Take a guess as to how long before Sun is just one building with a bunch of executives overseeing everything from middle management downward overseas and in outsourced domestic services. So basically like America in general, then?
You couldn't even tell if you cross-referenced with credit card information. One mixed drink might cost the same as two beers or four sodas, so anyone looking to use that info wouldn't be able to prove that the individual who went to the bar actually drank.
They wouldn't know if they cross-referenced it with the information in the credit card company's database. But there's the information at the other end -- at the bar -- that they could easily get, if they have access to the information in the card scanner already.
Most upscale bars use electronic register systems for tracking tabs and ringing up bills; these show all the items that you've ordered, and then if you pay by credit card they have that as well. So it would just be a matter of going into the bar's computer and finding the bill associated with a certain credit card number (here's hoping they're only storing the last four digits...) and you've got that person's order for the evening.
Also, I'm not sure it's a safe assumption that the credit card company only gets the bottom-line data. On my American Express statements, there's sometimes fairly granular data available. In some cases food, drinks/bar, and tips are broken out separately. So obviously the restaurant's system is passing that data up to Amex when it runs the transaction. I haven't seen this on anything except Amex, but it proves the capability exists and is being utilized. (They also print the ticket or confirmation number of rail and plane tickets that you buy with your card, right on your statement, and sometimes the order number of some online stores as well.)
That's pretty ridiculous. You could make the same argument about any data. Just think: if we put a GPS receiver and a radio transponder in everyone's car, we could compile all sorts of interesting data! We'd be able to tell if someone was speeding or driving aggressively, if they commit a hit-and-run, if they're cheating on their spouses... heck, we could even get rid of all those traffic helicopters. Does anyone think that's not a really fucking terrible idea? It would be an unbelievable mass invasion of privacy.
Lots of information has the potential to be useful. That's not enough, by itself, to invalidate the very serious privacy concerns.
Anytime you start collecting information in advance, "just in case," you're fundamentally doing something wrong. You're treating innocent, honest people like criminals in order to make life marginally easier for the cops. If that's what people in law enforcement say they need to succeed, then we need to fire them and get some more innovative law enforcement, and give them better resources -- not twist our society around backwards in order to make their jobs easier.
At any rate, since computers started to become superfluous in the West I have NOT noticed that people became more educated, happy, employed, etc (I'm sure those ppl still making big $$$ in the IT field would disagree). Yep, a shift in jobs for some people, and easier to do some second-hand research; but overall (unless you are a Gamer) I wouldn't say it has had a dramatic effect (for the better) on people's lives. I'm not sure whether there's been much of a real "happiness" benefit (although I have no idea how you'd really quantify happiness -- "how happy are you, on a scale of 1 to 10"?), but computers have contributed real productivity gains to the U.S. economy, which in general have helped to expand purchasing power. Plus there are a lot of fringe benefits. (Probably far exceeding the real productivity gains, which are difficult to measure and engender lots of argument based on the methodology.)
Joe Worker may not care much about 'computers' either way, but he can now make long distance phone calls for a fraction of what they cost a few decades ago. I suspect within a generation, the idea of "long distance" phone calls being different from "local" ones will probably be lost on the young, if it hasn't been already. And there are cellphones, which except for very rural areas I don't think you can say haven't had an impact.
And even beyond that, there's all the goods that you can buy down at your local MegaMart or even grocery store. One of the only reasons you can buy so much cheap stuff from halfway around the globe is because of logistics and supply chains that have been honed to razor-thin margins by computer models, managed using computers, and operated over information networks. Huge amounts of global trade are only feasible because of computerization. And that doesn't even get into the personal-communication and leisure activities that are only possible because of them.
Of course, some people will always argue that technology and development haven't done anything to promote "happiness," and perhaps we'd all be better off if we'd never developed agriculture in the first place. But to me, that represents a lot of second-guessing (from the very cushy armchair of modern civilization) of decisions made by our long-dead ancestors, who have felt at every step of the way that new technologies were a benefit and chose to implement them.
So: will giving computers to poor nations necessarily make them happier? I've no idea. I also don't know if it necessarily will make them richer or more educated -- that really has more to do with how the computers are used, than the computers themselves. But without computers they're going to be kept out of a vast amount of the economy, and that will almost certainly assure that they're poor. They aren't a guarantee of anything, but they seem quite absolutely necessary as a starting condition to have much of a shot at all.
