I admire your well-crafted rebuttal! Just one note:
Yeah, great monopoly busting: resulting in increased prices. Yeah, that's the way to go. Don't want those dirty monopolies that result in lower prices.
Many readers here may have been brainwashed in grade school into believing that monopolies are always harmful. That's certainly one type of monopoly, which usually exists because of some artificial grant to it by a State, but it's also possible (and we have had) monopolies which exist simply because one company is fantastic at providing its service or product and nobody else can out-compete them on the merits. These sorts of monopolies last as long as they don't bring prices to where others can outcompete them or engage in other unpredictable behaviors (e.g. wild price swings) and are typically considered beneficial.
That's just to reiterate that ending a monopoly can certainly be a cause of increased prices.
With a centralised controller the problem is much easier. One program running on one CPU decides how to reconfigure the network. This can be faster and possibly find a better solution.
I can see how centralizing the control can be easier. But if the history of Internet networking has taught us anything, we should expect somebody to come up with a more clever distributed algorithm (perhaps building on OpenFlow) that will make SDN's a footnote in history while the problem gets distributed out to the network nodes again, making it more resilient.
That's not to say that trading off resiliency for performance today isn't worthwhile in some applications.
There are clearly people working on Mozilla who 'get it', but the project management seems adverse to tackling anything long-term or difficult. They also like to officially deny that real problems exist. Just as a random sample of tech geeks, how long were people here bitching about Firefox memory usage while we were fed a line of excuses. I recall reading the blog of the lone dev who started what came to be known as the Memshrink project, which, when it was done, management loved to tout, but before that "didn't matter".
The bz on multithreading the browser has been open for, what, 12 years? As of 2011, it wasn't a problem anymore. "ooh, mobile, new shiny!"
This is one area where Chrome runs circles around Firefox. Their tech people get to work on things they think are valuable and management supports them. They take on hard projects (i.e. forking WebKit). If anything, it should be the private non-profit that can take these risks!
So, guess which browser is an irrelevant pig dog on my 2-year-old smartphone...
I've testified before my state Senate on the benefits of industrial hemp to me as a farmer (biomass, cash crop, soil recovery). I don't use any intoxicating drugs myself, and at our Senate hearing there was only one pothead (the rest being scientists and farmers).
A similar effort in Kentucky passed its Senate unanimously. I'm not sure what you're reading, but it's probably not legislative records, which is what really counts.
IIRC, the idea that the human brain runs entirely on classical interactions between neurons is one that is not settled science.
I suppose doing a simulation will lend some data to proving or disproving the theory, but to start out claiming that it will replicate the human brain makes some definitive a-priori claims. Maybe it will, maybe it won't.
Well if our country took your viewpoint, at least in 100 years the United States will be able to look back on a century of decline and find comfort knowing that the only reason we failed was because our companies weren't competent enough to make the correct decisions.
huh? H1B's are going to save the country?
That moral high ground is much more important than actually creating government policies that account for the human frailty and greed that actually go into many important corporate decisions.
So allow H1B's to prop up poorly run corporations that make inefficient hiring decisions?
What sort of work are they being taken away from to deal with his insignificant little problem, I wonder.
In determining the eitology and perhaps a therapy for this condition, what other medical conditions will be subsequently solved by the newly gained knowledge?
None of us knows. It could be zero, it could be dozens. It could have no bearing, it could cure heart disease.
If only the Pages and Huntsmans of the world were the common model of spending by the wealthy, the world would be better off.
most companies just hold off on upgrading their old systems because they would have to pay too much.
For most [competent] companies, the ROI of an IT system is much greater than the marginal difference in IT worker wages, or else they wouldn't be implementing them in the first place.
needs a think-tank to tell them it's going in the wrong direction
There's no "need" - they know exactly what the situation is, but the legislation is payback to corporate donors. It's plain and simple corruption - the think tanks only point out the obvious to be an inconvenience.
Or maybe Samsung sees the future on OLED, and doesn't want to spend resources on a stepping-stone technology
Yeah, good call. Amazon needs to stay top dog continuously, for its business model. $100M for three years of dominance might well be a good bargain. Samsung could skip a few years and wind up with the best display technology (which Amazon would buy) and they'd both still do well.
