Less oil doesn't necessarily mean less money for Dubai, at least not immediately. The less oil there is, the more they can charge for the oil that they do have.
That makes about a gazillion assumptions, like "Dubai won't be the first to run out of oil". But basically, even if we're at peak oil, Dubai will probably be very rich for at least another half-century or so. And when you're talking about ultra-luxe tourist destinations, that's well past your horizon of thinking.
From a technical level, the primary reason may be that it's pretty far south, as friends of Russia go. It's roughly on a latitude with Florida. Ideally you'd like something equatoria, but Russia doesn't have many friends in Africa or South America, and none of the countries on the African Equator are particularly safe.
Frankly, I don't know HOW they managed that; seems to me I can phone up Rosaviacosmos directly.
Unless you have their phone number, probably not. And if they pick up the phone, you'd better speak Russian.
I suspect somebody at SA knows somebody at Rosaviacosmos, and the Russians have basically outsourced their trip planning to them. That lets them focus on rockets while SA focuses on collecting clients and making them happy. Which is probably a real pain in the ass when it comes to people with $20 million to blow on a ride.
But God help [sic] the poor judge who finds himself faced with a project proving that all the dinosaurs were wiped out in a flood 6,000 years ago. Many years ago my project was next to a project proving the power of pyramids to do all sorts of stuff, and when the project didn't win (duh) the parent disrupted the awards ceremony complaining about bias and conspiracies.
I expect no better from the ID supporters, who have no conception of what science really is, so there's no logical basis on which to argue with them. It becomes a shouting match very quickly because there's no other place for it to go.
I use the same scheme, and eventually the personal address just leaks out. Dozens of my friends have it, and they'll use it to send me online greeting cards, forward articles, etc. I don't know who was responsible, or why.
Thus far the spam filters have kept things tolerably clean. I see a lot of spam at the "promiscuous" addresses (info@... addresses that are published on the web and are ways that customers get a hold of me).
For some reason my personal address has yet to make it onto the worst of the spammers' lists. I assume it will, eventually, and then some day I may change it.
I do have an ultra-personal emergency address that I give out only to people that I really trust not to misuse it.
Perhaps "Underwater currents TO BE used..." would make a better headline. It's four years before they deploy it. Save the past tense headlines for when I can ask questions like "Does it work?" and "Are there any unintended side effects?" and "Would it scale?"
I think that by the time you spread that 1.5 watt image over a 48" diagonal, you'd better have the room pretty dark if you want to see it.
They give figures for a 15" screen; a 48" image is going to require 9 times as much power. I'm sure you'd be content with 13 watts, too, compared to the vast amounts of juice your 48" projector puts out.
Unfortunately, there are no holes in the laws protecting these guys from great bodily harm...
No, but I believe that the CAN-SPAM law does require a valid physical postal address. It would be really, really illegal if somebody were to use that information to beat the sh*t out of him.
If he's not including that valid postal address, then he should be arrested under the law. My concern with CAN-SPAM isn't the loopholes as much as that they don't seem to be enforcing the rules. No law does any good if it isn't enforced.
I'd really like to see him try the "But it wasn't really me, it was my multiple domain names" excuse in front of a judge.
So you've never once forgotten to turn off your cell phone in a meeting?
And the trick, I've found, isn't so much turning the thing to ringer as turning it back afterwards. I'll discover the following day that I've missed a call or two when my phone was out of my pocket and set to buzz.
Perhaps a better (and simpler) algorithm would be to detect if the phone was in close proximity to the user. If it's in my pocket, always vibrate. If it's on the table recharging, always ring. Not perfect, but it sounds more practical.
Light-speed travel is impossible, but near-light-speed travel is wildly impractical, because of the mass you gain. This guy seems to be saying that if you have an anti-gravity machine, you could counteract that. You couldn't get to FTL, but you could go a lot faster than without it. Heck, there's all KINDS of nifty things you could do with an anti-gravity machine.
And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon.
I think that this guy has been pushing his anti-gravity solution of general relativity for a while. IANAP, so I can't say whether he's right or wrong, though being a good skeptic I'm inclined to guess the latter.
I have to admit I'm a bit surprised to hear that it's working. I would have thought that people who pirate discs at $80 would still pirate them at $20.
