It's not just the Internet. Just the other day I was trying to read some cooking instructions. They were printed in something like 4 point type in white on gold, on a plastic bag. My 14 year old daughter could read them, but I could not. (Disclaimer - I am 60 and have triple focus implanted lenses in my eyes, but still have trouble reading in poor light).
And this perpetual dark grey on light grey tiny font stuff - if you want me to use your site, I'd better be able to read it!
So get off that green stuff (I think it's a lawn).
Maybe the USA should tax guns, better yet, a license fee, like for dogs. How about $100 dollars per year for each gun-related death that year? No, what the heck, let's make it $1. That would be, let me see, about $800 per year.
Thee are about 300 million guns in the USA, so about 800 * 300 million, that's 2.4 billion dollars per year. That would help the budget.
I'm sure the NRA would approve, after all, it only seems fair. Guns should pay for the damage they do, like cigarettes pay for cancer treatments, or cars for road repairs.
If you are going to quote great people from my (ex)home country, please get it right...
"There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." Oscar Wilde
Maybe this is what our non-friend Trump, serial liar, murderer of language, is going for. He is certainly getting talked about. It saddens me that the great country of USA, 350 million people or so, can only come up with Trump and Hillary. I mean really, is that the best you can do?
You have astonishing folk - Elon Musk, Bernie Sanders even, Bill Gates (maybe), Steve Jobs,Susan B. Anthony, Washington, Nader, Fermi - the list is long and impressive (ok, I admit most of those are dead, history is a bit like that).
The catastrophic error IBM made while building OS/2 was not aiming at the 386 chip. Instead they targeted the 80286. Had they started off aiming at a chip with decent memory handling, it would have been far more effective.
But still, big companies had a terrible record of not grasping the PC nettle.
The "best chance ignored award" definitely goes to DEC, who at the appropriate time (first released 1972) had a brilliant multi tasking, time sharing, system for 16 bit computers called RSX-11. They could not bring themselves to sell it for a sensible price, and completely missed the boat. Sad, as it was a vastly better system than DOS, CP/M, etc.
>> in ten years there will be a number of people who will never open the hood, will not check the air pressure themselves
I am the only one in my family to ever open out car's bonnet (ok, you can say "hood" if you like), or check the tyres. (I added a little gadget on each wheel that flashes when pressure is low - and they tell me it's flashing. As opposed to actually doing anything about it).
Mind you, come to that, none of the other family members (yup, all female) have ever changed a fuse, wired a plug, changed a washer in a tap, or even flipped a circuit breaker. I think the lawn has been mowed once by someone other than me or a gardener. Correspondingly, I am expected to - and can - cook, clean, change nappies, calm babies, the list is quite long. And of course I also get to work longer, retire later, die earlier, and am expected to do all the dangerous jobs, go to war and die for my family.
So how's equality of the sexes working out for you, eh?
I signed - complete with sarcastic message. Foolish, I guess, as republicans has zero knowledge of sarcasm. Or statistics Or history. Or any other parts of the world. As far as I can tell (ie - "Despite the fact that reducing guns has reduced gun death everywhere it's been implemented, it wouldn't work here in the good old USA". I'm pretty sure that's not actually a quote, it shows awareness of other parts of the world, after all).
I especially love the line suggesting it's actually dangerous to NOT have people armed and will attract, y'know terrorists. That's priceless. (As a matter of interest, are there any cases of people actually resisting terrorists successfully with their guns, or even burglars come to that, where they have NOT managed to shoot themselves or their families? I'd love to see some statistics).
Back to the convention... Maybe they could take their kids, give them guns too, and everybody could shoot everybody else. Just like last week.
Oh look, another mass shooting... move along, nothing to see here...
It's hard to imagine the masculinity of the majority of researchers does not affect their research. The background of people always affects their outlook on life, so it's pretty likely something as fundamental as gender will too.
Historically, a lot of science has centred on conflict, and perhaps a little more female input would see more cooperation and manipulation in their subjects.
It's very probable a more even gender balance would result in more balanced science.
That would be good.
But feminist geology, loaded with anti masculine propaganda? Really? That doesn't sound too balanced.
Come back Marie Curie, we need you. (Also Rachel Carson, Ada Lovelace, Chien-Shiung Wu, Grace Hopper...)
