There is no economic difference between outsourcing a job and importing a good. If company A outsources its customer services calls to India, and company B imports a bunch of computer hardware from Taiwan, then both companies impact the US economy in the same way. The only difference is in the particular sector impacted (hardware manufacturing jobs vs. customer service jobs). If you prefer, you can think of outsourcing a job as importing a service.
2. Importation equals Technological Innovation
There is no economic difference between importing a cheaper good and implementing a labor-saving technology to produce that good for less. If company X imports cheaper computer (or potato) chips from China, and company Y reduces production costs by substituting robots for humans on a chip assembly line, then both companies impact the US economy in the same way. The sectoral employment disruptions and the effect on consumer prices are identical. If you prefer, you can think of the discovery that goods can be shipped from overseas as a labor-saving technological innovation.
3. Conclusion
Whenever you're tempted to cheer Lou Dobbs on when he blathers about 'Exporting America' on CNN, consider whether you'd be willing to send your PC back to Taiwan and insist on more expensive (and now non-existent!) US-made computer hardware. And anytime you feel the urge to insist on US-made goods, ask yourself whether you'd support outlawing the automobile so that buggy-whip makers can get their jobs back. This may seem rhetorically outlandish, but these are the types of equivalences the two propositions above force you into.
Since I'd rather not mod down incorrect responses to your question, I'll just post an answer. Short answer is 'No'. Long answer follows.
The unemployment rate is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics based on two *surveys*, a household survey and an establishment (business) survey, with the household survey being used for the unemployment percentage, currently 5.1%. Basically, A person is considered 'unemployed' if they don't have a job *AND* they are looking for one. If they're not working but not looking, they don't count (removed from the both the numerator and denominator of the unemployed % because they're not considered part of the labor force). See here for more details
Specifically, "The unemployment data derived from the household survey in no way depend upon the eligibility for or receipt of unemployment insurance benefits".
Occasionally, the news will report on new initial unemployment claims filed as another indicator of the job market, and those numbers would be affected by fraudulent claims, but that's the extent of it.
This basically says it was essentially fact, not rumor, by Friday morning. Note the lack of response today (i.e. little additional information), when the announcement supposedly became confirmed.
I'm not sure why this news translated to a 5% drop in Apple shares though ($1.5 billion in market cap lost).
The current (11:11 am) headline from the Wall Street Journal online states the switch as fact:
"Apple will start shifting its Macintosh line next year to Intel chips, in a major change of strategy for the computer maker. The move could be a blow to IBM and Freescale, which now supply Apple's PowerPC chips."
I think there's a big market for these 'desktop replacement' machines in cities where the majority of people live in small apartments. Don't underestimate the clutter of connections, cables, powerstrips, and peripherals necessary for a desktop pc.
Also, you may not want to tote a 19 inch laptop on a plane, but you might drag it around the apartment or to the neighborhood starbucks.
Take a look at this NYT writeup from Friday. I don't know how much confidence you want to put in an 'anonymous source', but it does seem like the excuses MS is using (limited resources, focus, should corps meddle in social policy) are just that: excuses.
All the services you mention do cost money, but are mostly irrelevant from the point of view of the academic user community. The vast majority of academic users would be content with a 'working paper' level editing/formatting (i.e. by the authors, spelling and grammar warts and all) as long as the work is peer-reviewed.
I do suspect that for some journals, possibly the NEJM and other medical journals, the intended audience is not purely academic, and therefore prefers nicely-formatted articles with correct grammar. For many (most?) other fields, the current model smacks of parasitism by publishers on academics.
Agreed, especially since all these people have to do is read a single 1-page article on the BBC website (or even just the side bar) to remove the mystery from all the 'jargon'.
Besides bandwidth/size issues, both sports clips and news headlines are essentially worthless within 24 hours of publication. Who's going to bother to break DRM and upload to P2P?
The same is probably true for music videos for slightly different reasons: sound-only is still the preferred format for most people to get their music. That's why music television stations hardly ever show music videos anymore.