I'd have guessed that some bean counter figured that enough people would switch from renting to buying if the price were low enough. Especially with Blockbuster late fees, I'm sure that some people would be tempted to just buy something if they thought there was any chance they'd rent it twice.
Back when I worked in a video store in the late 80s, new VHS tapes would be more like $50 to $80. That was them hitting up the heat-seekers and the rental places. They'd only come down to $20 or so after a few months. I'm actually a bit surprised (but happy) they don't still do that.
Believe it or not, I'm gonna stand up for cronyism. At least in a limited sense.
I've considered running for office. If I were to win, I'd have to fill a lot of jobs. Basically, the ultimate responsibility is mine, but I need to delegate tasks to people that I trust, and I need to get advice from people that I trust to know the topic and give me good answers.
So if I get there, I'm going to be appointing nearly all of my friends to office. They're my friends because they're smart and knowledgable people. When I can I'll put them into tasks that they know. But when I can't find out, where am I supposed to find somebody that I trust? Well, probably among my friends' friends. Or, occasionally, I'll end up putting somebody into a job that he can learn, and trust that he would be a smart delegator and manager, and take advice from the non-appointed civil service employees who already work there.
That's what every politician does: they have a network of people whom they trust, and who follow them from job to job. That trust is crucial; it's what makes a team out of the officeholder. The term "cronyism" has all the negative connotations because of people who appoint corrupt or stupid friends to jobs. But neither is a politician going to appoint a complete stranger; at the very least there will be some friend-of-a-friend network connecting the two to provide a reputation for the appointee. How else are you supposed to evaluate the guy? How many interviews do you have time for?
When you vote, you're not voting for a guy. You're voting for a guy and his team. The American voters elected a guy with a stupid, corrupt team, and they're getting precisely the government they should have known they were getting. Maybe next time they'll pick a guy with smarter cronies.
Afterall, I never get spam mail in my snail mail where it costs like $.40 to send.
But you only get a few of them a day. (And it's more like $.04, as other posters have said). The problem with spam is that you get so damn much of it. A few per day is no big deal. It's the hundreds per day that some people get that make spam a problem.
I take it that "free" means "no additional charges over the usual per-minute voice rate", right? As in "free evenings and weekends, but don't use it all day or you're gonna see a really, really big number at the end of the month".
The idea is that spammers spam only because spam is free.
My junk folder right now is full of Russian spams. I have no idea what they're selling; I don't speak Russian. But they sent it to me because it cost them literally nothing. It would take only a few people actually responding to the email to make it profitable. Phishing attacks work the same way; they send many emails and don't care about the vast number that don't get through.
Spammers have to send out millions of messages a day to reach their marks. Even at a tenth of a penny per email, it runs into real money real fast. This should cut out that sort of utterly random, opportunistic spam.
There are other problems. I run a few mailing lists, and I suppose I can afford to spend a buck or so for each mailing. But really popular lists, like the joke-a-day kind of lists, will have a problem. At that tenth-of-a-penny, 100,000 AOL subscribers will cost you $100. That would be a lot to ask of a free daily service.
The solution to that, I think, is going to be RSS, where you pull your daily joke rather than have it pushed to you. Or they just live with the risk of not being on the white list. Don't send spam and you won't (hopefully) be blacklisted.
It also won't stop the spam zombies, who don't necessarily look like a mass mailer; the look like an individual sending out a lot of messages. AOL may be able to recognize those and cut them off, too: "IP address www.xxx.yy.zzz sent 10,000 messages this hour. Let's open one of them up... yep, it's spam. Block all SMTP connections from that address."
That's tomorrow. Today they're trying to force mass senders to put trivially priced postage stamps on things. Most valid mass-email senders can afford to pay the trivial price; spammers can't. At least that's the idea. It'll be interesting to see if it works.
Actually, they won't have to re-buy you Photoshop for Intel Mac. Rosetta allows the old version to work, at least in theory, with caveats.
They admit it'll run slower, but they don't provide numbers, so I'll be curious to see if it's gun-to-the-head-must-upgrade slower, or just "hey, this isn't quite as snappy as it used to be" slower. The caveat is that Version Cue Workspace Server doesn't work at all. I wonder if they can patch that.
For the love of Taco, the target females are NOT bloody well watching soap operas!