To heck with pickups. What the world needs is decently driven trucks. Actual tractor trailer rigs (variously called 18 wheelers, articulated lorries, semis, big rigs) that move product around the country. In big countries, Australia, USA, Canada, Russia, not mention Europe, there are long distances to be covered by said trucks. They are currently driven by often exhausted, sometimes drugged, human drivers. Most of the travelling is not challenging - freeways and the like. The rigs are seriously expensive, and having them sitting about while the driver sleeps is a waste of investment (and slows delivery). Replace the driver with a machine and it'll drive for 24 hours per day. A halfway mode is possible - with a fairly standardised route, the driver could sleep in the back of the cab, and get called to duty for the tricky bits - cities, loading/unloading. Result - better use of investment, faster delivery, safer roads. So how about it Tesla... or Scania, Volvo... [insert list of manufacturers here]?
>> What services are Apple not paying for already?
Overseas, Apple go to extreme lengths to conceal the profits made in that country (see "transfer pricing"). This means they pay astonishingly little tax in said foreign countries, eg Australia. It seems fair to me that where profits are made in a country, which depend on the infrastructure of that country, those profits should pay tax there.
Imagine you live/work in - say - Belgium, and earn money there. You live there, you enjoy the benefits of Belgium's infrastructure. Does it seem fair to pay taxes in a country with low taxes and less infrastructure such as, say, Liberia? To me it sounds like tax dodging. Why is a company any different?
It's true that Apple pay a lot of tax in USA. But compared to their profits it is probably quite low compared with the taxes you presumably pay on income. (I'm assuming you are American as you don't seem too interested in taxes anywhere else). USA has an odd (possibly unique) scheme whereby any repatriated overseas profits are still due to pay US tax, less any overseas taxes paid. But as they pay very low overseas taxes, despite earning their profits in similar taxing countries, so they are unable to repatriate said profits. Hmm, could that possibly mean they have manipulated their accounts to do that? Surely not...
So, basically, Tim Cook is taking complete rubbish.
Apple - pay your taxes!
Ditto all other corporations, eg Google, and probably every other big multinational.
>> Why should Apple or any other corporation get all the benefits of a developed nation including limited liability and patents when they're doing their level best to avoid paying for those benefits? If they want to play these tax avoidance games they should have those benefits withdrawn
Absolutely. I think most people agree (especially Bostonians) "No taxation without representation"... well, no benefits without paying taxes, I say. Trade in a country, pay tax in that country on your trade.
But on the other hand, the USA policy of taxing any repatriated profits at the US rate is stupid. It means a company cannot compete with local corporations without cheating. So guess what - they cheat.
And having discovered cheating, gosh. they do it for everything. Great.
No they do not pay taxes where they earn the profits. They cheat by transferring the profits to countries with low taxes. It's disgusting behaviour. Look up transfer pricing and weep,
It would be nice if corporations actually paid tax in the country where they actually earned the money. Apple, like other giant corporates, earns billions in Australia and pays bugger all tax, carefully moving the "profit" to other low tax countries. If the richest company in the world paid its taxes like good citizen, as I do, the world would be a better place.
Someone once said "I lik paying taxes. With taxes I buy - civilisation".
Oh so true. I have worked with various banks, and that is precisely what happens.
Especially the part about "kill off internal knowledgeable staff, so changing back is impossible".
It seems absurd, but I have seen interviews for "new' external outsourced folk actually occurring over Skype with a second person sitting next to the interviewee audibly whispering answers to questions. I have tried to take part in "meeting" which appear to be in an outdoor market in India, complete with market sellers yelling in the background. Not to mention the language challenges.
Some of this would be fine, if it is a lot cheaper. But it's not. Certainly in a bank where I recently worked, the internal charge rate for on offshore contractor was pretty close to an onshore one. This is surely insane.
The overhead for the translation process (the banks internal standards to the outsource group's standard) was ridiculous - and charged to the customer.
And amusingly, the outsource group considered its staff completely replaceable. "Suresh is away [has left], Jael will be doing it", er no he won't, at least not efficiently, certainly not for a while.
I have yet to have a good experience with outsourcing.
Mind you, I'm outsourcing to a London group at the moment, from Sydney, so I guess I should not be so critical. (Of course I do actually follow their standards, speak the same language, and I'm cheaper than a local Londoner).
