It's like the prisoners dilemma on a society scale: If there are more engineers (or people who actually make thinks) society as a whole wins - but for the individual it pays to be one of the non-producers (lawyers, MBAs or others we like to rant about here).
The problem then is that americans are generally more individualistic and make the choice that benefit them individually, which unfortunately leads to a situation where everybody looses because there are too many non-producers trying to live off of the producers.
The overall solution so far seems to be importing an ever increasing supply of cheap labor for the ever increasing class of coorporate fat cats so richly represented in Obama's group. A better solution would be to make it more attractive to choose to be a "mouse" and much much less attractive to choose becoming a "cat" - but that's not a likely answer from a group consisting solely of "cats".
How about a solar power installation in the Sahara, big enough to curb the rising CO2 emissions, and finally drive the cost of green technology below that of coal. - or maybe a private bid to rekindle the space exploration that has been all but abandoned by the gouvernment since the end of the cold war.
I think I could probably find a few more projects that would both cost and be worth more than even $56 billion. Becoming a bilionaire and then having your biggest spending be the 15th mansion or the 3rd 150ft yacht shows a depressing lack of imagination. Kudos to Bill for at least having "making the world a better place" on his bucket list. If I had Steve's health record, I'd be making my bucket list right now.
So by this line of reasoning - there should be at least some russian and chineese women on the chart.
Regarding the glass ceiling - I don't think it matters one bit. Most of the truly revolutionary ideas a born in the mind of scientists while they are still students. It may take them the whole of their lives to prove and have the ideas accepted - but that's not the limiting factor.
Personally I believe that the reason for the gender disparity cannot be blamed on culture.
Women always seem to say they can do anything as well as the men - so I guess women always have, and still are, choosing to not be good at science. What troubles me the most, is that even in the current generation, where the girls are fare much better in our school systems - none of that intellectual potential goes into moving the frontiers of the hard sciences.
This senator for some reason seems to have forgotten that the sole reason privately owned services are often preferable to public ones is competition. In every instance that I've seen, a private monopoly is always a disaster. Given that private telco's stop at nothing to avoid competing - a public monopoly is the lesser evil. Free market fans like this guy should spend their energy ensuring that private industry keeps competing rather that trying to raise legal fences around markets that are no longer free because they have degenerated into monopolies. Granted there are many telco's - but if it's anything like here (in Denmark), their broadband cable networks are meticulously dug into the ground without any overlap at all, efectively leaving each customer without any choice. And when a municipal broadband appears - the previous local monopoly is always suddenly able to sell a much better product.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think GE still have to pay for violating the copyright/contract. The DMCA claim got thrown out because a dongle is a use prevention rather than a copy prevention device. The software itself was probably copied without circumventing anything. MGE are probably saying: "Oh what the hell it was worth a shot" regarding the DMCA claim, but it was not the core of their case. Regarding precedent, ther's not much in it for Joe average with his DVD collection.
The family of the author of "Tarzan of the Apes" sold the Tarzan trademark (not copyright) to Dis back in 1999, while the childrens book was also derived from the 1912-book, which I believe was neither copyright nor trademark back in 1975.
We see this nonsence all the time. Compagny lawyers who think they have a case completely ignoring if it will benefit or hurt their client to do so. More often than not, resorting to legal-bullying of ordinary people unwilfully brushing on your precious IP, is a terrible way to make a brand.
Every time I see the name (beginning with the letter D) of a very large maker of animated movies - the very first thing I think about, is how back in 2003 their legal vigilantes bullied a local musical into changing it's name from Rubber-Tarzan(translated) into Rubber-T. The name of the musical is the same as the title of the 1975 chilrens book that it's based on - while apparently the name Tarzan somehow became trademarked in 1999.
Legal experts say [insert name of litigous company here] would most likely loose the case - but the musical does't have the money to go to court, so they had to bend. It's impossible to imagine how [D.....] was damaged by a musical performance of a childrens book from 1975 not related to the animated movie - but their brand is irreparably damaged in the minds of countled danish parents (read prime costumers).
If you are a 500 pound gorilla, you have to be very nice to be viewed as likeable.
