Actually, I wouldn't be so sure. Microsoft basically paid them off to go away rather than risk losing their trademark. (There was some funny business in Europe, but I don't believe it truly reached the merits of the case.) Using the word "Windows" to refer to a window system product was pretty stupid -- it would be like calling a breed of cattle "Beef." A lot of Microsoft's older products used descriptive or generic names for marketing reasons. I would imagine they started using arbitrary (like "Excel") and fanciful (like "PowerPoint") names for trademark reasons.
The legal arguments aren't decisive one way or the other, but there was a pretty good chance Microsoft would have lost. I would imagine that Lindows pressed the suit as long as they did (in jurisdictions around the world, no less) not
because it was worth the legal fees to win, but because they knew Microsoft was on shaky ground and would probably pay them off to go away.
Normally I'm no fan of shakedown suits, but Microsoft brought this problem on themselves. It was gross negligence by their corporate counsel in the 1980s. (Alternatively, they co-opted the word "windows" so that people who don't know much about computers assume that Macs, etc. must run Windows because they have "windows." To the degree that's true, I wish all the bad karma in the world on Microsoft...)
That sounds like an unfortunate amount of time to spend on the phone with tech support, and I'm sorry you had to go through it. But I think this is a perfect time to point out that you can avoid much of that hassle.
If you know what you're doing then you have already diagnosed the problem and know that using Nero vs. XP's burn software shouldn't make a difference, and that reinstalling is a complete cop-out that changes nothing. So just lie.
I share your pain. The most irritating experience I can remember is using a $700/hr commercial database with Firefox, getting a server time-out on a particularly complicated query, and being told by the tech support chimp that the problem is that I wasn't using Internet Explorer.
That said, I briefly worked in network support at a university famous for its engineering program. What you describe is what we called "the savvy user problem."
We obviously didn't have a script (we're not idiots -- most of us were engineering students moonlighting for a little extra money or free in-room internet), but we did suggest people do things that "shouldn't" make a difference. For example, one of the first things we would do is we would tell people to take their patch cord, remove it, and plug it in the other way. The reason is that the cable might be loose, and if we just told them to "reseat the cable" the know-it-all would just look at it or give it a little poke and say it's fine.
When people would lie and say that they do what we're telling them, it wastes our time when we have to come out for simple problems. There's no reason for us to have to come out unless the jack in the wall has gone bad (which actually happens more than you would think with students plugging and unplugging their equipment over and over).
For a good laugh, see these RCA cables. Palladium wires with solid silver RCA plug.
That's amazing. Just a few years ago palladium cost twice as much as platinum. (There's a lot of volatility - Ford Motor ate a billion dollar loss on its palladium stockpile not too long ago!)
the pickup mechanism CAN produce distortion, but only on regular old audio cd's (known as jitter) AFAIK dvd's dont suffer from this because of the parity data that is read from the disc (and thereby correcting any bad data read)
I'm pretty sure you meant to say "reed solomon forward error correction." Parity data won't let you fix errors. And both DVDs and CDs use Reed Solomon.
As far I know, jitter doesn't have anything to do with any of this.
Aerogel caps have their own limitations - like transient current handling. Tantalum caps have been around since about the damn of electronics and they REALLY have issues, most notable being typically high DA and DF numbers. A capacitor with high delectric absorption and high ESR and/or inductance is meaningless - it's a "numbers race" and the futility of that path was (thankfully) well proven in the eighties.
That's fine, like I said this isn't something I claim expertise on -- I would barely claim literacy. I didn't claim that an aerogel cap would be a good idea, only that it was interesting that he didn't discuss the merits of different kinds of capacitors, as preventing voltage dip with higher capacitance was pretty much the only part of the article that passed my bullshit antenna.
But you've got to admit the article is hokum. Rhodium and silver RCA connectors? Give me a break.
My first summer job in school, back in the day, was working in a test lab at a defense contractor developing aircraft radios. Of all the connectors and cables we used (there were some TIGHT specs there), I never saw an RCA jack, and I'm pretty sure even the funny-looking military jacks that cost hundreds of dollars a piece weren't made out of rhodium and silver.