Excellent point. I suspect that the goal is better served by putting women in scientific/technical roles in ordinary TV shows. I'm afraid I don't have time to watch TV, but something like CSI would be a perfect place to position such role models.
Especially if they can do it without playing into the usual stereotypes, like the ugly-nerdy-geek-girl or (worse, to my mind) the girl-who's-supposed-to-be-unattractive when-she's-wearing-glasses but turns out to be a total hottie when the glasses come off (accompanied by a quick change in lighting, makeup, hair, etc.)
Because there's reason to believe that women are pushed out of tech.
It may be, as the Harvard president was attacked for suggesting, that women are not as capable as men in scientific and mathematical fields. The brains of women and men ARE different, and that could be one way. I'm willing to believe that on average, a woman is less likely than a man to want to be a programmer, in a biogically predetermined sense.
However, that doesn't mean that all women are worse than all men in technical fields. Unfortunately, many girls are brought up to believe precisely that. They're told in ways subtle and not-so-subtle that they can't make it in science/math/engineering, and if you tell a young person enough times they come to believe it. Some female friends of mine recall being told point-blank, "Girls aren't good at math. Stop it." Stupid, yeah, but it happens.
If nothing else, the lack of present role models for women in scientific fields gives them the message that women can't go into those fields. Yeah, there are some, but they're far outnumbered by men.
So how many potentially brilliant programmers have we lost because Women Can't Do Computers? And how many women grow up with a fear or deep-seated misunderstanding of tech because they were told that they can't possibly be any good at it? Could your girlfriend/wife/female friend really program her own $*@#$& VCR if she hadn't been told at a young age it was impossible?
The best solution is to eliminate the bias that girls receive, and I think the world is getting better at that. Girls are passing boys in the SAT math, for example. But some bias remains, and rather than wring our hands and decry it, we can also try to counteract it by explicitly showing them women who do like tech. If there aren't enough real ones, we can bootstrap the process with fictional ones.
It may be pointless. It may not work; perhaps we already have as many female programmers as women who want to be programmers. And this kind of social engineering is as best unproven, if not actually backfiring.
And in fact, there are pushes to get men into education, for precisely the same reason. There are fewer male nurses, and some who want to are pushed out of the field by the stereotype that they can't. There's a deficit of nurses, and I for one would like to see if we could encourage more men to take up the field. It's a reasonably lucrative profession, if men can get over the shame of being called by a "woman's" title. Perhaps a few extra male nurses on medical TV shows would help.
Nope. This is one of those "$foo... on the Internet!" patents where $foo is something well-known. In this case it's "$foo... on a mobile phone", but same diff.
So despair.com's trademark doesn't conflict with the patent. However, I would love to see despair.com threaten to sue them for trademark infringement when certain smileys are sent using their system.
You're absolutely right; I didn't want to get into a full balance-sheet analysis. I'm sure there's some creative accounting going on underneath it, to, though that could be either inflating or deflating their numbers, depending on what management needs.
A sibling post to yours also noted that the $27 million was quarterly, not yearly.
So yeah: chump change. My goal was merely to try to fight the dot-com notion that revenue by itself was a good valuation of the company.
It's the earnings, not the revenues. Earnings are revenues minus expenses. You could have revenues of a trillion dollars, but if your expenses are $999,999,999 then you've only earned a dollar in profit. If your expenses are $1,000,000,000,001, then you're in the red. Either way, it would mean that $10 million isn't something you have lying around.
Stock prices should be based on earnings rather than revenue. People looked heavily at revenue of tech startups because they were assumed to have high one-time building expenses (new server farms, new offices, etc), so the idea was that next year those high revenues wouldn't be offset by high expenses, and earnings would be high. Sometimes that was true; sometimes it wasn't. Investors who invested solely based on revenue lost it all when the bubble burst.
Still, in this case $10 million is a 1/3 of one year's revenues. That'll sting much more than bring up the number "$1 billion" implies, though ultimately it's still not all that much. I'd have liked to have seen them hit harder; several years' profits at least. That hammers the stock price without immediately putting the company out of business (and the workers out of work.)
Slashdot Mirror
Less oil doesn't necessarily mean less money for Dubai, at least not immediately. The less oil there is, the more they can charge for the oil that they do have.
