With all due respect to James Hansen, the problem here is simple: just how many microseconds after scientists attempted to influence politics did you think it would take before politicians attempted to influence science?
We've seen it everywhere from the debate on Global Warming (where scientists have joined forces with ecologists to engage in massive social engineering in the form of the Kyoto accord) to the debate on evolutionary science (where fundamentalists attempted to redefine science with Intelligent Design) to the debate on gun control (where researchers have attempted to show a direct causal link between guns and crime) and pesticides (Alar, anyone?)
Now, whenever I see a news report on a political topic start quoting "scientists" or "researchers", I generally don't think "oh, good; a concerned scientist trying to weigh in on an important topic", but "whose special interest money is paying for this guy?"
It's hard to play in the mud and not get muddy yourself.
Islam at various points in history was actually much more tolerant than Christianity during its day.
Well, there's tolerance and there's tolerance. During the hayday of the Muslim occupation of Andalusa, for example, Christians and Jews were "tolerated" as second-class citizens in a form of dimmitude during an era where Muslims attempting to live in Catholic controlled spain would have been put to death in a very cruel way. Yet today, Muslims move and live in the United States with a degree of tolerance that would make the Andalusian Muslim's treatment of Christians and Jews seem positively barbaric.
All things are relative. I would rather be a Christian living in Andalusia around 1100AD than a Muslim put to death in Catholic Spain at the same period. On the other hand, I'd much rather be a Muslim living in the United States today than a Christian living in Saudi Arabia--even though, by and large, the Christian living in Saudi Arabia is treated more or less the way he would have been in Andalusia a thousand years ago.
Actually, Judaism is also a combined religion and culture, and Deuteronomy also proscribes set of specific crimes and punishments and assumes a political system for enforcement of this system.
Christianity started as a combined religion and culture, but the Roman Catholic Church's attempt to spread Christianity around the world caused them to first decouple some aspects of the religion from the main themes (through absorption of local Gods as "Saints" and inclusion of various local holidays as Christian holidays), then eventually through decoupling religion and culture. (The decoupling of religion and culture we originally got from the Protestant reformation and the Rennesance; this was accelerated by the formalization of separation of Church and State in the United States.)
This decoupling in Christianity could be done because the New Testament was, in many ways, a refutation of the Old Testament's definition of what it means to be a "good" person. Whereas in the Old Testament people were good by following the 600-odd Rules in Deuteronomy, in the New Testament salvation was defined as "love of neighbor and love of God" (Mattthew 22:35-40), and on the idea that salvation can only be gained through the grace of the Holy Spirit and not through following the "Laws of the Flesh" (Galatians)
(It is this interpretation of Galatians, that salvation happens through the grace of the holy spirit and not through following arbitrary rules, that allows Christians to ignore the Deuteronomic requirements to keep Kosher.)
But prior to these pressures for Christianity to spread through the world, it was also intrinsically tied to a culture (Roman and Greek culture of the 400's), and to a political system inherited from the remnants of the falling Roman Empire. (Which is where the Roman Catholic Church comes from: the Roman Catholic church's organization of Cardinals and Bishops is lifted directly from the Roman Empire.)
By this definition all religions are "timeless". However, as I understand it, Islam (submission) is the third "covenant" after the Old and New Testaments, which makes the religion (as an organized set of beliefs driven by a document defining God's revealed plan to Mohammad) around 1.5 thousand years old.
Because I want to scratch my balls while watching hockey naked, fart while making nachos in the kitchen, and have passionate sex with my wife on the couch and dining room table.
And here's the kicker... I DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW ABOUT IT.
Then jeez, don't tell me about it!
(Still trying to get image of you scratching your balls while watching hockey naked out of my mind...)
You know where this is going, don't you? One of the biggest problems with the freeways in places such as Southern California is that even a 10 lane freeway can only carry so many cars before things jam up. Drivers simply cannot drive closer than about one car every 2 seconds per lane.
If we can create a car that can more or less drive itself, has a faster reaction time to sudden stops or changes than a human, and can pilot itself down the highway sharing information with cars before and after it, it means we can designate a lane or two on the freeway as "auto-drive" lanes, where cars can then be brought together even closer than they would be spaced by humans.
