If you can believe NPR, then the spending enabled by Citizens United is only 10% of the total spending. So seeing numbers like 1.5 billion in the context implied by the summary is pretty misleading.
There are people who use computers and there are people who do things using computers. The first group pretty much doesn't give a crap about those three seconds because it's part of being all techie and computer user-y. The people who actual do things (design buildings, engineering, physics, medicine, word processing, accounting, data entry, data mining, geological exploration, etc.) using a computer, they really do give a shit because the computer shouldn't get in the way. For those people three seconds are definitely noticeable and really fucking annoying.
Your average pickup truck has a bigger engine than your average minivan. The fact that the minivan's brakes can hold back the minivan's engine tells you nothing about how well the minivan can hold back a pickup truck's engine.
You have to remember that these are people who have been trained to believe in the free-market economy and capitalism and that it is their duty to conduct their business to support other businesses, otherwise the market as a whole is harmed.
Apparently these people have been trained by socialists or marxists or something. A free-market economy say cut out the middle man. And probably the next guy too. If it's in your best interest anyway. But paying extra just to pay extra sounds a lot more like paying a union guy to stand around than to find someone who'll do the job correctly and efficiently.
It'll be cheaper because dell likely has other customers in the same market. They have a parts depot and a local courier service who'll grab a part and meet up with an FE somewhere and the FE drops by your site and installs the part. Unless you're a ridiculously tiny company you will not be able to beat dell at this.
What a bunch of weasel words. "They might." "They may." Why don't you just do the research. There's a reason that in the UC system not only do Asians not qualify for AA, there are restrictions on the number of Asians who will be admitted.
You are right however in that it's a cultural thing. However culture isn't an inherent characteristic. A person can choose not to live the negative aspects of their culture if they so choose. At no point should the rest of society make accommodations for people who refuse to make good choices under the guise of "their culture."
When talking about families and individuals, which is what this is about -- the accomplishment of individuals -- a "generation" is one person's life. A family consisting of two parents, age 76, and a child, age 50, does not consist of three generations. It has two.
Go read the first chapter, of the "The Millionaire Next Door". It has a nice profile of who are the millionaires in the United States.
What IS meaningful is that the strongest correlation for the wealth of a son is the wealth of his father. Accidents of birth are the primary driver for how wealthy a person will be.
Did you actually read that paper at all? Did you for some reason stop after seeing figure 2? Did you see figure 3? The one that says parent's wealth contributes about 15% to predicting a child's wealth. And the huge area labeled "unexplained" that represents more than 65%. It supports exactly what I said: that parental wealth is not the determining factor in the child's success and wealth.
No, that's exactly what he was saying. That why he said things like "...born equal...don't stay that way..."
Then you identify one person that you personally thinks couldn't make it on his own and that confirms your hypothesis? Are you aware that every time anyone has done a study of millionaires in the U.S. they find that the majority are self-made, first generation? That the slacker trust-fund middle-ager is the rare exception instead of the norm?
Do you not know that the idea that there is some privileged demographic and if you're not part of that demographic then you can't succeed is bullshit? Consider Asian immigrants. It's well documented that within a single generation they rise to the ranks of the middle class if not the upper-middle class.
Additionally the definition of "white middle-class" is so broad, it's absurd to think that there is some universal benefit to being part of that demographic. Contrast the opportunities available to a "white middle-class" person from southern Utah to the opportunities available to a "black middle-class" from Chicago. There's no doubt who has better chances. Yet nobody seriously thinks that the large industrial cities should be drained of their wealth so that people from small towns all across America can be given go-karts, ponies, and pie.
The true reality is that if you want to succeed you can and if you don't you won't. It's not the fault of society.
I don't want to argue for him, but you don't seem to have read what he wrote at all. At no point did he way that some people are inherently superior due to an advantaged birth. He is clearly not talking about a value judgment of individuals at all. Rather he is saying that some people accomplish more, they contribute more, they create prosperity.