Samsung just bought Liquavista in 2012.. interesting.. How will that work? I mean Samsung is more than likely going to use this technology.
If I had to guess, Samsung gets a perpetual license to the technology at a small cost+ margin while Amazon foots the R&D bill. Probably Samsung was moving too slowly for what Amazon wanted, Bezos thought he could do better, so he made Samsung a win-win deal.
You're right, that's part of it that I left out. When the government spends in deficit, the Fed "prints" more USD and buys bonds with it.
If the total number of units of the USD (let's call it D) is worth some valuation (call it V), then each unit of USD (i.e. $1, call it P for purchasing power) is worth the ratio. So, P = V/D. As D increases at a rate greater than V, the value of P decreases.
If a commodity, say coffee beans, has a value of B, and the price of coffee is C, then C = B/P. As P decreases, then C increases.
The coffee bean farmers in Guatemala certainly aren't going to give us a discount because our printing presses are running at full speed.
Now, this is partially untrue, since the Breton Woods agreement set the USD as the world reserve currency, since it was a paper analogue for gold. The US has enjoyed being able to "print world gold" for 40 years now, but over the past several years many of the world powers have moved to exchange their currencies directly, rather than through a USD intermediate. As this trend continues the artificial value of the USD (40-60% by some estimates) will continue to fall, making things seem more expensive to US purchasers.
There are measures put in place to halt this, though. Saddam Hussein was moving to price his oil Euros and Gaddafi was organizing a gold dinar for African oil sales. Oh, but WMD's.
Uncle Ben, I keep trying to explain this to you - just because technology is improving, does not mean that the purchasing power of wages for commodities (heat, food, clothing) should be falling. People will only accept bread & circuses policies for so long.
Assuming your numbers are correct, why do you think people should be compensated at a rate proportional to the value of silver?
Silver has been the 'people's money' for thousands of years across various societies because it has most of the properties of good money. Gold is slightly better, because it does not tarnish, but it's so rare that it's hard to have sufficient liquidity for gold.
But silver is just a benchmark - we could use something else. Perhaps bitcoin even. The US used gold and silver from 1781 to 1971 and "good faith" from 1971 to 2013 (be careful to avoid chronological ethnocentrism).
Regardless, what people should not have to endure is falling purchasing power from their wages as the productivity of the marketplace improves, which is what we have by using the fiat version of the USD.
On the other hand, the minimum wage expressed in silver is about the same as the early 1980s, so it can't be that bad...
I assume you mean the very short term spike in silver prices when the market was cornered? Use a 52-week average and re-run the number.
And it could have nothing to do with the fact that in that time production has only doubled while industrial demand has grown much more, on top of which investment demand has grown too...
Shall we figure in every 10c to $1 coin in circulation being made of it? That's a massive amount of silver.
And funny how you didn't use gold, where in the 60s minimum wage would have gotten you about an eight of a gram... and it would get you about that much now too.
What? No way, man. The price of gold was fixed at $35/oz until 1968. Minimum wage would have netted 1/28th of an ounce of gold, or 1.11 grams. The 52-week range today is $1322-$1803. That works out to $47-$64 today.
Minimum wage today, would, as you point out, buy about 1/8th of a gram of gold. Don't mix up grams and ounces - you need to divide by 31.1 to get grams. Do 1.11g/.15g (actual USD price today at $7.25/hr), and you get a ratio of 7.4x more earning power in 1964 than today - not the same.
Slashdot Mirror
One negotiating tactic is to include something you always expected to lose (or never have), because that's a 'free' concession.
I admire your well-crafted rebuttal! Just one note:
Yeah, great monopoly busting: resulting in increased prices. Yeah, that's the way to go. Don't want those dirty monopolies that result in lower prices.
Many readers here may have been brainwashed in grade school into believing that monopolies are always harmful. That's certainly one type of monopoly, which usually exists because of some artificial grant to it by a State, but it's also possible (and we have had) monopolies which exist simply because one company is fantastic at providing its service or product and nobody else can out-compete them on the merits. These sorts of monopolies last as long as they don't bring prices to where others can outcompete them or engage in other unpredictable behaviors (e.g. wild price swings) and are typically considered beneficial.