I think this is a good point. A $75 'educational device' might not really be a general-purpose computer in the way we're familiar with it, and that might be perfectly okay. There seems to be a big assumption that general-purpose PCs are the way to go in the classroom, and to be honest I don't see a lot of evidence of this. It seems like a bit of a leap of faith, really.
Obviously, a general-purpose computer is better than nothing, so I'm not denigrating the OLPC, but that's not to say that the modern PC is the be-all and end-all of educational hardware. I think it's entirely possible that more "limited" devices are actually superior.
I, and many other Slashdotters I'm sure, cut my teeth on the Apple II series in school; I always thought these were a good design and I've heard quite a few teachers speak nostalgically of them. You put in a disk for the program you wanted to run, you turned it on. When you were done, you saved and turned it off. If a kid messed it up, all you had to remember was the "three finger salute" of Ctrl-Apple-Rst. The only things you really needed to beat into kids' heads was not to try and pull a disk out of the drive when the access light was on. I've always wondered if something similar might not be good for modern classrooms -- put each program on a bootable CD, and don't install a hard drive in the machine. Boot the computer from the disc you want, saving all your data to a USB key; when you're done, turn it off.
The PC basically killed off all the alternative paradigms because it's "good enough" for almost everything, and economies of scale made it cheap. But now I think we're getting to the point where we can use the manufacturing expertise gained through PC development to produce alternative devices once more, and get back some of the diversity in hardware that's been lost.
I was thinking along similar lines. But an 89 still costs over $100. How do they plan to make a computer for less than a calculator costs? Perhaps by not trying to charge $100 for something that was barely state-of-the-art ten years ago, and depending on their monopoly position in the market to ensure that people pony up?
The TI calculators are a prime example of how a market can stagnate when there's no competition. Pretty much since HP abandoned the educational market (which struck me as a bad idea, given how the professional market is getting eaten up by computer software packages) TI has rested on its laurels. Sure, every once in a while they toss out an incremental upgrade -- a little more RAM or Flash here, a little better screen there -- but by and large they're not doing a damn thing with their lineup, and they haven't decreased the prices much at all.
The TI-89 isn't bad -- it's probably the best handheld calculator out there, depending on how you feel about the HP-49 series -- but I can't help but wonder what we'd have if TI actually had some motivation to actually turn out a new model and cut prices every year or so, like the rest of the computer-hardware industry.
Do you really think that's why certain groups advocate getting away from fossil fuels? Well, that and global warming seem to be the obvious reasons. But you seem to think there's another motive -- what is it?
The only thing that comes to mind as being particularly valid concerns are the geopolitical ones; it would seem like a pretty good thing if we stopped letting the Saudis put us over a barrel. (And in Europe, the Russians with the natural gas supplies.)
There may be a core of radical environmentalists somewhere who hate civilization because, well, just because, but I've never met more than a handful and I don't think anyone takes them seriously.
* Apple Extended Keyboard II * IBM Model M * IBM Selectric (Typewriter)
I can't really think of any other absolutely outstanding ones. Right now, I use an Apple Extended Keyboard II through a ADB to USB adapter, but it's starting to get flaky. I can't tell whether it's the adapter or the keyboard, but it's started dumping random characters into the keystream more or less of its own accord. Since AEKIIs are extremely hard to come by, I think I'll probably get a Model M (and a AT or PS2 to USB) to replace it. The only downside to the Model M is that it's so unbelievably loud compared even to other buckling-spring designs.
If you're going to get an addon card, you just get Firewire. That's basically it's big differentiator from USB -- more of the processing is offloaded to the controller, so there's less load on the CPU.
Do berths on the SF side really go for that much? As a container port, I thought it was pretty much dead, with most cargo going through LA/Long Beach, Oakland or further north into one of the ports near Seattle. Back in the old days it was a pretty active breakbulk port, but my understanding was that it basically got killed by containerization due to insufficient space on the ground, and traffic bottlenecks compared to the Oakland side. $20k/hr sounds reasonable for a modern facility, including use of loading/unloading cranes and other infrastructure, but to just tie a barge up to a disused pier?
I'll admit to not being very familiar with the area, but looking at it on Google Maps, it seems like there's a lot of underutilized waterfront on the SF side. It looks like maybe there's some bulk terminals, but a lot of the piers look like the old perpendicular ones, which are generally regarded as a PITA by modern merchant ships. Granted it's just a snapshot of one point in time, but most of them were empty when the photos were taken, too. Looks pretty sleepy.
