Some of the items on the list, although we love to hate them, are things that really did help the tech world make strides forward. For example, say what you want about AOL but, if it weren't for them, I still probably wouldn't be able to send email to my mom. Zip disks? Yes, they had click-of-death but, at the time, a portable 100MB for $10? That was unreal. PointCast? PointCast was the first time where you could have your very own, customized scrolling ticker on your screen... just like the ones on the CNN screen... but it only had the stuff *you* wanted. When it first came out, it was a marvel. All of these items changed the way that people thought about what they could do with computers when they first came out.
Contrast that with some items on the list that were complete disasters from the moment they were launched: IBM PC Jr., CueCat, Microsoft Bob... THOSE belong on the list. The list probably should have included some other items that had lofty ambitions but just never "took" (like OS/2). But, like I said, some of the ones on the list, I feel, aren't getting their due. We look at them now and see how worthless they are by today's standards (you can probably get any of these items on eBay for $5, now), but that ignores the impact they had when they were first released.
It's they're product, and they're entitled to try to maximize revenue from it. This isn't unlike how airlines charge different fliers different amounts based on whether they're business travelers (spending freely with the company's money and not wanting to spend the weekend after the conference away from home) or vacationers (tight on money and often just going for a weekend). Price discrimination takes many forms... and some of them are fairly nuanced. Holding an auction is a fairly blunt way of going about it, but it's a legitimate business practice.
Now, I'll also point out that I sometimes scalp tickets. A local county fair usually has some very attractive acts that all go on sale on the same morning. If there's an act that I want to see (so I'm in line overnight, anyway...), then I'll buy the max they'll allow me for each act and then I sell them on eBay. My justification for doing this is that... without scalpers, those with more time than money (ie, students, slackers, etc.) would get all of the great seats. Scalpers allow those with more money than time (lawyers, doctors, etc.) a chance to get good seats, too. So, everybody gets a chance.
Before you say that I was just trying to justify my greed, I'll point out that the part about this that I do have a problem with is that it freezes out the first group I mentioned... those with more time than money. So, I think the auction is no better than having everyone stand in line. It would be nice to see some blend, where some of the tix went for auction and others were for people willing to do something incredibly boring for a long time.
The report, published in the most recent issue of the journal Nature, estimates that final break between the human and chimpanzee species did not come until 6.3 million years ago at the earliest...
Ah.. now I remember it. All those previous breaks, we ended up taking them back. However, the "final break" was after we caught those damn chimps cheating on us with our best friends. That was the last straw, man....
Going back and reading it, I have verified that Bush vowed to eliminate ANIMAL/human hybrids, and said nothing about hybrids with NON-animals. Ha! Those clever scientists have figured out a way to snub him once again. Of course, we'll be sorry we ignored his warnings when, someday, we're all enslaved by a race of self-harvesting "ricemen".
This is the canary in the coal-mine. We're not served by minimizing it when the canary laying at the bottom of its cage, gasping for air.
I haven't seen it put this way before, but I like the analogy.
The way I tell it to people is "If you wait until it's obvious that we're turning into a fascist police-state, it will be too late to stop it". (In fact, a friend of mine who even *voted* for Bush in 2004 told me "The main problem with Bush is that he's turning the country into NAZI Germany.... but he's doing it slowly enough so that nobody notices..."). Think about it for a moment. If you were trying to nullify the liberty and democracy that we, for the time being, enjoy, how would you go about it? You certainly wouldn't write it into a bill and put it before Congress. You'd have to slowly, patiently, chisel away at the safeguards.
Topping the to-do list would be to make "freedom of the press" a cliche' with no real meaning. Start with revoking the White House press pool credentials of any reporter that asks the president a hard-ball question so that all of the press pool is afraid to really go after him. Next, intimidate the non-press-pool reporters with surveilance so that all reporters are wary about exposing gov't misdoings.
It reminds me a lot of high-school. The school had rules against violence between students. So, if I saw some jock cheating on an exam in class, I should have been able to report him without fear of reprisal, right? Not. The analogy isn't perfect, but I think it gets the point across. When it's possible to exert intimidation, then it doesn't matter what rights are actually written down... they're just window dressing. Maybe Bush was right after all... the Constitution reall is "just a goddamn piece of paper".