At least in the US, web-enabled phones and PDAs are just starting to be affordable for mass adoption (freebies or highly subsidized with calling plans). Give it a year, and every website that matters will have a mobile-specific version available.
The January 24th print edition of Business Week had a two-pager, advertised on the cover, about Firefox and the threat it poses to Microsoft. I actually doubt there's a mainstream publication out there that *hasn't* done a feature on Firefox.
Take a look here for a slightly longer perspective on climate change. I haven't read TFA, but I'm guessing human-controlled causes of global warming are likely to be dwarfed by long-run trends and fluctuations.
There's a tradeoff with encryption. On the one hand, you make your email harder (impossible? do we really know?) to read for unauthorized third parties. On the other hand, given the percentage of people who use encryption, your emails will stick out like a sore thumb to the FBI/NSA/whoever as something worth investigating.
I know this is not fair; I don't have to be doing something criminal in order to want privacy. But I really wouldn't be surprised if encrypting your email nowadays raises a red flag in whatever carnivore-replacement program they're running.
I really like WMP Classic (what's linked to in the parent), but I've found that moving the time slider within many video file formats tends to be very slow, consume lots of resources, or just doesn't work.
I've settled on using Winamp for audio, and Zoom Player standard (from inmatix.com) for video. With the right plugins/codecs, Zoom Player will play anything you throw at it (including quicktime and real files).
Quick correction: Doubling megapixels only increases size (1x, 2x, 3x, etc.) by sqrt(2). E.g., if you have a 1000x1000 pixel image (1 megapixel), and you want to double its size to 2000x2000 pixels (equivalent to 2x optical zoom), you need 4 megapixels to do it.
1) Megapixels and Zoom are substitutes to some extent. Most people don't print pictures larger than 8x10, so 3-4 megapixels is usually enough (and too big for a PC screen or TV anyway). The higher megapixel count allows you to crop the picture and still retain decent resolution, but a good zoom may obviate the need for later cropping. Note that the substitution is not linear: Doubling megapixels only increases resolution (area) by sqrt(2).
2) Control: some cameras are strictly point-and-shoot. Other non-SLR cameras offer you all the manual controls of an SLR in addition to point-and-shoot automatic mode.
3) Picture Quality: probably one of the most important criteria, and it can vary tremendously between cameras that have pretty much the same specs. Would you buy stereo speakers based on the power rating alone?
I'm sure I'm being dense, but how does peerguardian prevent the **IA from "actually receiv[ing] data from them to prove they are illegally transmitting copyrighted material"? Isn't it a given that 'enforcement' companies would access all this info from run-of-the-mill commercial connections that would be impossible to block by IP-range?
If this had been a law designed to send copyright infringers to jail for six months, I doubt we'd be hearing the many 'hell, yeah!' responses posted so far. We should all be uneasy about 'tough' laws which can send people to jail by criminalizing online-specific types of behavior.
I'm not claiming that copyright infringment and spamming are equivalent activities, but I'll bet many of the same arguments people would use for criminalization and tough sentencing in one case are applicable to the other.
There are laws out there already against fraud and deceptive advertising, just as there are (old, established) laws against copyright infringement. We only start running into trouble by trying to 'update' these laws for the internet age (think DeCSS, DMCA, etc.). IMO, little good comes out of these 'tough updates'.
And so I say "tech solutions for tech problems" and keep the government and courts out of it as much as possible...
What's the Problem?
on
Netscape Reborn?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
AOL bankrolled the Mozilla foundation for several years, and when they let them go, they donated some stuff and did the decent thing (IIRC). Netscape 6+ was based on the Mozilla suite. What's so strange/controversial about Netscape basing a browser on Firefox?
AOL is in the dumps, but it's still a large corporation with huge marketing muscle. Is it bad for Firefox if a Netscape browser based on it starts to show up in AOL marketing?!