Also, a US citizen who works in another country is still considered to owe US taxes. I believe that a citizen who emigrates is considered to owe taxes for some number of years after leaving the US, as well.
Not if you earn it completely outside the U.S. and pay taxes to some other country on it. The issue can get complicated quickly (which is why most American expats that I know pay someone to do their taxes), but in general you can escape all U.S. tax liability for income earned when living full-time in another country and which is subject to that other country's taxes. Sometimes you end up having to wait and get a tax bill and then prove that you've already paid the taxes on it, though. There are treaties among almost all Western countries governing this sort of thing, since it would be an obvious impediment to commerce to have people constantly being double-taxed.
I'm also unsure of the claim about alcohol consumption. That strikes me as a little hard to believe because of the obvious jurisdictional problems. The way some 'extraterritorial' US laws work is by making the crime the act of going to some other place to do something illegal. This is how the anti-prostitution laws work; going to a foreign country to have sex with someone who it would be illegal to have sex with in the U.S., is itself a crime. I'm not sure whether the sex itself is a crime, inasmuch as it's proof that you were going to another country to do something that's illegal. That's how you get around the jurisdictional issue.
Yeah, but when it's a publicly traded company, you really need to focus your hate on the people who sell the stock at the slightest hint that the company won't be making those absurd profits in the near future. That's the reason that the corporate bigwigs whine--their value is dependant solely upon the speculation that they'll make more money this year than last year, since stock traders will dump the stock if they don't.
It's a terrible system that leads to inflation of the company's actual worth, and the need for short-term profits over long-term goals. I think this can't be said enough. The current corporate milieu, which is driven almost entirely by short-term profits, is itself driven by the stock market, which is dominated by investors looking to turn a quick buck. That's really the root cause of the problem.
If you're a corporate executive, heavily invested in your own company's stock (which isn't a bad thing, since it means you're putting your money where your mouth is), you stand to lose a lot of money if the share value tanks. So you do whatever's required to keep it up -- and what the market demands in many cases isn't long-term, stable profitability, but short-term growth and dividends. Nobody plans for further out than a few years, nobody can engage in really visionary or transformative projects; everything is about making this quarter's or this year's numbers so that all the Wall Street traders don't dump your stock.
I'm not entirely sure how to fix it. I've wondered for a while if some regulative penalty on stock flipping wouldn't be beneficial; something like the penalties that exist on most mutual funds to discourage 'market timing' that hurt long-term investors. On one hand you don't want to do anything to the market that creates a dead-weight loss (like stick a per-transaction tax on stock trades, which would be the obvious route to prevent flipping), but the culture of short-term profits seems to be so destructive to our economy and industrial base as a whole that even as a quasi-free-marketer, I'm not inherently opposed to the idea.
Anonymity on the net is not quite what it used to be.
This isn't true. You can be FAR more anonymous on the net today than you could 10 or certainly 15 years ago. The sheer number of people using it gives you a lot of cover; when there were fewer users and sites, it was a lot easier to backtrack and figure out who a person was.
Plus, the privacy and encryption tools have gotten a lot better. I don't think there has ever been a time in history when individuals had access to encryption that's as secure as what you can download for free right now. Same with anonymity systems like Tor (although I'd argue it has more historical and physical-world analogs; e.g. the mail is pretty anonymous). Look at how many hoary old plaintext protocols we're still burdened with, left over from more naive times.
All that's required is a desire to have privacy and anonymity, or perhaps better put, a refusal to give it up for a few convenience features here and there. Obviously you lose privacy if you use GMail and store everything on Google's servers. But nobody is making you do that; if you do regular POP/SMTP+GPG, you can have better security today than with any previous generation of system. It's only when you want to be on the (relatively) bleeding edge -- where, as is typical and certainly not new, features have been added without much thought to privacy or security -- that you have to give anything up.
If anything, people are becoming more and more concerned with data security, not less.
Perhaps Russia and China are on the right track, as it is obvious the US administration can not be trusted with anything that can be exploited for a profit.
I think you'll find that the Russians and the Chinese are on the same track; they're just lagging behind at the moment. Give them a few years.
I'd offer only one correction: anyone with a CS degree and half a brain should be able to pick up new languages within a very short amount of time.