The instructions involve things like replacing cheap caps with low-ESR versions, putting in better diodes in the bridge in the power supply, replacing cheap op-amps...
Okay, sure. A clean power supply is important.
I must confess that this is far outside my bailiwick, but my bullshit sensor went off when I read things like this:
Regardless of which way you go, replacing the stock nickel RCA jacks with better-quality ones is considered standard operating procedure.... Get gold-plated jacks if you must, but make sure they don't have any nickel under the gold (most of them do).
What on earth is that about? These joints aren't going underwater, he doesn't need to worry about the galvanic series.
Better choices are available from Cardas Audio and Kimber Kable; you can't go wrong with any of the jacks that use silver and rhodium over copper.
Right. Okay...
Rhodium is an extremely expensive metal -- costs about $2000/ounce I believe. It's not necessary for audio work, and you're sure as heck not going to get very much of it from these charlatans.
Silver costs about $5/ounce. I know that high-power circuit breakers use silver contacts, but to the extent that I care about a home audio connection I'd rather have something that didn't tarnish.
Some popular choices of these low-loss high-voltage capacitors are Auricap, Solen, Hovland, and Sonicaps. These can cost from $10 to $50 per pair. Each brand affects the sound in slightly different ways--again, this is where the art comes in. (I used Sonicaps.)
It seems rather unlikely that companies I've never heard of would have factories producing better parts than Panasonic, Sanyo, etc. You could certainly buy a top-quality part from a reputable company at reasonable cost. Parts companies have several different lines of parts to address different price/performance segments. (My guess is that these companies just relabel parts from name-brand manufacturers.)
The bit where he said "Each brand affects the sound in slightly different ways" actually made me laugh out loud.
One thing that surprised me is that he didn't mention the possibility of using a different kind of capacitor to achieve higher capacitance, where he was talking about "fit in the highest valued capacitor in the space provided." The last few years have given us all kinds of interesting high-valued capacitors, like tantalum caps, aerogel caps, etc.
Several companies sell sophisticated clock circuits meant to replace the stock clocks in disc players. Two examples are the Superclock3 from Audiocom International Ltd., Pembroke Dock, Wales, and the LClock XO3 from LC Audio Technology in Holstebro, Denmark. These replacement clocks cost between $200 and $300 and will require more technical knowledge to implement than I can give you here. They can, however, very dramatically improve the performance of a digital player.
Very dramatically, huh? Again, this isn't something I'm claiming a lot of knowledge on, but this smells like grade A fertilizer to me. Clock jitter just isn't a problem in this day and age -- definitely not to the degree that someone could hear it.
LC Audio Technology makes a circuit it calls the Zapfilter Mk2 that goes in place of the op-amps. It is a high-end solution and a price tag to match: a cool $270 for 2 channels. LC Audio offers a package deal with its LClock unit, at $540.79. Of course, this sum is more than twice what the Toshiba player and all the other parts will cost you all together. But, hey, if you're feeling flush, have lots of confidence in your soldering skills, and really want to go all out, this is a great way to do it.
I'm disappointed that BBC calls downloaders pirates. The term "pirate" when applied to copyright infringement first appeared to denote publishers who didn't pay the authors.
More to the point, using the word "piracy" is empty rhetoric that has no place in reputable newsreporting. The last time I checked the U.S. Code, "piracy" is a crime punishable by death (for air piracy; sea piracy is punishable by life imprisonment).
Why don't we just call file sharers "child rapists" with some equally strained analogy?
(The term "piracy" is used in some patent court decisions, true, but that's hardly an excuse.)
I think the firewire failing had more to do with the high royalties that Apple demanded than anything else... that was the reason why USB cards were going for 1/10th the cost of firewire cards for years - the silicone certainly did not cost any more to make. Apple and Sony are often just too greedy for their own good. That Apple resisted that temptation with iTunes songs still suprises me - I think they must of come up with the pricing while Jobs was out on a sick day.
