The products you're talking about are not. The Mac IE team was a subset of the IE team and set to working on IE for embedded Windows after v5.5. Mac WMP was supported by the WMP team that no longer wants to support the Max. Killing off these programs doesn't really say anything to Microsoft's commitment for the Mac BU.
IIRC Microsoft agreed to actively develop Office for OS X for 5 years as part of negotiations where Apple agreed to not ship Netscape Navigator as the default web browser.
The US Supreme Court has found it unconstitutional for states to require that out of state vendors withhold sales taxes for shipments into the state. Yet the US Supreme Court, however, has yet to strike down any state law where a state requires its residents to pay a "use tax" on new items ordered from out of state.
As internet commerce crosses state lines, it may very well be constitutional for Congress to enact a law requiring internet vendors to take part in a clearinghouse which would collect use tax on the basis of shipping address where such shipments cross state lines.
At least up through the present, the Supreme Court has already stated that any company with a physical presence in a state can be held liable for sales taxes to any shipments within that state regardless of where the shipment originated.
The simple solution is to implement a clearinghouse that hosts two web services. The first would allow vendors to submit a zip code and receive a tax rate. The second would allow vendors to submit a payment with a zip code. Given that ecommerce is already network enabled, this would not exactly create an undue burden when users check out with their online shopping cart.
This isn't exactly rocket science. Mobile phone vendors having been doing essentially the same thing for years, except not necessarily using the internet. Each mobile phone vendors sends each other switch records for roaming calls in a defined format. In the ancient past, this has even taken place on magnetic tapes. Given the ubiquity of the internet, it isn't all that difficult to do in the present.
When the product in question consists of little more than the expression of an idea, it is very hard to make a case that selling that idea is not free speech. First, the Supreme Court of the United States has decreed that spending money is a form of expression and, consequently, falls under the heading of freedom of speech.
But, more importantly, freedom of commerce is one of the lynchpin ideas of liberalism. Hugo Grotius in The Free Sea argued that restriction of trade is essentially an act of war, for freedom of trade is one of the essential human rights:
Nature had given all things to all men, but seeing they were barred from the use of many things whereof man's life standeth in need by reason of the distance of places, it was needful to pass over from place to place. Neither yet was there permutation, but finding other things with others they used them at their pleasure by course. Almost after the same manner they report the Seres do, who, leaving their goods in the wilderness, the bargain is made only by the honesty and conscience of the changers.
Grotius argues that human beings are limited in what they can provide with their own hands and, therefore, trade is necessity for living and, therefore, negotiating with others is a fundamental right. For the government to step in and infringe upon that right, in this view, is a violation of the very nature of humanity. Consequently, it is incumbent upon the government to demonstrate the necessity of prohibiting trade. Short of being at war with another nation, Grotius would argue that there is no good reason.
First, the Duke study criticizes other studies for counting engineers in other countries with less than a four year degree:
These massive numbers of Indian
and Chinese engineering graduates include not
only four-year degrees, but also three-year
training programs and diploma holders.
But then, they count US graduates with less than a four year degree:
Total Bachelors and Subbaccalaureate*** Engineering,
Computer Science and Information Technology Degrees US ---- India--- China
222,335 215,000 644,106
** Subbaccalaureate degrees refer to Associates degrees in the United States, short-cycle degrees in
China, and three-year diplomas in India
First, over 80k of the new US number comes from precisely these subbaccalaureate degrees.
Second, the IT degrees from many universities are offered by the business college rather than the engineering college.
I suspect that if you only counted four year comp-sci and engineering degrees that the numbers would be far closer to the 70k number provided by the National Acadamies. IMO, the study ought to have done a better breakdown. I'm also curious as to why postgraduate work wasn't included.
We have ten workstations in our training lab. Performance degraded to the unacceptable level after installing the latest Symantec AV. So I picked up various sizes of RAM sticks and did some testing w ith a script that measured the span of time it took the workstations to perform certain tasks. After tripling the RAM from 128MB per workstation to 392MB per workstation, we were able to almost get back to the speed at which our workstations ran prior to installing the AV product.
At least in the case of Symantec, their anti-spyware system uses the same engine as their AV product. Performance of other vendors may vary.