In 1981 I sailed a small boat across the Atlantic (30' cat, took 22 days). GPS (civilian) did not exist [1996 was when it became useful and accurate], we used the sun, tables, and a sextant. I only shot the sun, not stars. Sight reduction is tedious, but not too bad with tables and perhaps a calculator. I used an HP41c - wonderful gadget. Even with a calculator, it is not especially quick, and what you get is a position line (LOP) [actually a large circle mapped onto the earth surface corresponding to a constant angle between the sun and the horizon, but it appears as a straight line 'coz it's big]. You have to shoot the sun again in few hours, and you get crossing lines, which have to be adjusted by your speed and direction. At night, you can shoot stars, but it's hard and I never did it. The ocean is big, and pretty empty, after all. But no matter what you do, you won't get a position much more accurate than a nautical mile. Maybe you can do better on a more stable large ship.
So not instantaneous, not terribly accurate, and kinda tough if the conditions are rough. Which they often are.
And you get no position if it's cloudy.
But the sun has one major advantage over GPS. It's really, really hard to turn off (and if someone did, I think there might be other problems).
Later in life (at 50, actually, and yes, I still cut code 10 years after that), I took up figure skating as a hobby. (Warning, it's a) addictive, and b) very tough, oh, and c) quite dangerous... and expensive). Yes, it's well and truly dominated by females.
So, anyway, I was at the National Championships, at the after competition ball. Another chap and I looked out over the sea of fit, healthy femalehood, and he commented - "To think I spent most of teenage years with my head stuck up another blokes bum playing rugby. What was I thinking?"
This made me wonder why I spent some of my younger years on model railways - and why more females did not. It's surely a heck of a way to meet guys...
So, good advice to younger male chaps, seeking to meet girls. Take up figure skating. And, good advice to younger female chapesses, seeking to meet guys. Take up railway modelling.
In a couple of major companies where I worked, I archived all my code before leaving, burned them to CDs, and gave two copies to my manager. And I kept a copy for me. I copied them on my home discs, automatically backed up, and left them there. In both case, the companies lost the copies, and came back to me offering money - years later. And yes, I took it!
It's a sensible idea to have offsite backups - and taking copies home is a good way to do that. Could be illegal, theoretically, but really, what would you do with this specialised stuff? But it certainly is useful to the original company.
So take copies of all the emails, and leave good contact details with your manager, their manager, and if possible for your replacement, and offer a support rate of - say - double your current rate (don't mention that to your replacement). Make it a daily rate, not hourly.
You know, if these companies were good corporate citizens, and paid their fair share of taxes, then I'd certainly feel they have a right to comment on the disposition of said taxes.
Pro boy bias - you are kidding me, right? In the primary school where my two (female) children attended, it was dominated totally by female teachers. It's hard to imagine there is bias in favour of the opposite sex to the teacher, surely? Indeed, given the current climate, teaching is not a profession I think males enter without considerable trepidation.
Maybe we need to address some biases in the system?
Males are different to females. They mature differently, learn differently, and socialise differently. Their brains are slightly different. It's not too surprising that they end up being good at different things. Males seem to excel in tasks involving engineering (have you noticed that males end up doing all the "fixes" around the home/car, despite all this claimed "equality?), and females seem to excel in organisational and social tasks. There are always outliers in any such generalisations, and that's fabulous. But I am tired of bias claims where it's clearly not so - if girls or boys want to study subjects, nothing is stopping them that I can see. (Though I suspect boys get a harder time if they like ballet, than girls do if they like woodwork).
It's interesting to consider how good girls must be if they are suffering such bias - after all, they already outperform boys at school. Imagine how great they'd be if the school system was not based against them.
Or maybe the school system is actually biased against boys.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just the Internet. Just the other day I was trying to read some cooking instructions. They were printed in something like 4 point type in white on gold, on a plastic bag. My 14 year old daughter could read them, but I could not. (Disclaimer - I am 60 and have triple focus implanted lenses in my eyes, but still have trouble reading in poor light).
And this perpetual dark grey on light grey tiny font stuff - if you want me to use your site, I'd better be able to read it!
So get off that green stuff (I think it's a lawn).
Maybe the USA should tax guns, better yet, a license fee, like for dogs. How about $100 dollars per year for each gun-related death that year?