That would allow you to dramatically increase the carrying capacity of the freeways without having to widen them--just by designating a couple of lanes for auto-drive cars.
I'd love to have a car that would drive itself on the freeway to some designated zone a few miles shy of my destination. It may be freaky at first to be within a quarter second of the guy in front of me, without touching the steering wheel, barreling down the highway at 80 miles an hour. But if it gets me to work or home faster, I'd be all for it.
Prior to the Internet, in order to read any newspaper other than your local paper, you would have to go to the library and see if they subscribed to it, or you would have to pay for a subscription yourself. In a way newspapers by being news aggregators for various wire services and syndicated articles was a sort of primitive "internet", gathering up articles from various services with world-wide reach and presenting it all for a quarter.
Now that you can bypass the local paper to read Reuters directly, their information has become a commodity. All it took was Google to aggregate the information from various news sources in one place--and bypassing the syndication fees and subscription fees newspapers pay to various wire services by scraping their web sites rather than going directly to the wire services themselves--in order to gather all that commodity information into one place.
Personally I think this is a good thing; Google has in essence built a better news aggregator than a newspaper. What we're seeing now is a bunch of 20th century companies try to figure ot a 21st century market. Some will figure it out, some won't--and the overall quality of news product will be made better for it. It's called creative destruction, and is one of the reasons why we're worried about smog and oil dependency rather than figuring out how to clean the millions of tons of horse shit off our streets after morning rush hour on horseback.
I think the problem with most newspapers is that by and large, they are news aggregators, not news reporters. Most local newspapers have a staff of reporters who go out and report local news--but for the bulk of their content they rely upon content that is not written in-house. (Wire services such as Reuters, AP and UPI, along with syndicated columns, form the bulk of most newspapers today--which means that many of the national articles in the Fresno Bee, say, are the same articles that appear in the Washington Post.)
So while it's sort of simplistic to say that this is all fair use, the reality is that Google News, by making a better mouse trap (dynamic news aggregation) is--probably without even realizing it--competing head to head with local newspapers.
Would you mind if a garbage recycling plant was built just outside your house? Or a prison?
Both argubably help the environment and/or public health or safety--but most people don't want them near their homes. And while you may not give a fuck, a lot of people spend a lot of money and resources to find a bit of wilderness and a bit of peace--and it's a bummer to spend all that time and effort to have that view confiscated and crammed full of crap they didn't expect nor do they want.
While I personally appreciate that there is a balance in this society between individual need and societal need, by your own view it seems clear "individual need" doesn't mean "fuck" to you. At which point the discussion is "whose societal needs should come first?"
From the end of the article, the author notes that the software is less capable of predicting the success of "off-beat" films like the Blair Witch Project.
Suddenly I'm reminded of Asimov's fictional science of Psychohistory, which, in later books set in that universe written by Brin, Bear and Benford, which alluded to the fact that psychohistory was accurate only because humanity, under control for years by robots bent on making humanity happy, had managed to mane humanity incredibly predictable.
Most movies are so processed, so homogenized, so regularized, that it's no surprise that some software program can calculate the estimated success of a film based on such superfluous factors as the actors, the category of film, it's rating and if it has special effects.
Why can we do all of these things? Its like lucky charms, mass transit is part of a complete breakfast.
It would be nice if we did all these things. However, they did not do all these things in Los Angeles and squandered their money on a rail system that cost something like $1.25 billion per linear mile to install--thus pissing away tens of billions which could have been spent much more wisely on improving existing infrastructure.
They aren't doing all these things in Seattle, either, and thus are creating yet another boondoggle.
And let me note that most Eastern cities were founded back in the days prior to the invention of the automobile. Development patterns historically are far different with Eastern U.S. cities than with Western cities, not because of the introduction of mass transit, but because they developed during a time when walking was the major source of mass transportation. Mass transit was not installed in New York and then Manhattan developed around it--Mass transit was installed in Manhattan to solve the problem of heavy pedestrial traffic, then expanded to solve the problem of getting people on and off the island in later years.
