Meanwhile, median household income in the US is around $50K. Over half the people in this country cannot do well for themselves. This is despite the fact that US workers have the highest productivity of any country besides Norway.
The US workers with high productivity levels are the ones earning over the median income.
I suspect the numbers would be much better if they Baby Bells hadn't mismanaged our infrastructure for decades.
The existing copper twisted pair infrastructure in the US is fine and very efficient - for voice. The US has far longer local loops than most other countries because of efficient consolidation of COs (as well as our low-density suburbs). Longer local loops means lower DSL speeds. No one was thinking of DSL when these decisions were made.
I was wondering this myself, so here is the SIG Sauer page on the 716:
Familiar Handling, Unfamiliar Power, SIG SAUER has taken the proven features of the SIG516 and applied them into a potent AR-based rifle chambered in 7.62 x 51mm. Utilizing the short stroke pushrod operating system, an M1913 Mil-Std rail, free-floating barrel, aluminum quad rail forend, telescoping stock, and Magpul PMAG, the SIG716 is the rifle of choice when you require the power of a larger caliber carbine.
So apparently 7.62mm is "large caliber" according to SIG, but they say this is a "carbine" or "patrol rifle", but not an "assault rifle" or "assault weapon":)
Also, it is in a large caliber that makes it better suited for hunting than for rapid fire.
My understanding is that the SIG 716 is 7.62x51mm which is used in plenty of fully-automatic rifles such as the M60 machine gun.
The term "large caliber" never made much sense to me, as 7.62mm==.308" which is smaller than 9mm or.45" handgun rounds and clearly smaller than.50" rifle rounds.
Yes, 7.62mm > 5.56mm (original M16 round, which is close in caliber to.22").
But I give everyone a pass because I think even SIG calls the 716 a "high caliber carbine".
I once used differential equations to solve a problem of how to optimally transmit parts of an on-demand video program on multiple multicast addresses to minimize the start time to view the program. I'd say that was the only time I ever solved a differential equation outside of class.
As someone with an electrical engineering degree, I have to say that you really need to understand vector calculus to understand electromagnetic fields. But frankly unless you are designing microwave circuits or antennas, even that knowledge is rarely tested in a work field.
If you need to read any scholarly papers to pick up on new technological ideas, most will contain some calculus equations. Generally you don't need to really know how to solve the equations (as they will solve them in the paper), but you may need to at least understand what is going on. Kind of like knowing how football is played allows you to enjoy a game, even if you haven't thrown a football in 20 years.
Most knowledge of error-correcting codes and cryptography is more algebraic and number theory rather than dealing with calculus or differential equations.
On the other hand, every day I seem to have to convert from bits to bytes and back again.
A CP/M system has only one directory, which contains fixed-size (32-byte) entries. The directory size, although fixed for a given implementation, may be different in other implementations of CP/M All files in the system are listed in this directory. After CP/M boots, it reads in the directory and computes a bitmap containing the free disk blocks by seeing which blocks are not in any file. This bitmap, which is only 23 bytes for a 180-KB disk, is kept in memory during execution. At system shutdown time it is discarded, that is, not written back to the disk. This approach eliminates the need for a disk consistency checker (like fsck) and saves 1 block on the disk (percentually equivalent to saving 90 MB on a modern 16-GB disk).
the world tomorrow will be...less educated that the world today.
World literacy has risen from 77% in 1995 to 82% in 2005. More recently in 2010, 87% of female youth had basic literacy skills, compared to 92% of males.
In China almost all youth are now literate. In Kenya, 93% of youth are literate. Only countries like Ethiopia, Niger, Chad, and Mali have youth literacy rates at or below 50%.
People with college degrees increased to 6.7% of the world population in 2010 from 5.9% in 2000. That is around 50 million new college graduates.
The absolute number of hungry people may be up, but as a percentage of the global population, it's probably lower than in the 80's.
Indeed. The UN says there are 925 million hungry people in 2010, around 13.1% of global population.
Around 1980 there were 850 million, although the global population was much smaller (4.5 billion versus 7 million), so the percent hungry then was around 19%.
Most hungry people are in Asia and Africa. India alone has 230 million hungry people. Other countries with large absolute numbers of hungry people are Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Pakistan.
Like she thought that by privatising industries and selling the shares to the public (cheap), the British people would become shareholders in large numbers
I think it is more precise to say that Thatcher sought privatization to raise productivity in those industries (which was achieved), to seek immediate cash to compensate for tax cuts (also achieved), and to achieve longer run political changes by separating government and labor - in her words "eroding the corrosive and corrupting effects of socialism" (pretty much achieved).
The final owners of the privatized industries did not matter - the private owners achieved their productivity increases.