I think it's a little revisionist to say the royalty multiplied the FireWire price by 10. More accurately, I think, is that manufacturers were scared away by the thought of having to pay a couple bucks per card and so the virtuous cycle of adoption/competition never started.
3.5" floppies aren't exactly floppy (which is why they are called stiffies in some parts of the world)
I'm pretty sure it's because the DISC (i.e. the cookie, the magnetic medium) is floppy. Hard disk platters are made of aluminum, now glass, decidedly unfloppy media.
Also, the 8" and 5.25" discs that preceded the 3.5" floppy had flexible jackets, so the whole thing was pretty floppy, as you might recall.
And when they fire you for demanding it in writing sue them for wrongful dismissal.
The submitter almost certainly lives in America, given his spelling and the demographics of Slashdot. Either you didn't catch that, or you don't know much about American employment law.
Besides, this is not just a bomb that killed thousands of people. It's a bomb that saved hundreds of thousands of lives. By forcing the Japanese into surrender, a months-long, duke-it-out, land invasion of Japan became unneccessary.
Ah, it's because of messages like yours that I have "insightful" set to score "-2."
You do know that the "unconditional" surrender that Roosevelt accepted (keeping the emperor on the throne) was essentially the same as the rejected offer the Japanese had previously made, right?
There are two very good museums in Japan you'd learn a lot at. One is in Hiroshima, and has many, many historical U.S. documents that show very clearly why the bombs were dropped. (Here's a hint: It's not the reason you think it is.) The other is at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which gives a pretty good insight into the history of WW2 that most Americans (evidently including you) don't know.
Even accepting your argument as true, there's a rather disturbing calculus of the value of human life (foreign civilian v. domestic military) you're employing. We're seeing it in the popular American perception of Iraq, where Americans basically don't give a damn about how many Iraqi civilians are killed. I can at least understand that. The whole reason a war with Iraq was politically possible in the first place without any kind of provocation is that Americans basically don't like "those kinds of people" very much.
But given that WW2 happened 60 years ago, America was equally at war with Germany and Japan. amd Japan is one of America's closest economic and strategic allies today, the fact that you would still consider killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians to be negligible compared to "saving" hundreds of thousands of American military suggests you have deep prejudicial issues. I'm not going to call you racist, but it sure seems that you are.
Most large corporations are headquartered in places like Delaware or Bermuda so if states could only collect from companies that are HQ'd in them the pickings would be mighty slim.
Very few companies are headquartered in Delaware or Bermuda. I think you mean to say the companies are incorporated in Delaware or Bermuda.
What you say doesn't make sense, either -- most states charge income tax to the companies incorporated therein (there's also a foreign corporation tax, but that's another matter), and your message is equally non-sensical if you apply it to income tax.
I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about.
Automobiles are very much a special case when it comes to sales tax, so it's not at all relevant to bring them up when someone is discussing tax on book sales.
Something you may not know is that the special treatment on automobile sales ("use") tax is going away on a state-by-state basis. It was a nice equilibrium when every state did it by buyer's residence, but unfortunately states have started to "cheat." If State A goes to a sales tax, it's great in the short term, because residents from all other states pay tax twice at no cost to State A.
In response, states like Illinois very recently started keeping a list, updated every six months, of states with which there is reciprocity.
You need to leave whatever school you're going to.
Immediately.
Seriously. It's obviously a complete waste of money. Do it now before your head gets any more messed up.
Wow, you're pretty hostile for someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. May I ask where you got your Ph.D. in computer architecture?
Intel used to diligently guard some of the features of the Pentium series, the famous secret "appendix H" for example. People were eventually able to reverse-engineer the information in the appendix (and these sorts of trade secrets have a way of diffusing outward in spite of NDAs), but nevertheless these features were not implemented in competing processors because the information wasn't widely available. I believe the Cyrix chip didn't implement 4MB pages, for instance. There are other proprietary features documented in the appendix like virtual mode extensions.
since Apple does have the technology to efficiently serve fingerprinted documents already (from iTMS, which has a LOT more customers)
Apple does not serve encrypted iTunes songs -- the songs are sent plain, unencrypted, and the iTunes client software does the encrypting. One of DVDJon's releases showed this.