While it would be nice to nuke Los Angeles and rebuild it from the ground up into a centralized city with outlying suburbs like Washington D.C. and the surrounding areas, it ain't going to happen. Meaning we have to develop solutions which are taylored for each city, rather than doing what Los Angeles did--which was to install a subway system that doesn't work worth a damn here. If they had spent the money on simply widening the carrying capacity of highways 5, the 405 and the 10 through the central Los Angeles area and over Sepulveda pass, they could have doubled the carrying capacity, eased traffic congestion, and still had a few tens of billions left over.
Show me a city council that can walk and chew gum at the same time, and I'll show you a miracle.
The basic problem with a light rail mass transit system is that it only travels from fixed point to fixed point. If either the start of your trip or the destination of your trip are not near the rail station, you will need to take some other form of transportation to get to your destination.
Now in a city like New York or London, mass transit does work: they both have very dense packed downtown areas, so generally the destination is near where you want to go. You still will need a car if you don't live in the dense business districts or downtown districts: drive your car from your home in New Jersey to a "park and ride" parking lot, hop the subway, and take it into Manhattan. The same goes for London, though I did encounter many people on the fringes of London who have never taken the London Underground because they live in the suburbs that most tourists without cars never see.
Which is, by the way, the blind spot most tourists and travelers have when traveling and exclusively using the mass transit system at their destination: you never get to see the 90% of the residents who never use the mass transit rail system because they live too far away or don't go into the dense downtown region.
Now they are trying to install a mass transit system here in Los Angeles. When seen from the perspective of cost per person using the rail system, it's a complete failure: for the many tens of billions spent digging underground tunnels and repairing buildings in the Hollywood area which were damaged when the earth settled above the tunnels, we got a rail system that was hailed for being able to carry tens of thousands of people per day. Sounds like a lot until you realize that one major freeway junction (the 405/10 exchange) will often see over a million cars a day.
In Los Angeles, there are no centralized districts where people either start or wind up at. So often, such as in my case, the nearest metrostation is a good mile and a half away from where I live in Glendale, and five miles from where I work in Santa Monica. Now if the destination station was (say) a quarter mile from where I work, I could just drive to the metrostation and walk--God knows I could use the exercise. But to drive to the park and ride, tthen hop the yellow like, transfer to the red line, then to the blue line, then to the Green--then take a bus from the end of that ride and then transfer to a second bus--I'm sorry, but that doesn't make any sense. It's not because the light rail and bus systems are poorly designed: it's that Los Angeles is a sprawling metropolitan region of many smaller towns which grew into one mass (like most south-western and western cities in the United States), and people desire to own in their own home rather than live in a cramped apartment--so convincing people to change their living patterns would be impossible.
(That is what Los Angeles is trying to do, by the way: convince people the benefits of mass transit are so much better than the freeways--which have been neglected for the past two decades--that people will willingly sell their bungalos and move into sprawling apartment complexes that haven't been built yet. While it is true that along the Red Line there is a lot of revitilization projects going on, for the amount of money spent Los Angeles could have just bought the entire tract of land there and did the revitalization directly.)
I have a friend in Seattle who is trying to kill the Seattle Monorail project. It's cost overruns are insane, and the amount of money it sounds like they want to spend on their Monorail--which doesn't appear to go to enough destinations to serve enough of the population as to make a dent in current traffic (just like L.A.'s subway project)--works out to be a rediculous amount per transportation mile. And from the sounds of it, the Seattle area doesn't have the centralized business district that New York has that would make mass transit make some degree of sense.
By that metric, both Germany and Japan are still occupied nations, as both still house troops from the United States that were originally sent there during World War II.
Hell, Japan's Constitution, which the United States had a significant hand in rewriting, prohibits Japan from raising an army--effectively renouncing it's sovereign right to self defense and turning that right over to the United States. So one could effectively argue that Japan will never not be an occupied power so long as Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution is in effect.
So by your metric, Japan is not now, nor will ever be, a sovereign nation.