Today in the UK, 15% of the population directly hold equities, and 45.5% indirectly hold equities through equity funds.
She did oppose rail privatization, though British Rail was privatized later John Major.
Look at Norway then tell me those taxes are hurting them.
Norway gets 20% of GDP from oil, so they can afford to be socialist!
Spain: "Government spending has increased to a level equivalent to 45.8 percent of GDP. The budget balance has fallen into deficit, and public debt has grown to around 60 percent of total domestic output."
Norway: "Government spending has risen to a level equivalent to 46.4 percent of total domestic output, but the budget balance remains in surplus due to oil revenues."
Where some of the nations with the highest levels of class mobility also have the highest levels of income tax?
Yes, it is easier for rich kids who go to college become poor kids in countries where income taxes and labor laws make these kids just out of college unemployable. Because they move down in the relative scale, poorer kids who can get blue collar jobs move up the relative scale.
That is why it is better to look at what children are making compared to their parents in absolute terms rather than looking through the viewpoints of class and income relativism.
In Spain only 40% of college graduates get a job in their field.
Wages have been stagnent for all but those at the very top for decades.
But real total compensation has risen over 100% from 1968 to 2008. You just don't see the increase in real wages because tax laws encourage more of your total compensation to go into benefits such as medical insurance.
it really only raises the standard of living for those at the top.
The proportion of impoverished Chinese fell from 65% of the population in 1981 to 4% in 2007, during which time more than HALF A BILLION people were hoisted above the poverty line. (source)
If you look at actual numbers rather than relative numbers: "Most Americans (84 percent) exceed their parents income at a similar stage....Among sons, 59 percent had higher inflation-adjusted wages and salaries than their fathers." (source).
The Senator who was largely responsible for the legislation opening up the internet for business and personal use
It is true that due to a Congressional Hearing in 1992, NSFNET began to allow commercial traffic on its networks and established the NAPS, however you should remember that commercial Internet traffic had already been flowing between private providers for a few years (PSINet started in 1989, UUNET launched AlterNet in 1990 to avoid NSFNET AUP, and the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) was established in 1991).
I'll admit that University and Lab NSFNET traffic was probably larger than all commercial Internet traffic in 1991, but I think the writing was on the wall with the CIX that universities should not wall themselves off from the commercial Internet.
2) Lots of other people and organizations developed lots of networks. ARPANET between University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute (funded by ARPA). There was also privately operated Telenet & Tymnet, and university lead MERIT networks as well as UUCP started at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
3) I worked for one of the first private Internet Service Providers - tt was also one of the first providers of dial-up shell accounts, and later had one of the first national DS-3 IP networks. When I started cold-calling people for web design, they often told me "My customers will never use the Internet" (if they even knew what the Internet was). Suffice it to say that a lot of very forward-looking private providers of capital made that company possible, and they all made a lot of money in the process, and that turned the Internet from something you tinkered with at University into something real.
Also look at private companies like Cisco that made IP routing practical at large scales.
So I will 100% agree that government funding of university researchers created the Internet. However it would have never gone anywhere without private money funding a massive expansion and buildout of it.
Think university solar cell research funded by the government - good. Solyndra funded by government - bad.
And it would have also gone NOWHERE if government tried to regulate early ISPs as roughly as it regulated the incumbent telecommunications companies. We could do pretty much whatever we wanted with little regulation or censorship.
And the experience of people I know doing Teach For America is that no matter how good a teacher you are, you may be stuck with an administrator that cuts you down at the knees.
so those 20 people standing in front of the local home depot are actually wealthy venture capitalists just waiting for their IPO
I know unskilled Central American immigrants to the US (who were lucky enough to be legalized by the Reagan amnesty, but otherwise no different than the guys outside Home Depot) who have founded a chain of Salvadoran restaurants and a huge landscaping corporation.
Then there was this guy William Fox who came to this country (originally named "Vilmos Fried") a poor and unskilled kid from Hungary, who worked as a newsboy, then in the garment industry, saved money for years to buy a nickelodeon, then starting producing motion pictures to exhibit, and eventually started the Fox Film Corporation that was rolled into 20th Century Fox Films. Only we were more willing to let in immigrants legally back then.
For that matter, my own great-grandfather came to the US from Bohemia around the turn of the century. He was a lowly waiter. He saved up, bought a bar, then a restaurant, then a hotel, and retired a fairly well-off guy.
Just because you have no imagination or ambition does not mean other people don't.
Unfortunately, as the guys outside of Home Depot are largely illegal, they will not get a chance to try to live out their dreams.
Slashdot Mirror
Meanwhile, median household income in the US is around $50K. Over half the people in this country cannot do well for themselves. This is despite the fact that US workers have the highest productivity of any country besides Norway.