No, what the heck, let's make it $1. That would be, let me see, about $800 per year.
Thee are about 300 million guns in the USA, so about 800 * 300 million, that's 2.4 billion dollars per year. That would help the budget.
I'm sure the NRA would approve, after all, it only seems fair. Guns should pay for the damage they do, like cigarettes pay for cancer treatments, or cars for road repairs.
If you are going to quote great people from my (ex)home country, please get it right ...
"There is only one thing in life worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about." Oscar Wilde
Maybe this is what our non-friend Trump, serial liar, murderer of language, is going for. He is certainly getting talked about. It saddens me that the great country of USA, 350 million people or so, can only come up with Trump and Hillary. I mean really, is that the best you can do?
You have astonishing folk - Elon Musk, Bernie Sanders even, Bill Gates (maybe), Steve Jobs,Susan B. Anthony, Washington, Nader, Fermi - the list is long and impressive (ok, I admit most of those are dead, history is a bit like that).
America, you need to do better!
What? You have a special pigsty to fart in? - Americans think of everything, I'm impressed.
But once they have stolen it they then have - a Jeep.
What are they going to do with it? Surely nobody sane actually buys those things?
No, wait. There are apparently people in that country that actually plan to vote for a orange flavoured lunatic.
Forget what I said.
I propose planting Kim Jong-un on the moon.
The catastrophic error IBM made while building OS/2 was not aiming at the 386 chip. Instead they targeted the 80286.
Had they started off aiming at a chip with decent memory handling, it would have been far more effective.
But still, big companies had a terrible record of not grasping the PC nettle.
The "best chance ignored award" definitely goes to DEC, who at the appropriate time (first released 1972) had a brilliant multi tasking, time sharing, system for 16 bit computers called RSX-11. They could not bring themselves to sell it for a sensible price, and completely missed the boat.
Sad, as it was a vastly better system than DOS, CP/M, etc.
And now they are gone.
>> in ten years there will be a number of people who will never open the hood, will not check the air pressure themselves
I am the only one in my family to ever open out car's bonnet (ok, you can say "hood" if you like), or check the tyres. (I added a little gadget on each wheel that flashes when pressure is low - and they tell me it's flashing. As opposed to actually doing anything about it).
Mind you, come to that, none of the other family members (yup, all female) have ever changed a fuse, wired a plug, changed a washer in a tap, or even flipped a circuit breaker. I think the lawn has been mowed once by someone other than me or a gardener.
Correspondingly, I am expected to - and can - cook, clean, change nappies, calm babies, the list is quite long.
And of course I also get to work longer, retire later, die earlier, and am expected to do all the dangerous jobs, go to war and die for my family.
So how's equality of the sexes working out for you, eh?
I signed - complete with sarcastic message.
Foolish, I guess, as republicans has zero knowledge of sarcasm. Or statistics Or history. Or any other parts of the world. As far as I can tell (ie - "Despite the fact that reducing guns has reduced gun death everywhere it's been implemented, it wouldn't work here in the good old USA". I'm pretty sure that's not actually a quote, it shows awareness of other parts of the world, after all).
I especially love the line suggesting it's actually dangerous to NOT have people armed and will attract, y'know terrorists. That's priceless. (As a matter of interest, are there any cases of people actually resisting terrorists successfully with their guns, or even burglars come to that, where they have NOT managed to shoot themselves or their families? I'd love to see some statistics).
Back to the convention ...
Maybe they could take their kids, give them guns too, and everybody could shoot everybody else.
Just like last week.
Oh look, another mass shooting ... move along, nothing to see here ...
It's hard to imagine the masculinity of the majority of researchers does not affect their research. The background of people always affects their outlook on life, so it's pretty likely something as fundamental as gender will too.
Historically, a lot of science has centred on conflict, and perhaps a little more female input would see more cooperation and manipulation in their subjects.
It's very probable a more even gender balance would result in more balanced science.
That would be good.
But feminist geology, loaded with anti masculine propaganda? Really? That doesn't sound too balanced.
Come back Marie Curie, we need you. (Also Rachel Carson, Ada Lovelace, Chien-Shiung Wu, Grace Hopper ...)
360kb, takes me back to, oh, 1976?
Oh, 360TB.
