Err...we do [amtrak.com]. Americans just don't like to use it. Probably because once you get there, you will most likely need a car once again. One D.C. to Orlando route addresses this by tacking on some extra cars to carry your automobiles [amtrak.com] with you. Guess which is the one Amtrak train I've ever personally taken?
Air travel is even worse when it comes to needing transportation. Airports have to be located 30-40 miles outside the city. This is solved by having rental car stations on the airport and have circling vans to take you to hotels. At least the train stations are downtown, though in the ghettos. Anyway, most Amtrak stations are also served by Greyhound buses where you can be picked up or if in a commercial area take a cab.
I took Amtrak during 9/11 when all planes were grounded. We spent 2 days in Montana. Needless to say, Amtrak is way too slow to be a feasible long distance transportation and too expensive to be feasible short distance transportation/commute.
Of course if Americans *did* like to use it, then we'd probably have to add all those security checks like the airlines have. For example, in India everyone uses the train system, and it has been a primary terrorist target for decades.
The freeway is used by most Americans but is never a terrorist target. Why? In India, the trains itself aren't targeted but passenger compartments at specific passengers. And you'd have to use broad sense of terrorism when it's one religious faction targeting another religious faction.
On one hand, the companies giving up their seed corn aren't being forced to literally at gun point. They're deciding that at this moment, they're better living another day and starving tomorrow. So in a sense it's a win-win scenario.
This is like going to the mechanic and saying that I would only let him service the car if he lets me watch how he does the service. In the future, I could myself become a mechanic and steal business away from him. Of course he can say it's not safe and against company policy to do but he know I can drive out of there and go to the next mechanic and offer him the same terms.
China has to make it's purchasing decisions with the highest value and the seller has to sell with it's own highest value. This is good old capitalism of making good old rational decisions. I suppose it can be argued that starving China of technical know how is good for us but they have money. We have happily clacking away at Chinese made keyboards and sitting on Chinese fabric and plastic all the while spewing vitriol that for all that China has provided, they dare ask for knowledge as trade.
So China wins here not by being more ingenious or creating new knowledge or technology, but by exploiting its ability to control the rules of the game. If you twist your vision enough, I suppose that what it is doing in this case might look like innovation.
If you're such an innovation romantic, then you first have to give China a level playing field. Holding all the technical know how and then berating for lack of innovation doesn't make sense. Of course, I'm assuming here that you're not of the school of philosophy that Asian can't innovate because of their culture.
This sounds to me more like savvy business wheeling and dealing. It's no different than what the Indians, Japanese or Koreans would do.
Yeah, this is surprising because everyone expects the Chinese to be the sick man of Asia and a third world run by a regime. They actually did good business. They didn't let one supplier control their train systems while at the same time they built up an indigenous train industry realizing it is vital to their country.
What is surprising that those companies were not able to bribe the select chiefs and get an unfair position, or that some dictator didn't just buy the whole train system and charge it to some world bank loan but though of the future - far far into the future of developing a domestic industry.
And, I wish we had trains for long distance travel in the US. Traveling by car at 70mph for hours and hours is tiring and there is always the prospect of a problem with a car and being stuck somewhere. Airplane travel is marred by the security checks and delays and long wait times.
I guess this would be a stern counter-example to the service industry philosophy. China isn't content on being the factory workhorse while the US controls the technology. China would like to catch up on technical know-how as well and build their own industry.
I don't think there is a way to tell from the depositing bank.
Some people say wait a month but banks say it can take up to 2-3 months for checks to clear.
The other way is to ask the bank that issues the check or money order to check if it has cleared. Obviously, this is a big problem if the issuer is outside the US.
And that is why this scam is popular. Once people put the check in the bank and the balance shows up, people think everything is legit and send money out of that balance.
My field is not biomedical research but I feel that research in academia and industry are not quite comparable.
Industrial research is about products or features whereas academic research is about exploring the nooks and crannies that industry would never justify paying someone a salary to look into.
Some scientists get very good at getting money and even after tenure when the research dries up and the grad students aren't there anymore, they still get the money out of things they did 10 years ago. On the other hand, some veteran scientists turn into brilliant managers getting the right research done by the right grad students or post-docs.
What was the big rush? If Wikileaks didn't have enough volunteers to vet the info carefully, why rush ahead and publish it anyway?
The longer the delay, the bigger the chances that the release of the documents will be blocked and Assange would be put under very difficult circumstances to make him not release the documents. Anybody sitting on a pile of classified documents would want it out there and gone from it causing personal risks.