As to Germany, we have some 64,000 combat personnel stationed there, including 50,000 army units--not counting support folks--which is roughly half of the number of troops stationed in Iraq. To put it another way, our post World War II occupation force in Germany now stands at roughly half of our post Iraq War occupation force--which is a considerable occupation force given that Germany has now been "occupied" by your metric for roughly 60 years. (Source: DefenseLink)
Should ICANN confiscate the.jp and.de TLDs given that Germany and Japan have been occupied (and not sovereign) nations for around 60 years?
Being an on-campus Lloydie (who was, by the way, at the firing end of that damned cannon), I was only too happy to see that cannon go away. Perhaps it's part of the reason why no-one really bothered to stop y'all--because it was the Flem's cannon, and honestly many of us didn't care.
Seriously, man, you're living in a dream world. You probably graduated from college some time around 1999/2000 and got a job making way too much money with no effort whatsoever.
Wow, man, you need a good dose of the real world. For your sake I hope you don't get it, though. (The average salary in the US is $37,000. Hundreds of millions of us would strongly disagree with your assertion that "$50K really isn't that much".)
... In the software development industry, which I thought was clear from the context of my original post.
In your case, maybe your stock options are worth more than $50K, but judging from your description of how stock options work I doubt it.
I don't know why I bother with the tin-foil hat brigade, but it is an explicit terminatable offense at Symantec to write--or help in writing--a virus. They just clean out your desk and have security escort you out of the building that day, no appeal. Your stock options and stock purchase plan options are immediately revoked, you lose back vacation pay, and you get no severence. Just a bootprint on your ass as you're kicked out the door.
But of course I'm part of the conspiracy, so you'll probably think I'm either a dupe or a lying spokes-hole.
I like being part of conspiracies; I worked many years ago for JPL in the same building the Weekly World News claimed housed an alien spacecraft that was being studied by the military--and the tinfoil hat brigade didn't believe me then when I told them it was just so much hokem...
If you really worked for Symantec and bothered to read any of the internal or external announcements, you would realize that Symantec's rational is simple: as Apple's perceived market share goes up, it's value as a target to black-hat hackers goes up as well. There is no point in writing a trojan horse or worm to attack a platform that doesn't have a lot of market share, but as soon as market share increases so does the chances that virus writers will target the platform.
This has been pretty clear to most of the poeple I know who do work in the Santa Monica office in the Mac group.
So my guess: you're not a Symantec employee, but someone who is trolling.
Unless you're a dirt-poor college student or someone who just graduated a few months ago, $50K really isn't that much when compared to your salary.
Hell, some idiot who barely knows how to cobble together some ActiveX controls in the Visual C++ IDE can make that sort of money as an annual salary. To someone who has been out in the real world for more than a couple of years, $50K represents maybe 9 months salary--which is hardly worth getting fired from your job for.
This is obviously off-topic, but a stock option is a marginal investment--that is, a zero-risk investment where you essentially are gaining the rewards of someone else's investment. (Meaning that I didn't have to buy the stock to get the rewards of the increase in Symantec's valuation.)
If I take the gains and invest it in something else, I now have to front the principal of the investment.
So, for example, suppose I have 1000 options at a strike of $50. What that means is that someone else has invested $50K for me; I didn't have to front the $50K to get the gains. So now if the stock goes up to $55, I immediately have $5,000 in gains for $50K I never invested. If I were to take that money out and invest it somewhere else, I'd be investing the principal of $5K--so the same gain in the stock would only earn me $500.
It doesn't matter if Symantec's valuation is "fluff" or not--what's important is that it is perceived as undervalued by the Veritas/Symantec merger, as it's P/E ratio is under other software companies in the same sector. My bet is that it goes up between now and a couple of years from now--and even if it only goes up 2%--it's a lot more than I'd get if I took my options out and invested it in something that went up 10%...
If Symantec wrote virii, don't you think the offer would be for half the $25K instead of twice the amount? I mean, if you're being asked to do what you do day in, day out, there'd be no point in offering an additional incentive, would there?
It had better be more than $50K for a Symantec Employee: according to my employment contract, writing a virus will result in my immediate termination. Such termination also means that I forfit all my stock options, worth far more than $50K at this point. And not to mention a great paying job with annual bonuses worth about half the original award.