Sorry.
So the price of a cellphone drops by 400% ... twice!
I think your maths teaching must have been outsourced.
To heck with pickups. What the world needs is decently driven trucks. Actual tractor trailer rigs (variously called 18 wheelers, articulated lorries, semis, big rigs) that move product around the country. ... or Scania, Volvo ... [insert list of manufacturers here]?
In big countries, Australia, USA, Canada, Russia, not mention Europe, there are long distances to be covered by said trucks. They are currently driven by often exhausted, sometimes drugged, human drivers. Most of the travelling is not challenging - freeways and the like.
The rigs are seriously expensive, and having them sitting about while the driver sleeps is a waste of investment (and slows delivery). Replace the driver with a machine and it'll drive for 24 hours per day.
A halfway mode is possible - with a fairly standardised route, the driver could sleep in the back of the cab, and get called to duty for the tricky bits - cities, loading/unloading.
Result - better use of investment, faster delivery, safer roads.
So how about it Tesla
>> What services are Apple not paying for already?
Overseas, Apple go to extreme lengths to conceal the profits made in that country (see "transfer pricing"). This means they pay astonishingly little tax in said foreign countries, eg Australia.
It seems fair to me that where profits are made in a country, which depend on the infrastructure of that country, those profits should pay tax there.
Imagine you live/work in - say - Belgium, and earn money there. You live there, you enjoy the benefits of Belgium's infrastructure. Does it seem fair to pay taxes in a country with low taxes and less infrastructure such as, say, Liberia? To me it sounds like tax dodging.
Why is a company any different?
It's true that Apple pay a lot of tax in USA. But compared to their profits it is probably quite low compared with the taxes you presumably pay on income. (I'm assuming you are American as you don't seem too interested in taxes anywhere else). ...
USA has an odd (possibly unique) scheme whereby any repatriated overseas profits are still due to pay US tax, less any overseas taxes paid. But as they pay very low overseas taxes, despite earning their profits in similar taxing countries, so they are unable to repatriate said profits. Hmm, could that possibly mean they have manipulated their accounts to do that? Surely not
So, basically, Tim Cook is taking complete rubbish.
Apple - pay your taxes!
Ditto all other corporations, eg Google, and probably every other big multinational.
>> Why should Apple or any other corporation get all the benefits of a developed nation including limited liability and patents when they're doing their level best to avoid paying for those benefits? If they want to play these tax avoidance games they should have those benefits withdrawn
Absolutely. ... well, no benefits without paying taxes, I say.
I think most people agree (especially Bostonians) "No taxation without representation"
Trade in a country, pay tax in that country on your trade.
But on the other hand, the USA policy of taxing any repatriated profits at the US rate is stupid. It means a company cannot compete with local corporations without cheating.
So guess what - they cheat.
And having discovered cheating, gosh. they do it for everything. Great.
No they do not pay taxes where they earn the profits.
They cheat by transferring the profits to countries with low taxes. It's disgusting behaviour.
Look up transfer pricing and weep,
It would be nice if corporations actually paid tax in the country where they actually earned the money. Apple, like other giant corporates, earns billions in Australia and pays bugger all tax, carefully moving the "profit" to other low tax countries.
If the richest company in the world paid its taxes like good citizen, as I do, the world would be a better place.
Someone once said "I lik paying taxes. With taxes I buy - civilisation".
Well, if you want civilisation - pay your taxes!
If a company buys a startup, there are two possible reasons.
It wants to sit on the startup and hang on to the current business model.
Or
It's looking for a new business model.
Might we hope for the latter option?
Oh so true. I have worked with various banks, and that is precisely what happens.
Especially the part about "kill off internal knowledgeable staff, so changing back is impossible".
It seems absurd, but I have seen interviews for "new' external outsourced folk actually occurring over Skype with a second person sitting next to the interviewee audibly whispering answers to questions.
I have tried to take part in "meeting" which appear to be in an outdoor market in India, complete with market sellers yelling in the background.
Not to mention the language challenges.
Some of this would be fine, if it is a lot cheaper.
But it's not. Certainly in a bank where I recently worked, the internal charge rate for on offshore contractor was pretty close to an onshore one. This is surely insane.
The overhead for the translation process (the banks internal standards to the outsource group's standard) was ridiculous - and charged to the customer.
