If this was mobile phone dot com why not, but I (and I believe, the vast majority of readers here) are reading to learn about new stuffs in the IT world.
Phones are the new stuff in the IT world. In 10 years, traditional desktops and laptops will be much less common, and most people will use phones (really, handheld computers that also make phone calls) and tablets. And hopefully glasses with heads-up displays.
What, so suddenly Asperger's isn't an autism spectrum disorder, ie one that's genetically determined? It's all just social conditioning? Which just need to make sure these children "[grow] up with a firm grasp of social cues"?
It's very likely genetic, but there are things society can do. For example, I'd argue that the standard message of "study hard and be responsible" is wrong for children with Asperger's-like personalities. They'd be better off going to parties and getting drunk and building social skills in the process than reading a tenth book on quantum physics, which is what they'd rather do. Although I have no idea how to nudge them toward that while keeping the standard advice for normal kids, for whom it's correct.
It should be a tax on pollution rather than energy in general, but yes that's a good idea. We should tax things that are bad or at least neutral, but our current system taxes good things like salaries, investments, and profits.
People can't even drive straight while TALKING on a cell phone.
Certainly you wouldn't use it while driving, and even walking might take some practice. But if you're not moving, having the display on glasses is a huge improvement over both laptops and phone displays.
Not to mention the difficulty some of us have on focusing on a screen that close.
Nobody can, but my understanding is that they can create an image that appears clearly even though you aren't directly focused on it.
Great link, I knew about the Even More Plus $60/month plan but didn't know you could remove SMS and save $10. It really is a no-brainer to get the unlocked N1, unless you want to try the cancel-after-121-days-and-pay-$200-ETF arbitrage described above, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some clause in the contract that makes that not work.
If the Nexus One does nothing other than make unlocked phones with contract-free service more mainstream, Google will have done a very good thing.
Ask them why the USA's free market in health insurance
Health insurance is not remotely a free market. Hardly anyone pays directly for their treatment so there are no pricing signals, yet we allow providers to charge whatever they want. We've somehow managed to combine the worst aspects of capitalism and socialism without the benefits of either.
We should decouple health insurance from employers (another idiocy brought to you by government intervention), encourage people to buy high deductible catastrophic insurance policies and pay for routine or inexpensive care out of pocket, and subsidize those who can't afford a reasonable level of care. If that makes me a libertarian crackpot, so be it.
Even though every country with health insurance that WORKS has way MORE government involvement.
Every other significant country has more government involvement in general. And the US has Apple, Intel, and Google. I don't believe these facts are unrelated.
It's entirely reasonable to criticize governments when they enact stupid policies, whether they're democratically elected or not. As I recall one or two foreign entities on occasion said less than complimentary things about the Bush administration; were they wrong to do so?
But to the question at hand, I say yes, stay late with your workers.
If there's something the manager can do to help, then yes. If it's just staying out of an attempt to signal solidarity, I don't care either way. I'd actually prefer that they go home and then give me the next Friday afternoon off or something.
In fact, you may want to work on lightening the mood
Be careful with that; if an engineer has a good flow going, the last thing they need is their manager popping in to share the latest lolcat.
The scenario which scares me is: the idiots vote Sarah Palin into office, and she prevents control of greenhouse gases until a massive global catastrophe
Unlike the Obama administration, Sarah Palin supports nuclear power, which is currently the best way we have to reduce greenhouse gases.
Outstanding post. It would be great if you could get it to a wider audience. AGW proponents are being needlessly polarizing and alienating those of us in categories 4 and 5, with whom there should be some common ground.
The thing is, most anti-AGW proponents come off as people not wanting to change anything because it isn't convenient for them.
And a lot of pro-AGW proponents come off as activists whose primary goal is to impose their preferred lifestyle globally, regardless of whether it makes sense economically. Drastically reducing our energy consumption is just one possible solution, but it's the only one most environmentalists are interested in. Look at their decades of FUD against nuclear power, which has arguably resulted in more environmental damage than every squadron of Big Oil lobbyists.
the problem is that the solutions to AGW are arguably economically questionable
That, and the loudest AGW proponents seem to have no interest in anything other than their preferred solution of drastically curtailing energy usage. For example, we could build 400 nuclear plants in the US and replace all the electricity that we currently get from coal. But the same environmentalists preaching doom from AGW have prevented any nuclear plants from being built in the last 25 years, which is pretty good evidence that their real motivation is to change our lifestyles to how they think we should live, rather than actually solving the problem.