The 3D in movies does not, to my eye anyway, make the movies look more REAL; it makes them look more 3D. 2D movies look much closer to the way that I see the world than a 3D movie does, because I don't (and I doubt you do, either) see a 2D image as flat; I am able to infer all kinds of depth cues from things going on in the 2D image.
That's not true. With thousands of movies made, people know what a 2D images will look good and what won't. Thus, what is made is good for 2D movies.
Most movies or TV images will have either panoramic shots or have a central item to focus on. Suppose someone enters a room. How big is the room? What is in the room? OK, there is a desk in the room but how big is the desk in relation to the room? 3d movies will give a sense of being there. 2D movies will never focus on these things because then you'd be bored.
The best comparison I can think of is looking at real estate photos and then going there and seeing the place. If you see the place, then the photos make sense. But, just with the photos, no matter how many there are, it's really hard to make out how everything is in relation to each other.
Meanwhile a Civic will cost you around $20k and can drive more than 100 miles without waiting hours to refuel.
Even if you don't need to travel long distances, $12k will buy you a lot of gas.
You could buy a used car for $5K and that would be $15K for gas than buying a new Civic.
The first generation of electric vehicle adopters will view it as luxury or semi-luxury cars.
Of course, in 20% of the sign-ups, "wife" would find out, and we would have charge-backs from people that denied ever having been to our sites.
I once had my credit card number "stolen" (I ordered a PC part from an unknown company and an employee used it to purchase porn passes).
A few years later, I found out about this community which would steal credit card numbers, sign up for porn passes and share the user/pass.
Porn passes are the best thing to buy from a stolen credit card. There is no way to trace who bought it. I'm really surprised that only 20% of them became charge-backs.
Dell always had very competitive prices; but not wildly different from comparable stuff from HP and friends
I remember Dell pwning everyone in prices during that time. Dell was by far the cheapest every time anyone asked me to buy them a computer. And, cheapest by far. The only choice used to be which type of Dell.
Maybe you didn't get those Dell coupons with $ and &s in them that would take 40% off. If you just went to dell.com or hp.com, they had similar prices but they had those coupons that would take lots of amount off.
From what I see, this is what happened. They worked as engineers at GM and they were let go. Du then copied her work files and then started a company where they used the GM files to further their company. They probably rationalized that since they had worked on the project, they had a right to use it for their personal company.
I've heard variants of this in a few places. There was a software company who let a few engineers go but they started a competitive business with the code they had worked on but didn't own. Since they wrote parts of the code, they probably felt they could use it.
But people can't walk 30 mph.
US cities are designed with cars in mind and things are far from each other. If you don't have a parking arrangement, it's a major headache. Half the time you'll get a ticket and the other half time you'll end up driving 20 mph for 15 minutes looking for a spot.
Take, for example, agriculture. Chinese agriculture is a hundred years behind the United States, and not just because they can't afford to upgrade. The government forces manual labor simply to try and keep living inland viable. Were they to mechanize the labor needs of the central part of the nation would plummet, and massive migrations to coastal areas would take place: coastal areas that are already largely squalid pits. This has been commented on off the record by Chinese officials, but they would never openly admit it.
Maybe they don't want everyone's main diet to be high fructose corn syrup. Why do you think China has to go the exact same route the US went? China probably has no interest in building sprawling suburbia.
Infrastructure in China is hugely underdeveloped, to the point where the government there is raping local ecosystems in a desperate attempt to keep up with growth. The United States did the same thing, though spread over a longer period and with 1/5 the population. This will catch up with them in the not-too-distant future, and there will be hell to pay.
China has been building infrastructure and with their boom they have shown that the needed infrastructure can be built. You can say they don't have freeways, but they have a very good rail and mass transportation system.
Then there is the problem of population imbalance. Most of us know about the "one child" restriction many Chinese are under. Most of those children born are boys, for cultural reasons. The male/female gap in China is in the tens of millions. And those young men are just reaching relationship age. What happens when 50 million men realize it is mathematically impossible to have a family? Talk about a social experiment.
Why is this such a big deal. What will happen is that each girl will have numerous suitors and marriage would mean lots of money to the bride's family. Before males used to be in that position because of deaths in wars; but now it's the females. People won't think it's mathematically impossible, marriage will require at least a certain standard of success to be able to afford one. Then, marriage and family will be a combination of hard work, luck and skill rather than a given. Someone said as a joke the other day that in the US, a lot of young women have weight problems and are not attracting young males; and young males are not embracing the idea of families.