How is the National Renderer's Association (my source for the figure of the amount of animal waste produced each year) and Gas Price Watch (my source for federal and state gas tax numbers) biased?
The environmentalist wacko people are the ones arguing that the true price of gasoline in the US is fifteen bucks a gallon. I did not source any of those groups, nor did I use any numbers from their web pages.
A simple Google search will reveal that I am correct that the US federal government does subsidize the production of gasoline. The largest methods are (1) tax credits for oil exploration and development and (2) direct subsidies for oil based exports and foreign production of oil. Other subsidies also exist such as leasing federal land to oil companies for less than the lease of such land is worth and cleaning up oil spills and fining the companies that caused them at less than the price of clean up. From an economic perspective one can also argue that the national oil reserve is effectively a subsidy by artificially increasing demand which shifts the demand curve upward which results in higher prices for all consumers. One can also argue that a significant number of US military campaigns take place only because the US wants to buy oil from certain producers.
Without the last two considerations, estimates are that US federal subsidies amount to at least 22 cents per gallon at the pump. With the last two considerations, estimates end up being that subsidies end up over a dollar per gallon at the pump. Federal gasoline tax is presently less than twenty cents per gallon and many uses of gasoline are exempt from federal taxation (as you yourself mentioned). Hence, the undisputed federal subsidies for oil production is higher than the federal gas tax. When one adds the highest state gasoline taxes (just over thirty cents per gallon in some states) the price at the pump may still be less than federal subsidies alone.
They can also order certain types punitive damages if they feel it appropriate. That said, I'm not aware of any mechanism in the US of regularly getting the attourney's fees of the plaintiff waived if they they don't win the suit. (The two exceptions being lawyers that are willing to work entirely on contingency and lawyers willing to do pro bono work.)
As for my wife's situation, she is presently awaiting the results of the first step in the process, to get a written legal opinion regarding whether or not her work has been infringed upon by the work that she feels stole her material. The short version is that it certainly seems worth it to pay for such an opinion prior to making a more concrete decision on whether or not to pursue a law suit.
According to the rendering industry, slaughterhouses alone produce about 45 billion pounds of animal tissue waste per year. A conservative estimate is that this waste is about 25% fat by weight. This leaves 11 billion pounds of fat. Each gallon of biodiesel requires seven to eight pounds of fat. This means that slaughterhouse renderings alone could produce about 1.5 billion gallons of biodiesel per year.
The US consumes about 146 billion gallons of gasoline per year. Consequently, slaughterhouse renderings by themselves can supply 1% of the US market for gasoline. If you don't think 1% is significant, please pay me 1% of your income for the rest of your life as that isn't a significant amount to you.
My wife and I went to a lawyer to get some legal advice on her possibly pursuing a copyright infringement suit against a movie studio. The lawyer explained that copyright suits have to take place in federal courts and that it would probably take twenty to thirty grand just to get the suit to trial and another twenty or so to finish the trial. Even if the suit is a ``no brainer'' in the plaintiff's favor, we were told that the defendant almost certainly won't even think about settling until all motions to dismiss are heard and discover has been completed.
If every slaughterhouse in the states sold its leftovers to be processed for biodiesel, that would account for a significant percentage of the fuel needs of the states. Then add in the reprocessing of all the waste oil from deep fryers and greasy spoons and you've covered an even higher percentage of US fuel needs by merely processing what would normally go to a landfill. Then add in processing of surplus crops that the feds currently buys and lets rot in storehouses in biodiesel. Then add in crops that are grown specifically for biodiesel. That all starts to add up.
And if it's not enough? Well, if everyone's running diesel anyway, you can also make diesel fuel from coal.
Estimates on what the US price of gasoline would be if it wasn't subsidized by the federal government range from twenty cents to over a dollar per gallon more than the price we see at the pumps. So if you're going to include government subsidies on the side of biodiesel, you also need to include it on the side of regular diesel and gasoline.
Further, if you're doing a truly economic analysis, you have to include external costs. If biodiesel burns cleaner, then you have to include the cost of increased pollution on the side of regular diesel. If producing biodiesel can help remove dependency on foreign oil, then you have to include decreased defense costs. I'm not claiming that biodiesel necessarily does either of these, I'm just pointing out that you need to analyze the big picture rather than just the price at the pumps.