My vote goes to Lord John Whorfin, of Yoyodyne. I like him more than Chistopher Lloyd's BTTF Emmett Brown. The Brown character was just written a little too "nutty"... the "wild contraption" type.
With Whorfin, he was actually working with another scientist on something, which makes him seem less like a lone crackpot and more like he just "turned evil".
Where might one find voices or proposals which attempt to combat child pornography without encroaching on reasonable civil liberties or turning the internet into a police state?
I think a good start would be to follow the money and not the browsers. Although he's breaking the law, I don't see how some dude getting some kiddie porn on a P2P network for free is contributing to the further injury of children. Is the dude sick? Sure. But I don't see how he's making the problem worse (where the problem, the thing we're really trying to reduce, is the victimization of children). However, if somebody else is willing to pay for some... then they are creating a market, an incentive for others to go out and find some new victims (or to further victimize their current ones). It's analogous to the argument that we could eliminate spam if we just started lynching the people who respond to spam.:)
That's why I just don't buy this BS where the administration is trying to get the search engines to divulge who's searching for things like "sex". This "driftnetting" approach is going to net so many people who aren't "the problem". On the other hand, it should be much easier to find the suppliers and to find out who's been sending them money... and I think more of your leads are going to lead to the real offenders.
Y'know, this is one case where I kinda think the gov't needs to take a page from the RIAA playbook. In fact, why doesn't Congress just grant the RIAA the copyright to all kiddie porn. THEN, we'll see a crackdown.:)
GeIL DDR2-667 that was claimed to be purchased performed worse than the review samples they got: 471 MHz for the review samples vs. 421 MHz for the retail memory.
PLEASE don't tell me that you're surprised by this. In fact, you should be surprised if it isn't happening.
Recall the hubub from as recently as a half-decade ago, when video card manufacturers were rigging their drivers (or the cards themselves) to recognize when they were being asked to draw the same patterns over and over again (like, say, 10,000 colored boxes, or circles... like benchmark programs do) and would silently decide to perform only a fraction of them to jack the benchmark numbers up?
Never, ever trust the results from an item that the company sent you when they knew you were a reviewer. You should just go out and buy one off the shelf in a store. If you can't afford to do that, buy one from a store and ask the company for a review sample, return the sample to the store and test the, now free, one that you got "in the wild", as it were.
The question seem to be "who do you want to align yourself with (in the company) and can you get to your desired position with them?" If you want the position you're going to have to play their games to fall into their good graces...
This is a common sociological phenomenon, actually.
If you're not willing to do any work to assimilate into the new group, the message this sends is that inclusion isn't important to you... and that you can be expected to behave accordingly when the group needs you. It's the same reason that hazing works with fraternities. If you're willing to go through all of that toil in order to get accepted, then the other members are comfortable that you'll "have their back" the next time they need you (as an alibi for a date-rape charge, I'd figure).
You encounter this every day, too. In general, society has unspoken guidelines like: don't wear just one shoe, don't wear your clothes backward, and don't stab others in the face with a knife. So, when you see some dude walking down the street with his clothes backward and with one shoe missing, it reflects a lack of "buy in" on their part. Whether it's due to their being truly insane or just unconventional, they're advertizing that adherence to these social guidelines is not a priority for them.... which gets you wondering if they adhere to some of the bigger ones (like not stabbing people), so you instinctively tend to keep your distance from them.
So, I guess I'm saying that, if you're going to change things, your best shot is probably to do it from the inside. Learn the lingo, hobnob, get brought into the fold, and then start asking folks "So... just what *is* a multi-tiered vertical paradigm shift, anyway... and how is it different from the horizontal kind?".
You forget that the military personnel have all taken an oath to defend the US Constitution. If ordered to fire on American civilians, many of them will refuse.
Now you know why I'm very nervous about the military's development of autonomous combat vehicles. A self-piloting tank doesn't think to say "no" if Bush tells them to kill the liberals.