There are unfortunately a great many universities turning out a great many low-quality "computer science" grads who don't know the first thing about programming, much less the intricacies of stacks and pointers in C. I've met some alleged CS grads who didn't know a compiler from a hole in the ground.
I think the problem may be improving from how it was a few years back (the dot-com bust knocked CS off the lists of many students just looking for an easy $80k paycheck on graduation), but there are still a lot of dolts around, devaluing the degree.
The usual threat scenario for shoulder-fired SAMs are during takeoff and landing as well. You don't use them against an aircraft that's cruising up at 30,000 feet, you use it against one that's just gotten off the runway and is flying away from you. This gives you a plane that's nice and low, is easy to hit (flying away), can't easily land / crash safely, and has a full load of fuel.
That said, shoulder-fired missiles are a huge step up from machine guns. To say that you can do the same damage with a machine gun is just stupid -- shooting a plane down with a gun is significantly harder and requires much more time on the ground; you can't 'shoot and scoot' like you can with a Stinger or similar.
Erm, I'd like to see a source on that. Even if you blew somebody's hand off, I still doubt that you'd have 95% chance of killing them. You don't need to be a brain surgeon to put on a tourniquet.
That said, Glaser Safety Slugs are pretty good ammo, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them for home defense if you want to use a handgun (my first recommendation would be a shotgun for most people, though).
But this whole argument is a bit silly -- the idea that firing a handgun into an airplane window will cause the entire thing to explode out and decompress the cabin is pure Hollywood. You could punch several bullet-sized holes in a modern airliner without a catastrophic pressure decrease, certainly without any sort of structural failure because of the air movement. According to one pilot, you could blow out several whole windows and still maintain pressure.
There are many people who advocate that their own taxes be raised in order to pay for a social program they believe to be for the greater good, whether it be public education, socialized medicine, intervention in the Balkans, the fight against AIDS in Africa, amelioration of global climate change and so forth. Many super-rich people ask quite explicitly to pay more taxes. Warren Buffet is a good example.
The two things aren't mutually exclusive. You could easily be in favor of higher taxes as a way to benefit yourself -- it's all about defining 'benefit.' It's difficult to quantify a "warm, fuzzy feeling," but it obviously has some value to some people. I don't think it's hard to believe at all that people who have so much money that they can't figure out ways to spend it themselves anymore, would want higher taxes: it's a way of deriving benefit (or at least alleviating guilt?) from their money.
Plus, advocating taxes has another easy bonus: by advocating taxes, you can take a certain amount of credit for whatever gets done with them -- you can point at the fight against AIDS, climate change, etc., and say "I did that," at least in part -- but you get to do it with other people's money instead of just your own. It's a difference of scale. Even a rich person can only do so much, but by advocating taxes and public projects you have the possibility of being able to do a lot more.
Both "greed" and "altruism" can be driven by self-interest; it's all about what a person finds desirable and pleasurable to engage in or possess.
Why not reduce this to 1 in 250 when reporting? Not reducing it also gives us the size of the sample; 1 in 250 with a sample size of 250 is a lot different than 1:250 with a sample of 5,000. Changing raw values into ratios is one of the things reporters are pretty terrible at, actually. I think it's better when they just leave the raw values.
Unfortunately, while hard-hitting investigative journalism is very necessary to the continued functioning of society, it is not something which is profitable. Since it is not profitable, it doesn't seem likely that it will survive. That doesn't make sense. If it wasn't profitable, nobody would be doing it today. Since they are, it follows that it must be at least somewhat profitable -- perhaps not very much, but at least slightly.
I think the future will see a separation of content-creation and distribution. In the old model, a newspaper would do both: they paid reporters to do research and write stories; they also distributed the content, which included printing the paper and selling advertising. In the new model, reporters won't work directly for papers, but for a few big wire services that actually create "news" stories, and then sell them using a subscription model to news outlets.
This really isn't that bad; it remedies the inherent conflict-of-interest that newspapers have always had to deal with, between the news desk and the advertising-sales departments. The only thing it leaves out is local news, and bloggers seem to be doing a better job than all but the most 'hyperlocal' papers in that regard.
not waiting for perfection, just something that is an EXACT replacement for a incandescent. It's not going to happen. They're totally different devices; that would be like whining, a hundred and fifty years ago, that you're going to hold out on electric lights until they make one that's an EXACT replacement for gaslights, or naptha/kero lamps, or candles. It's not going to happen.
