.
We should be able to live modern lives as we understand such a thing today but is a disgrace if we don't attempt to do so by using the least energy possibly.
So you think that by closing our eyes, putting our hand in our ears and shouting "lah,lah,lah" our problems are going to go away?
It is reasonable to understand the environmental impact of our activities in order to so something about the way we pollute.
Nobody serious is advocating going back to primitive societies, only people like you that prefer to ignore reality and pass the environmental bill to future generations make such outrageous claims.
You quote Mr Segalstad, a Geologist. who rants against the conclusions of the UN IPCC.
Here is a rebuttal I found:
"Segalstad dismisses the IPCC's detailed ocean circulation models (which indicate that the deeper layers of the ocean do not mix much with the more mobile surface waters) and also ignores the feedback effect of rising surface temperatures on the ability of the surface waters to retain CO2. As many (other) AGW sceptics constantly remind us, in past warming periods CO2 rose after the warming began: this was due to warmer oceans.
If Segalstad was right, atmospheric CO2 levels would have risen far, far slower than they have over the last five decades and no-one would ever have been alarmed by the increase as it would have corresponded only to the last few years' emissions. We'd have seen a decrease in atmospheric CO2 in the mid 1990s corresponding to the economic collapse of the Soviet Union. It didn't happen.
The fact is, carbon dioxide is obviously remaining in the atmosphere for many decades, and is likely to remain there for centuries without human intervention."
So Mr Segalstad seems to be wrong about the main issue he seems to know something about, his model does not account for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Well, Duh!
If the rest of your links is so easily rebuttable by evidence so widely available I think your experts may not be such.
For goodness sakes, the enormous majority of the scientific community everywhere is saying he is wrong, the rebuttal to his main argument is easy to understand and put forward, so he may have been part of the panel, I don't see mentioned on his website why he had a change of heart about the whole matter.
Services are something tangible for which there is genuine demand.
Financial services, tourism services, movie making, game programming, they are real things for which there is real demand.
If you want to compete in manufacturing then be prepared to lower the standards of living of your population.
Manufacturing will not become fashionable again in rich countries for at least a couple of generations, once our manufacturing powerhouses are Burkina Fasso and Kazakhstan then that would mean that their is competition to be had again, for the time being rich countries have no chance in hell to compete, to pretend otherwise is wishful thinking.
Nokia alone is selling 16 times more phones than Apple.
I went directly to the earning reports of each company, so you will have to explain how the numbers you are quoting fit with what the companies themselves are telling us.
Apple was in the doldrums before Steve Jobs' come back.
Microsoft invested money on them for crying out loud.
Palm has a brand recognition that can be put to good use, if they come with a good product they could become big players again. Openness is key, they should remember how quickly Palm became ubiquitous thanks to the easy access to development tools.
That would be a sensible aim if the iPhone was the market leader.
Now, show us some reference where the iPhone is shown to be leading the market.
From Nokia's Q3 report:
"Nokia estimated mobile device market share of 38%, down from 39% in Q3 2007 and down from 40% in Q2 2008."
and later
"NOKIA MOBILE DEVICE VOLUME BY GEOGRAPHIC AREA (million units) Q3/2008 Q3/2007 YoY Change Q2/2008 QoQ Change Europe 27.4 29.0 -5.5% 27.1 1.1% Middle East & Africa 21.5 19.3 11.4% 21.1 1.9% Greater China 19.8 18.9 4.8% 17.6 12.5% Asia-Pacific 33.6 29.5 13.9% 36.4 -7.7% North America 4.5 5.4 -16.7% 4.5 0.0% Latin America 11.0 9.6 14.6% 15.3 -28.1% Total 117.8 111.7 5.5% 122.0 -3.4% "
From Apple's 2008 Q4 report: "Quarterly iPhone units sold were 6,892,000"
So Nokia is selling 117 million units, Apple is selling 7 million.
According to Nokia's report the global market for the period was 300 million units.
Again, why do we need to kill the iPhone?
That the iPhone is mentioned as the aim to be killed is a testament to the marketing skills of Apple.
The general public is not that stupid: we don't want network lockin (not in Europe, not in East Asia, the biggest mobile markets) and people are clearly finding the iPhone deals extortionate.
Certainly other companies need to do something about the mindshare that Apple is enjoying now, but I wonder how important that is going to be once Steve Jobs leaves Apple. His marketing based vision of the company will be difficult to be push by somebody that is not as charismatic as him (he has been described as a cult leader, which is not far from the truth).
