Strictly you have a choice to insure or not even when car insurance in "mandated" by law (yes obeying the "Law" is always an explicit choice - perhaps you simply choose to throw that option away even in extreme circumstance). Plenty of people "self-insure" every day by driving without insurance. Exactly like an insurance company, they are banking the savings (revenue as cost reduction) today against the unlikelihood for a future bad event that costs them money (being caught, which has lower costs than one might think). Thus they are like any consumer that seeks what their economic situation demands. The same will be true for health insurance if that ever were mandated also. Both insurance companies and the government are in certain ways limited by this.
Any price for insurance or liability through legal costs, market cost or government regulation is the communally assessed risk/price of the technology or business, in so far as we know the true risks at any given point in time.
For those who proport to hate lawyers, insurance, goverment, businesses and free-markets, etc., what these individuals or groups do is create emergent, collective decision making regarding risks faced by everyone.
One of the infuriating (but structurally essential) aspects is that it is emergent - there is not central control to say: "this is the correct answer, let's move on". That is what makes it adaptive and what assures collectiveness. It is ultimately very democratic in the pure sense that it is always messy, lengthy and involves everyone having some aspect of their desires limited for the equity of the collective. Sort of like open source scaled out to everyday life!
The point of mentioning lead and mercury is that we overlooked the environmental and human health of these infrastructure materials. Nanotechnology is poised to become the next infrastructure technology. We have a track record of overlooking these kinds of risks because of the shorter-term economic benefits.
> (insurance companies raise rate or don't pay claims)
Communicating communal risk experience to individual members is the entire point of insurance as that is a key element to the hedging decision (decision to buy insurance at all and from whom) of the individual. When you don't communicate that risk is when insurance collapses (e.g. current US health insurance crisis, Asian financial meltdown due to derivatives in the 90s).
Denied claims gives a risk signal/message to insured clients just as well as raising premiums do (call it a second order feedback loop of direct loss instead of a first order loop of fees cost).
If client has their rate raised, they received the message: "the risk I hedged with insurance is riskier that I thought, I need to think through whether it's worth it".
If a client has their claim denied, they received the message: "the risk I hedged with insurance is riskier that I thought, I need to think through whether it's worth it".
In either case, that is the correct economic signal for the client. The latter scenario could have a higher cost, naturally, but it suggests one or both parties seriously underestimated the risk of the insured circumstance (e.g. car insurance, maybe you're too incompetent to be driving at all) or the risk of the insuring/hedging relationship itself (you're penny-wise but pound-foolish in selecting insurance companies). If despite those messages a individual or company keeps doing the same thing, they utterly deserve any cost coming to them.
The latter (claim denial) also is what self-limits how much "obscene profit" they are make - who will hedge with them if they won't pay claims. One could argue that "the poor" (ignoring vagueness of the definition) will be shafted. That is a risk that government should deal with but from what I've seen many people make foolish insurance purchase decisions - i.e. waste money by having unrealistic expectations of what they are hedging for. Hedging is for risk reduction, not for alternatives for routine living cash flow or as a lottery.
E.g. there is absolutely no reason to buy life insurance for children, ever, period. Why? Because life insurance is for evening out cash flow when there is a sudden, unexpected loss of income, and then only until a new status quo is reached (not ever status quo ante!). Thus the only exception might be if you are the parent of Britney Spears and you live off her income! For simple investing, there are always better (ROI) vehicles for future expense investment (college). Similar arguments can be made for health insurance (raise your deductable above your routine cost level but below your exceptional cost level, and voila, affordability is trivial - that necessarily implies you actually budget your routine medical expenses - who's fault is it if you don't budget at all?).
Do insurance misrepresent this proper use? Sure, but it's also partly because they telling us what we want to hear (like any marketer may do) rather than what is right for us.
Indeed. The post-industrial rise in all sorts of "industrial nation" diseases, e.g. cancers, infertility, autism, etc., could very well be tied to something like that.