The GC is still not sold at a loss, the PS3's video is from ATI, not nVidia, and Sega did make money on consoles at one point. Then they decided to release 3 or 4 consoles nobody wants per year, that is what put them where they are now.
You may be correct that the GC "is not" sold at a loss, but it was sold at a loss after the late 2003 price cut. Source
IGNcube: Okay. Now GameCube is selling for $99 and it's doing great. But is Nintendo losing money on each unit sold?
Perrin: I would say that our losses are really negligible. It's such a small amount. Plus with the amount of software that's being sold we're still definitely in a solid profit situation. We're not in the position that I know that Microsoft has been in with the loss Xbox hardware.
Perrin Kaplan is the NOA vice president of corporate affairs.
As far as I know, though, you are correct that at no other time has Nintendo had to sell a console for a loss, which shows just how much trouble they are in.
It is highly unlikely that the Tiberius plate was aluminum, given the enormous temperatures required for reducing aluminum ore in the absence of electricity. We have no idea what this metal might have been -- perhaps tin?
nintendo reckoned that the gamecube was never sold at a loss despite its low price.
I'd love to see a quote on that. There was an interview on IGN with one of the Nintendo VPs who said they were losing a few dollars a unit after the price drop to $99. This was, by the way, according to IGN, the only time Nintendo ever lost money on console hardware.
That's part of what REAL ID is trying to fix. Being able to get into the country under false pretenses should be at least slightly less easy than it is right now, don't you think? Especially considering that states like my home state of California are seriously considering the bafflingly bad idea of giving driver's licenses to non-citizens.
You might know a lot about Apple, but you don't know much about immigration law. There are very few privileges that citizens have that green card holders don't, for the simple reason that green card holders are normally here permanently. Obviously, green card holders can't vote, and if they break the law they can be deported, but those are the significant differences.
There's no reason to condition driving, which is a practical requirement for living anywhere in this country but Boston and New York, on citizenship. There are good reasons for someone not to become a citizen. Some countries, like Japan, do not allow dual citizenship. If someone marries a U.S. citizen, should they have to permanently give up their connection to their family and their childhood just to get a drivers license? Nobody is proposing that. You'd think I would be an idiot if I took Japanese citizenship and gave up my U.S. citizenship; it's the same principle in the other direction.
I assume you mean that undocumented immigrants should not have drivers' licenses. I'm open to persuasion, but it needs to be by someone who has at least a rudimentary understanding of the issues.
Only according to INS, according to IRS you are a resident and will be paying taxes (and social security and other fees).
I don't think you know what you're talking about. I'm pretty sure a "resident" pays tax on world-wide income but a non-resident pays tax only on U.S. source income. There's usually a 183-day rule for determining international residency.
y. I know the US is stuffed full of skilled people, but my sample set was those who responded to our adverts. The Chinese were educated and skilled beyond belief. The Indian was a mistake because he had no grasp of the cost of any particular development path. The US nationals tended to overrate their abilities.
If I might hazard a guess, I would think that the Chinese you interviewed were sent to the U.S. as being the best people from their educational programs back in China. Being students in the U.S. and wanting to stay, they looked for permanent employment. (So either they were currently students, or they were recently students. I think this is a fair assumption, as they didn't yet have their green cards since you mention their visa status).
The U.S. candidates you interviewed were not selected on that basis. You were selecting from a larger pool which included less capable candidates, and it's also possible that the better American students were less attracted to the jobs you were offering. Something that sounds boring, or doesn't pay well, or sets off people's office-politics alarm isn't going to get the better Americans who have other options. (The exact same effect happens when Americans move overseas. That's why you see so many Americans teaching English in Japan, or doing very menial company jobs. They're not stupid, they just have fewer opportunities than the natives. But you do see a handful of extremely talented white people in Japan doing very well, like the new CEO of Sony or the CEO of Nissan.) You didn't say, but I'm assuming you also interviewed unemployed American programmers. Although many good people lose their jobs through no fault of their own, you wouldn't be surprised if some of the people who lose their jobs aren't the best programmers.
