They used to be much more differentiated, but they're overlapping more and more. Traditionally eBay's business was regular people selling used stuff, while Amazon's was first-party sales by Amazon. But both of them now do a lot of business in the third category of being basically the storefront for third-party businesses selling stuff. Everything from camera shop like Adorama, to third-party bookstores, now list a ton of items through both eBay and Amazon Marketplace, which is where they compete most directly.
There's an odd preference for already-employed people, so there's this kind of self-reinforcing phenomenon where, if you already have a job, you can easily get five job offers, but if you have no job, you can't get any job offers. Especially true if you've been unemployed for a non-negligible period of time: 3 months or something is fine, looks like you're just between jobs, but 3 years and employers start to assume there must be some horrible dark reason, and pass on the resume. Basically a variety of "social proof".
I suspect this is large part because companies have no reliable way of actually interviewing or screening potential hires, so they rely on these kind of tea-leaf-reading heuristics instead. Some of it is also that large companies are mostly looking to avoid bad hires, versus to get good hires. They might be passing up a great hire, but what they really care about is not hiring anyone who will rock the boat and cause problems.
how is this company even got a voice in America? in the old days they would be run out of town or worse
Nah, in the old days people would've tried to run them out of town, but they would've hired some private thugs (Pinkertons, etc.) to run the other people out of town instead.
I wonder if this is really aimed at academia.edu rather than the authors. As far as I can tell, Elsevier hasn't (yet, at least) gone after academics posting their own papers on their own website in the traditional manner, i.e. as a PDF at www.university.edu/~jsmith/papers/smith2013bigresult.pdf.
That's 4.5 kilowatt-hours per day. I.e. in a day, it draws 4.5 kWh of energy.
A watt is a unit of power. A watt-hour is a unit of energy. 1 Wh = 1 W x 1 h. Similarly, 1 kWh = 1 kW x 1h. A 200-watt motor left on for an hour will draw 200 Wh of energy. A 200-watt motor left on all thetime will draw 200 W x 24 h = 4.8 kWh of energy per day.
Re:Props to the authors of TFA
on
Opus 1.1 Released
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Yeah, Monty's writing on these topics is exceptionally clear. His series on the Daala video codec introduces modern video encoding in a way that's amazingly accessible. Maybe he should write a textbook.
True, although that's not the default. Extradition, mostly for computer crimes, is based on the somewhat dumb theory that if something happens to an American computer, the perpetrator was "in" the USA for legal purposes, even if he or she has never actually visited the USA and has nothing to do with the country. There is also a small category of explicitly extraterritorial laws; for example, it's illegal, under U.S. law, for an American to travel to another country for the purpose of underage sex, as defined in the U.S. statute. Most laws aren't extraterritorial, though. If you murder someone in Germany, you won't be prosecuted under American homicide law, but German law. And if you smoke pot in a coffee shop in Amsterdam, you aren't violating U.S. drug laws.
I think China is more worried about people circumventing RMB exchange controls than who owns Bitcoin. They don't seem to particularly care whether people use Bitcoin. All they care is that Chinese financial institutions don't allow RMB to be converted via this route.
All Japanese nuclear reactors were closed down after the tsunami, and only two, a long way from Fukushima, have restarted
They haven't actually restarted yet, fwiw. The operator has applied for permission to restart them, and after some controversy, the government has decided in principle to consider the request, so the relevant agency has started a safety assessment. Even if approved, they are unlikely to restart before 2016.
It's not still operating; they shut it down completely after the incident. The subsequent incidents, like this one, have been related to the containment/cooling/cleanup operation.
Which of the two states, in general, has a better government isn't really the question. Rather, it's which state in this specific instance specced out a website better.
The commerce clause doesn't say that a state cannot regulate anything that has ever traveled in interstate commerce. Rather, it does two things (as relevant here).
1. It prevents states from discriminating against out-of-state producers in favor of in-state producers. This is known as the "dormant commerce clause". So a state could not ban, say, the import of electric cars from out-of-state, while allowing in-state manufactures to produce and sell them them. But the state could completely ban the sale of electric cars within the state. The fact that someone wants to trade the cars in interstate commerce doesn't trump the state's right to regulate sales within its borders.
2. In certain areas where the federal government has enacted a comprehensive regulatory scheme under the interstate commerce clause such that it intends to fully "occupy the field" to the exclusion of any state regulation of the subject, the federal preemption doctrine does preempt any state laws. This might be closer to what you're thinking of. But it applies only in specific cases, where the federal government has actually explicitly preempted states' authority with a comprehensive regulatory scheme.
It'd be interesting to see the spec difference between Oregon's and California's. California's exchange seems to have turned out better. Is that because California managed the specification, tender, and contractor-communication process better than Oregon did? Or is it because California's contractor (Accenture) was better than Oregon's (Oracle)?