And yes, in the end they should have a higher standard of living. Otherwise you are treating people unequally. Look at it from the whole equation rather than just the result. Person A made substantial sacrifices, they learned a valuable skill, they work sixty hours a week and they have a high standard of living. To then turn around and say that Person B deserves the same standard of living without ever having had to make the sacrifices and put in the work is treating them unequally. The only real way to treat them equally is to let them reach their own level of success driven by how much they want to put into it.
No. The Niagara CPUs do a hardware level context thread on every clock cycle or on a cache stall or halted thread. That 8 core, 8 thread cpu is effectively 64 slow cpus sharing a single L2 cache and having an 8:1 ratio of threads:L1 cache. It's not the same as 64 true cores, but it's very different than multiple sockets. For someone not familiar with the line and not interested in going out and reading up on the processors, you could think of it as a form of hyperthreading. In fact the T2 series does exactly that -- in each clock cycle two threads can execute as long as one of them can fit within a particular set of hardware needs, no fpu and some other things.
The spiffy thing about the Niagara line is that there are many more opportunities to keep the CPU running, contrasted with a non hyperthreaded x86 system which spends 30% or more of it's time stalled waiting for a cache line.
Actually the Niagara line from Sun/Oracle has 64+ "cpus" per socket. Depending on the exact model, a system like a T5240 will have 64 "cpus" per socket and two sockets for a total of 128 "cpus". The SPARC T3 processors have 16 cores with 8 threads per core, for a total of 128 threads of execution running from a single socket. Each of which has it's own registers, etc. From an OS scheduling point of view it is 128 cores.
You'd be better off overall by requiring vehicles to have black boxes that monitor motion, acceleration, etc. And then have that data uploaded somewhere and algorithmically processed to determine if the driving fit within certain rational bounds. Anything outside those bounds needs to be justified. Place small broadcasters on each car so that your car can log which cars were nearby. Then why you are trying to explain why you jumped on the break and jerked the steering, it was because some dipshit cut you off and they can then go review that car's data. Include cameras so that non-vehicular obstacles can be logged as well.
Your argument would actually make sense if software occurred randomly in nature. But since software doesn't just appear -- that it is in fact scarce -- your argument fails.
However even if that wasn't the case, your argument is also easily dismissed by noting that it's not the person doing the labor that is being bought, it's the act of labor or the product produced by the labor. That is, when someone hires you to sweep a floor it's not the fact that you are sweeping the floor that they care about, it's the swept floor. And the reality is there are six billion people on this planet, at least half of which can trivially sweep a floor. So, in fact, the act of labor necessary to sweep a floor is not scarce, it is highly abundant. (This is the sole purpose of modern labor unions, to artificially reduce the labor supply.)
Still, even if you want to argue that it's not the swept floor that matters, that it is indeed the laborer who is sweeping the floor that matters. Then you are still wrong as the corollary case would be the software developers' labor that matters, not the software product itself.
So which is it? The person laboring, the act of labor, or the product of the labor? In every single case you're wrong and my illustrative example holds true.
Sorry to break it to you, but there is no guarantee that you are going to get paid in the software business.
Indeed. Similar to how laboring doesn't necessarily mean you'll get paid. The labor has to be something that creates value for someone. And when they receive that value, it's reasonable to expect to be paid. That is, if you dig random holes don't expect a paycheck, but if you dig post holes for someone who wants to put up a fence, then expecting a paycheck isn't unreasonable. Correspondingly, if you make software that no one wants, then you won't make money. But if you make software that people want and that they use, then you should receive payment. It's a simple concept.
As far as the rest of your post, I'm in total agreement. There is a crapload of entitlement weenies in the world.
I'm curious. What facts could they provide? Because the numbers they provide are facts and more detail would provide no more veracity than what they have now. Even if they presented their source code, sales data from the android store and their server logs, there still would be people who will turn around and say things like "Well, where are the grapes? If they don't provide grapes then they prove nothing."