I'm not sure how relevant it is that the Chinese were more humble about their abilities than the native Americans. Certainly any manager would want to know a candidate's true abilities rather than rely on self-representations. I agree that your stereotypes about Chinese, Indian, and American workers' self-representations are consistent with my experience.
To make this clearer, you have to realize that the Chinese students who speak English well enough to come to America on a government scholarship and finish school are smarter than the average bear. But analogizing from your experience is like deducing the state of physical education in China and America based on how many gold medals each won in the last Olympics. Especially when many of the best students from foreign countries who come to the U.S. for their university work choose to stay in the U.S. In that way the U.S. cherry-picks the best fruits of other countries' educational systems. (Although that trend is starting to slow, as native countries provide more economic opportunities.)
I am skeptical of your three decades estimate. The figures I have read suggest that if China's growth continues, in fifty years it will be half the size of the U.S. I'm sure I'm mistaken about the numbers, but China has a long, long way to go before overtaking the United States, in spite of the monstrous trade deficit we have with them.
Using air conditioning is supposed to make a difference, but last autumn I drove the same route for a week and noticed that my MPG was higher during a week where I was using air conditioning compared to one where I only had the windows open or the fan on.
That's not surprising when you had your windows down -- that adds serious air resistance.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you mean stealthily?
No, it means he will receive an integer number of kicks in the ass. It's rather difficult to kick someone a fractional number of times.
Actually, I wouldn't be so sure. Microsoft basically paid them off to go away rather than risk losing their trademark. (There was some funny business in Europe, but I don't believe it truly reached the merits of the case.) Using the word "Windows" to refer to a window system product was pretty stupid -- it would be like calling a breed of cattle "Beef." A lot of Microsoft's older products used descriptive or generic names for marketing reasons. I would imagine they started using arbitrary (like "Excel") and fanciful (like "PowerPoint") names for trademark reasons.
The legal arguments aren't decisive one way or the other, but there was a pretty good chance Microsoft would have lost. I would imagine that Lindows pressed the suit as long as they did (in jurisdictions around the world, no less) not because it was worth the legal fees to win, but because they knew Microsoft was on shaky ground and would probably pay them off to go away.
Normally I'm no fan of shakedown suits, but Microsoft brought this problem on themselves. It was gross negligence by their corporate counsel in the 1980s. (Alternatively, they co-opted the word "windows" so that people who don't know much about computers assume that Macs, etc. must run Windows because they have "windows." To the degree that's true, I wish all the bad karma in the world on Microsoft...)
I'm genuinely curious, did the eject button on the keyboard not work?
If you know what you're doing then you have already diagnosed the problem and know that using Nero vs. XP's burn software shouldn't make a difference, and that reinstalling is a complete cop-out that changes nothing. So just lie.
I share your pain. The most irritating experience I can remember is using a $700/hr commercial database with Firefox, getting a server time-out on a particularly complicated query, and being told by the tech support chimp that the problem is that I wasn't using Internet Explorer.
That said, I briefly worked in network support at a university famous for its engineering program. What you describe is what we called "the savvy user problem."
We obviously didn't have a script (we're not idiots -- most of us were engineering students moonlighting for a little extra money or free in-room internet), but we did suggest people do things that "shouldn't" make a difference. For example, one of the first things we would do is we would tell people to take their patch cord, remove it, and plug it in the other way. The reason is that the cable might be loose, and if we just told them to "reseat the cable" the know-it-all would just look at it or give it a little poke and say it's fine.
When people would lie and say that they do what we're telling them, it wastes our time when we have to come out for simple problems. There's no reason for us to have to come out unless the jack in the wall has gone bad (which actually happens more than you would think with students plugging and unplugging their equipment over and over).
That's amazing. Just a few years ago palladium cost twice as much as platinum. (There's a lot of volatility - Ford Motor ate a billion dollar loss on its palladium stockpile not too long ago!)