As an aside, you're also assuming that military personnel know the constitution. Every few years, somebody does an experiment where they stand outside of grocery stores, trying to get citizens to sign a petition to get a piece of "legislation" put onto the next election ballot. In every case, there are two frightening observations, and I don't know which is worse. First, only a tiny number (like 10-20%) recognized that the "legislation" was actually the first ammendment of the constitution. Second, many more people expressed that they felt that the legislation was unconstitutional.
Something tells me that the initial price of these fuel cells is going to exceed the price of the laptop itself. In fact, I'll bet it'll be cheaper for me to buy a car batter, an inverter, and a sherpa to carry them while he follows me everywhere.:)
It's simply not possible to make a DC power transformer because only alternating current provides the changing magnetic field that makes them work. Power transformers are required for stepping up the voltage before transmitting the power over long distances in order to reduce the power losses.
Switching power-supplies , charge pumps, and voltage multipliers can be used to convert from DC to DC. They can even step up the voltage.
Now, I notice that you said that you can't make a "DC power transformer" and I grant that as true if we define a transformer as the traditional hunk of iron with two coils of wire around it. However, it is possible, these days, to convert modest DC voltages to other DC voltages... with less heat loss than you can with a transformer in an AC-to-DC arrangement.
Of course, Edison didn't have the luxury of semiconductors, so stepping up DC voltages for transmission wasn't feasible. (So it was transmission that AC had over DC. Westinghouse didn't contend that AC was better for the home as much as he contended that AC was the only sensible option for transmission of electricity over long distances. So, the fact that there are gains realized by having some wired DC in a home or server room don't make Edison "right" regarding the infrastructure battle he was having with Westinghouse).
Indeed, Edison knew that, with DC, the power stations would have to be in close proximity to the consumers of that electricity. An interesting aspect of this is the Love Canal in New York. The Love Canal was originally supposed to divert water from the Niagara River from a spot above the Niagara Falls to a spot below. This canal would be used to power a hydro-electric facility to power the city of Niagara Falls. However, only a small fraction of the canal had been dug when it became clear that DC was going to lose and, with it, the requirement that power generation be in close proximity to power consumption would vanish. So, construction was halted and the canal was used, over the years, as a dumping ground for toxic waste. Murphy's Law being what it is, the waste was filled over with earth, and then the city built a school on the land. Kids got sick, parents demonstrated (even "kidnapping" some EPA inspectors), and a wonderful time was had by all... eventually leading to the air and water quality regulations in the United States today.
So, the next time you hear some business owner complaining about how he can't dump barium-chloride into the local river, you be sure to tell him to blame Westinghouse!:)
So the toad has no natural predators in Australia? Here's the solution... just import whatever its predators are in Hawaii.
Oh, and, so that we don't have this problem again, don't forget to import whatever their predators are (and so on). And, once we've had all of Hawaii's fauna displace the native ones, have Hawaii annex Australia... and rename it something like "Ulawakai'i".:)
People like John Seigenthaler Sr. seem to think that Wikipedia has some implicit pact with the browsing public to ensure the veracity of its content.
To the contrary, I've always viewed Wikipedia as a graffitti wall, in that anybody can scribble anything they want, and anbody else can scribble over that. The difference from other graffitt walls is that it happens to be correct 99% of the time.
Okay, so by your logic a person being tortured "decides" to give up information.
That's correct. They do. My guess is that, by choosing such an analogy, you're trying to insinuate that my defense of giving work to these people equates to a defense of torturing people... and, in that, I think you've missed the point. And here's why...
Suppose you came upon some dude who was being tortured. He wasn't being tortured to coerce him to do anything. Rather, the state of his existence was one of torture and there wasn't anything he could say or do to change it. Then, you come along and, somehow, manage to arrange things so that, if he gives up some secret information, you can have the torture stop. It's his choice. I think I should re-itterate that you didn't have anything to do with establishing this guy's torture situation. You merely became aware of it and were able to offer him another option.
I think that scenario more-closely matches what I was defending earlier. In my original post, I stated that the events which originally caused their existing conditions of poverty (the ones that make them willing to "choose" such miserable working conditions) are topics for another discussion... just like we should rightly use a separate discussion to figure out "how come nobody helped this torture victim earlier?".
