Personally I think it was inevitable they'd be crushed eventually. I have sympathy, having lived in Utah at the time when Novell and Wordperfect were doing really well there, and it appeared we might be a real player. But the market grew and they were crushed. As industries mature, only 1 or 2 behemoths survive. The odds of any particular company making it, even if they get off to a good start, are slim.
Your talking about an organization (the US government) which is consuming nearly 25% of the GDP of the richest country on Earth that cannot balance its books.
The bulk of that money is not "consumed," it is simply paid back out to pensioners, as you said, and other people who return it to the economy almost immediately.
Historically we take in between 18 and 20% of the GDP with the spending close to that, yet now we are at less than 19% because of the weak economy and nearly 25% out because of reckless spending (keynesian fixes that don't work).
That's it, it "didn't work"? Tens of thousands of people, including many state and local employees, have been working at jobs and providing value to the economy instead of sitting home watching the clock due to that expenditure. That is undeniable. No, that doesn't prove government is efficient. Admittedly it doesn't even prove the stimulus spending was worth what it cost - which is largely subjective. But to simply write it off as a completely ineffective waste of money is simply not the case. I'm afraid we're about to find how much worse it could be without the government keeping money changing hands - right back into the Hoover years of the Great Depression.
And even this is ignoring the reality that most federal dollars are spent on contractors instead of direct federal employees. Why? So those workers can be more easily fired, laid off, pay cut, whatever you wish to call it, simply by re-negotiating or not renewing a contract if it's not going well. Many (most?) federal government employee jobs are essentially just managing contractors. So, what percentage of managers are fired or laid off from the average corporation in a year? Many of the 3% of the private workforce that gets fired each year is dope-smoking kids with poor attendance at their fast-food jobs. There simply aren't any federal jobs at that level.
It is the summary, not the story, that inserted the word "mercenary" into the discussion. A discussion revolving around that word won't be very useful unless we at least define it.
I don't think Blackwater (Xe) counts as a mercenary force, because, although they fight for profit, they do not remain neutral politically and simply fight for whatever side pays the best. (Please correct me if there are solid examples to the contrary). Mainly, the move towards contractors such as Xe boils down to an end-run around paying expensive military benefits (retirement and healthcare) to veterans. (Although I have little doubt Blackwater's former employees will end up suing Blackwater and the government for these benefits eventually - "we were right there, fighting along other US forces...").
Similarly, I can see the US government relying more on contractors for Cyberdefense, but not simply posting "hit jobs" on an anonymous bulletin board with a specified payout (which would truly be mercenary).
So you approve of an unfair society where people are given things that they did not earn by having it forcefully taken from someone who did earn it?
There is no magic, infallible formula handed down from god to give the One True answer as to who "earned" what (though some answers are much more reasonable than others). NOTHING is made by an individual without building on contributions of countless other people both past and present. Not even a thought or a sentence. Thus who "earned" what equates to an argument about who deserves how much credit. Thus, for example, the inescapable complexity of property law (including all of corporate law, intellectual property law, contracts, bankruptcy, taxation) and endless arguments (lawsuits) about it.
Pure capitalism and pure communism both lead to obviously bad solutions, so we muddle along with a messy mix of both and argue a lot about moving a little either way. But any reasonable mix is far better than either extreme.
Well, sometimes. Think of LA's smog problem, or the depletion of the ozone layer due to CFC's - dilution wasn't working too well. Putting laws on the books helped a lot though.
Another example is heavy metals put into the air by coal burning. It was diluted in the ground before, it's diluted in the air now. One is a lot better than the other.
Actually no math is necessary - all people need to know is that during "rolldown week," the expected return of playing the game is positive. This is just as true for people who spend $3 as for people who spend $300,000. So I think it is debatable whether this is "broken" at all. It's probably not something a private company would do; then again they might have loss leaders sometimes.
Virtualization is very inefficient compared to simply running multiple server processes on a single box, because each VM allocates resources to an instance of the OS, and RAM is more-or-less statically allocated beetween them. This makes sense when running several different services that each require a different operating environment, or to enforce complete user separation, e.g. a hosting service. But I would imagine google is running tens of thousands of identical servers running the same server daemon, so why would Virtualization make sense and save energy there?
I'll give you a little dirt on solar panels too - they cast shadows, robbing whatever is in their shadow of its rightful electromagnetic energy! Same thing, different part of the spectrum.
You chose to buy expendable consumer goods for good prices and you got what you got.
Foxconn makes Apple stuff. Apple is sitting on $76 billion in cash. And yet you assume people will get what they pay for, as if companies would necessarily plough revenue into improving quality rather than simply bagging bigger profits?
On the other hand, my house was robbed earlier this year while I was on vacation, so the only apparent difference is this woman got some rent money:)
But seriously, unless your home is a prison, there is really nothing to stop people from coming in if that's what they want to do - other than the fear of getting caught, which is greater if you've made a reservation with airbnb.