So from an economic standpoint I'd be seriously in the hole, trading in options and bonuses worth a hell of a lot more than the amount being offered from a rather shady source.
All Apple would have to do to get people into a tizzy is to provide a new set of CHUD tools that support a completely different processor family and stick it in some obscure download area of their web site. Imagine how much of a fuss people would make if someone at Apple released (for example) some tools which showed processor cycle times for various Pentium-M instructions...
Slashdot Mirror
With all due respect to James Hansen, the problem here is simple: just how many microseconds after scientists attempted to influence politics did you think it would take before politicians attempted to influence science?
We've seen it everywhere from the debate on Global Warming (where scientists have joined forces with ecologists to engage in massive social engineering in the form of the Kyoto accord) to the debate on evolutionary science (where fundamentalists attempted to redefine science with Intelligent Design) to the debate on gun control (where researchers have attempted to show a direct causal link between guns and crime) and pesticides (Alar, anyone?)
Now, whenever I see a news report on a political topic start quoting "scientists" or "researchers", I generally don't think "oh, good; a concerned scientist trying to weigh in on an important topic", but "whose special interest money is paying for this guy?"
It's hard to play in the mud and not get muddy yourself.
All things are relative. I would rather be a Christian living in Andalusia around 1100AD than a Muslim put to death in Catholic Spain at the same period. On the other hand, I'd much rather be a Muslim living in the United States today than a Christian living in Saudi Arabia--even though, by and large, the Christian living in Saudi Arabia is treated more or less the way he would have been in Andalusia a thousand years ago.
Actually, Judaism is also a combined religion and culture, and Deuteronomy also proscribes set of specific crimes and punishments and assumes a political system for enforcement of this system.
Christianity started as a combined religion and culture, but the Roman Catholic Church's attempt to spread Christianity around the world caused them to first decouple some aspects of the religion from the main themes (through absorption of local Gods as "Saints" and inclusion of various local holidays as Christian holidays), then eventually through decoupling religion and culture. (The decoupling of religion and culture we originally got from the Protestant reformation and the Rennesance; this was accelerated by the formalization of separation of Church and State in the United States.)
This decoupling in Christianity could be done because the New Testament was, in many ways, a refutation of the Old Testament's definition of what it means to be a "good" person. Whereas in the Old Testament people were good by following the 600-odd Rules in Deuteronomy, in the New Testament salvation was defined as "love of neighbor and love of God" (Mattthew 22:35-40), and on the idea that salvation can only be gained through the grace of the Holy Spirit and not through following the "Laws of the Flesh" (Galatians)
(It is this interpretation of Galatians, that salvation happens through the grace of the holy spirit and not through following arbitrary rules, that allows Christians to ignore the Deuteronomic requirements to keep Kosher.)
But prior to these pressures for Christianity to spread through the world, it was also intrinsically tied to a culture (Roman and Greek culture of the 400's), and to a political system inherited from the remnants of the falling Roman Empire. (Which is where the Roman Catholic Church comes from: the Roman Catholic church's organization of Cardinals and Bishops is lifted directly from the Roman Empire.)
(Taking comment seriously despite "funny" modifier)
By this definition all religions are "timeless". However, as I understand it, Islam (submission) is the third "covenant" after the Old and New Testaments, which makes the religion (as an organized set of beliefs driven by a document defining God's revealed plan to Mohammad) around 1.5 thousand years old.
(Still trying to get image of you scratching your balls while watching hockey naked out of my mind...)
Uh, haven't we already tried this?
You know where this is going, don't you? One of the biggest problems with the freeways in places such as Southern California is that even a 10 lane freeway can only carry so many cars before things jam up. Drivers simply cannot drive closer than about one car every 2 seconds per lane.
If we can create a car that can more or less drive itself, has a faster reaction time to sudden stops or changes than a human, and can pilot itself down the highway sharing information with cars before and after it, it means we can designate a lane or two on the freeway as "auto-drive" lanes, where cars can then be brought together even closer than they would be spaced by humans.