Ahh, I don't know about other people who wear ties but when I wore them daily some years ago, any given tie was only for a day or two and off to the cleaners it goes. Not cleaning your ties regularly is like not washing your clothes or your hanky regularly - just nasty. With normal hygiene it would seem that this wouldn't be any worse a bacteria problem than a clothe hanky.
I don't mind ties much. Despite what anyone might wish for or delude themselves about; people make shallow, subjective judgements about you every single minute of the day. You can fight it (to little avail) or you can make it work for you. A "corporate uniform" if anything insulates you from that. If you are really a strong enough person/personality, doing the suit/tie thing isn't going to compromise you as a person - you know who you are and you don't need someone else's approval for it (rrright?).
Your logic is flawed. Let's translate what you said into more familar nouns and verbs:
Many big companies write bad software, but those companies aren't Microsoft, therefore Microsoft can't write bad code.
I never claimed that Catholicism is the cause of all improverishment and overpopulation in all poor nations (or even only Catholic nations). Thus to trot as a counter-example that because other nations are poor but not Catholic that that proves the church can't be responsible for the ails of a particular Catholic nation is simply inane.
In the Philippines, both the demographics and my personal experience living there suggests there is a connection between church policies on reproduction and economic destitution. There are other factors such as 100 years of US colonialism, natural resources (or lack thereof) and climate, but the Church deserves its equal share because those policies directly contradict the Church's own ethical frameworks, methods and values. And yes I was raised Catholic, went to Jesuit university, etc. etc.
Perhaps, though, often enough the "pretty one" might well have degrees qualifying her above the position she's apply for. Also the Philippines GDP was twice that of the US in 2002, so maybe it is a powerhouse compared to the US.;-)
Part of the attractiveness of the Philippines for outsourcing is that there are many tens of thousands of college graduates either unemployeed or underemployed (architects doing ditch-digging, engineers pumping gas, nurses working as secretaries, etc. and even more living with family unable to find work) The literacy rate in the Philippines is nearly the same as the US, probably with a higher per-capita college degree rate.
IMNSHO, much of this is caused by the Catholic Church (yes, I was raised Catholic and attended Catholic grad school) which has prevented meaningful population control (divorce is still illegal but largely ignored via separation as de facto divorce and mistresses/affairs, and until Aquino condoms and birth control were quasi-illegal; previously available due presence of US bases only). The islands have limited natural resources, insufficient for the population levels. The church still routinely tells people every sunday to "go forth and multiply; God will provide". Rubbish unless poverty, early death and misery are what you had in mind for "providing".
The other element is corruption. Even Cory Aquino exempted her own family land holdings when land reform was forced upon all the other major wealthy land owners under her adminstration. The US has just as much corruption only we have institutionalized it as campaign contributions and PACS which helps to limit the scope and obviousness. You are not blatantly asked for bribes trying to get government or commercial services, but the option is available in the US through the right channels.
It's an eye-opening experience to spend time in a developing nation - most our current national (US) stupidity is perpetrated by people who have obviously never done so. Hopefully our Christian Taliban doesn't get the chance to take the US there.
Things can change quickly in the Philippines. The first time I was there in the 1980s, getting a phone on your own home was akin to the Soviet Union - wait until someone died in the neighborhood so your number in wait-list at the PLDT would advance. Then in the 1990s suddenly all my relatives had their own phones (cellular handset or table-top). ATMs and credit cards made a similar leap from unavailability/unusability to proliferation/US-style ease of use.
What's allowed in most developing countries would make your head spin.
In the Philippines, it is customary to include on your resume: age, religion, marital status, weight, height, a recent photograph, and if female, "measurements". If you don't, you probably won't be considered. The age of being "past your prime" is about age 25, professionally and maritally. You can be summarily rejected for employment for any of the above parameter values - being muslim as always been a strike against in the Catholic Philippines. Not being of the right sex or not being "pretty enough" to "decorate" the office is pretty common.
I'm sure other countries are similar. USian companies are required to follow the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; I wonder if it could apply to foreign age discrimination of subcontractors and subsidiaries?