People need to be able to separate the two issues from one another, that is to say that the existence of AGW is a separate issue than any solutions to AGW. However, it will never ever happen. Both ends of the issues will not yield ground and everyone ends up losing something in the bickering.
Agreed.
Re:like trying to offer proof to a Birther
on
The Limits To Skepticism
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
CAFE standards work.
No they don't. SUVs came about as a direct result of CAFE loopholes. (They're "light trucks", yeah right). Increasing the gas tax would be far superior; not only would it encourage fuel efficiency in a way that can't be gamed, it would encourage other ways of saving gas like reducing commute distances.
I completely agree that revenue-neutral carbon taxes would be a good policy; even if AGW is completely false it would be no more economically harmful than our current income and payroll taxes.
In general, we don't make enough money to save a meaningful amount of money
Most do; we just choose not to. If you're making $X, look at somebody making $(X-5000). They probably aren't starving, so do what they do and you can build savings. But that requires forgoing instant gratification, which we're not very good at.
Losing your job probably will also mean losing your health insurance.
This is true and probably the most idiotic aspect of our utterly screwed-up health care system. Employer based coverage was sort of ok 60 years ago (when people changed jobs less frequently, and medical treatments were far less advanced and expensive), but is entirely counterproductive today.
Beat me to it. You'd think that enlightened progressives would be thrilled at the prospect of a billion people substantially improving their living conditions. But it exposes one of the uglier sides of the zero-sum economic thinking that pervades the left: one party's gain is another's loss, so we should keep other countries poor so they can't take our wealth.
Plus, letting online gambling be legal would pose the question of how the government regulates something that could end up costing you your house.
How is that going to happen exactly? Online casinos aren't in the business of extending credit; you have to make a deposit before you can gamble, and that deposit is all you can lose. Yes, if you sell your house to fund your account and lose it all then you're screwed, but that's also the case if you sold your house to buy Citigroup stock 5 years ago.
You do realize that there are health and life insurance industries that will do everything they can to prevent this?
Life insurance companies will be very much in favor of longer lifespans. For health insurance companies it depends on whether you're in good health for the extra years; if so, it will benefit them as well.
This could lead you to doing things you could never get away with in a Battle.net game. For instance, I was never a big fan of Vultures, but there were a few Terran missions where the spider mines were very useful.
Vultures are very heavily used in pro matches, both for the mines and to sneak into enemy bases and kill workers.
Slashdot Mirror
Phones are the new stuff in the IT world. In 10 years, traditional desktops and laptops will be much less common, and most people will use phones (really, handheld computers that also make phone calls) and tablets. And hopefully glasses with heads-up displays.
It's very likely genetic, but there are things society can do. For example, I'd argue that the standard message of "study hard and be responsible" is wrong for children with Asperger's-like personalities. They'd be better off going to parties and getting drunk and building social skills in the process than reading a tenth book on quantum physics, which is what they'd rather do. Although I have no idea how to nudge them toward that while keeping the standard advice for normal kids, for whom it's correct.
It should be a tax on pollution rather than energy in general, but yes that's a good idea. We should tax things that are bad or at least neutral, but our current system taxes good things like salaries, investments, and profits.
Um, no.
And going to the bathroom during commercials is stealing too, right? You may have a promising legal career at Time Warner.
Certainly you wouldn't use it while driving, and even walking might take some practice. But if you're not moving, having the display on glasses is a huge improvement over both laptops and phone displays.
Nobody can, but my understanding is that they can create an image that appears clearly even though you aren't directly focused on it.
Great link, I knew about the Even More Plus $60/month plan but didn't know you could remove SMS and save $10. It really is a no-brainer to get the unlocked N1, unless you want to try the cancel-after-121-days-and-pay-$200-ETF arbitrage described above, and I wouldn't be surprised if there's some clause in the contract that makes that not work.
If the Nexus One does nothing other than make unlocked phones with contract-free service more mainstream, Google will have done a very good thing.