That would allow you to dramatically increase the carrying capacity of the freeways without having to widen them--just by designating a couple of lanes for auto-drive cars.
I'd love to have a car that would drive itself on the freeway to some designated zone a few miles shy of my destination. It may be freaky at first to be within a quarter second of the guy in front of me, without touching the steering wheel, barreling down the highway at 80 miles an hour. But if it gets me to work or home faster, I'd be all for it.
"National/world news is commodity information."
It is, now. It wasn't when newspapers were king.
Prior to the Internet, in order to read any newspaper other than your local paper, you would have to go to the library and see if they subscribed to it, or you would have to pay for a subscription yourself. In a way newspapers by being news aggregators for various wire services and syndicated articles was a sort of primitive "internet", gathering up articles from various services with world-wide reach and presenting it all for a quarter.
Now that you can bypass the local paper to read Reuters directly, their information has become a commodity. All it took was Google to aggregate the information from various news sources in one place--and bypassing the syndication fees and subscription fees newspapers pay to various wire services by scraping their web sites rather than going directly to the wire services themselves--in order to gather all that commodity information into one place.
Personally I think this is a good thing; Google has in essence built a better news aggregator than a newspaper. What we're seeing now is a bunch of 20th century companies try to figure ot a 21st century market. Some will figure it out, some won't--and the overall quality of news product will be made better for it. It's called creative destruction, and is one of the reasons why we're worried about smog and oil dependency rather than figuring out how to clean the millions of tons of horse shit off our streets after morning rush hour on horseback.
I think the problem with most newspapers is that by and large, they are news aggregators, not news reporters. Most local newspapers have a staff of reporters who go out and report local news--but for the bulk of their content they rely upon content that is not written in-house. (Wire services such as Reuters, AP and UPI, along with syndicated columns, form the bulk of most newspapers today--which means that many of the national articles in the Fresno Bee, say, are the same articles that appear in the Washington Post.)
So while it's sort of simplistic to say that this is all fair use, the reality is that Google News, by making a better mouse trap (dynamic news aggregation) is--probably without even realizing it--competing head to head with local newspapers.
"Fuck your view!"
Would you mind if a garbage recycling plant was built just outside your house? Or a prison?
Both argubably help the environment and/or public health or safety--but most people don't want them near their homes. And while you may not give a fuck, a lot of people spend a lot of money and resources to find a bit of wilderness and a bit of peace--and it's a bummer to spend all that time and effort to have that view confiscated and crammed full of crap they didn't expect nor do they want.
While I personally appreciate that there is a balance in this society between individual need and societal need, by your own view it seems clear "individual need" doesn't mean "fuck" to you. At which point the discussion is "whose societal needs should come first?"
From the end of the article, the author notes that the software is less capable of predicting the success of "off-beat" films like the Blair Witch Project.
Suddenly I'm reminded of Asimov's fictional science of Psychohistory, which, in later books set in that universe written by Brin, Bear and Benford, which alluded to the fact that psychohistory was accurate only because humanity, under control for years by robots bent on making humanity happy, had managed to mane humanity incredibly predictable.
Most movies are so processed, so homogenized, so regularized, that it's no surprise that some software program can calculate the estimated success of a film based on such superfluous factors as the actors, the category of film, it's rating and if it has special effects.
It would be nice if we did all these things. However, they did not do all these things in Los Angeles and squandered their money on a rail system that cost something like $1.25 billion per linear mile to install--thus pissing away tens of billions which could have been spent much more wisely on improving existing infrastructure.
They aren't doing all these things in Seattle, either, and thus are creating yet another boondoggle.
And let me note that most Eastern cities were founded back in the days prior to the invention of the automobile. Development patterns historically are far different with Eastern U.S. cities than with Western cities, not because of the introduction of mass transit, but because they developed during a time when walking was the major source of mass transportation. Mass transit was not installed in New York and then Manhattan developed around it--Mass transit was installed in Manhattan to solve the problem of heavy pedestrial traffic, then expanded to solve the problem of getting people on and off the island in later years.