That makes about a gazillion assumptions, like "Dubai won't be the first to run out of oil". But basically, even if we're at peak oil, Dubai will probably be very rich for at least another half-century or so. And when you're talking about ultra-luxe tourist destinations, that's well past your horizon of thinking.
From a technical level, the primary reason may be that it's pretty far south, as friends of Russia go. It's roughly on a latitude with Florida. Ideally you'd like something equatoria, but Russia doesn't have many friends in Africa or South America, and none of the countries on the African Equator are particularly safe.
Frankly, I don't know HOW they managed that; seems to me I can phone up Rosaviacosmos directly.
Unless you have their phone number, probably not. And if they pick up the phone, you'd better speak Russian.
I suspect somebody at SA knows somebody at Rosaviacosmos, and the Russians have basically outsourced their trip planning to them. That lets them focus on rockets while SA focuses on collecting clients and making them happy. Which is probably a real pain in the ass when it comes to people with $20 million to blow on a ride.
But God help [sic] the poor judge who finds himself faced with a project proving that all the dinosaurs were wiped out in a flood 6,000 years ago. Many years ago my project was next to a project proving the power of pyramids to do all sorts of stuff, and when the project didn't win (duh) the parent disrupted the awards ceremony complaining about bias and conspiracies.
I expect no better from the ID supporters, who have no conception of what science really is, so there's no logical basis on which to argue with them. It becomes a shouting match very quickly because there's no other place for it to go.
I use the same scheme, and eventually the personal address just leaks out. Dozens of my friends have it, and they'll use it to send me online greeting cards, forward articles, etc. I don't know who was responsible, or why.
Thus far the spam filters have kept things tolerably clean. I see a lot of spam at the "promiscuous" addresses (info@... addresses that are published on the web and are ways that customers get a hold of me).
For some reason my personal address has yet to make it onto the worst of the spammers' lists. I assume it will, eventually, and then some day I may change it.
I do have an ultra-personal emergency address that I give out only to people that I really trust not to misuse it.
Perhaps "Underwater currents TO BE used..." would make a better headline. It's four years before they deploy it. Save the past tense headlines for when I can ask questions like "Does it work?" and "Are there any unintended side effects?" and "Would it scale?"
I think that by the time you spread that 1.5 watt image over a 48" diagonal, you'd better have the room pretty dark if you want to see it.
They give figures for a 15" screen; a 48" image is going to require 9 times as much power. I'm sure you'd be content with 13 watts, too, compared to the vast amounts of juice your 48" projector puts out.
Unfortunately, there are no holes in the laws protecting these guys from great bodily harm...
No, but I believe that the CAN-SPAM law does require a valid physical postal address. It would be really, really illegal if somebody were to use that information to beat the sh*t out of him.
If he's not including that valid postal address, then he should be arrested under the law. My concern with CAN-SPAM isn't the loopholes as much as that they don't seem to be enforcing the rules. No law does any good if it isn't enforced.
I'd really like to see him try the "But it wasn't really me, it was my multiple domain names" excuse in front of a judge.
So you've never once forgotten to turn off your cell phone in a meeting?
And the trick, I've found, isn't so much turning the thing to ringer as turning it back afterwards. I'll discover the following day that I've missed a call or two when my phone was out of my pocket and set to buzz.
Perhaps a better (and simpler) algorithm would be to detect if the phone was in close proximity to the user. If it's in my pocket, always vibrate. If it's on the table recharging, always ring. Not perfect, but it sounds more practical.
Light-speed travel is impossible, but near-light-speed travel is wildly impractical, because of the mass you gain. This guy seems to be saying that if you have an anti-gravity machine, you could counteract that. You couldn't get to FTL, but you could go a lot faster than without it. Heck, there's all KINDS of nifty things you could do with an anti-gravity machine.
And if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a wagon.
I think that this guy has been pushing his anti-gravity solution of general relativity for a while. IANAP, so I can't say whether he's right or wrong, though being a good skeptic I'm inclined to guess the latter.
Huh. Didn't know that. Thanks.
I have to admit I'm a bit surprised to hear that it's working. I would have thought that people who pirate discs at $80 would still pirate them at $20.
I'd have guessed that some bean counter figured that enough people would switch from renting to buying if the price were low enough. Especially with Blockbuster late fees, I'm sure that some people would be tempted to just buy something if they thought there was any chance they'd rent it twice.