Beyond brand cheering, the most important thing for the success of Firefox is that it (or branded versions of it) reach about 10% or so of websurfers; large enough to force sites (except slashdot!) to write compliant HTML, and small enough not to attract the majority of internet security attacks. AOL/Netscape's move can only help.
First, the pdf is posted on the FAS website. The Federation of American Scientist is *not* a joke organization. Second, this is based on a USA Today story here:
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-11-05-tel ep ortation_x.htm
Now, USA Today is not exactly a paragon of reliable news, but the reporter seems to have contacted the Air Force Research Lab and gotten a reply.
This is a great open source mail notifier that will monitor as many Pop accounts as you like, at any interval you like, with preview and delete functionality while the email is still on the server. One button click will launch your favorite email client, so it's almost indistinguishable from having Thunderbird minimized to tray, and it uses less memory.
The other side of the "voter fraud" coin is "voter suppression". The original poster could've just as easily decided voting was not worth the additional time and hassle. In fact, it's still possible his vote won't count despite trying to resolve the issue.
This very tradeoff has been playing in the courts in Ohio (see any national newspaper), with Republicans wanting 'election monitors' at many polling stations to challenge possible fraud, and Democrats claiming it's voter suppression. A federal appeals court *today* reversed two Ohio court decisions *yesterday*, and monitors will be allowed.
There's a balance to be struck here. Guarding against every "conceivable" fraud will have a cost in legitimate vote suppression.
There's an analogy to a tradeoff between computer security and usability, but I've rambled long enough:)
Slashdot Mirror
I got tired of repeating what I say below, I actually put it on my web page here:
e w=5
http://www.windbag.us/index.php?module=article&vi
1. Outsourcing equals Importation
There is no economic difference between outsourcing a job and importing a good. If company A outsources its customer services calls to India, and company B imports a bunch of computer hardware from Taiwan, then both companies impact the US economy in the same way. The only difference is in the particular sector impacted (hardware manufacturing jobs vs. customer service jobs). If you prefer, you can think of outsourcing a job as importing a service.
2. Importation equals Technological Innovation
There is no economic difference between importing a cheaper good and implementing a labor-saving technology to produce that good for less. If company X imports cheaper computer (or potato) chips from China, and company Y reduces production costs by substituting robots for humans on a chip assembly line, then both companies impact the US economy in the same way. The sectoral employment disruptions and the effect on consumer prices are identical. If you prefer, you can think of the discovery that goods can be shipped from overseas as a labor-saving technological innovation.
3. Conclusion
Whenever you're tempted to cheer Lou Dobbs on when he blathers about 'Exporting America' on CNN, consider whether you'd be willing to send your PC back to Taiwan and insist on more expensive (and now non-existent!) US-made computer hardware. And anytime you feel the urge to insist on US-made goods, ask yourself whether you'd support outlawing the automobile so that buggy-whip makers can get their jobs back. This may seem rhetorically outlandish, but these are the types of equivalences the two propositions above force you into.
Since I'd rather not mod down incorrect responses to your question, I'll just post an answer. Short answer is 'No'. Long answer follows.
The unemployment rate is calculated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics based on two *surveys*, a household survey and an establishment (business) survey, with the household survey being used for the unemployment percentage, currently 5.1%. Basically, A person is considered 'unemployed' if they don't have a job *AND* they are looking for one. If they're not working but not looking, they don't count (removed from the both the numerator and denominator of the unemployed % because they're not considered part of the labor force). See here for more details
http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.tn.htm
Specifically, "The unemployment data derived from the household survey in no way depend upon the eligibility for or receipt of unemployment insurance benefits".
Occasionally, the news will report on new initial unemployment claims filed as another indicator of the job market, and those numbers would be affected by fraudulent claims, but that's the extent of it.
Take a look here:
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=5d
This basically says it was essentially fact, not rumor, by Friday morning. Note the lack of response today (i.e. little additional information), when the announcement supposedly became confirmed.
I'm not sure why this news translated to a 5% drop in Apple shares though ($1.5 billion in market cap lost).