The problem is, the person is in need of food, and instead of a carrot, you hold up a carrot on a stick and make him chase it. Nice.
Well, I think that's what belongs in the other discussion, because you're talking about charity to counter human suffering. It belongs in another discussion because charity isn't the corporation's line of work. If it were, it wouldn't be a corporation very long. If you want to discuss how selfish we all are, as individuals, for not flying to India to help stamp out poverty there, then we can discuss that, but you're not going to convince me that the corporation is evil because it offered jobs to these people and they took them.
"Yes, it is dangerous work," he said, wiping his face on a blackened sleeve. "But there is no other work we know how to do. We are helpless."
It certainly appears to me from the above quote that "Mobeen" considers himself and his coworkers exploited in this situation
I didn't take his words as meaning exploited. It sounded, to me, like he was a guy with very few options and he knew it... but they are options nonetheless. Keep in mind that nobody else is more affected by the guy's decision than he is... and he's deciding to do this. He has decided that risking personal injury is worth not starving to death.
Imagine if someone came to him one day and said "Mobeen, some Americans have decided that you were being exploited. So, to save you from exploitation, you're going to have to be unemployed from now on.". Something tells me that would make as much sense to him as "We had to destroy the village in order to save it".
it's as big a scandal as the ships being dissassembled by hand on the beaches of India...
The only "scandal" I see here is that the living conditions in those areas are so bad that the inhabitants place so little value on their time, health, and life.
However, when a corporation decides to "shop around" and find the cheapest solution to their problem, I don't see how that's not just a large-scale version of when I go on Froogle to find the cheapest place to get my new DVD burner.
This whole scenario plays into what economists call "factor price equalization". The idea goes something like this: Let's say you're in the business of manufacturing something (like a car engine or whatnot). You've got all of your manufacturing pieces in place except for one: you need ten thousand washers placed on ten thousand bolts. For doing this job, "Joe American" in Detroit wants $10/hr, plus medical, dental, and vision coverage... and 2 weeks per year paid vacation. Meanwhile, Shankar in India will do the same job for $4/day and requires none of the other benefits.
Now, if "Joe American" were able to put the washer on the bolt with an expertise, precision, and efficiency that was simply unmatched by Shankar, then there might be a reason to pay him the 20x as much. However, even if there was such a disparity in skill, it would also have to be worth it to you to have the washers put on the bolts with that extra skill.
Alas, in reality, there is no skill disparity when it comes to tasks as simple as this, so the American worker can offer no advantage to the employer to justify his high price. The "equalization" part of Factor-Price Equalization theory is the observation that, eventually, the prices (in wages and benefits) charged by Joe American and Shankar will equalize. Eventually, increasing competition for Indian labor will drive their price up, while Joe American will finally come to the realization that simply having been born in the USA doesn't make up for the fact that he never finished high-school and he'll face the fact that the value of his labor is much lower than what he was, up until now, able to get away with.
The lesson is clear: If you want to be well-compensated for your work, you need to be able to do something that... A) few other people can do (ie, low supply), and B) many people want/need done (ie, high demand). This lesson isn't new. It's just that we're now starting to see a decrease in people being able to get away with not heeding it.
Now, like I said at the outset, the fact that there exist such squalid conditions in India (and countless other parts of the world) might qualify as a travesty (and how is employing these people doing anything but working towards eliminating that?), but... as has been pointed out here numerous times... the hundreds of workers showing up every day don't consider themselves to be exploited. They call it opportunity.
How stupid do these people have to be? A gravity generator? Are you freaking kidding me? And "low orbit" not giving you weightlessness?
Please tell me that the "winners" of this thing are the people who figure out that it's bogus and that the "prize" is getting to keep your reproductive organs.
From the article: "Wales, in a recent C-SPAN interview...insisted that his Web site is accountable and that his community of thousands of volunteer editors...corrects mistakes within minutes," former Robert Kennedy aide John Seigenthaler wrote in USA Today. "My experience refutes that...For four months, Wikipedia depicted me as a suspected assassin."