Back when I worked in a video store in the late 80s, new VHS tapes would be more like $50 to $80. That was them hitting up the heat-seekers and the rental places. They'd only come down to $20 or so after a few months. I'm actually a bit surprised (but happy) they don't still do that.
Try GarageBand. You can download public domain loops, and build your music that way.
I think of it as the platypus and "the other montreme", the echidna, though there are at least four species of that.
Believe it or not, I'm gonna stand up for cronyism. At least in a limited sense.
I've considered running for office. If I were to win, I'd have to fill a lot of jobs. Basically, the ultimate responsibility is mine, but I need to delegate tasks to people that I trust, and I need to get advice from people that I trust to know the topic and give me good answers.
So if I get there, I'm going to be appointing nearly all of my friends to office. They're my friends because they're smart and knowledgable people. When I can I'll put them into tasks that they know. But when I can't find out, where am I supposed to find somebody that I trust? Well, probably among my friends' friends. Or, occasionally, I'll end up putting somebody into a job that he can learn, and trust that he would be a smart delegator and manager, and take advice from the non-appointed civil service employees who already work there.
That's what every politician does: they have a network of people whom they trust, and who follow them from job to job. That trust is crucial; it's what makes a team out of the officeholder. The term "cronyism" has all the negative connotations because of people who appoint corrupt or stupid friends to jobs. But neither is a politician going to appoint a complete stranger; at the very least there will be some friend-of-a-friend network connecting the two to provide a reputation for the appointee. How else are you supposed to evaluate the guy? How many interviews do you have time for?
When you vote, you're not voting for a guy. You're voting for a guy and his team. The American voters elected a guy with a stupid, corrupt team, and they're getting precisely the government they should have known they were getting. Maybe next time they'll pick a guy with smarter cronies.
Afterall, I never get spam mail in my snail mail where it costs like $.40 to send.
But you only get a few of them a day. (And it's more like $.04, as other posters have said). The problem with spam is that you get so damn much of it. A few per day is no big deal. It's the hundreds per day that some people get that make spam a problem.
you where limited to 14.4 but it was free
I take it that "free" means "no additional charges over the usual per-minute voice rate", right? As in "free evenings and weekends, but don't use it all day or you're gonna see a really, really big number at the end of the month".
The idea is that spammers spam only because spam is free.
My junk folder right now is full of Russian spams. I have no idea what they're selling; I don't speak Russian. But they sent it to me because it cost them literally nothing. It would take only a few people actually responding to the email to make it profitable. Phishing attacks work the same way; they send many emails and don't care about the vast number that don't get through.
Spammers have to send out millions of messages a day to reach their marks. Even at a tenth of a penny per email, it runs into real money real fast. This should cut out that sort of utterly random, opportunistic spam.
There are other problems. I run a few mailing lists, and I suppose I can afford to spend a buck or so for each mailing. But really popular lists, like the joke-a-day kind of lists, will have a problem. At that tenth-of-a-penny, 100,000 AOL subscribers will cost you $100. That would be a lot to ask of a free daily service.
The solution to that, I think, is going to be RSS, where you pull your daily joke rather than have it pushed to you. Or they just live with the risk of not being on the white list. Don't send spam and you won't (hopefully) be blacklisted.
It also won't stop the spam zombies, who don't necessarily look like a mass mailer; the look like an individual sending out a lot of messages. AOL may be able to recognize those and cut them off, too: "IP address www.xxx.yy.zzz sent 10,000 messages this hour. Let's open one of them up... yep, it's spam. Block all SMTP connections from that address."
That's tomorrow. Today they're trying to force mass senders to put trivially priced postage stamps on things. Most valid mass-email senders can afford to pay the trivial price; spammers can't. At least that's the idea. It'll be interesting to see if it works.
Actually, they won't have to re-buy you Photoshop for Intel Mac. Rosetta allows the old version to work, at least in theory, with caveats.
They admit it'll run slower, but they don't provide numbers, so I'll be curious to see if it's gun-to-the-head-must-upgrade slower, or just "hey, this isn't quite as snappy as it used to be" slower. The caveat is that Version Cue Workspace Server doesn't work at all. I wonder if they can patch that.
It's still a windfall for Mac software vendors.