I think it has more to do with shifts to other devices than people keeping their PCs longer. People are still buying new computing devices regularly, they're just things like iPads, Chromebooks, etc. Even households with PCs will nowadays typically have fewer of them. When I was a kid, we had two: one for my parents, and one for my brother and me. But nowadays many households have just one, since between the other devices there is not as much contention for occasional use of the stationary PC.
For example paired programming with constantly changing pairs, including pairs where a member is on unfamiliar ground.
Is there XP literature actually advocating that, with a theory behind why it's a good idea? Or is this some kind of DIY management innovation? Honestly it sounds Extreme more in the sense of a reality TV show: watch this wacky company that randomly assigns untrained people to a new job every day, with new partners they've never worked with before! See what hijinks ensue!
There are plenty of tech jobs doing interesting stuff with stable income. In some disciplines there's the "hey, gotta make a living" excuse, but programmers really do have a lot of options.
It's possible Bezos really means it, but my guess is that two things are behind it:
1. Using the current drone hype to help position Amazon as exciting/technological/futuristic, rather than just a boring logistics company that owns warehouses and brown cardboard boxes. With Google working on self-driving cars, and Elon Musk proposing a hyperloop and working on a reusable rocket, Amazon might want to join the futurology game. Otherwise they risk being seen as a low-margin but very efficient (and high-volume) mass retailer, the online version of Wal-Mart.
2. Provide some leverage in negotiations with the delivery and courier companies they depend on by threatening to bypass them. Amazon may want at least a halfway credible alternative to companies like UPS/Fedex when negotiating rates, something to hang over their head as "if you piss us off enough, we're really going to do it, we're going to just deliver everything with drones".
You can also mail it through the postal service. Works okay for modest amounts in the first world, and is not that uncommon. Just conceal the money a bit so someone can't see it through the envelope, and as long as you're not in the kind of country where the postman routinely steals mail, it'll arrive fine.
That makes some sense to me, but conflicts with some of the original gold-esque ideology of Bitcoin, of wanting to be an indefinite store of value in which depreciation (in the monetary sense) is impossible.
If you like research, I agree it's a good deal. It's not a good ROI on a purely monetary basis (your lifelong earnings will probably be higher if you skip the PhD), but you do indeed get paid to go to school and take a deep dive into a research area.
Slashdot Mirror
They used to be much more differentiated, but they're overlapping more and more. Traditionally eBay's business was regular people selling used stuff, while Amazon's was first-party sales by Amazon. But both of them now do a lot of business in the third category of being basically the storefront for third-party businesses selling stuff. Everything from camera shop like Adorama, to third-party bookstores, now list a ton of items through both eBay and Amazon Marketplace, which is where they compete most directly.
There's an odd preference for already-employed people, so there's this kind of self-reinforcing phenomenon where, if you already have a job, you can easily get five job offers, but if you have no job, you can't get any job offers. Especially true if you've been unemployed for a non-negligible period of time: 3 months or something is fine, looks like you're just between jobs, but 3 years and employers start to assume there must be some horrible dark reason, and pass on the resume. Basically a variety of "social proof".
I suspect this is large part because companies have no reliable way of actually interviewing or screening potential hires, so they rely on these kind of tea-leaf-reading heuristics instead. Some of it is also that large companies are mostly looking to avoid bad hires, versus to get good hires. They might be passing up a great hire, but what they really care about is not hiring anyone who will rock the boat and cause problems.
Nah, in the old days people would've tried to run them out of town, but they would've hired some private thugs (Pinkertons, etc.) to run the other people out of town instead.
I wonder if this is really aimed at academia.edu rather than the authors. As far as I can tell, Elsevier hasn't (yet, at least) gone after academics posting their own papers on their own website in the traditional manner, i.e. as a PDF at www.university.edu/~jsmith/papers/smith2013bigresult.pdf.
That's 4.5 kilowatt-hours per day. I.e. in a day, it draws 4.5 kWh of energy.
A watt is a unit of power. A watt-hour is a unit of energy. 1 Wh = 1 W x 1 h. Similarly, 1 kWh = 1 kW x 1h. A 200-watt motor left on for an hour will draw 200 Wh of energy. A 200-watt motor left on all thetime will draw 200 W x 24 h = 4.8 kWh of energy per day.
Yeah, Monty's writing on these topics is exceptionally clear. His series on the Daala video codec introduces modern video encoding in a way that's amazingly accessible. Maybe he should write a textbook.
True, although that's not the default. Extradition, mostly for computer crimes, is based on the somewhat dumb theory that if something happens to an American computer, the perpetrator was "in" the USA for legal purposes, even if he or she has never actually visited the USA and has nothing to do with the country. There is also a small category of explicitly extraterritorial laws; for example, it's illegal, under U.S. law, for an American to travel to another country for the purpose of underage sex, as defined in the U.S. statute. Most laws aren't extraterritorial, though. If you murder someone in Germany, you won't be prosecuted under American homicide law, but German law. And if you smoke pot in a coffee shop in Amsterdam, you aren't violating U.S. drug laws.