Books are very expensive in poor countries. In many of them the government assumes the cost of production and distribution of books for primary education since the population could not afford them otherwise.
If each child had a cheap laptop the books could be distributed electronically, saving millions that could be put to other uses in the educational system.
Just that would be justification enough.
But something else elitist people in this website forget is that having a computer with access to the Internet is really an equalizer in terms of access to knowledge and the world economy.
Many children would be able to learn English and other languages by browsing the Internet (heck, many did so by watching Sesame Street on cable TV, the Internet is vastly superior on this regard), all children would have access to dictionaries and encyclopaedias, both items they would never see otherwise.
And of course they would be computer literate, which is a competitive disadvantage they will have to deal with: workers in other countries are raise with computers around them, people in poor countries may never have seen a computer before they are 18, so they start disadvantages when they go into University or looking for a job.
In an era where pretty much any job requires computer literacy it is a huge disadvantage not to be familiar with the basics of how a computer works.
In Mexico for example the books for primary education are all provided by the government. The distribution of theses books would be immensely cheaper in an electronic format.
In many poor countries books are taxed as luxury items, that is how expensive they are.
Even when the books are pirated (imagine, the original are so expensive that it pays of to photocopy the original and sell the copies) the cost is still substantial.
An electronic copy delivered via the Internet costs practically 0 to distribute. You can hardly beat that.
The Pope can't ban the use of birth control. Million of Catholics worldwide use birth control in all its forms and look at the Pope with derision in regards to this topic.
The Pope can only mandate in matters of faith, and even there his powers are quite narrow.
I am amazed there are people out there still trying to rationalize the pretty obvious by fancy means.
All this talk about risk is utter nonsense, as long as it is considered sane to lend to people that can't possibly pay back all your fancy wording is worth squat.
I have seen billions thrown at banks and car companies. Where is the legislation ensuring that people lacking any creditworthiness will not get a loan?
I don't know which reality you are talking about, in the one where I live If I know my employer is breaking the law I would have to ask very serious questions about my continued involvement with them. Some of us have a moral spine and are grown up enough to understand if we are in moral dubious grounds or not.
As for not getting emotionally involved with technology, who the heck are you to tell other people where their emotions should be? Also who gave you an universal arbitration about the standards of credibility of other people?
The only standard is an honest representation of the truth as one sees it, this may include a passionate emotional involvement with the topic at hand.
if you can't stand people passionate about something don't disguise this as a failing of your opposite, it is most disingenuous.
Shortermism has spread in all capitalist economies, but that was not always the case: in European countries very successful companies always had the input of employees, and often profit was agreed with them. In Japan older employees were moved to positions with less responsibility, often doing nothing, because companies understood that knowledge could come handy later, and also as a sign of respect for years of loyal service.
Capitalism has not been the same everywhere, the failed kind that the US has defended must be abandoned, pronto.
Short termism, lack of employee input and far too much flexibility to get rid of people other than the fat cats at the top are practices that should go, they have proven to be a sickness not an strength of the system.
This shortermism is part of the mentality that has landed the world economy in the pit where we all are.
A company that wants to increase profits at all times no matter what is brain dead. A company that fires people because they have one or two quarters below expectations (not even necessarily being unprofitable) are badly managed.
That employee that apparently is not producing as much now may be the key to your success in the future. Companies are losing their corporate culture, that internal knowledge that would stop them committing the same mistakes or reinventing the wheel, propositions both that very often are costlier than the salary of a few employees that may appear momentarily as non performers.
Those are not friends, there are acquaintances at best.
Real friends can be counted with the fingers of a hand, and they are so important to me I will ring each one of them if I am on their respective towns.
Anything else is a cop out and frankly the world does not work like that, few people have so many friends that it becomes justifiable to make more efficient the communication process....
Slashdot Mirror
People that think responsibly about the environment want that people make small choices that save energy and that governments encourage people to make those choices.
We should be able to live modern lives as we understand such a thing today but is a disgrace if we don't attempt to do so by using the least energy possibly.
So you think that by closing our eyes, putting our hand in our ears and shouting "lah,lah,lah" our problems are going to go away?
It is reasonable to understand the environmental impact of our activities in order to so something about the way we pollute.
Nobody serious is advocating going back to primitive societies, only people like you that prefer to ignore reality and pass the environmental bill to future generations make such outrageous claims.
You quote Mr Segalstad, a Geologist. who rants against the conclusions of the UN IPCC.