The US workers with high productivity levels are the ones earning over the median income.
I suspect the numbers would be much better if they Baby Bells hadn't mismanaged our infrastructure for decades.
The existing copper twisted pair infrastructure in the US is fine and very efficient - for voice. The US has far longer local loops than most other countries because of efficient consolidation of COs (as well as our low-density suburbs). Longer local loops means lower DSL speeds. No one was thinking of DSL when these decisions were made.
What's a "high-caliber" assault rifle?
I was wondering this myself, so here is the SIG Sauer page on the 716:
So apparently 7.62mm is "large caliber" according to SIG, but they say this is a "carbine" or "patrol rifle", but not an "assault rifle" or "assault weapon" :)
Also, it is in a large caliber that makes it better suited for hunting than for rapid fire.
My understanding is that the SIG 716 is 7.62x51mm which is used in plenty of fully-automatic rifles such as the M60 machine gun.
The term "large caliber" never made much sense to me, as 7.62mm==.308" which is smaller than 9mm or .45" handgun rounds and clearly smaller than .50" rifle rounds.
Yes, 7.62mm > 5.56mm (original M16 round, which is close in caliber to .22").
But I give everyone a pass because I think even SIG calls the 716 a "high caliber carbine".
If water has a market price on it, people will use it efficiently.
Unfortunately, most fresh water supplies are owned by governments that price is far below what a private owner would.
I once used differential equations to solve a problem of how to optimally transmit parts of an on-demand video program on multiple multicast addresses to minimize the start time to view the program. I'd say that was the only time I ever solved a differential equation outside of class.
As someone with an electrical engineering degree, I have to say that you really need to understand vector calculus to understand electromagnetic fields. But frankly unless you are designing microwave circuits or antennas, even that knowledge is rarely tested in a work field.
If you need to read any scholarly papers to pick up on new technological ideas, most will contain some calculus equations. Generally you don't need to really know how to solve the equations (as they will solve them in the paper), but you may need to at least understand what is going on. Kind of like knowing how football is played allows you to enjoy a game, even if you haven't thrown a football in 20 years.
Most knowledge of error-correcting codes and cryptography is more algebraic and number theory rather than dealing with calculus or differential equations.
On the other hand, every day I seem to have to convert from bits to bytes and back again.
The H1B Visa 2013 cap was reached in June, 2012. That is 65,000 under the "regular" quota and 20,000 more who have a Master's degree or better.
From here,:
And holographic billboards
Large scale 3D lenticular billboards are possible, it just seems no one cares about them.
the world tomorrow will be...less educated that the world today.
World literacy has risen from 77% in 1995 to 82% in 2005. More recently in 2010, 87% of female youth had basic literacy skills, compared to 92% of males.
In China almost all youth are now literate. In Kenya, 93% of youth are literate. Only countries like Ethiopia, Niger, Chad, and Mali have youth literacy rates at or below 50%.
People with college degrees increased to 6.7% of the world population in 2010 from 5.9% in 2000. That is around 50 million new college graduates.
The absolute number of hungry people may be up, but as a percentage of the global population, it's probably lower than in the 80's.
Indeed. The UN says there are 925 million hungry people in 2010, around 13.1% of global population.
Around 1980 there were 850 million, although the global population was much smaller (4.5 billion versus 7 million), so the percent hungry then was around 19%.
Most hungry people are in Asia and Africa. India alone has 230 million hungry people. Other countries with large absolute numbers of hungry people are Bangladesh, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Pakistan.
Perhaps there is something to be said about routing & switching performed by open source software based systems...
Like she thought that by privatising industries and selling the shares to the public (cheap), the British people would become shareholders in large numbers
I think it is more precise to say that Thatcher sought privatization to raise productivity in those industries (which was achieved), to seek immediate cash to compensate for tax cuts (also achieved), and to achieve longer run political changes by separating government and labor - in her words "eroding the corrosive and corrupting effects of socialism" (pretty much achieved).
The final owners of the privatized industries did not matter - the private owners achieved their productivity increases.
Today in the UK, 15% of the population directly hold equities, and 45.5% indirectly hold equities through equity funds.
She did oppose rail privatization, though British Rail was privatized later John Major.
If the US is actually threatened, use nuclear weapons.
It is unclear we the US has achieved much in terms of actually protecting the country since 1945 using any other weapon.
Look at Norway then tell me those taxes are hurting them.
Norway gets 20% of GDP from oil, so they can afford to be socialist!
Spain: "Government spending has increased to a level equivalent to 45.8 percent of GDP. The budget balance has fallen into deficit, and public debt has grown to around 60 percent of total domestic output."