I agree HFT is rubbish, but where do you see justification for long-term investment in capital goods in the US? It seems that industry is being moved to where it can be operated more cheaply - there is no economic justification for more investment here. In fact there's a surplus of "capital," at lest in the sense of invested money seeking good returns. (Overall the S&P has returned almost exactly 0% over the last 10 years.) So we keep getting bubbles due to over-investment, first in.com, then housing... what is the "next big thing" where we could invest to bring real growth?
Re:Determining the quota
on
Beyond HDTV
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· Score: 1
We'll just have to see if any of that remains an issue. People are worrying about quotas, but the total bandwidth used every year continues to grow by leaps and bounds. If that trend continues for another few years, the infrastructure will catch up to the demand and the quotas will go away, or at least be ample for watching TV. I'm sure that will happen, it's just a matter of time. Even if providers decided to halt progress, they wouldn't be able to keep a lid on it for long.
Re:Cellphone connected to projector
on
Beyond HDTV
·
· Score: 1
My vote would be for the smartphone to be smart enough to determine the capacity of its bandwidth and display and to adjust itself accordingly. Subject to user override, of course.
Re:Joe Sixpack isn't even using his 1080p right
on
Beyond HDTV
·
· Score: 1
This thread is missing the point - we don't need to worry about the "average joe" any more because on-demand viewing can be tailored to whomever is watching. Once you stop broadcasting and start unicasting, it would be absurd to send an 8 megapixel video stream to a cellphone for viewing. But somebody with a nice projection system (a few years down the road) might well be willing to pay extra for it. There will be little if any reason not to produce at high resolution and then downscale as necessary.
As for "it's all advertising," give me a break. Sports and nature shows, in particular, really do look fantastically better on hdtv's than on the NTSC tubes of yesteryear. I know we look down on the common man and all that, but there are limits even to that.
Re:How Good is "Good Enough?"
on
Beyond HDTV
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· Score: 1
It all depends on the picture size. We simply don't expect TVs to fill our field of vision, only because it has never been practical to do so. If it were practical, I'm sure lots of people would like to have wall-sized "retinal" displays. I would, why not?
Also, if these things could be designed to require fairly low heat, then I imagine they could be used in basically any everyday device, generating low power from room-temperature heat.
According to the article:
a slab of tungsten, engineering billions of tiny pits on its surface. When the slab heats up, it generates bright light with an altered emission spectrum because each pit acts as a resonator, capable of giving off radiation at only certain wavelengths.
Is that black body radiation?
Radiating visible light requires a high temperature (a hunk of tungsten doesn't glow at room temp), but maybe you can emit other frequencies at lower temperatures?
Did he say, "it is worthless" (as you quoted), or "it will always been worthless and should not be pursued further" (as you interpreted him saying?)
Aviation was worthless as an instrument of war in 1911.
Anyways, I don't know what that has to do with computer security. I don't know any organization the size of DoD that does it as well.
It will also force me to buy a new car, which sucks because my current car is awesome and will last another 20 years at least...
I don't want to shell out that kind of cash when I have a perfectly good car already.
What? No, they would never do that. I'm sure this will only affect new cars.
Maybe you could, you know, let people buy the vehicles they want to buy and then if gas is expensive most won't buy gas guzzlers?
Gasoline is a limited natural resource, so people who use a lot drive up the price for everybody else. This efficiency standard will do far more to relieve gas prices than drilling in ANWR ever would.
there's no way you can assert that either CO2 concentration changes or temperature changes over the last few decades are unprecedented - there are certainly similar rates observed, in the historical record, just within the past 150 years, well before the industrial revolution.
That all being said, what observations of CO2 and temperature over the next few decades would you consider a falsification of your hypothesis?
If CO2 concentration continues to increase (as I'm sure it will) but the warming trend reversed itself, that would falsify the idea of CO2 as an overriding contributor to global warming.
Slashdot Mirror
Personally I think it was inevitable they'd be crushed eventually. I have sympathy, having lived in Utah at the time when Novell and Wordperfect were doing really well there, and it appeared we might be a real player. But the market grew and they were crushed. As industries mature, only 1 or 2 behemoths survive. The odds of any particular company making it, even if they get off to a good start, are slim.
The bulk of that money is not "consumed," it is simply paid back out to pensioners, as you said, and other people who return it to the economy almost immediately.
That's it, it "didn't work"? Tens of thousands of people, including many state and local employees, have been working at jobs and providing value to the economy instead of sitting home watching the clock due to that expenditure. That is undeniable. No, that doesn't prove government is efficient. Admittedly it doesn't even prove the stimulus spending was worth what it cost - which is largely subjective. But to simply write it off as a completely ineffective waste of money is simply not the case. I'm afraid we're about to find how much worse it could be without the government keeping money changing hands - right back into the Hoover years of the Great Depression.
And even this is ignoring the reality that most federal dollars are spent on contractors instead of direct federal employees. Why? So those workers can be more easily fired, laid off, pay cut, whatever you wish to call it, simply by re-negotiating or not renewing a contract if it's not going well. Many (most?) federal government employee jobs are essentially just managing contractors. So, what percentage of managers are fired or laid off from the average corporation in a year? Many of the 3% of the private workforce that gets fired each year is dope-smoking kids with poor attendance at their fast-food jobs. There simply aren't any federal jobs at that level.