Why anyone would make speaker wires out of that is beyond me. They must have a solid gold house and a rocket car, too.
I'm pretty sure you meant to say "reed solomon forward error correction." Parity data won't let you fix errors. And both DVDs and CDs use Reed Solomon.
As far I know, jitter doesn't have anything to do with any of this.
That's fine, like I said this isn't something I claim expertise on -- I would barely claim literacy. I didn't claim that an aerogel cap would be a good idea, only that it was interesting that he didn't discuss the merits of different kinds of capacitors, as preventing voltage dip with higher capacitance was pretty much the only part of the article that passed my bullshit antenna.
But you've got to admit the article is hokum. Rhodium and silver RCA connectors? Give me a break.
My first summer job in school, back in the day, was working in a test lab at a defense contractor developing aircraft radios. Of all the connectors and cables we used (there were some TIGHT specs there), I never saw an RCA jack, and I'm pretty sure even the funny-looking military jacks that cost hundreds of dollars a piece weren't made out of rhodium and silver.
Okay, sure. A clean power supply is important.
I must confess that this is far outside my bailiwick, but my bullshit sensor went off when I read things like this:
Regardless of which way you go, replacing the stock nickel RCA jacks with better-quality ones is considered standard operating procedure. ... Get gold-plated jacks if you must, but make sure they don't have any nickel under the gold (most of them do).
What on earth is that about? These joints aren't going underwater, he doesn't need to worry about the galvanic series.
Better choices are available from Cardas Audio and Kimber Kable; you can't go wrong with any of the jacks that use silver and rhodium over copper.
Right. Okay...
Rhodium is an extremely expensive metal -- costs about $2000/ounce I believe. It's not necessary for audio work, and you're sure as heck not going to get very much of it from these charlatans.
Silver costs about $5/ounce. I know that high-power circuit breakers use silver contacts, but to the extent that I care about a home audio connection I'd rather have something that didn't tarnish.
Some popular choices of these low-loss high-voltage capacitors are Auricap, Solen, Hovland, and Sonicaps. These can cost from $10 to $50 per pair. Each brand affects the sound in slightly different ways--again, this is where the art comes in. (I used Sonicaps.)
It seems rather unlikely that companies I've never heard of would have factories producing better parts than Panasonic, Sanyo, etc. You could certainly buy a top-quality part from a reputable company at reasonable cost. Parts companies have several different lines of parts to address different price/performance segments. (My guess is that these companies just relabel parts from name-brand manufacturers.)
The bit where he said "Each brand affects the sound in slightly different ways" actually made me laugh out loud.
One thing that surprised me is that he didn't mention the possibility of using a different kind of capacitor to achieve higher capacitance, where he was talking about "fit in the highest valued capacitor in the space provided." The last few years have given us all kinds of interesting high-valued capacitors, like tantalum caps, aerogel caps, etc.
Several companies sell sophisticated clock circuits meant to replace the stock clocks in disc players. Two examples are the Superclock3 from Audiocom International Ltd., Pembroke Dock, Wales, and the LClock XO3 from LC Audio Technology in Holstebro, Denmark. These replacement clocks cost between $200 and $300 and will require more technical knowledge to implement than I can give you here. They can, however, very dramatically improve the performance of a digital player.
Very dramatically, huh? Again, this isn't something I'm claiming a lot of knowledge on, but this smells like grade A fertilizer to me. Clock jitter just isn't a problem in this day and age -- definitely not to the degree that someone could hear it.
LC Audio Technology makes a circuit it calls the Zapfilter Mk2 that goes in place of the op-amps. It is a high-end solution and a price tag to match: a cool $270 for 2 channels. LC Audio offers a package deal with its LClock unit, at $540.79. Of course, this sum is more than twice what the Toshiba player and all the other parts will cost you all together. But, hey, if you're feeling flush, have lots of confidence in your soldering skills, and really want to go all out, this is a great way to do it.
Uh, huh.