More detail may be interesting, but it's not any more or less proof than the number they have provided.
I have a scenario for you. Say you go out one day and get to thinking you'd like a new laptop but find that you have no money. Not being a criminal sort, you look around and note that that store over there has a now hiring sign in the window. So you go in have a talk with the manager, they get you your tools and you spend the day working. Then the next day. And so on for a month. So payday finally rolls around and surprise, surprise, no pay check for you. The boss has decided not to pay you.
How do you feel about this? Do you feel ripped off? Keep in mind that no one has gone into your wallet and taken anything away from you. The only thing you've "lost" was your time and the things you invested in in order to be able to go to work (rent, food, clothing, fuel, etc.) Also remember that he may not have ever intended to pay an employee anyway.
Well, that's exactly how a software developer feels. Why do they feel like that? Because they live in a country where the law says that they can make the investment in time and money to create a work and then they will get paid by people who choose to benefit from that work.
When you pirate software you are exactly like the boss who chooses not to pay his employees after they've already done the work.
Where you going to get the data from? Being able to implement an algorithm is a far cry from being able to sense and apply a voltage on an HDMI connector. The current HDMI capture cards do not provide access to the raw data stream.
What's the open competitor to the aforementioned consoles?
What stops you from making said console? There's more to being a responsible human being that merely having a desire for something. Usually you have to either build it yourself or somehow provide a good or service that you can trade for the product you so desire. If the product you want is exceptionally exotic then you may have to pay a significant premium. Regardless, no one in the entire universe is obligated to provide you with prepackaged goods.
You have a choice here, 1) just accept what others are willing to provide, or 2) create your own product. If you are correct in your assessment of what people want then you will be successful. I doubt that you'll be successful.
I'm not. If such people aren't worth having in society then they should just be killed. Putting them into a facility and paying fifty thousand dollars a year for thirty to sixty years just so the squeamish don't have to feel bad about eliminating someone they can't tolerate having around isn't worth it. Either they should be killed or let go.
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If you can believe NPR, then the spending enabled by Citizens United is only 10% of the total spending. So seeing numbers like 1.5 billion in the context implied by the summary is pretty misleading.
There are people who use computers and there are people who do things using computers. The first group pretty much doesn't give a crap about those three seconds because it's part of being all techie and computer user-y. The people who actual do things (design buildings, engineering, physics, medicine, word processing, accounting, data entry, data mining, geological exploration, etc.) using a computer, they really do give a shit because the computer shouldn't get in the way. For those people three seconds are definitely noticeable and really fucking annoying.
That's called productivity, you knucklehead.
Your average pickup truck has a bigger engine than your average minivan. The fact that the minivan's brakes can hold back the minivan's engine tells you nothing about how well the minivan can hold back a pickup truck's engine.
Apparently these people have been trained by socialists or marxists or something. A free-market economy say cut out the middle man. And probably the next guy too. If it's in your best interest anyway. But paying extra just to pay extra sounds a lot more like paying a union guy to stand around than to find someone who'll do the job correctly and efficiently.
It'll be cheaper because dell likely has other customers in the same market. They have a parts depot and a local courier service who'll grab a part and meet up with an FE somewhere and the FE drops by your site and installs the part. Unless you're a ridiculously tiny company you will not be able to beat dell at this.
What a bunch of weasel words. "They might." "They may." Why don't you just do the research. There's a reason that in the UC system not only do Asians not qualify for AA, there are restrictions on the number of Asians who will be admitted.
You are right however in that it's a cultural thing. However culture isn't an inherent characteristic. A person can choose not to live the negative aspects of their culture if they so choose. At no point should the rest of society make accommodations for people who refuse to make good choices under the guise of "their culture."
When talking about families and individuals, which is what this is about -- the accomplishment of individuals -- a "generation" is one person's life. A family consisting of two parents, age 76, and a child, age 50, does not consist of three generations. It has two.