I've been wearing my tin-foil hat to protect me from space alien abduction for three years
I haven't been abducted by space aliens in the last three years
that must prove by tin-foil hat is working to protect me from space aliens
Which, of course, is excrement for logical. Just because I posit a cause is not proof of cause-and-effect. Just because I have no measureable effect is not proof of cause-and-effect.
The effectiveness of Patriot I&II is utterly unproven - and there are plenty of documented negative and unintended (or were they?) side effects.
Re:SCO attempting to prove selective enforcement?
on
FSF Subpoenaed by SCO
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Neo-cons (which I think Daryl, et al. easily qualify as) have a pathological blindspot that sees human behavior only occuring due to some Real Politik control. It's sort of a conspiracy theory of human sociological behavior. The concept of emergent systems and behaviors are impossible in their dogma. It's pathetically Newtonian in a way. "God" or "god" (as in human leader) as the one and only watchmaker.
You see it here. You also see it in US foreign policy - Bush, et al., seem to believe it's not possible that terrorism could simply occur out of a Heisenberg-like generation from the world soup of discontent; the fact is, it trivially can!
Been on DNC since before it's introduction. I still get calls. One tele-droid actually claimed that since my number was chosen at random, it was somehow OK to for them to call and try to sell me something even though I was on DNC! LOL
Technically this correct. Perhaps a more accurate way people probably should be putting is: "Sue your own market base" or "Sue your products own consumers" or perhaps "doing an SCO" and "doing an RIAA" are simply interchangeable synonyms.
Anyone with even a passing understanding of sales knows this isn't much better for one's long term economic prospects as it has a direct impact on both your products' marketability (it gives strong incentives for selecting substitutes like DVD or video games or stealth file trading) and on what price prospective buyer are willing to pay (lower, never higher prices! the "baggage" this behavior adds to transaction must be compensated by the seller to compensate for reduced demand).
However the process of buying things isn't simply a digital state either: it's a continuum of phases or states of acquisition. Thus being "customer" or "not a customer" aren't really binary states. When does someone who may have bought a CD legitimately, at any time, sudden cease being a customer?
When they haven't bought anything for X hours, days, or years?
When they've broken copyright X times for Y times obeying copyright?
When they've bought X units of the top 40 vs. X units of something more obscure (more expensive to market and distribute)?
It's pretty obvious that the RIAA and its member companies haven't asked these questions themselves, either operationally or philosophically. Up to the executive suite they don't seem to have even a rudimentary understanding of music, technology or business.
From the site owner's POW (which I believe the comment was refering to), yes, these new Google ImageAds are blockable (in the AdSense FAQ): if you don't want image ads on your site that uses AdSense already you can set your account to not serve them and simply retain the traditional text Google ads.
From the site visitor's POW, yes, these (and most) ImageAds are usually/often blockable, after a fashion. Use a real browser (not IE), local proxy and/or the "host" file trick. But that's a bigger fish to fry.
In the US, you do pay sales tax on the lease payment itself (you're buying 1 month of service or use of the vehicle).
The cashflow implications of this tax are one of the pro's of leasing: "buying" you pay all sales tax on the entire purchase price at time 0, while "leasing" you pay k/N sales tax of the entire purchase price spread over time 0 to N, where k is the ratio of residual to purchase price (typ. 0.5-0.8) and N is the number of payments, typically 36-60. The NPV of the sales tax is far less on a lease. This and other factors determine the total NPV of lease vs. buy though.
Hmmm. Like qwerty and car axle widths: just because that's how "people" have always done it? So by that logic I should shut-up-and-be-happy with MS Windows.;-)
Well, at least give an option for the user to decide - I'll take the better UI that aligns with *my* intuition over what's conventional but dissonant any day.
The folks pooh-pooh-ing 7 tuners don't get the use model. Imagine a combo of channel surfing, instant record PVR and pictures-in-picture. I really miss picture-in-picture with my DirecTV Tivo, and even then having only 2 tuners on my TV in the pre-Tivo days was *way too few*. I'd want to be able to mark a set of "surfable channels" as PiP with PVR available to be running on them while I'm surfing on the others.