Sure, never been a problem.
You work for idiots. That's not at all typical.
Health insurance is not remotely a free market. Hardly anyone pays directly for their treatment so there are no pricing signals, yet we allow providers to charge whatever they want. We've somehow managed to combine the worst aspects of capitalism and socialism without the benefits of either.
We should decouple health insurance from employers (another idiocy brought to you by government intervention), encourage people to buy high deductible catastrophic insurance policies and pay for routine or inexpensive care out of pocket, and subsidize those who can't afford a reasonable level of care. If that makes me a libertarian crackpot, so be it.
Every other significant country has more government involvement in general. And the US has Apple, Intel, and Google. I don't believe these facts are unrelated.
It's entirely reasonable to criticize governments when they enact stupid policies, whether they're democratically elected or not. As I recall one or two foreign entities on occasion said less than complimentary things about the Bush administration; were they wrong to do so?
If there's something the manager can do to help, then yes. If it's just staying out of an attempt to signal solidarity, I don't care either way. I'd actually prefer that they go home and then give me the next Friday afternoon off or something.
Be careful with that; if an engineer has a good flow going, the last thing they need is their manager popping in to share the latest lolcat.
Unlike the Obama administration, Sarah Palin supports nuclear power, which is currently the best way we have to reduce greenhouse gases.
Outstanding post. It would be great if you could get it to a wider audience. AGW proponents are being needlessly polarizing and alienating those of us in categories 4 and 5, with whom there should be some common ground.
And a lot of pro-AGW proponents come off as activists whose primary goal is to impose their preferred lifestyle globally, regardless of whether it makes sense economically. Drastically reducing our energy consumption is just one possible solution, but it's the only one most environmentalists are interested in. Look at their decades of FUD against nuclear power, which has arguably resulted in more environmental damage than every squadron of Big Oil lobbyists.
That, and the loudest AGW proponents seem to have no interest in anything other than their preferred solution of drastically curtailing energy usage. For example, we could build 400 nuclear plants in the US and replace all the electricity that we currently get from coal. But the same environmentalists preaching doom from AGW have prevented any nuclear plants from being built in the last 25 years, which is pretty good evidence that their real motivation is to change our lifestyles to how they think we should live, rather than actually solving the problem.
Agreed.
No they don't. SUVs came about as a direct result of CAFE loopholes. (They're "light trucks", yeah right). Increasing the gas tax would be far superior; not only would it encourage fuel efficiency in a way that can't be gamed, it would encourage other ways of saving gas like reducing commute distances.
I completely agree that revenue-neutral carbon taxes would be a good policy; even if AGW is completely false it would be no more economically harmful than our current income and payroll taxes.
Most do; we just choose not to. If you're making $X, look at somebody making $(X-5000). They probably aren't starving, so do what they do and you can build savings. But that requires forgoing instant gratification, which we're not very good at.
This is true and probably the most idiotic aspect of our utterly screwed-up health care system. Employer based coverage was sort of ok 60 years ago (when people changed jobs less frequently, and medical treatments were far less advanced and expensive), but is entirely counterproductive today.
That's just silly. Go to an Apple store sometime.
So in summary, we'd be better off if Silicon Valley were replaced with textile factories.
Beat me to it. You'd think that enlightened progressives would be thrilled at the prospect of a billion people substantially improving their living conditions. But it exposes one of the uglier sides of the zero-sum economic thinking that pervades the left: one party's gain is another's loss, so we should keep other countries poor so they can't take our wealth.
Murder is much easier to prosecute than drug crimes, mainly because it's almost always obvious when a murder occurs.
How is that going to happen exactly? Online casinos aren't in the business of extending credit; you have to make a deposit before you can gamble, and that deposit is all you can lose. Yes, if you sell your house to fund your account and lose it all then you're screwed, but that's also the case if you sold your house to buy Citigroup stock 5 years ago.
Life insurance companies will be very much in favor of longer lifespans. For health insurance companies it depends on whether you're in good health for the extra years; if so, it will benefit them as well.
That's not a very useful statistic. The marginal value of extra medical spending falls rapidly after you get the basic stuff like antibiotics.
Vultures are very heavily used in pro matches, both for the mines and to sneak into enemy bases and kill workers.