I don't doubt that there were probably people around who didn't like electric lights' harshness when compared to gas (the light definitely does have a different quality to it), but eventually they got won over either because of the other advantages of electric lights or by the cost and declining availability of gas.
That's what's eventually going to happen with incandescent vs CFLs; never will a CFL bulb be made that's exactly the same as incandescent, but eventually people will move over because they're cheaper and more widely available. And when they do, and when they get used to them, CFL light will be seen as normal, and incandescents will be weird and yellow by comparison.
I don't think that heavyhanded regulation by the Federal government is the right way to go (yet another ridiculous abuse of the Commerce Clause) -- I'd like to see CFLs take over on their own merits as the cost of energy increases -- but eventually CFLs are going to overtake incandescent bulbs, regardless of whether they're perceived as 'perfect' or 'exact' replacements.
I think you're ignoring the real reason why the mechanic offers you the parts back: it's the law. Not even just general property-law (which it ought to be) but -- in most states, anyway -- part of very specific laws governing automobile repair.
Frankly I think it's time to see this generalized out to include computer repair as well, or at least to devices that can contain data, but I don't expect to see it happen until there are a few more high-profile cases of misuse or abuse of confidential information by technicians (or people further down in the refurbish/refuse cycle).
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You couldn't even tell if you cross-referenced with credit card information. One mixed drink might cost the same as two beers or four sodas, so anyone looking to use that info wouldn't be able to prove that the individual who went to the bar actually drank.
They wouldn't know if they cross-referenced it with the information in the credit card company's database. But there's the information at the other end -- at the bar -- that they could easily get, if they have access to the information in the card scanner already.
Most upscale bars use electronic register systems for tracking tabs and ringing up bills; these show all the items that you've ordered, and then if you pay by credit card they have that as well. So it would just be a matter of going into the bar's computer and finding the bill associated with a certain credit card number (here's hoping they're only storing the last four digits...) and you've got that person's order for the evening.
Also, I'm not sure it's a safe assumption that the credit card company only gets the bottom-line data. On my American Express statements, there's sometimes fairly granular data available. In some cases food, drinks/bar, and tips are broken out separately. So obviously the restaurant's system is passing that data up to Amex when it runs the transaction. I haven't seen this on anything except Amex, but it proves the capability exists and is being utilized. (They also print the ticket or confirmation number of rail and plane tickets that you buy with your card, right on your statement, and sometimes the order number of some online stores as well.)
That's pretty ridiculous. You could make the same argument about any data. Just think: if we put a GPS receiver and a radio transponder in everyone's car, we could compile all sorts of interesting data! We'd be able to tell if someone was speeding or driving aggressively, if they commit a hit-and-run, if they're cheating on their spouses ... heck, we could even get rid of all those traffic helicopters. Does anyone think that's not a really fucking terrible idea? It would be an unbelievable mass invasion of privacy.
Lots of information has the potential to be useful. That's not enough, by itself, to invalidate the very serious privacy concerns.
Anytime you start collecting information in advance, "just in case," you're fundamentally doing something wrong. You're treating innocent, honest people like criminals in order to make life marginally easier for the cops. If that's what people in law enforcement say they need to succeed, then we need to fire them and get some more innovative law enforcement, and give them better resources -- not twist our society around backwards in order to make their jobs easier.
Joe Worker may not care much about 'computers' either way, but he can now make long distance phone calls for a fraction of what they cost a few decades ago. I suspect within a generation, the idea of "long distance" phone calls being different from "local" ones will probably be lost on the young, if it hasn't been already. And there are cellphones, which except for very rural areas I don't think you can say haven't had an impact.
And even beyond that, there's all the goods that you can buy down at your local MegaMart or even grocery store. One of the only reasons you can buy so much cheap stuff from halfway around the globe is because of logistics and supply chains that have been honed to razor-thin margins by computer models, managed using computers, and operated over information networks. Huge amounts of global trade are only feasible because of computerization. And that doesn't even get into the personal-communication and leisure activities that are only possible because of them.
Of course, some people will always argue that technology and development haven't done anything to promote "happiness," and perhaps we'd all be better off if we'd never developed agriculture in the first place. But to me, that represents a lot of second-guessing (from the very cushy armchair of modern civilization) of decisions made by our long-dead ancestors, who have felt at every step of the way that new technologies were a benefit and chose to implement them.