While it would be nice to nuke Los Angeles and rebuild it from the ground up into a centralized city with outlying suburbs like Washington D.C. and the surrounding areas, it ain't going to happen. Meaning we have to develop solutions which are taylored for each city, rather than doing what Los Angeles did--which was to install a subway system that doesn't work worth a damn here. If they had spent the money on simply widening the carrying capacity of highways 5, the 405 and the 10 through the central Los Angeles area and over Sepulveda pass, they could have doubled the carrying capacity, eased traffic congestion, and still had a few tens of billions left over.
Show me a city council that can walk and chew gum at the same time, and I'll show you a miracle.
The basic problem with a light rail mass transit system is that it only travels from fixed point to fixed point. If either the start of your trip or the destination of your trip are not near the rail station, you will need to take some other form of transportation to get to your destination.
Now in a city like New York or London, mass transit does work: they both have very dense packed downtown areas, so generally the destination is near where you want to go. You still will need a car if you don't live in the dense business districts or downtown districts: drive your car from your home in New Jersey to a "park and ride" parking lot, hop the subway, and take it into Manhattan. The same goes for London, though I did encounter many people on the fringes of London who have never taken the London Underground because they live in the suburbs that most tourists without cars never see.
Which is, by the way, the blind spot most tourists and travelers have when traveling and exclusively using the mass transit system at their destination: you never get to see the 90% of the residents who never use the mass transit rail system because they live too far away or don't go into the dense downtown region.
Now they are trying to install a mass transit system here in Los Angeles. When seen from the perspective of cost per person using the rail system, it's a complete failure: for the many tens of billions spent digging underground tunnels and repairing buildings in the Hollywood area which were damaged when the earth settled above the tunnels, we got a rail system that was hailed for being able to carry tens of thousands of people per day. Sounds like a lot until you realize that one major freeway junction (the 405/10 exchange) will often see over a million cars a day.
In Los Angeles, there are no centralized districts where people either start or wind up at. So often, such as in my case, the nearest metrostation is a good mile and a half away from where I live in Glendale, and five miles from where I work in Santa Monica. Now if the destination station was (say) a quarter mile from where I work, I could just drive to the metrostation and walk--God knows I could use the exercise. But to drive to the park and ride, tthen hop the yellow like, transfer to the red line, then to the blue line, then to the Green--then take a bus from the end of that ride and then transfer to a second bus--I'm sorry, but that doesn't make any sense. It's not because the light rail and bus systems are poorly designed: it's that Los Angeles is a sprawling metropolitan region of many smaller towns which grew into one mass (like most south-western and western cities in the United States), and people desire to own in their own home rather than live in a cramped apartment--so convincing people to change their living patterns would be impossible.
(That is what Los Angeles is trying to do, by the way: convince people the benefits of mass transit are so much better than the freeways--which have been neglected for the past two decades--that people will willingly sell their bungalos and move into sprawling apartment complexes that haven't been built yet. While it is true that along the Red Line there is a lot of revitilization projects going on, for the amount of money spent Los Angeles could have just bought the entire tract of land there and did the revitalization directly.)
I have a friend in Seattle who is trying to kill the Seattle Monorail project. It's cost overruns are insane, and the amount of money it sounds like they want to spend on their Monorail--which doesn't appear to go to enough destinations to serve enough of the population as to make a dent in current traffic (just like L.A.'s subway project)--works out to be a rediculous amount per transportation mile. And from the sounds of it, the Seattle area doesn't have the centralized business district that New York has that would make mass transit make some degree of sense.
I guess what I'm saying is that
By that metric, both Germany and Japan are still occupied nations, as both still house troops from the United States that were originally sent there during World War II.
.jp and .de TLDs given that Germany and Japan have been occupied (and not sovereign) nations for around 60 years?
Hell, Japan's Constitution, which the United States had a significant hand in rewriting, prohibits Japan from raising an army--effectively renouncing it's sovereign right to self defense and turning that right over to the United States. So one could effectively argue that Japan will never not be an occupied power so long as Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution is in effect.
So by your metric, Japan is not now, nor will ever be, a sovereign nation.