Here is a rebuttal I found:
"Segalstad dismisses the IPCC's detailed ocean circulation models (which indicate that the deeper layers of the ocean do not mix much with the more mobile surface waters) and also ignores the feedback effect of rising surface temperatures on the ability of the surface waters to retain CO2. As many (other) AGW sceptics constantly remind us, in past warming periods CO2 rose after the warming began: this was due to warmer oceans.
If Segalstad was right, atmospheric CO2 levels would have risen far, far slower than they have over the last five decades and no-one would ever have been alarmed by the increase as it would have corresponded only to the last few years' emissions. We'd have seen a decrease in atmospheric CO2 in the mid 1990s corresponding to the economic collapse of the Soviet Union. It didn't happen.
The fact is, carbon dioxide is obviously remaining in the atmosphere for many decades, and is likely to remain there for centuries without human intervention."
So Mr Segalstad seems to be wrong about the main issue he seems to know something about, his model does not account for the collapse of the Soviet Union. Well, Duh!
If the rest of your links is so easily rebuttable by evidence so widely available I think your experts may not be such.
For goodness sakes, the enormous majority of the scientific community everywhere is saying he is wrong, the rebuttal to his main argument is easy to understand and put forward, so he may have been part of the panel, I don't see mentioned on his website why he had a change of heart about the whole matter.
Services are something tangible for which there is genuine demand.
Financial services, tourism services, movie making, game programming, they are real things for which there is real demand.
If you want to compete in manufacturing then be prepared to lower the standards of living of your population.
Manufacturing will not become fashionable again in rich countries for at least a couple of generations, once our manufacturing powerhouses are Burkina Fasso and Kazakhstan then that would mean that their is competition to be had again, for the time being rich countries have no chance in hell to compete, to pretend otherwise is wishful thinking.
Yeah, sure, lies, damned lies and statistics, the tools of the marketing gurus.
It is like that baseball player in a movie who is fired but claims it is unfair since he broke the record for triples for a month of August.
Nokia alone is selling 16 times more phones than Apple.
I went directly to the earning reports of each company, so you will have to explain how the numbers you are quoting fit with what the companies themselves are telling us.
Apple was in the doldrums before Steve Jobs' come back.
Microsoft invested money on them for crying out loud.
Palm has a brand recognition that can be put to good use, if they come with a good product they could become big players again. Openness is key, they should remember how quickly Palm became ubiquitous thanks to the easy access to development tools.
That would be a sensible aim if the iPhone was the market leader.
Now, show us some reference where the iPhone is shown to be leading the market.
From Nokia's Q3 report:
"Nokia estimated mobile device market share of 38%, down from 39% in Q3 2007 and down from 40%
in Q2 2008."
and later
"NOKIA MOBILE DEVICE VOLUME BY GEOGRAPHIC AREA (million units) Q3/2008 Q3/2007 YoY
Change Q2/2008 QoQ
Change
Europe 27.4 29.0 -5.5% 27.1 1.1%
Middle East & Africa 21.5 19.3 11.4% 21.1 1.9%
Greater China 19.8 18.9 4.8% 17.6 12.5%
Asia-Pacific 33.6 29.5 13.9% 36.4 -7.7%
North America 4.5 5.4 -16.7% 4.5 0.0%
Latin America 11.0 9.6 14.6% 15.3 -28.1%
Total 117.8 111.7 5.5% 122.0 -3.4%
"
From Apple's 2008 Q4 report: "Quarterly iPhone units sold were 6,892,000"
So Nokia is selling 117 million units, Apple is selling 7 million.
According to Nokia's report the global market for the period was 300 million units.
Again, why do we need to kill the iPhone?
That the iPhone is mentioned as the aim to be killed is a testament to the marketing skills of Apple.
The general public is not that stupid: we don't want network lockin (not in Europe, not in East Asia, the biggest mobile markets) and people are clearly finding the iPhone deals extortionate.
Certainly other companies need to do something about the mindshare that Apple is enjoying now, but I wonder how important that is going to be once Steve Jobs leaves Apple. His marketing based vision of the company will be difficult to be push by somebody that is not as charismatic as him (he has been described as a cult leader, which is not far from the truth).
Books are very expensive in poor countries. In many of them the government assumes the cost of production and distribution of books for primary education since the population could not afford them otherwise.
If each child had a cheap laptop the books could be distributed electronically, saving millions that could be put to other uses in the educational system.
Just that would be justification enough.
But something else elitist people in this website forget is that having a computer with access to the Internet is really an equalizer in terms of access to knowledge and the world economy.
Many children would be able to learn English and other languages by browsing the Internet (heck, many did so by watching Sesame Street on cable TV, the Internet is vastly superior on this regard), all children would have access to dictionaries and encyclopaedias, both items they would never see otherwise.