Actually, since his page wasn't linked to from any other Wikipedia articles, I'd have to say that Wikipedia was *actually* depicting him as someone of negligible importance... a depiction with which I'd have to concur.
Someone who thinks he's being wiretapped can apparently just send a low tone down the line that turns off the recorder
Of course nobody would actually play that tone over the phone unless they were trying to foil wiretaps, right? How long do you think it'll be before the feds try to ammend the Patriot Act to allow them to listen just for that tone even on lines that they don't have a wiretap warrant for? Imagine picking up any phone in the U.S., playing the tone into it, and immediately getting your conversation recorded.... simply by virtue that you've already demonstrated your "guilty mind".
On the Discovery Channel's discussion forum, they solicit suggestions for bustable myths. However, they also list a littany of "don't bother suggesting these" myths that, apparently, have either been busted/confirmed already or have been ruled out. One of the items on this list is exploding woodshop dust-collectors (ignited by static electricity build-up) in PVC ducts.
Why is this myth off-limits? It seems to have all of the MB pre-requisites: It involves something exploding or catching on fire, it's fairly easy to test, and, if you bust the myth, you can go overboard with the myth to force the phenomenon (personally, I've made a flame-thrower with a leaf-blower and a bag of flour). Most-importantly, however, is that this myth has real-world implications for how wood-workers plumb their shops for dust-collection (using PVC vs. steel ducting) unlike, say, exploding jawbreakers. Or, is that precisely *why* you guys don't do it, because it would have *such* real-world effect? Because MB might bust the myth, woodworkers across the country would plumb their shops with PVC, one of them would still somehow blow their shop up, and then sue the show?
Before the MB show came along, you guys were an FX shop, and I'm figuring that you still do that as your main gig. So, which do you guys enjoy more, the FX or filming MB? Going further, how often do you have to meet some commitment for one of them (say, taping a MB episode) and wished it would just be over so that you could go back to the other one that you like more?
So it looks like we might soon have near immortal, fearless mice.
The article talked about aging, not immortality. All this really does is decrease the mouse's chances of dying of old-age, which, consequently, gives the mouse more chances to die of something else. This is even more likely if we surpress their flight response (unless we can engineer cats that never get hungry).
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Some of the items on the list, although we love to hate them, are things that really did help the tech world make strides forward. For example, say what you want about AOL but, if it weren't for them, I still probably wouldn't be able to send email to my mom. Zip disks? Yes, they had click-of-death but, at the time, a portable 100MB for $10? That was unreal. PointCast? PointCast was the first time where you could have your very own, customized scrolling ticker on your screen... just like the ones on the CNN screen... but it only had the stuff *you* wanted. When it first came out, it was a marvel. All of these items changed the way that people thought about what they could do with computers when they first came out.
Contrast that with some items on the list that were complete disasters from the moment they were launched: IBM PC Jr., CueCat, Microsoft Bob... THOSE belong on the list. The list probably should have included some other items that had lofty ambitions but just never "took" (like OS/2). But, like I said, some of the ones on the list, I feel, aren't getting their due. We look at them now and see how worthless they are by today's standards (you can probably get any of these items on eBay for $5, now), but that ignores the impact they had when they were first released.
It's they're product, and they're entitled to try to maximize revenue from it. This isn't unlike how airlines charge different fliers different amounts based on whether they're business travelers (spending freely with the company's money and not wanting to spend the weekend after the conference away from home) or vacationers (tight on money and often just going for a weekend). Price discrimination takes many forms... and some of them are fairly nuanced. Holding an auction is a fairly blunt way of going about it, but it's a legitimate business practice.
Now, I'll also point out that I sometimes scalp tickets. A local county fair usually has some very attractive acts that all go on sale on the same morning. If there's an act that I want to see (so I'm in line overnight, anyway...), then I'll buy the max they'll allow me for each act and then I sell them on eBay. My justification for doing this is that... without scalpers, those with more time than money (ie, students, slackers, etc.) would get all of the great seats. Scalpers allow those with more money than time (lawyers, doctors, etc.) a chance to get good seats, too. So, everybody gets a chance.