So: will giving computers to poor nations necessarily make them happier? I've no idea. I also don't know if it necessarily will make them richer or more educated -- that really has more to do with how the computers are used, than the computers themselves. But without computers they're going to be kept out of a vast amount of the economy, and that will almost certainly assure that they're poor. They aren't a guarantee of anything, but they seem quite absolutely necessary as a starting condition to have much of a shot at all.
I think this is a good point. A $75 'educational device' might not really be a general-purpose computer in the way we're familiar with it, and that might be perfectly okay. There seems to be a big assumption that general-purpose PCs are the way to go in the classroom, and to be honest I don't see a lot of evidence of this. It seems like a bit of a leap of faith, really.
Obviously, a general-purpose computer is better than nothing, so I'm not denigrating the OLPC, but that's not to say that the modern PC is the be-all and end-all of educational hardware. I think it's entirely possible that more "limited" devices are actually superior.
I, and many other Slashdotters I'm sure, cut my teeth on the Apple II series in school; I always thought these were a good design and I've heard quite a few teachers speak nostalgically of them. You put in a disk for the program you wanted to run, you turned it on. When you were done, you saved and turned it off. If a kid messed it up, all you had to remember was the "three finger salute" of Ctrl-Apple-Rst. The only things you really needed to beat into kids' heads was not to try and pull a disk out of the drive when the access light was on. I've always wondered if something similar might not be good for modern classrooms -- put each program on a bootable CD, and don't install a hard drive in the machine. Boot the computer from the disc you want, saving all your data to a USB key; when you're done, turn it off.
The PC basically killed off all the alternative paradigms because it's "good enough" for almost everything, and economies of scale made it cheap. But now I think we're getting to the point where we can use the manufacturing expertise gained through PC development to produce alternative devices once more, and get back some of the diversity in hardware that's been lost.
The TI calculators are a prime example of how a market can stagnate when there's no competition. Pretty much since HP abandoned the educational market (which struck me as a bad idea, given how the professional market is getting eaten up by computer software packages) TI has rested on its laurels. Sure, every once in a while they toss out an incremental upgrade -- a little more RAM or Flash here, a little better screen there -- but by and large they're not doing a damn thing with their lineup, and they haven't decreased the prices much at all.
The TI-89 isn't bad -- it's probably the best handheld calculator out there, depending on how you feel about the HP-49 series -- but I can't help but wonder what we'd have if TI actually had some motivation to actually turn out a new model and cut prices every year or so, like the rest of the computer-hardware industry.
Then we hear that the government can't possibly protect us when they have to follow the law.
Except that this is a very true statement.
The fallacy is believing that the government can protect you at all, or that it gives a shit either way.
The only thing that comes to mind as being particularly valid concerns are the geopolitical ones; it would seem like a pretty good thing if we stopped letting the Saudis put us over a barrel. (And in Europe, the Russians with the natural gas supplies.)
There may be a core of radical environmentalists somewhere who hate civilization because, well, just because, but I've never met more than a handful and I don't think anyone takes them seriously.
* Apple Extended Keyboard II
* IBM Model M
* IBM Selectric (Typewriter)
I can't really think of any other absolutely outstanding ones. Right now, I use an Apple Extended Keyboard II through a ADB to USB adapter, but it's starting to get flaky. I can't tell whether it's the adapter or the keyboard, but it's started dumping random characters into the keystream more or less of its own accord. Since AEKIIs are extremely hard to come by, I think I'll probably get a Model M (and a AT or PS2 to USB) to replace it. The only downside to the Model M is that it's so unbelievably loud compared even to other buckling-spring designs.
If you're going to get an addon card, you just get Firewire. That's basically it's big differentiator from USB -- more of the processing is offloaded to the controller, so there's less load on the CPU.
Do berths on the SF side really go for that much? As a container port, I thought it was pretty much dead, with most cargo going through LA/Long Beach, Oakland or further north into one of the ports near Seattle. Back in the old days it was a pretty active breakbulk port, but my understanding was that it basically got killed by containerization due to insufficient space on the ground, and traffic bottlenecks compared to the Oakland side. $20k/hr sounds reasonable for a modern facility, including use of loading/unloading cranes and other infrastructure, but to just tie a barge up to a disused pier?
I'll admit to not being very familiar with the area, but looking at it on Google Maps, it seems like there's a lot of underutilized waterfront on the SF side. It looks like maybe there's some bulk terminals, but a lot of the piers look like the old perpendicular ones, which are generally regarded as a PITA by modern merchant ships. Granted it's just a snapshot of one point in time, but most of them were empty when the photos were taken, too. Looks pretty sleepy.