And of course they would be computer literate, which is a competitive disadvantage they will have to deal with: workers in other countries are raise with computers around them, people in poor countries may never have seen a computer before they are 18, so they start disadvantages when they go into University or looking for a job.
In an era where pretty much any job requires computer literacy it is a huge disadvantage not to be familiar with the basics of how a computer works.
In Mexico for example the books for primary education are all provided by the government. The distribution of theses books would be immensely cheaper in an electronic format.
In many poor countries books are taxed as luxury items, that is how expensive they are.
Even when the books are pirated (imagine, the original are so expensive that it pays of to photocopy the original and sell the copies) the cost is still substantial.
An electronic copy delivered via the Internet costs practically 0 to distribute. You can hardly beat that.
You can get your work done with any reasonable tool.
Not using the tools available in Linux is a lame excuse for not switching. The tools are adequate and in some cases superior to the competition.
It is used in embeded devices and in grid computing, and all beasts in between.
Linux is so flexible it is scary, specially for monopolists.
I have 3 cards (I use them interchangeably between my MP3 player, digital camera, phone and PDA).
Why do you need much more than that?
Why aren't you dumping stuff to your computer's disk?
What is wrong with you!
Since when a person dressed as a Muslim is a threat?
It is statements like the one you just made what makes this world a sorry place to live in.
The Pope can't ban the use of birth control. Million of Catholics worldwide use birth control in all its forms and look at the Pope with derision in regards to this topic.
The Pope can only mandate in matters of faith, and even there his powers are quite narrow.
I am amazed there are people out there still trying to rationalize the pretty obvious by fancy means.
All this talk about risk is utter nonsense, as long as it is considered sane to lend to people that can't possibly pay back all your fancy wording is worth squat.
I have seen billions thrown at banks and car companies. Where is the legislation ensuring that people lacking any creditworthiness will not get a loan?
As long as you have an excuse, it is OK.
I don't know which reality you are talking about, in the one where I live If I know my employer is breaking the law I would have to ask very serious questions about my continued involvement with them. Some of us have a moral spine and are grown up enough to understand if we are in moral dubious grounds or not.
As for not getting emotionally involved with technology, who the heck are you to tell other people where their emotions should be? Also who gave you an universal arbitration about the standards of credibility of other people?
The only standard is an honest representation of the truth as one sees it, this may include a passionate emotional involvement with the topic at hand.
if you can't stand people passionate about something don't disguise this as a failing of your opposite, it is most disingenuous.
This is the foundation of US capitalism.
Shortermism has spread in all capitalist economies, but that was not always the case: in European countries very successful companies always had the input of employees, and often profit was agreed with them. In Japan older employees were moved to positions with less responsibility, often doing nothing, because companies understood that knowledge could come handy later, and also as a sign of respect for years of loyal service.
Capitalism has not been the same everywhere, the failed kind that the US has defended must be abandoned, pronto.
Short termism, lack of employee input and far too much flexibility to get rid of people other than the fat cats at the top are practices that should go, they have proven to be a sickness not an strength of the system.
This shortermism is part of the mentality that has landed the world economy in the pit where we all are.
A company that wants to increase profits at all times no matter what is brain dead. A company that fires people because they have one or two quarters below expectations (not even necessarily being unprofitable) are badly managed.
That employee that apparently is not producing as much now may be the key to your success in the future. Companies are losing their corporate culture, that internal knowledge that would stop them committing the same mistakes or reinventing the wheel, propositions both that very often are costlier than the salary of a few employees that may appear momentarily as non performers.
I wonder how people can come here, quote their expertise in the industry and then come with pearls of wisdom like the one above.
I sometimes really wonder if we are working in the same industry but in different planets.
There are times at which you have no profits or you need to reinvest them.
Or you pay dividends to the shareholders.
10? 20? 100?
Those are not friends, there are acquaintances at best.
Real friends can be counted with the fingers of a hand, and they are so important to me I will ring each one of them if I am on their respective towns.
Anything else is a cop out and frankly the world does not work like that, few people have so many friends that it becomes justifiable to make more efficient the communication process....
I question how genuine a friendship is if neither part can be bothered to write an email, letter or can't be bothered to phone.
Twitter seems like an excuse for the lazy.
Honestly, which need is there to either know all what is going on with somebody else or to let everybody else know what I am doing?
Why either of these is necessary?
Just because the government is trying to spy on us 24x7 means that we should give up privacy for no particular reason.