Yes and no. The courts have a fixation with "damages" (financial being the only kind they know of). If there are no damages, the court is unlikely to do much besides maybe order a few pictures be taken down.
This is all fine with regards to the rocket equation, but that's just about conservation of momentum. You still have to provide it with energy, and 2*H2+O2 -> 2*H2O happens to be as good as you can get in terms of energy/mass ratio. As I see it, this plasma rocket is not really useful without a nuclear power source of some kind.
Here in Denmark, where we've been metric for like 100 years, building materials are in lengths multipla of 30cm (remarkably close to a foot) and some are even 122cm (almost 4') - but that's besides the point. The advantage of the metric system is not any of the units on their own - but the fact that all the units are connected in a way that makes calculations trivial. With the imperal system, there doesn't even seem to be a reasonable link between the units measuring the same quantity on different scales - and when there is one, it's sometimes 12, sometimes 16... how many inches on a mile?... anyone? and how heavy is gallon of water in ounzes?? - the metric system is not perfect, but the imperial one is not a system at all - is a buch of unrelated units thrown together in a bucket.
If I'm not mistaking, the U.S. was in fact the second country in the world (after France) to formally adopt the metric system back in the days of Napoleon - somehow the implementation just took >200 years, while most other countrys did it in 20~40 years.
> Again, I don't see your point. Are you arguing that if a tree falls in the woods, and nobody is around to hear it,
> the laws of physics change so that it doesn't cause the air molecules nearby to vibrate?
In the sick and twisted quantummechanical world we live in, if noone were around to hear the tree fall - it wouldn't make a sound. Problem is that something as large as a tree is unlikely to fall unheard. If the event ocured in an isolated system (which btw is a synonym for a quantum computer) - the PHYSICAL REALITY of the the past of the system would be determined (by a dice roll so to speak) the moment somone bothered to lift the isolation and look at the outcome. Before that - the reality would be a superposition of all imaginable outsomes based on what was known before the box is closed. It's bizare and counterintuitive for sure - but it's reality as physicists know it at the subatomic level - Schrodingers cat all over again.
Slashdot Mirror
It's like the prisoners dilemma on a society scale: If there are more engineers (or people who actually make thinks) society as a whole wins - but for the individual it pays to be one of the non-producers (lawyers, MBAs or others we like to rant about here).
The problem then is that americans are generally more individualistic and make the choice that benefit them individually, which unfortunately leads to a situation where everybody looses because there are too many non-producers trying to live off of the producers.
The overall solution so far seems to be importing an ever increasing supply of cheap labor for the ever increasing class of coorporate fat cats so richly represented in Obama's group. A better solution would be to make it more attractive to choose to be a "mouse" and much much less attractive to choose becoming a "cat" - but that's not a likely answer from a group consisting solely of "cats".
How about a solar power installation in the Sahara, big enough to curb the rising CO2 emissions, and finally drive the cost of green technology below that of coal.
- or maybe a private bid to rekindle the space exploration that has been all but abandoned by the gouvernment since the end of the cold war.
I think I could probably find a few more projects that would both cost and be worth more than even $56 billion. Becoming a bilionaire and then having your biggest spending be the 15th mansion or the 3rd 150ft yacht shows a depressing lack of imagination. Kudos to Bill for at least having "making the world a better place" on his bucket list. If I had Steve's health record, I'd be making my bucket list right now.
So by this line of reasoning - there should be at least some russian and chineese women on the chart.
Regarding the glass ceiling - I don't think it matters one bit. Most of the truly revolutionary ideas a born in the mind of scientists while they are still students. It may take them the whole of their lives to prove and have the ideas accepted - but that's not the limiting factor.
Personally I believe that the reason for the gender disparity cannot be blamed on culture.
Women always seem to say they can do anything as well as the men - so I guess women always have, and still are, choosing to not be good at science. What troubles me the most, is that even in the current generation, where the girls are fare much better in our school systems - none of that intellectual potential goes into moving the frontiers of the hard sciences.