The current (11:11 am) headline from the Wall Street Journal online states the switch as fact:
"Apple will start shifting its Macintosh line next year to Intel chips, in a major change of strategy for the computer maker. The move could be a blow to IBM and Freescale, which now supply Apple's PowerPC chips."
From the front page of
http://online.wsj.com/public/us
The actual article is in the paid section.
In fact, a quick look at Apple's stock price reaction here
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=AAPL&t=5d
seems to imply this was mostly a done deal on Friday.
I think there's a big market for these 'desktop replacement' machines in cities where the majority of people live in small apartments. Don't underestimate the clutter of connections, cables, powerstrips, and peripherals necessary for a desktop pc.
Also, you may not want to tote a 19 inch laptop on a plane, but you might drag it around the apartment or to the neighborhood starbucks.
Actually, these prices are terrible compared to what Dell is offering these days. Take a look here:
r y. aspx/monitors?c=us&cs=04&l=en&s=bsd
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/catego
IMO, the 24" 2405FPW at $999 (if you can afford it) beats pretty much anything on the large flat panel market right now.
Take a look at this NYT writeup from Friday. I don't know how much confidence you want to put in an 'anonymous source', but it does seem like the excuses MS is using (limited resources, focus, should corps meddle in social policy) are just that: excuses.
y .h tml
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/22/national/22ga
All the services you mention do cost money, but are mostly irrelevant from the point of view of the academic user community. The vast majority of academic users would be content with a 'working paper' level editing/formatting (i.e. by the authors, spelling and grammar warts and all) as long as the work is peer-reviewed.
I do suspect that for some journals, possibly the NEJM and other medical journals, the intended audience is not purely academic, and therefore prefers nicely-formatted articles with correct grammar. For many (most?) other fields, the current model smacks of parasitism by publishers on academics.
Agreed, especially since all these people have to do is read a single 1-page article on the BBC website (or even just the side bar) to remove the mystery from all the 'jargon'.
Besides bandwidth/size issues, both sports clips and news headlines are essentially worthless within 24 hours of publication. Who's going to bother to break DRM and upload to P2P?
The same is probably true for music videos for slightly different reasons: sound-only is still the preferred format for most people to get their music. That's why music television stations hardly ever show music videos anymore.
At least in the US, web-enabled phones and PDAs are just starting to be affordable for mass adoption (freebies or highly subsidized with calling plans). Give it a year, and every website that matters will have a mobile-specific version available.
What if you re-encode back to the original WMA (I assume) form, sans DRM?
The January 24th print edition of Business Week had a two-pager, advertised on the cover, about Firefox and the threat it poses to Microsoft. I actually doubt there's a mainstream publication out there that *hasn't* done a feature on Firefox.
:)
I predict 10-15% market share by mid-year
The fines are still being appealed (who wouldn't appeal half a billion Euros in fines?!). MS only agreed to strip WMP from Windows.
Take a look here for a slightly longer perspective on climate change. I haven't read TFA, but I'm guessing human-controlled causes of global warming are likely to be dwarfed by long-run trends and fluctuations.
There's a tradeoff with encryption. On the one hand, you make your email harder (impossible? do we really know?) to read for unauthorized third parties. On the other hand, given the percentage of people who use encryption, your emails will stick out like a sore thumb to the FBI/NSA/whoever as something worth investigating.
I know this is not fair; I don't have to be doing something criminal in order to want privacy. But I really wouldn't be surprised if encrypting your email nowadays raises a red flag in whatever carnivore-replacement program they're running.
I really like WMP Classic (what's linked to in the parent), but I've found that moving the time slider within many video file formats tends to be very slow, consume lots of resources, or just doesn't work.
I've settled on using Winamp for audio, and Zoom Player standard (from inmatix.com) for video. With the right plugins/codecs, Zoom Player will play anything you throw at it (including quicktime and real files).