Also, a US citizen who works in another country is still considered to owe US taxes. I believe that a citizen who emigrates is considered to owe taxes for some number of years after leaving the US, as well.
Not if you earn it completely outside the U.S. and pay taxes to some other country on it. The issue can get complicated quickly (which is why most American expats that I know pay someone to do their taxes), but in general you can escape all U.S. tax liability for income earned when living full-time in another country and which is subject to that other country's taxes. Sometimes you end up having to wait and get a tax bill and then prove that you've already paid the taxes on it, though. There are treaties among almost all Western countries governing this sort of thing, since it would be an obvious impediment to commerce to have people constantly being double-taxed.
I'm also unsure of the claim about alcohol consumption. That strikes me as a little hard to believe because of the obvious jurisdictional problems. The way some 'extraterritorial' US laws work is by making the crime the act of going to some other place to do something illegal. This is how the anti-prostitution laws work; going to a foreign country to have sex with someone who it would be illegal to have sex with in the U.S., is itself a crime. I'm not sure whether the sex itself is a crime, inasmuch as it's proof that you were going to another country to do something that's illegal. That's how you get around the jurisdictional issue.
It's a terrible system that leads to inflation of the company's actual worth, and the need for short-term profits over long-term goals. I think this can't be said enough. The current corporate milieu, which is driven almost entirely by short-term profits, is itself driven by the stock market, which is dominated by investors looking to turn a quick buck. That's really the root cause of the problem.
If you're a corporate executive, heavily invested in your own company's stock (which isn't a bad thing, since it means you're putting your money where your mouth is), you stand to lose a lot of money if the share value tanks. So you do whatever's required to keep it up -- and what the market demands in many cases isn't long-term, stable profitability, but short-term growth and dividends. Nobody plans for further out than a few years, nobody can engage in really visionary or transformative projects; everything is about making this quarter's or this year's numbers so that all the Wall Street traders don't dump your stock.
I'm not entirely sure how to fix it. I've wondered for a while if some regulative penalty on stock flipping wouldn't be beneficial; something like the penalties that exist on most mutual funds to discourage 'market timing' that hurt long-term investors. On one hand you don't want to do anything to the market that creates a dead-weight loss (like stick a per-transaction tax on stock trades, which would be the obvious route to prevent flipping), but the culture of short-term profits seems to be so destructive to our economy and industrial base as a whole that even as a quasi-free-marketer, I'm not inherently opposed to the idea.
Anonymity on the net is not quite what it used to be.
This isn't true. You can be FAR more anonymous on the net today than you could 10 or certainly 15 years ago. The sheer number of people using it gives you a lot of cover; when there were fewer users and sites, it was a lot easier to backtrack and figure out who a person was.
Plus, the privacy and encryption tools have gotten a lot better. I don't think there has ever been a time in history when individuals had access to encryption that's as secure as what you can download for free right now. Same with anonymity systems like Tor (although I'd argue it has more historical and physical-world analogs; e.g. the mail is pretty anonymous). Look at how many hoary old plaintext protocols we're still burdened with, left over from more naive times.
All that's required is a desire to have privacy and anonymity, or perhaps better put, a refusal to give it up for a few convenience features here and there. Obviously you lose privacy if you use GMail and store everything on Google's servers. But nobody is making you do that; if you do regular POP/SMTP+GPG, you can have better security today than with any previous generation of system. It's only when you want to be on the (relatively) bleeding edge -- where, as is typical and certainly not new, features have been added without much thought to privacy or security -- that you have to give anything up.
If anything, people are becoming more and more concerned with data security, not less.
Perhaps Russia and China are on the right track, as it is obvious the US administration can not be trusted with anything that can be exploited for a profit.
I think you'll find that the Russians and the Chinese are on the same track; they're just lagging behind at the moment. Give them a few years.
I'd offer only one correction:
anyone with a CS degree and half a brain should be able to pick up new languages within a very short amount of time.
There are unfortunately a great many universities turning out a great many low-quality "computer science" grads who don't know the first thing about programming, much less the intricacies of stacks and pointers in C. I've met some alleged CS grads who didn't know a compiler from a hole in the ground.
I think the problem may be improving from how it was a few years back (the dot-com bust knocked CS off the lists of many students just looking for an easy $80k paycheck on graduation), but there are still a lot of dolts around, devaluing the degree.