The other serious flaw with most set-tops and tv channel UIs (Tivo almost gets it right) is not having dynamic filtering and style sheets for the schedule and channels attached to the up/down channel buttons. E.g. there are some channels I absolutely never want: fine I lock them out now. But then there is the gray area which is content dependent: I'm not a big basketball fan so I should be able to make channels disappear completely during the time that basketball is on - if I up-channel through it, it just skips and if I chose it's even gone from the schedule. When other "desired" programming is on those channels re-appear again.
Now combine that kind of "editing/filtering" to 50 tuners with PVR and PiP: now you have television usability!!
A serious, serious bone-head UI gaffe on the DirecTV Tivo: you ascend channels up-screen with the channel up/down buttons but the program guide the channels ascend down-screen! Who was the moron...?! Oh yeah, Huge Air Crash idiots own DirecTV.
It is a good thing. And you're right, there may be a homology in humans. I used to work in biotech, specifically a genomics company, so I'm pretty familiar with how this works.
I also know how little we really understand on genomic-proteomic-metabolic pathways. In most cases the math needed to grok this isn't a common skill in the biological community. An organism's genomic-proteomic-metabolic pathways have similar complexity to the system of operating system, plus firmware/microcode, plus transistor-level circuit, plus process-level (e.g. doping) interactions of a Pentium processor-based computer, though:
the Pentium computer is far more simple than most biological organisms,
we don't yet understand the components, specification languages or algebras/calculi yet. Imagine having only a late 19th century understand of the workings of a modern computer including: programming, os theory, processor architecture, boolean logical/reduction, circuit analysis, Maxwell's equations, device level doping and manufacturing, semiconductor quantum mechanics, etc. but then thinking you grok such a computer well enough to make changes to function to "improve" it; this is where we are today with proteomics and enzyme/protein/substrate circuits and still to a large extent with genomics.
there are as many different biological "processor" types as there are species. Most computer processors have registers and alu's but then it diverges pretty fast, especially if you want to tweak something based on what worked on another architecture. Do a pipeline tweak on a PowerPC that worked on a Pentium and the chances of seeing the desired results are pretty low.
There has been some interesting work but the heavy math and analysis required has only recently become common option for biology degrees, and then only those folks who do bioinformatics are going to have the education for 21st century biology. Biology will soon be part of the engineering school and/or part of the hard sciences like physics. It will not be a major you go into to avoid math like it has in the past.
I'm also remembering how slow and meticulous a process this research is and must be, and how uncertain the end result may be compared to initial hypotheses. Compare this to the scientifically illiterate mass-communication sound bite that type of research gets in the general media, and well, that tends to temper my enthusiasm when I see something like this outside the realm of a journal (my, how academically elitist of me:-) ).
Yes, they have a ton of cash now, but they also have equally enormous revenue growth needs and equally enormous expenses. Plenty of people were multimillionaires on paper during the dot-com boom, but that all went away in just a few years - the "now" then didn't prove much about the "now" now.
You should do some pro forma of Microsoft's future financials based on their own past financials. Account for demographic shifts over the next 10 years (scary for most USians) with the likely effects on the Fortune 1000 (their primary paying customer base), a range of believable Linux adoption rates, trends in outsourcing, Wall Street expectations of growth, available remaining market caps in markets they actually have demonstrated talent any in, effects of corporate inertia/culture, just to name a few.
The net result is that their situation isn't nearly as a rosy as one might presume, even with that cash on hand today. Some of the likely scenarios for the next ten years will eat a lot of cash if they choose to fight for market share and growth rates, i.e. maintain the current Microsoft status quo. They could avoid it certainly if they do most of the "right" things, but chances of a crunch happening are in double digits - not a trivial or near-zero probability.
One of the reasons I'm glad I took corporate finance and accounting!
Slashdot Mirror
Must be a troll. You aren't serious, are you?
Strictly you have a choice to insure or not even when car insurance in "mandated" by law (yes obeying the "Law" is always an explicit choice - perhaps you simply choose to throw that option away even in extreme circumstance). Plenty of people "self-insure" every day by driving without insurance. Exactly like an insurance company, they are banking the savings (revenue as cost reduction) today against the unlikelihood for a future bad event that costs them money (being caught, which has lower costs than one might think). Thus they are like any consumer that seeks what their economic situation demands. The same will be true for health insurance if that ever were mandated also. Both insurance companies and the government are in certain ways limited by this.
