When all science and engineering fields are considered, the percentage of bachelor's degree recipients who are women has improved to 51 percent in 2004-5 from 39 percent in 1984-85, according to National Science Foundation surveys.
What are the bounds on "science and engineering fields"? Psychology? Sociology? Anthropology? History? Probably not that last one, but I'm pretty sure people can get science degrees now without taking any math classes - except maybe "statistics for people who think math is hard".
I'd guess that 0,0,0 is Sol. The earth being at 0,0,1 means that 1 unit of measure in this co-ordinate system is the distance from the earth to the sun.
lol. I couldn't even read that without immediately coming up with three or four problems with the geometry involved.
Talking about more or less regulation (as the word "deregulation" does), is useless. A regulated market needs two things: Policy that makes sense, and exactly that minimum set of regulations necessary to reasonably implement that policy.
People who are for "deregulation" generally assume that we started with neither of those things, and so removing some regulation will make things less screwed up. Those against "deregulation" assume we started with a situation reasonably close to those things and removing some regulations will break everything. And you know what they say about assumptions...
I think you're letting your personal ideology cloud your view of the world around you.
Of COURSE nobody would trust their critical systems to, say, an OS they don't have the source for!
Most major companies don't. They happily run employee desktops on Microsoft Windows, because they can easily swap them out when they break. They run critical legacy systems on IBM mainframes (or whatever). And they run new critical systems on platforms that are almost entirely FOSS. I'm sure you can easily come up with a counterexample, but they're the exception, not the rule.
That's not a false negative, that's you misunderstanding the test. They are testing users who are actually IPv6 enabled, not just users running IPv6 capable hardware.
None of those requires the source code for the driver.
And Google just serves web pages, which doesn't require access to the source code for the web server. That doesn't mean that they'd be caught dead using a binary blob for a web server. It's just not an acceptable business risk.
It's like having backups. Sure, restoring from backups isn't part of the plan, but not having backups isn't a risk that anyone takes with important business data. Personally, I'd consider my research data to be even more important than that. I sure as hell wouldn't risk it to a poorly maintained and unstable binary blob - at least not if there was absolutely any other choice, and even then not without a hell of a lot of precautions to make sure it didn't get quietly corrupted or randomly lost.
So... is there an open standard API for this stuff yet that works on hardware from multiple manufacturers?
If not, developing for this feels like writing assembly code for Itanium or the IBM Cell processor. Sure, it'll give you pretty good performance now, but the chances of the code still being useful in 5 years is basically zero.
OTOH, if hardware development slowed, software developers would be forced make version 2.0 faster by writing good code, rather than by upping the system requirements on even-more-bloated-than-ever-crap.
Not only do you want to die of some potentially treatable genetic defect, you want your software to be crappier and take longer to write because the programmers had to spend all their time obfuscating previously elegant and readable code so the machine liked it better or, alternatively, simply stripping out features?
Screw that. I'll take maintainable code running on fast computers.
You seem to be thinking of Intel as the "good brand" and AMD as the "off brand". That made sense in 1997, but now it's like Toyota vs Honda - both companies make top quality products.
For the past year Intel has boxed AMD in with chips at the same performance and lower price, or the same price and higher performance, or both.
That's been true in some price ranges, but Intel hasn't trumped AMD across the board any time recently. There's always been a couple price ranges - and usually the relevant ones like $120 to $150 - where AMD has a better product.
pricing segments (Atom) well below AMD's.
Geode?
I'm not trying to say that Intel hasn't been "the winner" for the past year or so, but it certainly hasn't been as one-sided as you're claiming. AMD has been selling chips, based on being the best choice for individual consumers, the whole time.
I wonder what would happen to the overall CPU picture is suddenly everyone stopped biting at the bleeding edge tech and waited for the inevitable price drop?
There would simply be no price drop. The price drop comes from the company having made their money on that generation and released the new generation. If both Intel and AMD were to drastically slow down selling high end processors, they'd stop building new fabs - and run their current-generation fabs until they had made their money on them.
This would be really bad for everyone, because we'd miss out on the benifits of progress in computer hardware technology. Sure, you'll claim to only run applications that would basically run fine on a Commodore 64, but that's probably not even true - since nearly every website you visit has reasonably high end hardware backing it. And that's completely ignoring things like bioinformatics, where fast computers are quietly but drastically transforming human life for the better.
Old school, yet it handled nearly flawlessly all but the last level in Portal.