Combine these with the typical problems associated with repressive governments, and we have ourselves an interesting pot of instability. The "growing middle class" is just the cream floating on top of a vat of very rotten milk, and I suspect we are going to see just how unsavory it is in not too long. I'd say India is far more likely to become a power than China, if we were betting. Though in reality, we might be looking at a superpower-less world in the near future...
I think the problems of China are different set of problems. Since China was built on foreign know how, it has no value of knowledge and expertise and no incentive to produce homegrown industry and innovation. It's a businessman's world. There are no major companies or conglomerates that are Chinese. They make every product for Apple but don't have a remote competitor to Apple.
I don't know what will happen in the next few decades, but trends like this scare me. It makes me think about how, in an effort to make more profit, corporations have essentially dismantled US tech and manufacturing, which, for most of America's history, have been the backbone of this country. Heck, you can't even call farmers and ranchers that anymore; we import even our beef from other countries.
What will happen is that other countries will become good at things that will kill certain parts of our industry. For example, no televisions or computer monitors are made in the USA. Maybe solar panels will be made in China. However, what has happened is that TVs and computer monitors are become frigging amazing that it has spawned completed new industries.
I keep telling people that globalization leads to a flatter market. The problem is that even distribution of wealth means that the 3rd world improves a little and the 1st world declines a LOT.
Nothing frightens Americans more than "economy".
What is wealth specifically? The infrastructure, the fuel, the stuff we buy? I can see a competition for fuel but letting a billion people into modern technology might also produce a new innovation that will make new energy methods.
Look at food. We were supposed to run out of food but innovation keeps happening and there are newer ways to grow more food, faster. There is no reason why it won't happen with energy.
As for infrastructure, I wish the whole world has great infrastructure and great purchasing power. It would mean less people in poverty and subsistence and more artists, scientists, engineers etc in the world.
The education there is very different from that of Western nations. Since they have so many people competing for comparatively few spots, they resort to various aptitude tests to try and weed out people. The people who succeed here are the ones who can memorize huge amounts of otherwise useless information, and regurgitate it at will.
Aptitude tests are different than memorization tests. Aptitude tests are what is given in the USA (SAT, GRE, GMAT etc) as standardized tests.
In R&D, the main factor to consider is how inventive and innovative a researcher is. That doesn't come from being "book smart". It comes from being able to think flexibly and creatively. This is a trait that is encouraged in the academia of the West, but denounced and suppressed in the East.
This is a popular belief. There are plenty of past and active Indian researchers who have published and publish good papers, or Indian researchers in large companies who work on very innovative products. So, citation needed please for your beliefs.
They have fought to secure those same elements and done their homework. it gives them an economic advantage with both manufacturing and raw mining/refining done in the same place. most western countries in the same position would do the same as would any corporate entity in the western hemisphere. they can export the finished products at a huge markup compared to what they would get for raw minerals.
Well said.
Especially, since China has sold out almost everything in pursuit of money: their labor, their environment - it would be good for China to groom it's own industries which it already has a natural advantage at.
I know other countries would like to buy Chinese raw materials and sell them finished products and make huge profits. I would have thought with carefully targeted bribes at the right man in power, these raw materials could be bought but I think it's a good progression that China is able to look after it's interests as a country.
To be specific, the companies are Warner Music Canada, Sony BMG Music Canada, EMI Music Canada, and Universal Music Canada.
Somehow, Capital Records of Canada managed to get missed.
It's Capitol records. They were eaten by EMI a while ago.
But, the carrot is the PhD and then the assistant prof. job and finally tenure.
I have seen 40+ year old postdocs in the biomedical fields that have been postdocs over 10 years. I knew him because he had been living in our apartment complex (graduate student and postdocs favored) that he had decided it was economically sound idea to be the live in building manager.
I mean, the guy works on curing cancer during the day (works on cancer experiments:) ) and is interrupted by phone calls from graduate students who want to take a look at apt 12b.
> "I think my world looks dystopian if you're a middle class white guy doing reasonably well in 1993..." > How about if you are a middle class "black" guy doing reasonably well in 1993?
I think the white middle class joke comes from psychology. Most experiments that psychology professors did during the last few decades were done on undergraduate students who tended to be white middle class.
So, all the psychology papers would sort of say, results on white middle class only.
Slashdot Mirror
Air travel is even worse when it comes to needing transportation. Airports have to be located 30-40 miles outside the city. This is solved by having rental car stations on the airport and have circling vans to take you to hotels. At least the train stations are downtown, though in the ghettos. Anyway, most Amtrak stations are also served by Greyhound buses where you can be picked up or if in a commercial area take a cab.