For those who proport to hate lawyers, insurance, goverment, businesses and free-markets, etc., what these individuals or groups do is create emergent, collective decision making regarding risks faced by everyone.
One of the infuriating (but structurally essential) aspects is that it is emergent - there is not central control to say: "this is the correct answer, let's move on". That is what makes it adaptive and what assures collectiveness. It is ultimately very democratic in the pure sense that it is always messy, lengthy and involves everyone having some aspect of their desires limited for the equity of the collective. Sort of like open source scaled out to everyday life!
The point of mentioning lead and mercury is that we overlooked the environmental and human health of these infrastructure materials. Nanotechnology is poised to become the next infrastructure technology. We have a track record of overlooking these kinds of risks because of the shorter-term economic benefits.
Communicating communal risk experience to individual members is the entire point of insurance as that is a key element to the hedging decision (decision to buy insurance at all and from whom) of the individual. When you don't communicate that risk is when insurance collapses (e.g. current US health insurance crisis, Asian financial meltdown due to derivatives in the 90s).
Denied claims gives a risk signal/message to insured clients just as well as raising premiums do (call it a second order feedback loop of direct loss instead of a first order loop of fees cost).
In either case, that is the correct economic signal for the client. The latter scenario could have a higher cost, naturally, but it suggests one or both parties seriously underestimated the risk of the insured circumstance (e.g. car insurance, maybe you're too incompetent to be driving at all) or the risk of the insuring/hedging relationship itself (you're penny-wise but pound-foolish in selecting insurance companies). If despite those messages a individual or company keeps doing the same thing, they utterly deserve any cost coming to them.
The latter (claim denial) also is what self-limits how much "obscene profit" they are make - who will hedge with them if they won't pay claims. One could argue that "the poor" (ignoring vagueness of the definition) will be shafted. That is a risk that government should deal with but from what I've seen many people make foolish insurance purchase decisions - i.e. waste money by having unrealistic expectations of what they are hedging for. Hedging is for risk reduction, not for alternatives for routine living cash flow or as a lottery.
E.g. there is absolutely no reason to buy life insurance for children, ever, period. Why? Because life insurance is for evening out cash flow when there is a sudden, unexpected loss of income, and then only until a new status quo is reached (not ever status quo ante!). Thus the only exception might be if you are the parent of Britney Spears and you live off her income! For simple investing, there are always better (ROI) vehicles for future expense investment (college). Similar arguments can be made for health insurance (raise your deductable above your routine cost level but below your exceptional cost level, and voila, affordability is trivial - that necessarily implies you actually budget your routine medical expenses - who's fault is it if you don't budget at all?).
Do insurance misrepresent this proper use? Sure, but it's also partly because they telling us what we want to hear (like any marketer may do) rather than what is right for us.
> saved by nanotechnology, but being an insurance
> company this is not their focus.
Ah, seriously, that's what entrepeneurs and marketing are for.
Indeed. The post-industrial rise in all sorts of "industrial nation" diseases, e.g. cancers, infertility, autism, etc., could very well be tied to something like that.
I don't mind ties much. Despite what anyone might wish for or delude themselves about; people make shallow, subjective judgements about you every single minute of the day. You can fight it (to little avail) or you can make it work for you. A "corporate uniform" if anything insulates you from that. If you are really a strong enough person/personality, doing the suit/tie thing isn't going to compromise you as a person - you know who you are and you don't need someone else's approval for it (rrright?).
Many big companies write bad software, but those companies aren't Microsoft, therefore Microsoft can't write bad code.
I never claimed that Catholicism is the cause of all improverishment and overpopulation in all poor nations (or even only Catholic nations). Thus to trot as a counter-example that because other nations are poor but not Catholic that that proves the church can't be responsible for the ails of a particular Catholic nation is simply inane.