You're attempting to measure a quantum system in binary terms. A traditional bit (binary digit), the atomic particle of the binary system, can only hold two possible values. A traditional byte is eight (or seven, depending on your protocol) bits.
But qubits, the atomic particle of the quantum system, can hold four possible values. A qubyte, being eight qbits, holds a far greater amount of information than a traditional byte.
Your confustion stems from applying the binary term to the quantum system without doing the conversion arithmetic.
A bit is an atom of information, the smallest meaningful particle that can be represented in a system. A bit (binary digit in classical computer science has only two possible values because a digit in binary only has two possible values. The atomic particle of information in quantum computing, however, has four possible states. This means that the smallest possible quantum representation (the qubit) can represent four states. A qubyte, being 8 qubits, holds far more information than a traditional byte.
There are a few corner cases that Preview doesn't do well with, but in the two years I've been using OS X at home, (outside the case of PDF forms and PDFs that have active content) there have been less than a half dozen times where I've had to load Acrobat Reader instead.
One would have thought that after events in the recent past more people would have a clue as to just how badly munged the power distribution infrastructure is in much of the country.
But I get brown outs and blackouts at non-peak times such as the middle of the night, just after dinner time, and before breakfast regardless of the season.
Given that a perfectly functional electricty infrastructure already exists
As a native of Ohio, I call bulldookey. The electrical infrastructure in most of the US is aged, dilapitated and barely serviceable. I get brown outs and power outages enough without everyone on the block also plugging their cars in.
Apparently the author of the article doesn't apply his own analysis to the realm of computers
Aside from which, as others have pointed out, his analysis makes some large errors such as not including a curve for the increase of the cost of gas above increases in general inflation.
Others have also pointed out the author also doesn't address that if the claim that hybrids are undisputedly better for the environment, then everyone alive directly benefits from more hybrids being on the road.
Lastly, I would have expected better treatment of the way that economics uses the way consumers are willing to spend money as a measure of their satisfaction. As it is, the article is a financial analysis and not an economic analysis. An econonomic analysis would not be complete without comparing rates of owner satisfaction. If hybrid owners, for the most part, would be willing to make the same decision again to forgo being able to spend the premium they paid for the hybrid on some other service or good, then the hybrid was economically a sound choice.
Slashdot Mirror
The products you're talking about are not. The Mac IE team was a subset of the IE team and set to working on IE for embedded Windows after v5.5. Mac WMP was supported by the WMP team that no longer wants to support the Max. Killing off these programs doesn't really say anything to Microsoft's commitment for the Mac BU.
IIRC Microsoft agreed to actively develop Office for OS X for 5 years as part of negotiations where Apple agreed to not ship Netscape Navigator as the default web browser.
I'm assuming you know what a clearinghouse is. If not, go look it up and then we'll talk.
A simple web service is not too complicated for mom and pop shops to use. You could even put a pretty front end on it.
The best part is that you could make the localities that charge tax responsible for updates.
Even if zip code alone doesn't work, complete address will.
The US Supreme Court has found it unconstitutional for states to require that out of state vendors withhold sales taxes for shipments into the state. Yet the US Supreme Court, however, has yet to strike down any state law where a state requires its residents to pay a "use tax" on new items ordered from out of state.
As internet commerce crosses state lines, it may very well be constitutional for Congress to enact a law requiring internet vendors to take part in a clearinghouse which would collect use tax on the basis of shipping address where such shipments cross state lines.
At least up through the present, the Supreme Court has already stated that any company with a physical presence in a state can be held liable for sales taxes to any shipments within that state regardless of where the shipment originated.
The simple solution is to implement a clearinghouse that hosts two web services. The first would allow vendors to submit a zip code and receive a tax rate. The second would allow vendors to submit a payment with a zip code. Given that ecommerce is already network enabled, this would not exactly create an undue burden when users check out with their online shopping cart.