More to the point, using the word "piracy" is empty rhetoric that has no place in reputable newsreporting. The last time I checked the U.S. Code, "piracy" is a crime punishable by death (for air piracy; sea piracy is punishable by life imprisonment).
Why don't we just call file sharers "child rapists" with some equally strained analogy?
(The term "piracy" is used in some patent court decisions, true, but that's hardly an excuse.)
I seem to remember that they fought the infamous "XOR cursor" patent and lost, too. Have to give them props for that.
Ironically, the royalty per port is the same as the price of an iTunes song.
I think it's a little revisionist to say the royalty multiplied the FireWire price by 10. More accurately, I think, is that manufacturers were scared away by the thought of having to pay a couple bucks per card and so the virtuous cycle of adoption/competition never started.
I'm pretty sure it's because the DISC (i.e. the cookie, the magnetic medium) is floppy. Hard disk platters are made of aluminum, now glass, decidedly unfloppy media.
Also, the 8" and 5.25" discs that preceded the 3.5" floppy had flexible jackets, so the whole thing was pretty floppy, as you might recall.
The submitter almost certainly lives in America, given his spelling and the demographics of Slashdot. Either you didn't catch that, or you don't know much about American employment law.
Ah, it's because of messages like yours that I have "insightful" set to score "-2."
You do know that the "unconditional" surrender that Roosevelt accepted (keeping the emperor on the throne) was essentially the same as the rejected offer the Japanese had previously made, right?
There are two very good museums in Japan you'd learn a lot at. One is in Hiroshima, and has many, many historical U.S. documents that show very clearly why the bombs were dropped. (Here's a hint: It's not the reason you think it is.) The other is at Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, which gives a pretty good insight into the history of WW2 that most Americans (evidently including you) don't know.
Even accepting your argument as true, there's a rather disturbing calculus of the value of human life (foreign civilian v. domestic military) you're employing. We're seeing it in the popular American perception of Iraq, where Americans basically don't give a damn about how many Iraqi civilians are killed. I can at least understand that. The whole reason a war with Iraq was politically possible in the first place without any kind of provocation is that Americans basically don't like "those kinds of people" very much.
But given that WW2 happened 60 years ago, America was equally at war with Germany and Japan. amd Japan is one of America's closest economic and strategic allies today, the fact that you would still consider killing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians to be negligible compared to "saving" hundreds of thousands of American military suggests you have deep prejudicial issues. I'm not going to call you racist, but it sure seems that you are.
Very few companies are headquartered in Delaware or Bermuda. I think you mean to say the companies are incorporated in Delaware or Bermuda.
What you say doesn't make sense, either -- most states charge income tax to the companies incorporated therein (there's also a foreign corporation tax, but that's another matter), and your message is equally non-sensical if you apply it to income tax.
I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about.
Something you may not know is that the special treatment on automobile sales ("use") tax is going away on a state-by-state basis. It was a nice equilibrium when every state did it by buyer's residence, but unfortunately states have started to "cheat." If State A goes to a sales tax, it's great in the short term, because residents from all other states pay tax twice at no cost to State A.
In response, states like Illinois very recently started keeping a list, updated every six months, of states with which there is reciprocity.
Wow, you're pretty hostile for someone who doesn't know what he's talking about. May I ask where you got your Ph.D. in computer architecture?
Intel used to diligently guard some of the features of the Pentium series, the famous secret "appendix H" for example. People were eventually able to reverse-engineer the information in the appendix (and these sorts of trade secrets have a way of diffusing outward in spite of NDAs), but nevertheless these features were not implemented in competing processors because the information wasn't widely available. I believe the Cyrix chip didn't implement 4MB pages, for instance. There are other proprietary features documented in the appendix like virtual mode extensions.
Apple does not serve encrypted iTunes songs -- the songs are sent plain, unencrypted, and the iTunes client software does the encrypting. One of DVDJon's releases showed this.
You may be correct that the GC "is not" sold at a loss, but it was sold at a loss after the late 2003 price cut. Source
IGNcube: Okay. Now GameCube is selling for $99 and it's doing great. But is Nintendo losing money on each unit sold?