For the love of Taco, the target females are NOT bloody well watching soap operas!
Excellent point. I suspect that the goal is better served by putting women in scientific/technical roles in ordinary TV shows. I'm afraid I don't have time to watch TV, but something like CSI would be a perfect place to position such role models.
Especially if they can do it without playing into the usual stereotypes, like the ugly-nerdy-geek-girl or (worse, to my mind) the girl-who's-supposed-to-be-unattractive when-she's-wearing-glasses but turns out to be a total hottie when the glasses come off (accompanied by a quick change in lighting, makeup, hair, etc.)
Wow. You should write this up and submit it to Journal of Anecdotal Evidence.
Because there's reason to believe that women are pushed out of tech.
It may be, as the Harvard president was attacked for suggesting, that women are not as capable as men in scientific and mathematical fields. The brains of women and men ARE different, and that could be one way. I'm willing to believe that on average, a woman is less likely than a man to want to be a programmer, in a biogically predetermined sense.
However, that doesn't mean that all women are worse than all men in technical fields. Unfortunately, many girls are brought up to believe precisely that. They're told in ways subtle and not-so-subtle that they can't make it in science/math/engineering, and if you tell a young person enough times they come to believe it. Some female friends of mine recall being told point-blank, "Girls aren't good at math. Stop it." Stupid, yeah, but it happens.
If nothing else, the lack of present role models for women in scientific fields gives them the message that women can't go into those fields. Yeah, there are some, but they're far outnumbered by men.
So how many potentially brilliant programmers have we lost because Women Can't Do Computers? And how many women grow up with a fear or deep-seated misunderstanding of tech because they were told that they can't possibly be any good at it? Could your girlfriend/wife/female friend really program her own $*@#$& VCR if she hadn't been told at a young age it was impossible?
The best solution is to eliminate the bias that girls receive, and I think the world is getting better at that. Girls are passing boys in the SAT math, for example. But some bias remains, and rather than wring our hands and decry it, we can also try to counteract it by explicitly showing them women who do like tech. If there aren't enough real ones, we can bootstrap the process with fictional ones.
It may be pointless. It may not work; perhaps we already have as many female programmers as women who want to be programmers. And this kind of social engineering is as best unproven, if not actually backfiring.
And in fact, there are pushes to get men into education, for precisely the same reason. There are fewer male nurses, and some who want to are pushed out of the field by the stereotype that they can't. There's a deficit of nurses, and I for one would like to see if we could encourage more men to take up the field. It's a reasonably lucrative profession, if men can get over the shame of being called by a "woman's" title. Perhaps a few extra male nurses on medical TV shows would help.
Nope. This is one of those "$foo ... on the Internet!" patents where $foo is something well-known. In this case it's "$foo ... on a mobile phone", but same diff.
So despair.com's trademark doesn't conflict with the patent. However, I would love to see despair.com threaten to sue them for trademark infringement when certain smileys are sent using their system.
You're absolutely right; I didn't want to get into a full balance-sheet analysis. I'm sure there's some creative accounting going on underneath it, to, though that could be either inflating or deflating their numbers, depending on what management needs.
A sibling post to yours also noted that the $27 million was quarterly, not yearly.
So yeah: chump change. My goal was merely to try to fight the dot-com notion that revenue by itself was a good valuation of the company.
Good catch. The fine should have been much, much larger.
It's the earnings, not the revenues. Earnings are revenues minus expenses. You could have revenues of a trillion dollars, but if your expenses are $999,999,999 then you've only earned a dollar in profit. If your expenses are $1,000,000,000,001, then you're in the red. Either way, it would mean that $10 million isn't something you have lying around.
Stock prices should be based on earnings rather than revenue. People looked heavily at revenue of tech startups because they were assumed to have high one-time building expenses (new server farms, new offices, etc), so the idea was that next year those high revenues wouldn't be offset by high expenses, and earnings would be high. Sometimes that was true; sometimes it wasn't. Investors who invested solely based on revenue lost it all when the bubble burst.
Still, in this case $10 million is a 1/3 of one year's revenues. That'll sting much more than bring up the number "$1 billion" implies, though ultimately it's still not all that much. I'd have liked to have seen them hit harder; several years' profits at least. That hammers the stock price without immediately putting the company out of business (and the workers out of work.)