And amusingly, the outsource group considered its staff completely replaceable. "Suresh is away [has left], Jael will be doing it", er no he won't, at least not efficiently, certainly not for a while.
I have yet to have a good experience with outsourcing.
Mind you, I'm outsourcing to a London group at the moment, from Sydney, so I guess I should not be so critical. (Of course I do actually follow their standards, speak the same language, and I'm cheaper than a local Londoner).
In 1981 I sailed a small boat across the Atlantic (30' cat, took 22 days). GPS (civilian) did not exist [1996 was when it became useful and accurate], we used the sun, tables, and a sextant. I only shot the sun, not stars. Sight reduction is tedious, but not too bad with tables and perhaps a calculator. I used an HP41c - wonderful gadget.
Even with a calculator, it is not especially quick, and what you get is a position line (LOP) [actually a large circle mapped onto the earth surface corresponding to a constant angle between the sun and the horizon, but it appears as a straight line 'coz it's big]. You have to shoot the sun again in few hours, and you get crossing lines, which have to be adjusted by your speed and direction.
At night, you can shoot stars, but it's hard and I never did it. The ocean is big, and pretty empty, after all. But no matter what you do, you won't get a position much more accurate than a nautical mile. Maybe you can do better on a more stable large ship.
So not instantaneous, not terribly accurate, and kinda tough if the conditions are rough. Which they often are.
And you get no position if it's cloudy.
But the sun has one major advantage over GPS.
It's really, really hard to turn off (and if someone did, I think there might be other problems).
Later in life (at 50, actually, and yes, I still cut code 10 years after that), I took up figure skating as a hobby. (Warning, it's a) addictive, and b) very tough, oh, and c) quite dangerous ... and expensive).
Yes, it's well and truly dominated by females.
So, anyway, I was at the National Championships, at the after competition ball. Another chap and I looked out over the sea of fit, healthy femalehood, and he commented - "To think I spent most of teenage years with my head stuck up another blokes bum playing rugby. What was I thinking?"
This made me wonder why I spent some of my younger years on model railways - and why more females did not. It's surely a heck of a way to meet guys ...
So, good advice to younger male chaps, seeking to meet girls. Take up figure skating.
And, good advice to younger female chapesses, seeking to meet guys. Take up railway modelling.
>> It's a hard way to learn a lesson like this.
I don't think he learned the lesson.
But we did.
In a couple of major companies where I worked, I archived all my code before leaving, burned them to CDs, and gave two copies to my manager. And I kept a copy for me. I copied them on my home discs, automatically backed up, and left them there.
In both case, the companies lost the copies, and came back to me offering money - years later. And yes, I took it!
It's a sensible idea to have offsite backups - and taking copies home is a good way to do that. Could be illegal, theoretically, but really, what would you do with this specialised stuff? But it certainly is useful to the original company.
So take copies of all the emails, and leave good contact details with your manager, their manager, and if possible for your replacement, and offer a support rate of - say - double your current rate (don't mention that to your replacement). Make it a daily rate, not hourly.
You know, if these companies were good corporate citizens, and paid their fair share of taxes, then I'd certainly feel they have a right to comment on the disposition of said taxes.
But they don't do they?
Pro boy bias - you are kidding me, right?
In the primary school where my two (female) children attended, it was dominated totally by female teachers.
It's hard to imagine there is bias in favour of the opposite sex to the teacher, surely? Indeed, given the current climate, teaching is not a profession I think males enter without considerable trepidation.
Maybe we need to address some biases in the system?
Males are different to females. They mature differently, learn differently, and socialise differently. Their brains are slightly different. It's not too surprising that they end up being good at different things. Males seem to excel in tasks involving engineering (have you noticed that males end up doing all the "fixes" around the home/car, despite all this claimed "equality?), and females seem to excel in organisational and social tasks. There are always outliers in any such generalisations, and that's fabulous. But I am tired of bias claims where it's clearly not so - if girls or boys want to study subjects, nothing is stopping them that I can see. (Though I suspect boys get a harder time if they like ballet, than girls do if they like woodwork).
It's interesting to consider how good girls must be if they are suffering such bias - after all, they already outperform boys at school. Imagine how great they'd be if the school system was not based against them.
Or maybe the school system is actually biased against boys.