Perrin: I would say that our losses are really negligible. It's such a small amount. Plus with the amount of software that's being sold we're still definitely in a solid profit situation. We're not in the position that I know that Microsoft has been in with the loss Xbox hardware.
Perrin Kaplan is the NOA vice president of corporate affairs.
As far as I know, though, you are correct that at no other time has Nintendo had to sell a console for a loss, which shows just how much trouble they are in.
It is highly unlikely that the Tiberius plate was aluminum, given the enormous temperatures required for reducing aluminum ore in the absence of electricity. We have no idea what this metal might have been -- perhaps tin?
I'd love to see a quote on that. There was an interview on IGN with one of the Nintendo VPs who said they were losing a few dollars a unit after the price drop to $99. This was, by the way, according to IGN, the only time Nintendo ever lost money on console hardware.
You might know a lot about Apple, but you don't know much about immigration law. There are very few privileges that citizens have that green card holders don't, for the simple reason that green card holders are normally here permanently. Obviously, green card holders can't vote, and if they break the law they can be deported, but those are the significant differences.
There's no reason to condition driving, which is a practical requirement for living anywhere in this country but Boston and New York, on citizenship. There are good reasons for someone not to become a citizen. Some countries, like Japan, do not allow dual citizenship. If someone marries a U.S. citizen, should they have to permanently give up their connection to their family and their childhood just to get a drivers license? Nobody is proposing that. You'd think I would be an idiot if I took Japanese citizenship and gave up my U.S. citizenship; it's the same principle in the other direction.
I assume you mean that undocumented immigrants should not have drivers' licenses. I'm open to persuasion, but it needs to be by someone who has at least a rudimentary understanding of the issues.
I don't think you know what you're talking about. I'm pretty sure a "resident" pays tax on world-wide income but a non-resident pays tax only on U.S. source income. There's usually a 183-day rule for determining international residency.
If I might hazard a guess, I would think that the Chinese you interviewed were sent to the U.S. as being the best people from their educational programs back in China. Being students in the U.S. and wanting to stay, they looked for permanent employment. (So either they were currently students, or they were recently students. I think this is a fair assumption, as they didn't yet have their green cards since you mention their visa status).
The U.S. candidates you interviewed were not selected on that basis. You were selecting from a larger pool which included less capable candidates, and it's also possible that the better American students were less attracted to the jobs you were offering. Something that sounds boring, or doesn't pay well, or sets off people's office-politics alarm isn't going to get the better Americans who have other options. (The exact same effect happens when Americans move overseas. That's why you see so many Americans teaching English in Japan, or doing very menial company jobs. They're not stupid, they just have fewer opportunities than the natives. But you do see a handful of extremely talented white people in Japan doing very well, like the new CEO of Sony or the CEO of Nissan.) You didn't say, but I'm assuming you also interviewed unemployed American programmers. Although many good people lose their jobs through no fault of their own, you wouldn't be surprised if some of the people who lose their jobs aren't the best programmers.
I'm not sure how relevant it is that the Chinese were more humble about their abilities than the native Americans. Certainly any manager would want to know a candidate's true abilities rather than rely on self-representations. I agree that your stereotypes about Chinese, Indian, and American workers' self-representations are consistent with my experience.
To make this clearer, you have to realize that the Chinese students who speak English well enough to come to America on a government scholarship and finish school are smarter than the average bear. But analogizing from your experience is like deducing the state of physical education in China and America based on how many gold medals each won in the last Olympics. Especially when many of the best students from foreign countries who come to the U.S. for their university work choose to stay in the U.S. In that way the U.S. cherry-picks the best fruits of other countries' educational systems. (Although that trend is starting to slow, as native countries provide more economic opportunities.)
I am skeptical of your three decades estimate. The figures I have read suggest that if China's growth continues, in fifty years it will be half the size of the U.S. I'm sure I'm mistaken about the numbers, but China has a long, long way to go before overtaking the United States, in spite of the monstrous trade deficit we have with them.
That's not surprising when you had your windows down -- that adds serious air resistance.