The usual threat scenario for shoulder-fired SAMs are during takeoff and landing as well. You don't use them against an aircraft that's cruising up at 30,000 feet, you use it against one that's just gotten off the runway and is flying away from you. This gives you a plane that's nice and low, is easy to hit (flying away), can't easily land / crash safely, and has a full load of fuel.
That said, shoulder-fired missiles are a huge step up from machine guns. To say that you can do the same damage with a machine gun is just stupid -- shooting a plane down with a gun is significantly harder and requires much more time on the ground; you can't 'shoot and scoot' like you can with a Stinger or similar.
Erm, I'd like to see a source on that. Even if you blew somebody's hand off, I still doubt that you'd have 95% chance of killing them. You don't need to be a brain surgeon to put on a tourniquet.
That said, Glaser Safety Slugs are pretty good ammo, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend them for home defense if you want to use a handgun (my first recommendation would be a shotgun for most people, though).
But this whole argument is a bit silly -- the idea that firing a handgun into an airplane window will cause the entire thing to explode out and decompress the cabin is pure Hollywood. You could punch several bullet-sized holes in a modern airliner without a catastrophic pressure decrease, certainly without any sort of structural failure because of the air movement. According to one pilot, you could blow out several whole windows and still maintain pressure.
One supports the law that benefits oneself.
There are many people who advocate that their own taxes be raised in order to pay for a social program they believe to be for the greater good, whether it be public education, socialized medicine, intervention in the Balkans, the fight against AIDS in Africa, amelioration of global climate change and so forth. Many super-rich people ask quite explicitly to pay more taxes. Warren Buffet is a good example.
The two things aren't mutually exclusive. You could easily be in favor of higher taxes as a way to benefit yourself -- it's all about defining 'benefit.' It's difficult to quantify a "warm, fuzzy feeling," but it obviously has some value to some people. I don't think it's hard to believe at all that people who have so much money that they can't figure out ways to spend it themselves anymore, would want higher taxes: it's a way of deriving benefit (or at least alleviating guilt?) from their money.Plus, advocating taxes has another easy bonus: by advocating taxes, you can take a certain amount of credit for whatever gets done with them -- you can point at the fight against AIDS, climate change, etc., and say "I did that," at least in part -- but you get to do it with other people's money instead of just your own. It's a difference of scale. Even a rich person can only do so much, but by advocating taxes and public projects you have the possibility of being able to do a lot more.
Both "greed" and "altruism" can be driven by self-interest; it's all about what a person finds desirable and pleasurable to engage in or possess.
I think the future will see a separation of content-creation and distribution. In the old model, a newspaper would do both: they paid reporters to do research and write stories; they also distributed the content, which included printing the paper and selling advertising. In the new model, reporters won't work directly for papers, but for a few big wire services that actually create "news" stories, and then sell them using a subscription model to news outlets.
This really isn't that bad; it remedies the inherent conflict-of-interest that newspapers have always had to deal with, between the news desk and the advertising-sales departments. The only thing it leaves out is local news, and bloggers seem to be doing a better job than all but the most 'hyperlocal' papers in that regard.
I don't doubt that there were probably people around who didn't like electric lights' harshness when compared to gas (the light definitely does have a different quality to it), but eventually they got won over either because of the other advantages of electric lights or by the cost and declining availability of gas.
That's what's eventually going to happen with incandescent vs CFLs; never will a CFL bulb be made that's exactly the same as incandescent, but eventually people will move over because they're cheaper and more widely available. And when they do, and when they get used to them, CFL light will be seen as normal, and incandescents will be weird and yellow by comparison.
I don't think that heavyhanded regulation by the Federal government is the right way to go (yet another ridiculous abuse of the Commerce Clause) -- I'd like to see CFLs take over on their own merits as the cost of energy increases -- but eventually CFLs are going to overtake incandescent bulbs, regardless of whether they're perceived as 'perfect' or 'exact' replacements.
I think you're ignoring the real reason why the mechanic offers you the parts back: it's the law. Not even just general property-law (which it ought to be) but -- in most states, anyway -- part of very specific laws governing automobile repair.
Frankly I think it's time to see this generalized out to include computer repair as well, or at least to devices that can contain data, but I don't expect to see it happen until there are a few more high-profile cases of misuse or abuse of confidential information by technicians (or people further down in the refurbish/refuse cycle).