I suggest upgrading. I know you're putting a lot of mental effort into convincing yourself that game graphics quality it's irrelevant so you can avoid getting a new computer, but there's like 5 years of good games that you're missing out on - or effectively missing out on - with that rig. It's like watching an action movie on a 12" TV - it's possible, but it ruins the movie compared to watching it with some immersion.
Oh, and if you upgrade, humanity will thank you for supporting technological progress. You never know - your money could make a fab break even just enough sooner to build a new fab a month earlier, which could give a biotech lab one generation better processors, which could enable the breakthrough that creates a medical treatment that saves your life one day...
Perhaps there are details in the contract that expose some sensitive trade secrets, and releasing it wouldn't only feed general curiousity.
If that's true, they should have thought of that before they put those trade secrets in what should be a public document then. When a government keeps secrets, that government is obviously betraying the interests of the people it was intended to serve. The sole exception to this - active strategic or tactical information being held by a military in a time of war - doesn't apply unless there's a (real and winnable soon) war going on.
However it is the right of governments to decide what they make public and not. And for my American friends remember that we have a different view on things like this, usually European governments are MORE open than the US.
The idea that governments have rights is absurd. People have rights. The people have delegated certain tasks to government for their own convenience, and have accepted limits on some minimal subset of their rights so that society can best protect the rest. Note that "society" is not the same as "the government"; the government is just a mechanism used by society to accomplish certain specific things.
Now, the next question is this: Is the class of problems caused by the existance of a monopoly restricted to situations where a market actor meets the strict definition of a monopoly that you gave?
The answer is no, and anti-trust law in the United States recognizes that. Therefore, you can be convicted of "abusing monopoly power" without technically being a monopoly. Since strict monopolies basically never occur in nature without government interference (and even then you could argue about black market suppliers), it is convenient to use the term imprecisely to refer to any market participant that has significantly more market power in relation to a single product or service than any other participant.
The general (economic and social) problem is market power, not the number of suppliers. Any oligopoly will warp the market in their favor and cause the same type of problem that a theoretical abusive monopolist would.
I can't see anybody investing $10m in making a movie or game if everybody who wanted it could get it for free. I just can't see enough people paying voluntarily to make it worthwhile.
Like I said:
I mean, what good is metal as a building material - you can build perfectly good four story buildings out of bricks. 640k should be enough for anybody. The automobile is a curiosity for rich eccentrics, no threat to the horse and buggy.
Just because you can't "see" it doesn't mean it's not the future. This is especially true for business models vs. legal climate - with a different legal climate, the business models would be different. And it's awfully hard to anticipate all of those business models, because they're exactly the models that are not viable under the current laws.
working hard + hiring best talent + large market share != monopoly.
An actor that has significantly more market power than anyone else is a monopoly. Microsoft is an abusive monopoly, which should have specific legal ramifications, but even the nicest possible single provider of a product or service is still a monopoly.
32-bit apps work fine on 64-bit Windows unless the application specifically checks for it and doesn't work on purpose.
Unless it's a binary plugin to a binary application (like Flash), in which case either being 32-bit forces the other to be 32-bit. Hope no-one planned on having more than 2gb of browser windows open...
Can you give me any examples of the wonderful things we could expect to see in an unconstrained market that don't happen now?
High budget versions of all the low budget activities you discount as garbage, plus more. One of the key problems here is that I *can't* give you meaningful and accurate examples of things that currently can't exist. I mean, what good is metal as a building material - you can build perfectly good four story buildings out of bricks. 640k should be enough for anybody. The automobile is a curiosity for rich eccentrics, no threat to the horse and buggy.
Copyright not only encourages people to create full-time, it encourages originality too.
Is all art really so crappy that nothing can be reused? Must the wheel really be re-invented every time?
I don't rate a derivative (in the copyright sense) work like putting the vocals from song A over the beat from song B as highly as an original composition inspired by songs A and B, so I don't think the fact that copyright hinders the process of taking chunks of other people's work verbatim and re-using them is such a terrible loss.
Given that that sort of work is, in the general case, illegal - do you have any basis for your opinion or is it just arbitrary? Certainly dance and rap remixes of pop songs don't tend to be the greatest artistic works ever, but that's such a constrained sample (usually happening when both artists are contracted to the same record label) that I don't think it tells us much of anything about what we'd get in an unconstrained market.