As to Germany, we have some 64,000 combat personnel stationed there, including 50,000 army units--not counting support folks--which is roughly half of the number of troops stationed in Iraq. To put it another way, our post World War II occupation force in Germany now stands at roughly half of our post Iraq War occupation force--which is a considerable occupation force given that Germany has now been "occupied" by your metric for roughly 60 years. (Source: DefenseLink)
Should ICANN confiscate the
The only thing that would be stranger is if Microsoft moved to the PowerPC platform...
Being an on-campus Lloydie (who was, by the way, at the firing end of that damned cannon), I was only too happy to see that cannon go away. Perhaps it's part of the reason why no-one really bothered to stop y'all--because it was the Flem's cannon, and honestly many of us didn't care.
*sigh*
*sigh*
I don't know why I bother with the tin-foil hat brigade, but it is an explicit terminatable offense at Symantec to write--or help in writing--a virus. They just clean out your desk and have security escort you out of the building that day, no appeal. Your stock options and stock purchase plan options are immediately revoked, you lose back vacation pay, and you get no severence. Just a bootprint on your ass as you're kicked out the door.
But of course I'm part of the conspiracy, so you'll probably think I'm either a dupe or a lying spokes-hole.
I like being part of conspiracies; I worked many years ago for JPL in the same building the Weekly World News claimed housed an alien spacecraft that was being studied by the military--and the tinfoil hat brigade didn't believe me then when I told them it was just so much hokem...
If you really worked for Symantec and bothered to read any of the internal or external announcements, you would realize that Symantec's rational is simple: as Apple's perceived market share goes up, it's value as a target to black-hat hackers goes up as well. There is no point in writing a trojan horse or worm to attack a platform that doesn't have a lot of market share, but as soon as market share increases so does the chances that virus writers will target the platform.
This has been pretty clear to most of the poeple I know who do work in the Santa Monica office in the Mac group.
So my guess: you're not a Symantec employee, but someone who is trolling.
Unless you're a dirt-poor college student or someone who just graduated a few months ago, $50K really isn't that much when compared to your salary.
Hell, some idiot who barely knows how to cobble together some ActiveX controls in the Visual C++ IDE can make that sort of money as an annual salary. To someone who has been out in the real world for more than a couple of years, $50K represents maybe 9 months salary--which is hardly worth getting fired from your job for.
This is obviously off-topic, but a stock option is a marginal investment--that is, a zero-risk investment where you essentially are gaining the rewards of someone else's investment. (Meaning that I didn't have to buy the stock to get the rewards of the increase in Symantec's valuation.)
If I take the gains and invest it in something else, I now have to front the principal of the investment.
So, for example, suppose I have 1000 options at a strike of $50. What that means is that someone else has invested $50K for me; I didn't have to front the $50K to get the gains. So now if the stock goes up to $55, I immediately have $5,000 in gains for $50K I never invested. If I were to take that money out and invest it somewhere else, I'd be investing the principal of $5K--so the same gain in the stock would only earn me $500.
It doesn't matter if Symantec's valuation is "fluff" or not--what's important is that it is perceived as undervalued by the Veritas/Symantec merger, as it's P/E ratio is under other software companies in the same sector. My bet is that it goes up between now and a couple of years from now--and even if it only goes up 2%--it's a lot more than I'd get if I took my options out and invested it in something that went up 10%...
If Symantec wrote virii, don't you think the offer would be for half the $25K instead of twice the amount? I mean, if you're being asked to do what you do day in, day out, there'd be no point in offering an additional incentive, would there?
It had better be more than $50K for a Symantec Employee: according to my employment contract, writing a virus will result in my immediate termination. Such termination also means that I forfit all my stock options, worth far more than $50K at this point. And not to mention a great paying job with annual bonuses worth about half the original award.
So from an economic standpoint I'd be seriously in the hole, trading in options and bonuses worth a hell of a lot more than the amount being offered from a rather shady source.
No way!
All Apple would have to do to get people into a tizzy is to provide a new set of CHUD tools that support a completely different processor family and stick it in some obscure download area of their web site. Imagine how much of a fuss people would make if someone at Apple released (for example) some tools which showed processor cycle times for various Pentium-M instructions...