That's just to reiterate that ending a monopoly can certainly be a cause of increased prices.
With a centralised controller the problem is much easier. One program running on one CPU decides how to reconfigure the network. This can be faster and possibly find a better solution.
I can see how centralizing the control can be easier. But if the history of Internet networking has taught us anything, we should expect somebody to come up with a more clever distributed algorithm (perhaps building on OpenFlow) that will make SDN's a footnote in history while the problem gets distributed out to the network nodes again, making it more resilient.
That's not to say that trading off resiliency for performance today isn't worthwhile in some applications.
"use our services, or loose contact with 80% of your contacts".
Hey, but it's Google. "Use our services. 80% of your contacts are losers."
There are clearly people working on Mozilla who 'get it', but the project management seems adverse to tackling anything long-term or difficult. They also like to officially deny that real problems exist. Just as a random sample of tech geeks, how long were people here bitching about Firefox memory usage while we were fed a line of excuses. I recall reading the blog of the lone dev who started what came to be known as the Memshrink project, which, when it was done, management loved to tout, but before that "didn't matter".
The bz on multithreading the browser has been open for, what, 12 years? As of 2011, it wasn't a problem anymore. "ooh, mobile, new shiny!"
This is one area where Chrome runs circles around Firefox. Their tech people get to work on things they think are valuable and management supports them. They take on hard projects (i.e. forking WebKit). If anything, it should be the private non-profit that can take these risks!
So, guess which browser is an irrelevant pig dog on my 2-year-old smartphone...
I've testified before my state Senate on the benefits of industrial hemp to me as a farmer (biomass, cash crop, soil recovery). I don't use any intoxicating drugs myself, and at our Senate hearing there was only one pothead (the rest being scientists and farmers).
A similar effort in Kentucky passed its Senate unanimously. I'm not sure what you're reading, but it's probably not legislative records, which is what really counts.
We will implement a police state in the name of safety, only to find that it did not provide us that. By then, we won't be able to undo it peacefully.
And the lameness filter prevents it from being posted here. Aptly named.
IIRC, the idea that the human brain runs entirely on classical interactions between neurons is one that is not settled science.
I suppose doing a simulation will lend some data to proving or disproving the theory, but to start out claiming that it will replicate the human brain makes some definitive a-priori claims. Maybe it will, maybe it won't.
Well if our country took your viewpoint, at least in 100 years the United States will be able to look back on a century of decline and find comfort knowing that the only reason we failed was because our companies weren't competent enough to make the correct decisions.
huh? H1B's are going to save the country?
That moral high ground is much more important than actually creating government policies that account for the human frailty and greed that actually go into many important corporate decisions.
So allow H1B's to prop up poorly run corporations that make inefficient hiring decisions?
What sort of work are they being taken away from to deal with his insignificant little problem, I wonder.
In determining the eitology and perhaps a therapy for this condition, what other medical conditions will be subsequently solved by the newly gained knowledge?
None of us knows. It could be zero, it could be dozens. It could have no bearing, it could cure heart disease.
If only the Pages and Huntsmans of the world were the common model of spending by the wealthy, the world would be better off.
If I wanted to switch to a tab, I would just click on the damn tab.
You have fewer than a thousand tabs open? (not every feature is for every user)
most companies just hold off on upgrading their old systems because they would have to pay too much.
For most [competent] companies, the ROI of an IT system is much greater than the marginal difference in IT worker wages, or else they wouldn't be implementing them in the first place.
needs a think-tank to tell them it's going in the wrong direction
There's no "need" - they know exactly what the situation is, but the legislation is payback to corporate donors. It's plain and simple corruption - the think tanks only point out the obvious to be an inconvenience.
Or maybe Samsung sees the future on OLED, and doesn't want to spend resources on a stepping-stone technology
Yeah, good call. Amazon needs to stay top dog continuously, for its business model. $100M for three years of dominance might well be a good bargain. Samsung could skip a few years and wind up with the best display technology (which Amazon would buy) and they'd both still do well.