In the Philippines, both the demographics and my personal experience living there suggests there is a connection between church policies on reproduction and economic destitution. There are other factors such as 100 years of US colonialism, natural resources (or lack thereof) and climate, but the Church deserves its equal share because those policies directly contradict the Church's own ethical frameworks, methods and values. And yes I was raised Catholic, went to Jesuit university, etc. etc.
Part of the attractiveness of the Philippines for outsourcing is that there are many tens of thousands of college graduates either unemployeed or underemployed (architects doing ditch-digging, engineers pumping gas, nurses working as secretaries, etc. and even more living with family unable to find work) The literacy rate in the Philippines is nearly the same as the US, probably with a higher per-capita college degree rate.
IMNSHO, much of this is caused by the Catholic Church (yes, I was raised Catholic and attended Catholic grad school) which has prevented meaningful population control (divorce is still illegal but largely ignored via separation as de facto divorce and mistresses/affairs, and until Aquino condoms and birth control were quasi-illegal; previously available due presence of US bases only). The islands have limited natural resources, insufficient for the population levels. The church still routinely tells people every sunday to "go forth and multiply; God will provide". Rubbish unless poverty, early death and misery are what you had in mind for "providing".
The other element is corruption. Even Cory Aquino exempted her own family land holdings when land reform was forced upon all the other major wealthy land owners under her adminstration. The US has just as much corruption only we have institutionalized it as campaign contributions and PACS which helps to limit the scope and obviousness. You are not blatantly asked for bribes trying to get government or commercial services, but the option is available in the US through the right channels.
It's an eye-opening experience to spend time in a developing nation - most our current national (US) stupidity is perpetrated by people who have obviously never done so. Hopefully our Christian Taliban doesn't get the chance to take the US there.
Things can change quickly in the Philippines. The first time I was there in the 1980s, getting a phone on your own home was akin to the Soviet Union - wait until someone died in the neighborhood so your number in wait-list at the PLDT would advance. Then in the 1990s suddenly all my relatives had their own phones (cellular handset or table-top). ATMs and credit cards made a similar leap from unavailability/unusability to proliferation/US-style ease of use.
In the Philippines, it is customary to include on your resume: age, religion, marital status, weight, height, a recent photograph, and if female, "measurements". If you don't, you probably won't be considered. The age of being "past your prime" is about age 25, professionally and maritally. You can be summarily rejected for employment for any of the above parameter values - being muslim as always been a strike against in the Catholic Philippines. Not being of the right sex or not being "pretty enough" to "decorate" the office is pretty common.
I'm sure other countries are similar. USian companies are required to follow the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act; I wonder if it could apply to foreign age discrimination of subcontractors and subsidiaries?
- I've been wearing my tin-foil hat to protect me from space alien abduction for three years
- I haven't been abducted by space aliens in the last three years
- that must prove by tin-foil hat is working to protect me from space aliens
Which, of course, is excrement for logical. Just because I posit a cause is not proof of cause-and-effect. Just because I have no measureable effect is not proof of cause-and-effect.The effectiveness of Patriot I&II is utterly unproven - and there are plenty of documented negative and unintended (or were they?) side effects.
You see it here. You also see it in US foreign policy - Bush, et al., seem to believe it's not possible that terrorism could simply occur out of a Heisenberg-like generation from the world soup of discontent; the fact is, it trivially can!
(The = The (English), El = The (Spanish), Al = The (Arabic)). :-) :-)
Been on DNC since before it's introduction. I still get calls. One tele-droid actually claimed that since my number was chosen at random, it was somehow OK to for them to call and try to sell me something even though I was on DNC! LOL
Anyone with even a passing understanding of sales knows this isn't much better for one's long term economic prospects as it has a direct impact on both your products' marketability (it gives strong incentives for selecting substitutes like DVD or video games or stealth file trading) and on what price prospective buyer are willing to pay (lower, never higher prices! the "baggage" this behavior adds to transaction must be compensated by the seller to compensate for reduced demand).