Quick correction: Doubling megapixels only increases size (1x, 2x, 3x, etc.) by sqrt(2). E.g., if you have a 1000x1000 pixel image (1 megapixel), and you want to double its size to 2000x2000 pixels (equivalent to 2x optical zoom), you need 4 megapixels to do it.
Just to add to the parent post:
1) Megapixels and Zoom are substitutes to some extent. Most people don't print pictures larger than 8x10, so 3-4 megapixels is usually enough (and too big for a PC screen or TV anyway). The higher megapixel count allows you to crop the picture and still retain decent resolution, but a good zoom may obviate the need for later cropping. Note that the substitution is not linear: Doubling megapixels only increases resolution (area) by sqrt(2).
2) Control: some cameras are strictly point-and-shoot. Other non-SLR cameras offer you all the manual controls of an SLR in addition to point-and-shoot automatic mode.
3) Picture Quality: probably one of the most important criteria, and it can vary tremendously between cameras that have pretty much the same specs. Would you buy stereo speakers based on the power rating alone?
I'm sure I'm being dense, but how does peerguardian prevent the **IA from "actually receiv[ing] data from them to prove they are illegally transmitting copyrighted material"? Isn't it a given that 'enforcement' companies would access all this info from run-of-the-mill commercial connections that would be impossible to block by IP-range?
If this had been a law designed to send copyright infringers to jail for six months, I doubt we'd be hearing the many 'hell, yeah!' responses posted so far. We should all be uneasy about 'tough' laws which can send people to jail by criminalizing online-specific types of behavior.
...
I'm not claiming that copyright infringment and spamming are equivalent activities, but I'll bet many of the same arguments people would use for criminalization and tough sentencing in one case are applicable to the other.
There are laws out there already against fraud and deceptive advertising, just as there are (old, established) laws against copyright infringement. We only start running into trouble by trying to 'update' these laws for the internet age (think DeCSS, DMCA, etc.). IMO, little good comes out of these 'tough updates'.
And so I say "tech solutions for tech problems" and keep the government and courts out of it as much as possible
AOL bankrolled the Mozilla foundation for several years, and when they let them go, they donated some stuff and did the decent thing (IIRC). Netscape 6+ was based on the Mozilla suite. What's so strange/controversial about Netscape basing a browser on Firefox?
AOL is in the dumps, but it's still a large corporation with huge marketing muscle. Is it bad for Firefox if a Netscape browser based on it starts to show up in AOL marketing?!
Beyond brand cheering, the most important thing for the success of Firefox is that it (or branded versions of it) reach about 10% or so of websurfers; large enough to force sites (except slashdot!) to write compliant HTML, and small enough not to attract the majority of internet security attacks. AOL/Netscape's move can only help.
First, the pdf is posted on the FAS website. The Federation of American Scientist is *not* a joke organization. Second, this is based on a USA Today story here:
l ep ortation_x.htm
http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2004-11-05-te
Now, USA Today is not exactly a paragon of reliable news, but the reporter seems to have contacted the Air Force Research Lab and gotten a reply.
So no, it's not a joke.
This is a great open source mail notifier that will monitor as many Pop accounts as you like, at any interval you like, with preview and delete functionality while the email is still on the server. One button click will launch your favorite email client, so it's almost indistinguishable from having Thunderbird minimized to tray, and it uses less memory.
The other side of the "voter fraud" coin is "voter suppression". The original poster could've just as easily decided voting was not worth the additional time and hassle. In fact, it's still possible his vote won't count despite trying to resolve the issue.
:)
This very tradeoff has been playing in the courts in Ohio (see any national newspaper), with Republicans wanting 'election monitors' at many polling stations to challenge possible fraud, and Democrats claiming it's voter suppression. A federal appeals court *today* reversed two Ohio court decisions *yesterday*, and monitors will be allowed.
There's a balance to be struck here. Guarding against every "conceivable" fraud will have a cost in legitimate vote suppression.
There's an analogy to a tradeoff between computer security and usability, but I've rambled long enough