Before you say that I was just trying to justify my greed, I'll point out that the part about this that I do have a problem with is that it freezes out the first group I mentioned... those with more time than money. So, I think the auction is no better than having everyone stand in line. It would be nice to see some blend, where some of the tix went for auction and others were for people willing to do something incredibly boring for a long time.
Going back and reading it, I have verified that Bush vowed to eliminate ANIMAL/human hybrids, and said nothing about hybrids with NON-animals. Ha! Those clever scientists have figured out a way to snub him once again. Of course, we'll be sorry we ignored his warnings when, someday, we're all enslaved by a race of self-harvesting "ricemen".
The way I tell it to people is "If you wait until it's obvious that we're turning into a fascist police-state, it will be too late to stop it". (In fact, a friend of mine who even *voted* for Bush in 2004 told me "The main problem with Bush is that he's turning the country into NAZI Germany.... but he's doing it slowly enough so that nobody notices..."). Think about it for a moment. If you were trying to nullify the liberty and democracy that we, for the time being, enjoy, how would you go about it? You certainly wouldn't write it into a bill and put it before Congress. You'd have to slowly, patiently, chisel away at the safeguards.
Topping the to-do list would be to make "freedom of the press" a cliche' with no real meaning. Start with revoking the White House press pool credentials of any reporter that asks the president a hard-ball question so that all of the press pool is afraid to really go after him. Next, intimidate the non-press-pool reporters with surveilance so that all reporters are wary about exposing gov't misdoings.
It reminds me a lot of high-school. The school had rules against violence between students. So, if I saw some jock cheating on an exam in class, I should have been able to report him without fear of reprisal, right? Not. The analogy isn't perfect, but I think it gets the point across. When it's possible to exert intimidation, then it doesn't matter what rights are actually written down... they're just window dressing. Maybe Bush was right after all... the Constitution reall is "just a goddamn piece of paper".
My vote goes to Lord John Whorfin, of Yoyodyne. I like him more than Chistopher Lloyd's BTTF Emmett Brown. The Brown character was just written a little too "nutty"... the "wild contraption" type.
With Whorfin, he was actually working with another scientist on something, which makes him seem less like a lone crackpot and more like he just "turned evil".
That's why I just don't buy this BS where the administration is trying to get the search engines to divulge who's searching for things like "sex". This "driftnetting" approach is going to net so many people who aren't "the problem". On the other hand, it should be much easier to find the suppliers and to find out who's been sending them money... and I think more of your leads are going to lead to the real offenders.
Y'know, this is one case where I kinda think the gov't needs to take a page from the RIAA playbook. In fact, why doesn't Congress just grant the RIAA the copyright to all kiddie porn. THEN, we'll see a crackdown.
Recall the hubub from as recently as a half-decade ago, when video card manufacturers were rigging their drivers (or the cards themselves) to recognize when they were being asked to draw the same patterns over and over again (like, say, 10,000 colored boxes, or circles... like benchmark programs do) and would silently decide to perform only a fraction of them to jack the benchmark numbers up?
Never, ever trust the results from an item that the company sent you when they knew you were a reviewer. You should just go out and buy one off the shelf in a store. If you can't afford to do that, buy one from a store and ask the company for a review sample, return the sample to the store and test the, now free, one that you got "in the wild", as it were.
You encounter this every day, too. In general, society has unspoken guidelines like: don't wear just one shoe, don't wear your clothes backward, and don't stab others in the face with a knife. So, when you see some dude walking down the street with his clothes backward and with one shoe missing, it reflects a lack of "buy in" on their part. Whether it's due to their being truly insane or just unconventional, they're advertizing that adherence to these social guidelines is not a priority for them.... which gets you wondering if they adhere to some of the bigger ones (like not stabbing people), so you instinctively tend to keep your distance from them.
So, I guess I'm saying that, if you're going to change things, your best shot is probably to do it from the inside. Learn the lingo, hobnob, get brought into the fold, and then start asking folks "So... just what *is* a multi-tiered vertical paradigm shift, anyway... and how is it different from the horizontal kind?".