Do you have any basis for your position, or is it just a "gut feeling" based on a feeling that the right answer must be a compromise between the "two extremes"?
highly beneficial to artists, with little drain on the commons; short for me means 5 or 10 years).
It may be difficult to see it from where we are now, but even a 5 year copyright period might be enough to prevent *most* artistic works from ever being made.
A key function of works in the cultural "commons" is to serve as the basis for new works. The number of possible derivative works that can be created based on a single basis work is practically unlimited. Further, artists are most likely to get the idea for a derivative work when the basis work is new and popular. Exactly what the function of disinterest is would be interesting to look at, but certainly with the current copyright period almost no-one cares about a work by the time it gets out of copyright. It doesn't seem entirely unlikely to me that the majority of interest in creating derivative works would come in the first year or so of the existence of a basis work, so it's certainly possible that a 5 year copyright could eliminate tens or hundreds of derivative works per work - stopping most artworks before they are ever created.
Slashdot Mirror
What are the bounds on "science and engineering fields"? Psychology? Sociology? Anthropology? History? Probably not that last one, but I'm pretty sure people can get science degrees now without taking any math classes - except maybe "statistics for people who think math is hard".
lol. I couldn't even read that without immediately coming up with three or four problems with the geometry involved.
Talking about more or less regulation (as the word "deregulation" does), is useless. A regulated market needs two things: Policy that makes sense, and exactly that minimum set of regulations necessary to reasonably implement that policy.
People who are for "deregulation" generally assume that we started with neither of those things, and so removing some regulation will make things less screwed up. Those against "deregulation" assume we started with a situation reasonably close to those things and removing some regulations will break everything. And you know what they say about assumptions...
I think you're letting your personal ideology cloud your view of the world around you.
Most major companies don't. They happily run employee desktops on Microsoft Windows, because they can easily swap them out when they break. They run critical legacy systems on IBM mainframes (or whatever). And they run new critical systems on platforms that are almost entirely FOSS. I'm sure you can easily come up with a counterexample, but they're the exception, not the rule.
That's not a false negative, that's you misunderstanding the test. They are testing users who are actually IPv6 enabled, not just users running IPv6 capable hardware.
And Google just serves web pages, which doesn't require access to the source code for the web server. That doesn't mean that they'd be caught dead using a binary blob for a web server. It's just not an acceptable business risk.
It's like having backups. Sure, restoring from backups isn't part of the plan, but not having backups isn't a risk that anyone takes with important business data. Personally, I'd consider my research data to be even more important than that. I sure as hell wouldn't risk it to a poorly maintained and unstable binary blob - at least not if there was absolutely any other choice, and even then not without a hell of a lot of precautions to make sure it didn't get quietly corrupted or randomly lost.
So... is there an open standard API for this stuff yet that works on hardware from multiple manufacturers?
If not, developing for this feels like writing assembly code for Itanium or the IBM Cell processor. Sure, it'll give you pretty good performance now, but the chances of the code still being useful in 5 years is basically zero.
We're not talking about video games here. Some people use computers for important work, not just for screwing around.
Not only do you want to die of some potentially treatable genetic defect, you want your software to be crappier and take longer to write because the programmers had to spend all their time obfuscating previously elegant and readable code so the machine liked it better or, alternatively, simply stripping out features?
Screw that. I'll take maintainable code running on fast computers.
You seem to be thinking of Intel as the "good brand" and AMD as the "off brand". That made sense in 1997, but now it's like Toyota vs Honda - both companies make top quality products.
That's been true in some price ranges, but Intel hasn't trumped AMD across the board any time recently. There's always been a couple price ranges - and usually the relevant ones like $120 to $150 - where AMD has a better product.
Geode?
I'm not trying to say that Intel hasn't been "the winner" for the past year or so, but it certainly hasn't been as one-sided as you're claiming. AMD has been selling chips, based on being the best choice for individual consumers, the whole time.
There would simply be no price drop. The price drop comes from the company having made their money on that generation and released the new generation. If both Intel and AMD were to drastically slow down selling high end processors, they'd stop building new fabs - and run their current-generation fabs until they had made their money on them.
This would be really bad for everyone, because we'd miss out on the benifits of progress in computer hardware technology. Sure, you'll claim to only run applications that would basically run fine on a Commodore 64, but that's probably not even true - since nearly every website you visit has reasonably high end hardware backing it. And that's completely ignoring things like bioinformatics, where fast computers are quietly but drastically transforming human life for the better.