Go read the first chapter, of the "The Millionaire Next Door". It has a nice profile of who are the millionaires in the United States.
Did you actually read that paper at all? Did you for some reason stop after seeing figure 2? Did you see figure 3? The one that says parent's wealth contributes about 15% to predicting a child's wealth. And the huge area labeled "unexplained" that represents more than 65%. It supports exactly what I said: that parental wealth is not the determining factor in the child's success and wealth.
No, that's exactly what he was saying. That why he said things like "...born equal...don't stay that way..."
Then you identify one person that you personally thinks couldn't make it on his own and that confirms your hypothesis? Are you aware that every time anyone has done a study of millionaires in the U.S. they find that the majority are self-made, first generation? That the slacker trust-fund middle-ager is the rare exception instead of the norm?
Do you not know that the idea that there is some privileged demographic and if you're not part of that demographic then you can't succeed is bullshit? Consider Asian immigrants. It's well documented that within a single generation they rise to the ranks of the middle class if not the upper-middle class.
Additionally the definition of "white middle-class" is so broad, it's absurd to think that there is some universal benefit to being part of that demographic. Contrast the opportunities available to a "white middle-class" person from southern Utah to the opportunities available to a "black middle-class" from Chicago. There's no doubt who has better chances. Yet nobody seriously thinks that the large industrial cities should be drained of their wealth so that people from small towns all across America can be given go-karts, ponies, and pie.
The true reality is that if you want to succeed you can and if you don't you won't. It's not the fault of society.
I don't want to argue for him, but you don't seem to have read what he wrote at all. At no point did he way that some people are inherently superior due to an advantaged birth. He is clearly not talking about a value judgment of individuals at all. Rather he is saying that some people accomplish more, they contribute more, they create prosperity.
And yes, in the end they should have a higher standard of living. Otherwise you are treating people unequally. Look at it from the whole equation rather than just the result. Person A made substantial sacrifices, they learned a valuable skill, they work sixty hours a week and they have a high standard of living. To then turn around and say that Person B deserves the same standard of living without ever having had to make the sacrifices and put in the work is treating them unequally. The only real way to treat them equally is to let them reach their own level of success driven by how much they want to put into it.
No. The Niagara CPUs do a hardware level context thread on every clock cycle or on a cache stall or halted thread. That 8 core, 8 thread cpu is effectively 64 slow cpus sharing a single L2 cache and having an 8:1 ratio of threads:L1 cache. It's not the same as 64 true cores, but it's very different than multiple sockets. For someone not familiar with the line and not interested in going out and reading up on the processors, you could think of it as a form of hyperthreading. In fact the T2 series does exactly that -- in each clock cycle two threads can execute as long as one of them can fit within a particular set of hardware needs, no fpu and some other things.
The spiffy thing about the Niagara line is that there are many more opportunities to keep the CPU running, contrasted with a non hyperthreaded x86 system which spends 30% or more of it's time stalled waiting for a cache line.
Actually the Niagara line from Sun/Oracle has 64+ "cpus" per socket. Depending on the exact model, a system like a T5240 will have 64 "cpus" per socket and two sockets for a total of 128 "cpus". The SPARC T3 processors have 16 cores with 8 threads per core, for a total of 128 threads of execution running from a single socket. Each of which has it's own registers, etc. From an OS scheduling point of view it is 128 cores.
You'd be better off overall by requiring vehicles to have black boxes that monitor motion, acceleration, etc. And then have that data uploaded somewhere and algorithmically processed to determine if the driving fit within certain rational bounds. Anything outside those bounds needs to be justified. Place small broadcasters on each car so that your car can log which cars were nearby. Then why you are trying to explain why you jumped on the break and jerked the steering, it was because some dipshit cut you off and they can then go review that car's data. Include cameras so that non-vehicular obstacles can be logged as well.
Just cut the thumbs of anyone caught texting while driving. Future problems solved.
Your argument would actually make sense if software occurred randomly in nature. But since software doesn't just appear -- that it is in fact scarce -- your argument fails.