I took Amtrak during 9/11 when all planes were grounded. We spent 2 days in Montana. Needless to say, Amtrak is way too slow to be a feasible long distance transportation and too expensive to be feasible short distance transportation/commute.
The freeway is used by most Americans but is never a terrorist target. Why? In India, the trains itself aren't targeted but passenger compartments at specific passengers. And you'd have to use broad sense of terrorism when it's one religious faction targeting another religious faction.
This is like going to the mechanic and saying that I would only let him service the car if he lets me watch how he does the service. In the future, I could myself become a mechanic and steal business away from him. Of course he can say it's not safe and against company policy to do but he know I can drive out of there and go to the next mechanic and offer him the same terms.
China has to make it's purchasing decisions with the highest value and the seller has to sell with it's own highest value. This is good old capitalism of making good old rational decisions. I suppose it can be argued that starving China of technical know how is good for us but they have money. We have happily clacking away at Chinese made keyboards and sitting on Chinese fabric and plastic all the while spewing vitriol that for all that China has provided, they dare ask for knowledge as trade.
If you're such an innovation romantic, then you first have to give China a level playing field. Holding all the technical know how and then berating for lack of innovation doesn't make sense. Of course, I'm assuming here that you're not of the school of philosophy that Asian can't innovate because of their culture.
Yeah, this is surprising because everyone expects the Chinese to be the sick man of Asia and a third world run by a regime. They actually did good business. They didn't let one supplier control their train systems while at the same time they built up an indigenous train industry realizing it is vital to their country.
What is surprising that those companies were not able to bribe the select chiefs and get an unfair position, or that some dictator didn't just buy the whole train system and charge it to some world bank loan but though of the future - far far into the future of developing a domestic industry.
And, I wish we had trains for long distance travel in the US. Traveling by car at 70mph for hours and hours is tiring and there is always the prospect of a problem with a car and being stuck somewhere. Airplane travel is marred by the security checks and delays and long wait times.
I guess this would be a stern counter-example to the service industry philosophy. China isn't content on being the factory workhorse while the US controls the technology. China would like to catch up on technical know-how as well and build their own industry.
I don't think there is a way to tell from the depositing bank.
Some people say wait a month but banks say it can take up to 2-3 months for checks to clear.
The other way is to ask the bank that issues the check or money order to check if it has cleared. Obviously, this is a big problem if the issuer is outside the US.
And that is why this scam is popular. Once people put the check in the bank and the balance shows up, people think everything is legit and send money out of that balance.
My field is not biomedical research but I feel that research in academia and industry are not quite comparable.
Industrial research is about products or features whereas academic research is about exploring the nooks and crannies that industry would never justify paying someone a salary to look into.
Some scientists get very good at getting money and even after tenure when the research dries up and the grad students aren't there anymore, they still get the money out of things they did 10 years ago. On the other hand, some veteran scientists turn into brilliant managers getting the right research done by the right grad students or post-docs.
The longer the delay, the bigger the chances that the release of the documents will be blocked and Assange would be put under very difficult circumstances to make him not release the documents. Anybody sitting on a pile of classified documents would want it out there and gone from it causing personal risks.
That's not true. With thousands of movies made, people know what a 2D images will look good and what won't. Thus, what is made is good for 2D movies.
Most movies or TV images will have either panoramic shots or have a central item to focus on. Suppose someone enters a room. How big is the room? What is in the room? OK, there is a desk in the room but how big is the desk in relation to the room? 3d movies will give a sense of being there. 2D movies will never focus on these things because then you'd be bored.
The best comparison I can think of is looking at real estate photos and then going there and seeing the place. If you see the place, then the photos make sense. But, just with the photos, no matter how many there are, it's really hard to make out how everything is in relation to each other.
You could buy a used car for $5K and that would be $15K for gas than buying a new Civic.
The first generation of electric vehicle adopters will view it as luxury or semi-luxury cars.
I once had my credit card number "stolen" (I ordered a PC part from an unknown company and an employee used it to purchase porn passes).
A few years later, I found out about this community which would steal credit card numbers, sign up for porn passes and share the user/pass.
Porn passes are the best thing to buy from a stolen credit card. There is no way to trace who bought it. I'm really surprised that only 20% of them became charge-backs.
I remember Dell pwning everyone in prices during that time. Dell was by far the cheapest every time anyone asked me to buy them a computer. And, cheapest by far. The only choice used to be which type of Dell.