As an aside, you're also assuming that military personnel know the constitution. Every few years, somebody does an experiment where they stand outside of grocery stores, trying to get citizens to sign a petition to get a piece of "legislation" put onto the next election ballot. In every case, there are two frightening observations, and I don't know which is worse. First, only a tiny number (like 10-20%) recognized that the "legislation" was actually the first ammendment of the constitution. Second, many more people expressed that they felt that the legislation was unconstitutional.
Something tells me that the initial price of these fuel cells is going to exceed the price of the laptop itself. In fact, I'll bet it'll be cheaper for me to buy a car batter, an inverter, and a sherpa to carry them while he follows me everywhere. :)
Now, I notice that you said that you can't make a "DC power transformer" and I grant that as true if we define a transformer as the traditional hunk of iron with two coils of wire around it. However, it is possible, these days, to convert modest DC voltages to other DC voltages... with less heat loss than you can with a transformer in an AC-to-DC arrangement.
Of course, Edison didn't have the luxury of semiconductors, so stepping up DC voltages for transmission wasn't feasible. (So it was transmission that AC had over DC. Westinghouse didn't contend that AC was better for the home as much as he contended that AC was the only sensible option for transmission of electricity over long distances. So, the fact that there are gains realized by having some wired DC in a home or server room don't make Edison "right" regarding the infrastructure battle he was having with Westinghouse).
Indeed, Edison knew that, with DC, the power stations would have to be in close proximity to the consumers of that electricity. An interesting aspect of this is the Love Canal in New York. The Love Canal was originally supposed to divert water from the Niagara River from a spot above the Niagara Falls to a spot below. This canal would be used to power a hydro-electric facility to power the city of Niagara Falls. However, only a small fraction of the canal had been dug when it became clear that DC was going to lose and, with it, the requirement that power generation be in close proximity to power consumption would vanish. So, construction was halted and the canal was used, over the years, as a dumping ground for toxic waste. Murphy's Law being what it is, the waste was filled over with earth, and then the city built a school on the land. Kids got sick, parents demonstrated (even "kidnapping" some EPA inspectors), and a wonderful time was had by all... eventually leading to the air and water quality regulations in the United States today.
So, the next time you hear some business owner complaining about how he can't dump barium-chloride into the local river, you be sure to tell him to blame Westinghouse!
So the toad has no natural predators in Australia? Here's the solution... just import whatever its predators are in Hawaii.
:)
Oh, and, so that we don't have this problem again, don't forget to import whatever their predators are (and so on). And, once we've had all of Hawaii's fauna displace the native ones, have Hawaii annex Australia... and rename it something like "Ulawakai'i".
- Joe
People like John Seigenthaler Sr. seem to think that Wikipedia has some implicit pact with the browsing public to ensure the veracity of its content.
To the contrary, I've always viewed Wikipedia as a graffitti wall, in that anybody can scribble anything they want, and anbody else can scribble over that. The difference from other graffitt walls is that it happens to be correct 99% of the time.
That's correct. They do. My guess is that, by choosing such an analogy, you're trying to insinuate that my defense of giving work to these people equates to a defense of torturing people... and, in that, I think you've missed the point. And here's why...
Suppose you came upon some dude who was being tortured. He wasn't being tortured to coerce him to do anything. Rather, the state of his existence was one of torture and there wasn't anything he could say or do to change it. Then, you come along and, somehow, manage to arrange things so that, if he gives up some secret information, you can have the torture stop. It's his choice. I think I should re-itterate that you didn't have anything to do with establishing this guy's torture situation. You merely became aware of it and were able to offer him another option.
I think that scenario more-closely matches what I was defending earlier. In my original post, I stated that the events which originally caused their existing conditions of poverty (the ones that make them willing to "choose" such miserable working conditions) are topics for another discussion... just like we should rightly use a separate discussion to figure out "how come nobody helped this torture victim earlier?".