I don't think Blackwater (Xe) counts as a mercenary force, because, although they fight for profit, they do not remain neutral politically and simply fight for whatever side pays the best. (Please correct me if there are solid examples to the contrary). Mainly, the move towards contractors such as Xe boils down to an end-run around paying expensive military benefits (retirement and healthcare) to veterans. (Although I have little doubt Blackwater's former employees will end up suing Blackwater and the government for these benefits eventually - "we were right there, fighting along other US forces...").
Similarly, I can see the US government relying more on contractors for Cyberdefense, but not simply posting "hit jobs" on an anonymous bulletin board with a specified payout (which would truly be mercenary).
So, I'm not convinced any of this is "mercenary."
History shows that cancer cures itself by killing the patient, after which the cancer dies shortly thereafter. Nothing to worry about.
There is no magic, infallible formula handed down from god to give the One True answer as to who "earned" what (though some answers are much more reasonable than others). NOTHING is made by an individual without building on contributions of countless other people both past and present. Not even a thought or a sentence. Thus who "earned" what equates to an argument about who deserves how much credit. Thus, for example, the inescapable complexity of property law (including all of corporate law, intellectual property law, contracts, bankruptcy, taxation) and endless arguments (lawsuits) about it.
Pure capitalism and pure communism both lead to obviously bad solutions, so we muddle along with a messy mix of both and argue a lot about moving a little either way. But any reasonable mix is far better than either extreme.
Well, sometimes. Think of LA's smog problem, or the depletion of the ozone layer due to CFC's - dilution wasn't working too well. Putting laws on the books helped a lot though.
Another example is heavy metals put into the air by coal burning. It was diluted in the ground before, it's diluted in the air now. One is a lot better than the other.
Really, you'd just be building another nationwide cellular network. So my question is, how is this different/better than 4G?
Unlike a satellite, a transmitter station is stationary, so you can point a nice, high-gain dish at it.
Actually no math is necessary - all people need to know is that during "rolldown week," the expected return of playing the game is positive. This is just as true for people who spend $3 as for people who spend $300,000. So I think it is debatable whether this is "broken" at all. It's probably not something a private company would do; then again they might have loss leaders sometimes.
Virtualization is very inefficient compared to simply running multiple server processes on a single box, because each VM allocates resources to an instance of the OS, and RAM is more-or-less statically allocated beetween them. This makes sense when running several different services that each require a different operating environment, or to enforce complete user separation, e.g. a hosting service. But I would imagine google is running tens of thousands of identical servers running the same server daemon, so why would Virtualization make sense and save energy there?
I'll give you a little dirt on solar panels too - they cast shadows, robbing whatever is in their shadow of its rightful electromagnetic energy! Same thing, different part of the spectrum.
Foxconn makes Apple stuff. Apple is sitting on $76 billion in cash. And yet you assume people will get what they pay for, as if companies would necessarily plough revenue into improving quality rather than simply bagging bigger profits?
But seriously, unless your home is a prison, there is really nothing to stop people from coming in if that's what they want to do - other than the fear of getting caught, which is greater if you've made a reservation with airbnb.
I agree HFT is rubbish, but where do you see justification for long-term investment in capital goods in the US? It seems that industry is being moved to where it can be operated more cheaply - there is no economic justification for more investment here. In fact there's a surplus of "capital," at lest in the sense of invested money seeking good returns. (Overall the S&P has returned almost exactly 0% over the last 10 years.) So we keep getting bubbles due to over-investment, first in .com, then housing... what is the "next big thing" where we could invest to bring real growth?
Fixed the title for you.
We'll just have to see if any of that remains an issue. People are worrying about quotas, but the total bandwidth used every year continues to grow by leaps and bounds. If that trend continues for another few years, the infrastructure will catch up to the demand and the quotas will go away, or at least be ample for watching TV. I'm sure that will happen, it's just a matter of time. Even if providers decided to halt progress, they wouldn't be able to keep a lid on it for long.
My vote would be for the smartphone to be smart enough to determine the capacity of its bandwidth and display and to adjust itself accordingly. Subject to user override, of course.
As for "it's all advertising," give me a break. Sports and nature shows, in particular, really do look fantastically better on hdtv's than on the NTSC tubes of yesteryear. I know we look down on the common man and all that, but there are limits even to that.
It all depends on the picture size. We simply don't expect TVs to fill our field of vision, only because it has never been practical to do so. If it were practical, I'm sure lots of people would like to have wall-sized "retinal" displays. I would, why not?
According to the article:
Is that black body radiation?
Radiating visible light requires a high temperature (a hunk of tungsten doesn't glow at room temp), but maybe you can emit other frequencies at lower temperatures?
Anyways, I don't know what that has to do with computer security. I don't know any organization the size of DoD that does it as well.
What? No, they would never do that. I'm sure this will only affect new cars.
Gasoline is a limited natural resource, so people who use a lot drive up the price for everybody else. This efficiency standard will do far more to relieve gas prices than drilling in ANWR ever would.
Huh?
If CO2 concentration continues to increase (as I'm sure it will) but the warming trend reversed itself, that would falsify the idea of CO2 as an overriding contributor to global warming.