I suggest upgrading. I know you're putting a lot of mental effort into convincing yourself that game graphics quality it's irrelevant so you can avoid getting a new computer, but there's like 5 years of good games that you're missing out on - or effectively missing out on - with that rig. It's like watching an action movie on a 12" TV - it's possible, but it ruins the movie compared to watching it with some immersion.
Oh, and if you upgrade, humanity will thank you for supporting technological progress. You never know - your money could make a fab break even just enough sooner to build a new fab a month earlier, which could give a biotech lab one generation better processors, which could enable the breakthrough that creates a medical treatment that saves your life one day...
If that's true, they should have thought of that before they put those trade secrets in what should be a public document then. When a government keeps secrets, that government is obviously betraying the interests of the people it was intended to serve. The sole exception to this - active strategic or tactical information being held by a military in a time of war - doesn't apply unless there's a (real and winnable soon) war going on.
The idea that governments have rights is absurd. People have rights. The people have delegated certain tasks to government for their own convenience, and have accepted limits on some minimal subset of their rights so that society can best protect the rest. Note that "society" is not the same as "the government"; the government is just a mechanism used by society to accomplish certain specific things.
This is probably worth looking at for anyone who's interested in the topic of monopoly: Wikipedia: Concentration ratio
You are technically correct.
Now, the next question is this: Is the class of problems caused by the existance of a monopoly restricted to situations where a market actor meets the strict definition of a monopoly that you gave?
The answer is no, and anti-trust law in the United States recognizes that. Therefore, you can be convicted of "abusing monopoly power" without technically being a monopoly. Since strict monopolies basically never occur in nature without government interference (and even then you could argue about black market suppliers), it is convenient to use the term imprecisely to refer to any market participant that has significantly more market power in relation to a single product or service than any other participant.
The general (economic and social) problem is market power, not the number of suppliers. Any oligopoly will warp the market in their favor and cause the same type of problem that a theoretical abusive monopolist would.
Like I said:
Just because you can't "see" it doesn't mean it's not the future. This is especially true for business models vs. legal climate - with a different legal climate, the business models would be different. And it's awfully hard to anticipate all of those business models, because they're exactly the models that are not viable under the current laws.
An actor that has significantly more market power than anyone else is a monopoly. Microsoft is an abusive monopoly, which should have specific legal ramifications, but even the nicest possible single provider of a product or service is still a monopoly.
Unless it's a binary plugin to a binary application (like Flash), in which case either being 32-bit forces the other to be 32-bit. Hope no-one planned on having more than 2gb of browser windows open...
High budget versions of all the low budget activities you discount as garbage, plus more. One of the key problems here is that I *can't* give you meaningful and accurate examples of things that currently can't exist. I mean, what good is metal as a building material - you can build perfectly good four story buildings out of bricks. 640k should be enough for anybody. The automobile is a curiosity for rich eccentrics, no threat to the horse and buggy.
Is all art really so crappy that nothing can be reused? Must the wheel really be re-invented every time?
Given that that sort of work is, in the general case, illegal - do you have any basis for your opinion or is it just arbitrary? Certainly dance and rap remixes of pop songs don't tend to be the greatest artistic works ever, but that's such a constrained sample (usually happening when both artists are contracted to the same record label) that I don't think it tells us much of anything about what we'd get in an unconstrained market.
Do you have any basis for your position, or is it just a "gut feeling" based on a feeling that the right answer must be a compromise between the "two extremes"?
It may be difficult to see it from where we are now, but even a 5 year copyright period might be enough to prevent *most* artistic works from ever being made.
A key function of works in the cultural "commons" is to serve as the basis for new works. The number of possible derivative works that can be created based on a single basis work is practically unlimited. Further, artists are most likely to get the idea for a derivative work when the basis work is new and popular. Exactly what the function of disinterest is would be interesting to look at, but certainly with the current copyright period almost no-one cares about a work by the time it gets out of copyright. It doesn't seem entirely unlikely to me that the majority of interest in creating derivative works would come in the first year or so of the existence of a basis work, so it's certainly possible that a 5 year copyright could eliminate tens or hundreds of derivative works per work - stopping most artworks before they are ever created.
The minute it's "non-commercial", you certainly can't re-use it in your work - at least not if you intend to make a living from it.
You sure about that? I'd bet good money that some voting machines are stored in church basements between elections.