Norway: "Government spending has risen to a level equivalent to 46.4 percent of total domestic output, but the budget balance remains in surplus due to oil revenues."
(Source: 2012 Index of Economic Freedom)
Where some of the nations with the highest levels of class mobility also have the highest levels of income tax?
Yes, it is easier for rich kids who go to college become poor kids in countries where income taxes and labor laws make these kids just out of college unemployable. Because they move down in the relative scale, poorer kids who can get blue collar jobs move up the relative scale.
That is why it is better to look at what children are making compared to their parents in absolute terms rather than looking through the viewpoints of class and income relativism.
In Spain only 40% of college graduates get a job in their field.
Wages have been stagnent for all but those at the very top for decades.
But real total compensation has risen over 100% from 1968 to 2008. You just don't see the increase in real wages because tax laws encourage more of your total compensation to go into benefits such as medical insurance.
it really only raises the standard of living for those at the top.
The proportion of impoverished Chinese fell from 65% of the population in 1981 to 4% in 2007, during which time more than HALF A BILLION people were hoisted above the poverty line. (source)
If you look at actual numbers rather than relative numbers: "Most Americans (84 percent) exceed their parents income at a similar stage....Among sons, 59 percent had higher inflation-adjusted wages and salaries than their fathers." (source).
ERP systems that are difficult to use are a feature.
That way you spend less money because it is so annoying to use.
MikeRT, I totally agree with you. Run for office please!
The Senator who was largely responsible for the legislation opening up the internet for business and personal use
It is true that due to a Congressional Hearing in 1992, NSFNET began to allow commercial traffic on its networks and established the NAPS, however you should remember that commercial Internet traffic had already been flowing between private providers for a few years (PSINet started in 1989, UUNET launched AlterNet in 1990 to avoid NSFNET AUP, and the Commercial Internet eXchange (CIX) was established in 1991).
I'll admit that University and Lab NSFNET traffic was probably larger than all commercial Internet traffic in 1991, but I think the writing was on the wall with the CIX that universities should not wall themselves off from the commercial Internet.
1) "The Internet" was invented by Vint Cerf, Yogen Dalal, and Carl Sunshine who worked for Stanford University and issued RFC 675 "SPECIFICATION OF INTERNET TRANSMISSION CONTROL PROGRAM", and they were funded by ARPA.
2) Lots of other people and organizations developed lots of networks. ARPANET between University of California, Los Angeles and the Stanford Research Institute (funded by ARPA). There was also privately operated Telenet & Tymnet, and university lead MERIT networks as well as UUCP started at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
3) I worked for one of the first private Internet Service Providers - tt was also one of the first providers of dial-up shell accounts, and later had one of the first national DS-3 IP networks. When I started cold-calling people for web design, they often told me "My customers will never use the Internet" (if they even knew what the Internet was). Suffice it to say that a lot of very forward-looking private providers of capital made that company possible, and they all made a lot of money in the process, and that turned the Internet from something you tinkered with at University into something real.
Also look at private companies like Cisco that made IP routing practical at large scales.
So I will 100% agree that government funding of university researchers created the Internet. However it would have never gone anywhere without private money funding a massive expansion and buildout of it.
Think university solar cell research funded by the government - good. Solyndra funded by government - bad.
And it would have also gone NOWHERE if government tried to regulate early ISPs as roughly as it regulated the incumbent telecommunications companies. We could do pretty much whatever we wanted with little regulation or censorship.
And the experience of people I know doing Teach For America is that no matter how good a teacher you are, you may be stuck with an administrator that cuts you down at the knees.
so those 20 people standing in front of the local home depot are actually wealthy venture capitalists just waiting for their IPO
I know unskilled Central American immigrants to the US (who were lucky enough to be legalized by the Reagan amnesty, but otherwise no different than the guys outside Home Depot) who have founded a chain of Salvadoran restaurants and a huge landscaping corporation.
Then there was this guy William Fox who came to this country (originally named "Vilmos Fried") a poor and unskilled kid from Hungary, who worked as a newsboy, then in the garment industry, saved money for years to buy a nickelodeon, then starting producing motion pictures to exhibit, and eventually started the Fox Film Corporation that was rolled into 20th Century Fox Films. Only we were more willing to let in immigrants legally back then.
For that matter, my own great-grandfather came to the US from Bohemia around the turn of the century. He was a lowly waiter. He saved up, bought a bar, then a restaurant, then a hotel, and retired a fairly well-off guy.
Just because you have no imagination or ambition does not mean other people don't.
Unfortunately, as the guys outside of Home Depot are largely illegal, they will not get a chance to try to live out their dreams.