However even if that wasn't the case, your argument is also easily dismissed by noting that it's not the person doing the labor that is being bought, it's the act of labor or the product produced by the labor. That is, when someone hires you to sweep a floor it's not the fact that you are sweeping the floor that they care about, it's the swept floor. And the reality is there are six billion people on this planet, at least half of which can trivially sweep a floor. So, in fact, the act of labor necessary to sweep a floor is not scarce, it is highly abundant. (This is the sole purpose of modern labor unions, to artificially reduce the labor supply.)
Still, even if you want to argue that it's not the swept floor that matters, that it is indeed the laborer who is sweeping the floor that matters. Then you are still wrong as the corollary case would be the software developers' labor that matters, not the software product itself.
So which is it? The person laboring, the act of labor, or the product of the labor? In every single case you're wrong and my illustrative example holds true.
Indeed. Similar to how laboring doesn't necessarily mean you'll get paid. The labor has to be something that creates value for someone. And when they receive that value, it's reasonable to expect to be paid. That is, if you dig random holes don't expect a paycheck, but if you dig post holes for someone who wants to put up a fence, then expecting a paycheck isn't unreasonable. Correspondingly, if you make software that no one wants, then you won't make money. But if you make software that people want and that they use, then you should receive payment. It's a simple concept.
As far as the rest of your post, I'm in total agreement. There is a crapload of entitlement weenies in the world.
I'm curious. What facts could they provide? Because the numbers they provide are facts and more detail would provide no more veracity than what they have now. Even if they presented their source code, sales data from the android store and their server logs, there still would be people who will turn around and say things like "Well, where are the grapes? If they don't provide grapes then they prove nothing."
More detail may be interesting, but it's not any more or less proof than the number they have provided.
I have a scenario for you. Say you go out one day and get to thinking you'd like a new laptop but find that you have no money. Not being a criminal sort, you look around and note that that store over there has a now hiring sign in the window. So you go in have a talk with the manager, they get you your tools and you spend the day working. Then the next day. And so on for a month. So payday finally rolls around and surprise, surprise, no pay check for you. The boss has decided not to pay you.
How do you feel about this? Do you feel ripped off? Keep in mind that no one has gone into your wallet and taken anything away from you. The only thing you've "lost" was your time and the things you invested in in order to be able to go to work (rent, food, clothing, fuel, etc.) Also remember that he may not have ever intended to pay an employee anyway.
Well, that's exactly how a software developer feels. Why do they feel like that? Because they live in a country where the law says that they can make the investment in time and money to create a work and then they will get paid by people who choose to benefit from that work.
When you pirate software you are exactly like the boss who chooses not to pay his employees after they've already done the work.
Where you going to get the data from? Being able to implement an algorithm is a far cry from being able to sense and apply a voltage on an HDMI connector. The current HDMI capture cards do not provide access to the raw data stream.
Indeed. Even at the "free" price point, nobody seems to want information... unless it has boobies.
What stops you from making said console? There's more to being a responsible human being that merely having a desire for something. Usually you have to either build it yourself or somehow provide a good or service that you can trade for the product you so desire. If the product you want is exceptionally exotic then you may have to pay a significant premium. Regardless, no one in the entire universe is obligated to provide you with prepackaged goods.
You have a choice here, 1) just accept what others are willing to provide, or 2) create your own product. If you are correct in your assessment of what people want then you will be successful. I doubt that you'll be successful.
I meant laws banning/controlling/regarding weapons.
Yet nerds are always heated up about privacy eroding technologies. Not to mention weapons. And drugs. And corruption in the financial industry.
I'm not. If such people aren't worth having in society then they should just be killed. Putting them into a facility and paying fifty thousand dollars a year for thirty to sixty years just so the squeamish don't have to feel bad about eliminating someone they can't tolerate having around isn't worth it. Either they should be killed or let go.
Fortunately we still have telephones so there is no need to exclude them from your list of options.