Paul Rand is dead, though.
I think China is more worried about people circumventing RMB exchange controls than who owns Bitcoin. They don't seem to particularly care whether people use Bitcoin. All they care is that Chinese financial institutions don't allow RMB to be converted via this route.
They haven't actually restarted yet, fwiw. The operator has applied for permission to restart them, and after some controversy, the government has decided in principle to consider the request, so the relevant agency has started a safety assessment. Even if approved, they are unlikely to restart before 2016.
It's not still operating; they shut it down completely after the incident. The subsequent incidents, like this one, have been related to the containment/cooling/cleanup operation.
The most surprising thing to me here is that Hotfile was profitable enough to have $80 million.
Ah yes, America, with its famous freedom of speech that covers all subjects without question.
Which of the two states, in general, has a better government isn't really the question. Rather, it's which state in this specific instance specced out a website better.
The commerce clause doesn't say that a state cannot regulate anything that has ever traveled in interstate commerce. Rather, it does two things (as relevant here).
1. It prevents states from discriminating against out-of-state producers in favor of in-state producers. This is known as the "dormant commerce clause". So a state could not ban, say, the import of electric cars from out-of-state, while allowing in-state manufactures to produce and sell them them. But the state could completely ban the sale of electric cars within the state. The fact that someone wants to trade the cars in interstate commerce doesn't trump the state's right to regulate sales within its borders.
2. In certain areas where the federal government has enacted a comprehensive regulatory scheme under the interstate commerce clause such that it intends to fully "occupy the field" to the exclusion of any state regulation of the subject, the federal preemption doctrine does preempt any state laws. This might be closer to what you're thinking of. But it applies only in specific cases, where the federal government has actually explicitly preempted states' authority with a comprehensive regulatory scheme.
It'd be interesting to see the spec difference between Oregon's and California's. California's exchange seems to have turned out better. Is that because California managed the specification, tender, and contractor-communication process better than Oregon did? Or is it because California's contractor (Accenture) was better than Oregon's (Oracle)?
I think it has more to do with shifts to other devices than people keeping their PCs longer. People are still buying new computing devices regularly, they're just things like iPads, Chromebooks, etc. Even households with PCs will nowadays typically have fewer of them. When I was a kid, we had two: one for my parents, and one for my brother and me. But nowadays many households have just one, since between the other devices there is not as much contention for occasional use of the stationary PC.
Wow, this part sounds absurd:
For example paired programming with constantly changing pairs, including pairs where a member is on unfamiliar ground.
Is there XP literature actually advocating that, with a theory behind why it's a good idea? Or is this some kind of DIY management innovation? Honestly it sounds Extreme more in the sense of a reality TV show: watch this wacky company that randomly assigns untrained people to a new job every day, with new partners they've never worked with before! See what hijinks ensue!
Nah, there are also the teams/projects with vast inexperience, and where everybody knows how to solve the problem directly.
There are plenty of tech jobs doing interesting stuff with stable income. In some disciplines there's the "hey, gotta make a living" excuse, but programmers really do have a lot of options.
That's a fairly typical monster-movie premise; same as Godzilla not being fazed by cruise missiles.
It's possible Bezos really means it, but my guess is that two things are behind it:
1. Using the current drone hype to help position Amazon as exciting/technological/futuristic, rather than just a boring logistics company that owns warehouses and brown cardboard boxes. With Google working on self-driving cars, and Elon Musk proposing a hyperloop and working on a reusable rocket, Amazon might want to join the futurology game. Otherwise they risk being seen as a low-margin but very efficient (and high-volume) mass retailer, the online version of Wal-Mart.
2. Provide some leverage in negotiations with the delivery and courier companies they depend on by threatening to bypass them. Amazon may want at least a halfway credible alternative to companies like UPS/Fedex when negotiating rates, something to hang over their head as "if you piss us off enough, we're really going to do it, we're going to just deliver everything with drones".
You can also mail it through the postal service. Works okay for modest amounts in the first world, and is not that uncommon. Just conceal the money a bit so someone can't see it through the envelope, and as long as you're not in the kind of country where the postman routinely steals mail, it'll arrive fine.
That makes some sense to me, but conflicts with some of the original gold-esque ideology of Bitcoin, of wanting to be an indefinite store of value in which depreciation (in the monetary sense) is impossible.
If you like research, I agree it's a good deal. It's not a good ROI on a purely monetary basis (your lifelong earnings will probably be higher if you skip the PhD), but you do indeed get paid to go to school and take a deep dive into a research area.