This senator for some reason seems to have forgotten that the sole reason privately owned services are often preferable to public ones is competition. In every instance that I've seen, a private monopoly is always a disaster. Given that private telco's stop at nothing to avoid competing - a public monopoly is the lesser evil. Free market fans like this guy should spend their energy ensuring that private industry keeps competing rather that trying to raise legal fences around markets that are no longer free because they have degenerated into monopolies. Granted there are many telco's - but if it's anything like here (in Denmark), their broadband cable networks are meticulously dug into the ground without any overlap at all, efectively leaving each customer without any choice. And when a municipal broadband appears - the previous local monopoly is always suddenly able to sell a much better product.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think GE still have to pay for violating the copyright/contract. The DMCA claim got thrown out because a dongle is a use prevention rather than a copy prevention device. The software itself was probably copied without circumventing anything. MGE are probably saying: "Oh what the hell it was worth a shot" regarding the DMCA claim, but it was not the core of their case. Regarding precedent, ther's not much in it for Joe average with his DVD collection.
The family of the author of "Tarzan of the Apes" sold the Tarzan trademark (not copyright) to Dis back in 1999, while the childrens book was also derived from the 1912-book, which I believe was neither copyright nor trademark back in 1975.
We see this nonsence all the time. Compagny lawyers who think they have a case completely ignoring if it will benefit or hurt their client to do so. More often than not, resorting to legal-bullying of ordinary people unwilfully brushing on your precious IP, is a terrible way to make a brand.
Every time I see the name (beginning with the letter D) of a very large maker of animated movies - the very first thing I think about, is how back in 2003 their legal vigilantes bullied a local musical into changing it's name from Rubber-Tarzan(translated) into Rubber-T. The name of the musical is the same as the title of the 1975 chilrens book that it's based on - while apparently the name Tarzan somehow became trademarked in 1999.
Legal experts say [insert name of litigous company here] would most likely loose the case - but the musical does't have the money to go to court, so they had to bend. It's impossible to imagine how [D.....] was damaged by a musical performance of a childrens book from 1975 not related to the animated movie - but their brand is irreparably damaged in the minds of countled danish parents (read prime costumers).
If you are a 500 pound gorilla, you have to be very nice to be viewed as likeable.
Yes and no. The courts have a fixation with "damages" (financial being the only kind they know of). If there are no damages, the court is unlikely to do much besides maybe order a few pictures be taken down.
This is all fine with regards to the rocket equation, but that's just about conservation of momentum. You still have to provide it with energy, and 2*H2+O2 -> 2*H2O happens to be as good as you can get in terms of energy/mass ratio. As I see it, this plasma rocket is not really useful without a nuclear power source of some kind.
Here in Denmark, where we've been metric for like 100 years, building materials are in lengths multipla of 30cm (remarkably close to a foot) and some are even 122cm (almost 4') - but that's besides the point. The advantage of the metric system is not any of the units on their own - but the fact that all the units are connected in a way that makes calculations trivial.
With the imperal system, there doesn't even seem to be a reasonable link between the units measuring the same quantity on different scales - and when there is one, it's sometimes 12, sometimes 16... how many inches on a mile?... anyone? and how heavy is gallon of water in ounzes?? - the metric system is not perfect, but the imperial one is not a system at all - is a buch of unrelated units thrown together in a bucket.
If I'm not mistaking, the U.S. was in fact the second country in the world (after France) to formally adopt the metric system back in the days of Napoleon - somehow the implementation just took >200 years, while most other countrys did it in 20~40 years.
> Again, I don't see your point. Are you arguing that if a tree falls in the woods, and nobody is around to hear it,
> the laws of physics change so that it doesn't cause the air molecules nearby to vibrate?
In the sick and twisted quantummechanical world we live in, if noone were around to hear the tree fall - it wouldn't make a sound. Problem is that something as large as a tree is unlikely to fall unheard. If the event ocured in an isolated system (which btw is a synonym for a quantum computer) - the PHYSICAL REALITY of the the past of the system would be determined (by a dice roll so to speak) the moment somone bothered to lift the isolation and look at the outcome. Before that - the reality would be a superposition of all imaginable outsomes based on what was known before the box is closed. It's bizare and counterintuitive for sure - but it's reality as physicists know it at the subatomic level - Schrodingers cat all over again.
That would be a thousand TB!
Tera: 2^40 ~10^12
Peta: 2^50 ~10^15
Exa: 2^60 ~10^18