However the process of buying things isn't simply a digital state either: it's a continuum of phases or states of acquisition. Thus being "customer" or "not a customer" aren't really binary states. When does someone who may have bought a CD legitimately, at any time, sudden cease being a customer?
- When they haven't bought anything for X hours, days, or years?
- When they've broken copyright X times for Y times obeying copyright?
- When they've bought X units of the top 40 vs. X units of something more obscure (more expensive to market and distribute)?
It's pretty obvious that the RIAA and its member companies haven't asked these questions themselves, either operationally or philosophically. Up to the executive suite they don't seem to have even a rudimentary understanding of music, technology or business.From the site visitor's POW, yes, these (and most) ImageAds are usually/often blockable, after a fashion. Use a real browser (not IE), local proxy and/or the "host" file trick. But that's a bigger fish to fry.
The cashflow implications of this tax are one of the pro's of leasing: "buying" you pay all sales tax on the entire purchase price at time 0, while "leasing" you pay k/N sales tax of the entire purchase price spread over time 0 to N, where k is the ratio of residual to purchase price (typ. 0.5-0.8) and N is the number of payments, typically 36-60. The NPV of the sales tax is far less on a lease. This and other factors determine the total NPV of lease vs. buy though.
Didn't see this link but it's excellent: http://linux-sound.org/
Well, at least give an option for the user to decide - I'll take the better UI that aligns with *my* intuition over what's conventional but dissonant any day.
The other serious flaw with most set-tops and tv channel UIs (Tivo almost gets it right) is not having dynamic filtering and style sheets for the schedule and channels attached to the up/down channel buttons. E.g. there are some channels I absolutely never want: fine I lock them out now. But then there is the gray area which is content dependent: I'm not a big basketball fan so I should be able to make channels disappear completely during the time that basketball is on - if I up-channel through it, it just skips and if I chose it's even gone from the schedule. When other "desired" programming is on those channels re-appear again.
Now combine that kind of "editing/filtering" to 50 tuners with PVR and PiP: now you have television usability!!
A serious, serious bone-head UI gaffe on the DirecTV Tivo: you ascend channels up-screen with the channel up/down buttons but the program guide the channels ascend down-screen! Who was the moron...?! Oh yeah, Huge Air Crash idiots own DirecTV.
I also know how little we really understand on genomic-proteomic-metabolic pathways. In most cases the math needed to grok this isn't a common skill in the biological community. An organism's genomic-proteomic-metabolic pathways have similar complexity to the system of operating system, plus firmware/microcode, plus transistor-level circuit, plus process-level (e.g. doping) interactions of a Pentium processor-based computer, though:
There has been some interesting work but the heavy math and analysis required has only recently become common option for biology degrees, and then only those folks who do bioinformatics are going to have the education for 21st century biology. Biology will soon be part of the engineering school and/or part of the hard sciences like physics. It will not be a major you go into to avoid math like it has in the past.
I'm also remembering how slow and meticulous a process this research is and must be, and how uncertain the end result may be compared to initial hypotheses. Compare this to the scientifically illiterate mass-communication sound bite that type of research gets in the general media, and well, that tends to temper my enthusiasm when I see something like this outside the realm of a journal (my, how academically elitist of me :-) ).
Should have included this Slashdot post - it's just part of what I'm talking about: MS Sales Growth Limited by Delays in Windows.
You should do some pro forma of Microsoft's future financials based on their own past financials. Account for demographic shifts over the next 10 years (scary for most USians) with the likely effects on the Fortune 1000 (their primary paying customer base), a range of believable Linux adoption rates, trends in outsourcing, Wall Street expectations of growth, available remaining market caps in markets they actually have demonstrated talent any in, effects of corporate inertia/culture, just to name a few.
The net result is that their situation isn't nearly as a rosy as one might presume, even with that cash on hand today. Some of the likely scenarios for the next ten years will eat a lot of cash if they choose to fight for market share and growth rates, i.e. maintain the current Microsoft status quo. They could avoid it certainly if they do most of the "right" things, but chances of a crunch happening are in double digits - not a trivial or near-zero probability.
One of the reasons I'm glad I took corporate finance and accounting!