Hey, when a government gets blowback for being repressive and corrupt, the only valid response is to become more repressive and corrupt.
Right?
Also, one man's terrorist is another man's agent.
And sometimes one man's agent becomes that same man's terrorist.
Oops, we're not allowed to talk about that.
Samsung just bought Liquavista in 2012.. interesting.. How will that work? I mean Samsung is more than likely going to use this technology.
If I had to guess, Samsung gets a perpetual license to the technology at a small cost+ margin while Amazon foots the R&D bill. Probably Samsung was moving too slowly for what Amazon wanted, Bezos thought he could do better, so he made Samsung a win-win deal.
Watch out, you're starting to sound like known terrorist Thomas Jefferson, AC.
Money is not speech
Hey, SCOTUS said it is. So that makes taxation a 1st Amendment violation, right?
You're right, that's part of it that I left out. When the government spends in deficit, the Fed "prints" more USD and buys bonds with it.
If the total number of units of the USD (let's call it D) is worth some valuation (call it V), then each unit of USD (i.e. $1, call it P for purchasing power) is worth the ratio. So, P = V/D. As D increases at a rate greater than V, the value of P decreases.
If a commodity, say coffee beans, has a value of B, and the price of coffee is C, then C = B/P. As P decreases, then C increases.
The coffee bean farmers in Guatemala certainly aren't going to give us a discount because our printing presses are running at full speed.
Now, this is partially untrue, since the Breton Woods agreement set the USD as the world reserve currency, since it was a paper analogue for gold. The US has enjoyed being able to "print world gold" for 40 years now, but over the past several years many of the world powers have moved to exchange their currencies directly, rather than through a USD intermediate. As this trend continues the artificial value of the USD (40-60% by some estimates) will continue to fall, making things seem more expensive to US purchasers.
There are measures put in place to halt this, though. Saddam Hussein was moving to price his oil Euros and Gaddafi was organizing a gold dinar for African oil sales. Oh, but WMD's.
Uncle Ben, I keep trying to explain this to you - just because technology is improving, does not mean that the purchasing power of wages for commodities (heat, food, clothing) should be falling. People will only accept bread & circuses policies for so long.
Assuming your numbers are correct, why do you think people should be compensated at a rate proportional to the value of silver?
Silver has been the 'people's money' for thousands of years across various societies because it has most of the properties of good money. Gold is slightly better, because it does not tarnish, but it's so rare that it's hard to have sufficient liquidity for gold.
But silver is just a benchmark - we could use something else. Perhaps bitcoin even. The US used gold and silver from 1781 to 1971 and "good faith" from 1971 to 2013 (be careful to avoid chronological ethnocentrism).
Regardless, what people should not have to endure is falling purchasing power from their wages as the productivity of the marketplace improves, which is what we have by using the fiat version of the USD.
On the other hand, the minimum wage expressed in silver is about the same as the early 1980s, so it can't be that bad...
I assume you mean the very short term spike in silver prices when the market was cornered? Use a 52-week average and re-run the number.
And it could have nothing to do with the fact that in that time production has only doubled while industrial demand has grown much more, on top of which investment demand has grown too...
Shall we figure in every 10c to $1 coin in circulation being made of it? That's a massive amount of silver.
And funny how you didn't use gold, where in the 60s minimum wage would have gotten you about an eight of a gram... and it would get you about that much now too.
What? No way, man. The price of gold was fixed at $35/oz until 1968. Minimum wage would have netted 1/28th of an ounce of gold, or 1.11 grams. The 52-week range today is $1322-$1803. That works out to $47-$64 today.
Minimum wage today, would, as you point out, buy about 1/8th of a gram of gold. Don't mix up grams and ounces - you need to divide by 31.1 to get grams. Do 1.11g/.15g (actual USD price today at $7.25/hr), and you get a ratio of 7.4x more earning power in 1964 than today - not the same.
OK, you are an "end the fed" loon. I can pretty much ignore the rest of your comment then.
Haha, that's awesome. Thank you for proving my point that "pure faith required, abandon all skepticsm" folks are out there.