Maybe you didn't get those Dell coupons with $ and &s in them that would take 40% off. If you just went to dell.com or hp.com, they had similar prices but they had those coupons that would take lots of amount off.
From what I see, this is what happened. They worked as engineers at GM and they were let go. Du then copied her work files and then started a company where they used the GM files to further their company. They probably rationalized that since they had worked on the project, they had a right to use it for their personal company.
I've heard variants of this in a few places. There was a software company who let a few engineers go but they started a competitive business with the code they had worked on but didn't own. Since they wrote parts of the code, they probably felt they could use it.
But people can't walk 30 mph. US cities are designed with cars in mind and things are far from each other. If you don't have a parking arrangement, it's a major headache. Half the time you'll get a ticket and the other half time you'll end up driving 20 mph for 15 minutes looking for a spot.
If some place is nice to live, it's not easy to move there.
See how much hate there is for immigrants in the US.
Maybe they don't want everyone's main diet to be high fructose corn syrup. Why do you think China has to go the exact same route the US went? China probably has no interest in building sprawling suburbia.
China has been building infrastructure and with their boom they have shown that the needed infrastructure can be built. You can say they don't have freeways, but they have a very good rail and mass transportation system.
Why is this such a big deal. What will happen is that each girl will have numerous suitors and marriage would mean lots of money to the bride's family. Before males used to be in that position because of deaths in wars; but now it's the females. People won't think it's mathematically impossible, marriage will require at least a certain standard of success to be able to afford one. Then, marriage and family will be a combination of hard work, luck and skill rather than a given. Someone said as a joke the other day that in the US, a lot of young women have weight problems and are not attracting young males; and young males are not embracing the idea of families.
I think the problems of China are different set of problems. Since China was built on foreign know how, it has no value of knowledge and expertise and no incentive to produce homegrown industry and innovation. It's a businessman's world. There are no major companies or conglomerates that are Chinese. They make every product for Apple but don't have a remote competitor to Apple.
Microsoft has been locking the hard disk so no further game saves can be done; and also disabling the "play from hard disk" feature.
I would think that supersonics would be harder to shoot down given all the interest in shooting down missiles.
What will happen is that other countries will become good at things that will kill certain parts of our industry. For example, no televisions or computer monitors are made in the USA. Maybe solar panels will be made in China. However, what has happened is that TVs and computer monitors are become frigging amazing that it has spawned completed new industries.
Nothing frightens Americans more than "economy".
What is wealth specifically? The infrastructure, the fuel, the stuff we buy? I can see a competition for fuel but letting a billion people into modern technology might also produce a new innovation that will make new energy methods.
Look at food. We were supposed to run out of food but innovation keeps happening and there are newer ways to grow more food, faster. There is no reason why it won't happen with energy.
As for infrastructure, I wish the whole world has great infrastructure and great purchasing power. It would mean less people in poverty and subsistence and more artists, scientists, engineers etc in the world.
Aptitude tests are different than memorization tests. Aptitude tests are what is given in the USA (SAT, GRE, GMAT etc) as standardized tests.
This is a popular belief. There are plenty of past and active Indian researchers who have published and publish good papers, or Indian researchers in large companies who work on very innovative products. So, citation needed please for your beliefs.
Or buy with tinfoil.
Well said.
Especially, since China has sold out almost everything in pursuit of money: their labor, their environment - it would be good for China to groom it's own industries which it already has a natural advantage at.
I know other countries would like to buy Chinese raw materials and sell them finished products and make huge profits. I would have thought with carefully targeted bribes at the right man in power, these raw materials could be bought but I think it's a good progression that China is able to look after it's interests as a country.
You want the government to reduce competition for you? What else? You want the government to buy you a Cadillac also?
It's Capitol records. They were eaten by EMI a while ago.
But, the carrot is the PhD and then the assistant prof. job and finally tenure.
I have seen 40+ year old postdocs in the biomedical fields that have been postdocs over 10 years. I knew him because he had been living in our apartment complex (graduate student and postdocs favored) that he had decided it was economically sound idea to be the live in building manager.
I mean, the guy works on curing cancer during the day (works on cancer experiments :) ) and is interrupted by phone calls from graduate students who want to take a look at apt 12b.
> "I think my world looks dystopian if you're a middle class white guy doing reasonably well in 1993..."
> How about if you are a middle class "black" guy doing reasonably well in 1993?
I think the white middle class joke comes from psychology. Most experiments that psychology professors did during the last few decades were done on undergraduate students who tended to be white middle class.
So, all the psychology papers would sort of say, results on white middle class only.