This isn't exactly rocket science. Mobile phone vendors having been doing essentially the same thing for years, except not necessarily using the internet. Each mobile phone vendors sends each other switch records for roaming calls in a defined format. In the ancient past, this has even taken place on magnetic tapes. Given the ubiquity of the internet, it isn't all that difficult to do in the present.
But, more importantly, freedom of commerce is one of the lynchpin ideas of liberalism. Hugo Grotius in The Free Sea argued that restriction of trade is essentially an act of war, for freedom of trade is one of the essential human rights: Grotius argues that human beings are limited in what they can provide with their own hands and, therefore, trade is necessity for living and, therefore, negotiating with others is a fundamental right. For the government to step in and infringe upon that right, in this view, is a violation of the very nature of humanity. Consequently, it is incumbent upon the government to demonstrate the necessity of prohibiting trade. Short of being at war with another nation, Grotius would argue that there is no good reason.
Second, the IT degrees from many universities are offered by the business college rather than the engineering college.
I suspect that if you only counted four year comp-sci and engineering degrees that the numbers would be far closer to the 70k number provided by the National Acadamies. IMO, the study ought to have done a better breakdown. I'm also curious as to why postgraduate work wasn't included.
We have ten workstations in our training lab. Performance degraded to the unacceptable level after installing the latest Symantec AV. So I picked up various sizes of RAM sticks and did some testing w ith a script that measured the span of time it took the workstations to perform certain tasks. After tripling the RAM from 128MB per workstation to 392MB per workstation, we were able to almost get back to the speed at which our workstations ran prior to installing the AV product.
At least in the case of Symantec, their anti-spyware system uses the same engine as their AV product. Performance of other vendors may vary.
How is the National Renderer's Association (my source for the figure of the amount of animal waste produced each year) and Gas Price Watch (my source for federal and state gas tax numbers) biased?
The environmentalist wacko people are the ones arguing that the true price of gasoline in the US is fifteen bucks a gallon. I did not source any of those groups, nor did I use any numbers from their web pages.
A simple Google search will reveal that I am correct that the US federal government does subsidize the production of gasoline. The largest methods are (1) tax credits for oil exploration and development and (2) direct subsidies for oil based exports and foreign production of oil. Other subsidies also exist such as leasing federal land to oil companies for less than the lease of such land is worth and cleaning up oil spills and fining the companies that caused them at less than the price of clean up. From an economic perspective one can also argue that the national oil reserve is effectively a subsidy by artificially increasing demand which shifts the demand curve upward which results in higher prices for all consumers. One can also argue that a significant number of US military campaigns take place only because the US wants to buy oil from certain producers.
Without the last two considerations, estimates are that US federal subsidies amount to at least 22 cents per gallon at the pump. With the last two considerations, estimates end up being that subsidies end up over a dollar per gallon at the pump. Federal gasoline tax is presently less than twenty cents per gallon and many uses of gasoline are exempt from federal taxation (as you yourself mentioned). Hence, the undisputed federal subsidies for oil production is higher than the federal gas tax. When one adds the highest state gasoline taxes (just over thirty cents per gallon in some states) the price at the pump may still be less than federal subsidies alone.
They can also order certain types punitive damages if they feel it appropriate. That said, I'm not aware of any mechanism in the US of regularly getting the attourney's fees of the plaintiff waived if they they don't win the suit. (The two exceptions being lawyers that are willing to work entirely on contingency and lawyers willing to do pro bono work.)
As for my wife's situation, she is presently awaiting the results of the first step in the process, to get a written legal opinion regarding whether or not her work has been infringed upon by the work that she feels stole her material. The short version is that it certainly seems worth it to pay for such an opinion prior to making a more concrete decision on whether or not to pursue a law suit.
According to the rendering industry, slaughterhouses alone produce about 45 billion pounds of animal tissue waste per year. A conservative estimate is that this waste is about 25% fat by weight. This leaves 11 billion pounds of fat. Each gallon of biodiesel requires seven to eight pounds of fat. This means that slaughterhouse renderings alone could produce about 1.5 billion gallons of biodiesel per year.
The US consumes about 146 billion gallons of gasoline per year. Consequently, slaughterhouse renderings by themselves can supply 1% of the US market for gasoline. If you don't think 1% is significant, please pay me 1% of your income for the rest of your life as that isn't a significant amount to you.