Well, I think that's what belongs in the other discussion, because you're talking about charity to counter human suffering. It belongs in another discussion because charity isn't the corporation's line of work. If it were, it wouldn't be a corporation very long. If you want to discuss how selfish we all are, as individuals, for not flying to India to help stamp out poverty there, then we can discuss that, but you're not going to convince me that the corporation is evil because it offered jobs to these people and they took them.
Imagine if someone came to him one day and said "Mobeen, some Americans have decided that you were being exploited. So, to save you from exploitation, you're going to have to be unemployed from now on.". Something tells me that would make as much sense to him as "We had to destroy the village in order to save it".
However, when a corporation decides to "shop around" and find the cheapest solution to their problem, I don't see how that's not just a large-scale version of when I go on Froogle to find the cheapest place to get my new DVD burner.
This whole scenario plays into what economists call "factor price equalization". The idea goes something like this: Let's say you're in the business of manufacturing something (like a car engine or whatnot). You've got all of your manufacturing pieces in place except for one: you need ten thousand washers placed on ten thousand bolts. For doing this job, "Joe American" in Detroit wants $10/hr, plus medical, dental, and vision coverage... and 2 weeks per year paid vacation. Meanwhile, Shankar in India will do the same job for $4/day and requires none of the other benefits.
Now, if "Joe American" were able to put the washer on the bolt with an expertise, precision, and efficiency that was simply unmatched by Shankar, then there might be a reason to pay him the 20x as much. However, even if there was such a disparity in skill, it would also have to be worth it to you to have the washers put on the bolts with that extra skill.
Alas, in reality, there is no skill disparity when it comes to tasks as simple as this, so the American worker can offer no advantage to the employer to justify his high price. The "equalization" part of Factor-Price Equalization theory is the observation that, eventually, the prices (in wages and benefits) charged by Joe American and Shankar will equalize. Eventually, increasing competition for Indian labor will drive their price up, while Joe American will finally come to the realization that simply having been born in the USA doesn't make up for the fact that he never finished high-school and he'll face the fact that the value of his labor is much lower than what he was, up until now, able to get away with.
The lesson is clear: If you want to be well-compensated for your work, you need to be able to do something that... A) few other people can do (ie, low supply), and B) many people want/need done (ie, high demand). This lesson isn't new. It's just that we're now starting to see a decrease in people being able to get away with not heeding it.
Now, like I said at the outset, the fact that there exist such squalid conditions in India (and countless other parts of the world) might qualify as a travesty (and how is employing these people doing anything but working towards eliminating that?), but... as has been pointed out here numerous times... the hundreds of workers showing up every day don't consider themselves to be exploited. They call it opportunity.
How stupid do these people have to be? A gravity generator? Are you freaking kidding me? And "low orbit" not giving you weightlessness?
Please tell me that the "winners" of this thing are the people who figure out that it's bogus and that the "prize" is getting to keep your reproductive organs.
Quick! I wanna call in and vote for explosive decompression.
I feel safer already....
On the Discovery Channel's discussion forum, they solicit suggestions for bustable myths. However, they also list a littany of "don't bother suggesting these" myths that, apparently, have either been busted/confirmed already or have been ruled out. One of the items on this list is exploding woodshop dust-collectors (ignited by static electricity build-up) in PVC ducts.
Why is this myth off-limits? It seems to have all of the MB pre-requisites: It involves something exploding or catching on fire, it's fairly easy to test, and, if you bust the myth, you can go overboard with the myth to force the phenomenon (personally, I've made a flame-thrower with a leaf-blower and a bag of flour). Most-importantly, however, is that this myth has real-world implications for how wood-workers plumb their shops for dust-collection (using PVC vs. steel ducting) unlike, say, exploding jawbreakers. Or, is that precisely *why* you guys don't do it, because it would have *such* real-world effect? Because MB might bust the myth, woodworkers across the country would plumb their shops with PVC, one of them would still somehow blow their shop up, and then sue the show?
Before the MB show came along, you guys were an FX shop, and I'm figuring that you still do that as your main gig. So, which do you guys enjoy more, the FX or filming MB? Going further, how often do you have to meet some commitment for one of them (say, taping a MB episode) and wished it would just be over so that you could go back to the other one that you like more?