My wife and I went to a lawyer to get some legal advice on her possibly pursuing a copyright infringement suit against a movie studio. The lawyer explained that copyright suits have to take place in federal courts and that it would probably take twenty to thirty grand just to get the suit to trial and another twenty or so to finish the trial. Even if the suit is a ``no brainer'' in the plaintiff's favor, we were told that the defendant almost certainly won't even think about settling until all motions to dismiss are heard and discover has been completed.
If every slaughterhouse in the states sold its leftovers to be processed for biodiesel, that would account for a significant percentage of the fuel needs of the states. Then add in the reprocessing of all the waste oil from deep fryers and greasy spoons and you've covered an even higher percentage of US fuel needs by merely processing what would normally go to a landfill. Then add in processing of surplus crops that the feds currently buys and lets rot in storehouses in biodiesel. Then add in crops that are grown specifically for biodiesel. That all starts to add up.
And if it's not enough? Well, if everyone's running diesel anyway, you can also make diesel fuel from coal.
Estimates on what the US price of gasoline would be if it wasn't subsidized by the federal government range from twenty cents to over a dollar per gallon more than the price we see at the pumps. So if you're going to include government subsidies on the side of biodiesel, you also need to include it on the side of regular diesel and gasoline.
Further, if you're doing a truly economic analysis, you have to include external costs. If biodiesel burns cleaner, then you have to include the cost of increased pollution on the side of regular diesel. If producing biodiesel can help remove dependency on foreign oil, then you have to include decreased defense costs. I'm not claiming that biodiesel necessarily does either of these, I'm just pointing out that you need to analyze the big picture rather than just the price at the pumps.
You're attempting to measure a quantum system in binary terms. A traditional bit (binary digit), the atomic particle of the binary system, can only hold two possible values. A traditional byte is eight (or seven, depending on your protocol) bits.
But qubits, the atomic particle of the quantum system, can hold four possible values. A qubyte, being eight qbits, holds a far greater amount of information than a traditional byte.
Your confustion stems from applying the binary term to the quantum system without doing the conversion arithmetic.
A bit is an atom of information, the smallest meaningful particle that can be represented in a system. A bit (binary digit in classical computer science has only two possible values because a digit in binary only has two possible values. The atomic particle of information in quantum computing, however, has four possible states. This means that the smallest possible quantum representation (the qubit) can represent four states. A qubyte, being 8 qubits, holds far more information than a traditional byte.
There are a few corner cases that Preview doesn't do well with, but in the two years I've been using OS X at home, (outside the case of PDF forms and PDFs that have active content) there have been less than a half dozen times where I've had to load Acrobat Reader instead.
Because (1) not everyone lives in an area that has good reception and (2) not all cable content is broadcast over air.
When they made the Postgres engine SQL compliant, they changed the name to PostgreSQL.
One would have thought that after events in the recent past more people would have a clue as to just how badly munged the power distribution infrastructure is in much of the country.
But I get brown outs and blackouts at non-peak times such as the middle of the night, just after dinner time, and before breakfast regardless of the season.
Given that a perfectly functional electricty infrastructure already exists
As a native of Ohio, I call bulldookey. The electrical infrastructure in most of the US is aged, dilapitated and barely serviceable. I get brown outs and power outages enough without everyone on the block also plugging their cars in.
From TFA: Written on a Mac
Apparently the author of the article doesn't apply his own analysis to the realm of computers
Aside from which, as others have pointed out, his analysis makes some large errors such as not including a curve for the increase of the cost of gas above increases in general inflation.
Others have also pointed out the author also doesn't address that if the claim that hybrids are undisputedly better for the environment, then everyone alive directly benefits from more hybrids being on the road.
Lastly, I would have expected better treatment of the way that economics uses the way consumers are willing to spend money as a measure of their satisfaction. As it is, the article is a financial analysis and not an economic analysis. An econonomic analysis would not be complete without comparing rates of owner satisfaction. If hybrid owners, for the most part, would be willing to make the same decision again to forgo being able to spend the premium they paid for the hybrid on some other service or good, then the hybrid was economically a sound choice.