There's another distinction: liability. Doctors are a good example, but it's true of many professionals, especially self-employed ones. You are liable for any suits levied against you. You have to carry an enormous insurance load to cover you. No matter how well they do their job, their personal assets are always at risk.
The incorporated rich, on the other hand, are bulletproof. You can sue the corporation, but their personal assets are almost always off limits. So no matter how bad a job Bill Gates does, no matter how directly any problems are his fault, you can bet the worst that will happen is that shareholders will get hosed while he runs off to the Caymans with enough cash to buy a country.
No they didn't. Your taxes were deferred for an indeterminate period until the debts incurred to pay off the reductions come due. At which point you will have to pay back not only the reduction, but interest rates well in excess of the rate of inflation. The government did not reduce your taxes, they took out a high interest loan in your name. It's one thing when you have to do that for economic stability, but as an electoral gimmick it's terrible public policy.
The "tax reductions" we're seeing now are every bit as real as the "free money" people get with a credit card.
We could put wifi repeaters in every car, put a solar powered unit (with a battery back, of course) on every street corner, build them into streetlights. Once they get small enough, every cellphone, pager, and PDA could be a repeater and the entire national voice network could go VOIP in a giant P2P network.
Of course, then we have to find a way to pay for it all. But hey, people need wifi access at rest stops and such. I mean, what are you going to do if you're out of internet access range for a few hours?
True, but there is a great deal of difference between developing the material and developing the application. Just making the nanotubes doens't allow you to make a memory card out of them. I would be rather interested in how much research has been put into memory-holding, write/read times, memory density, interference and the like before deciding to switch over to NRAM.
That a hacker will necromance your password off the hard drive, or that you'll get a keylogging spyware installation? To avoid the first you need to never store your password, to avoid the second you need to always store it. Sure, we could all go to scratch pads couple with retinal scans, but nobody's going to pay for that infrastructure.
Bottom line, patch your software, get a firewall, be carfeul about opening email, don't use IE or Outlook, and do virus/spyware scans regularly. You'll be safe from all but the most determined hackers, and they don't care about your password.
Don't forget that for the normals, free is synonomous with paying for the service through price increases in other areas. There are hoards of people (and I use the word in its most flexible sense) that will gladly pay $10 for a cup of coffee because that coffee shop has "free" high speed wifi, which they need to check their text based email every ten minutes for fresh spam.
Especially if someone tells them that helps their cell phone reception.
There's lots of veggie burgers out there that taste great, but McDonalds had to make one that could never compete in taste with their real meat patties.
No, no there are not. There are some veggie burgers that taste slightly less like raw sewage than others, but there are no good veggie burgers. You want a vegetarian hamburger, make it with a grilled portabello or maybe some fried eggplant. Or here's a crazy idea, try eating a vegetarian dish instead of making believe you're eating meat.
The veggie burger is just an outgrowth of the health nut obsession with evangelizing those of us who eat meat. Carrot chips and wood shavings are not going to taste as good as dead cow, no matter how hard you try.
What often gets missed in these debates is that the mere fact of stopping that aging process, or at least slowing it a great deal, is not the same as living forever. You will still get hit by a car, get shot, catch a nasty virus, or slip in the tub sooner or later. You just won't have to deal with the various nasty bits of growing old while you're waiting for it to happen. Realistically, I imagine that the average human lifespan would only increase marginally due to such technology.
And if you wind up living a few hundred years and it gets boring, it's not like you can't jump off a bridge.
The average WiFi user was tech savvy too, back when only us computer geeks used it. But now that Best Buy is convincing people they need WiFi to hook up their printers, things are not so secure. Once a technology goes into mass use, the onus for security and functionality rapidly shifts to the manufacturer instead of the user. Unfortunately, most companies just shrug off these problems until we start seeing catastrophic side effects.
It would be nice if Homeland Security could take a break from trying to find terrrorists by which shoelaces they buy to enforce technological security mandates. Unsecured WiFi networks all over the country are very useful to criminals and terrorists.
Fleet vehicles rack up more mileage, so they get a better return on investment with hybrids. Plus they're in a better position to absorb the increased up front costs than consumers. I've seen a lot more switchover to alternative fuel technologies and the like with fleet vehicles than the general public. Hopefully this will provide the needed incentive to get these technologies into commercially viable stages of development.
I'd say a better solution is to start telling people the having their shiny electronic gizmos (very) occasionally stolen is not the biggest concern facing mankind. By all means we should pursue and punish those involved, but at some point the marginal cost of lowering the crime rate outweighs the cost incurred by the crimes.
People need to learn the mentality that crime can actually be low enough. But try getting that through to a populace that can't be made to understand that life will always be imperfect.
No no no. Planes and cars should never crash. Nobody should get cancer from anything. Everything you eat should be good for you. Prolonging HIV patients' lives by years, even decades doesn't count because it's not a cure. We need to toss out our civil liberties because terrorism is doing a fraction of the damage of eating too much red meat.
Know what I don't get about the movie ticket idea? What the hell is the big problem with buying movie tickets conventionally? I mean, do they honestly believe people are so sheeplike they'll impulse buy tickets just because they walk past a poster?
Okay, dumb question.
But seriously, it's not like you can watch the movie at the poster. You have to go to the theater, where they sell the tickets anyways. So instead of buying some universal payment laptop and worrying about who has a "smart device" skimmer in their briefcase, why not just, I don't know, LEAVE THE FRIGGIN HOUSE FIVE MINUTES EARLIER AND BUY THE TICKET WHEN YOU GET THERE?!?!?! Or if you really have to involve futuristic technology in the process, buy the tickets online as above. It's not like there's been some huge gap in our purchasing ability and we were crying out for the ability to buy random crap in more convoluted ways.
I just wish I could get the same quality programming in the US for the much higher price we pay. Ah, the joys of the free market.
And by free market, I mean a tiny group of collusionary, racketeering, megalomaniacal jerks who bribe Congress to stifle any form of competition so they won't get their comeuppance for the miserable job they do.
A large pool of false positives doesn't imply safety. Quite the opposite in fact, it means that the data you do return is of limited value and you wind up swamping investigators with more suspects than they can possibly investigate, or having them ignore the information entirely.
It would be much more useful if it returned only suspects with an EXTREMELY high likelihood of being terrorists, because that would give you good grounds to mount a real investigation. And when you find one real terrorist, the investigation will probably ferret out several others.
The reason they're using this godawful mess is that it's not that difficult to find the people with very high likelihoods. To justify a multi-billion dollar fee to Congress, they need to talk about how the system will ID suspects based on what they buy at McDonald's, and hope this comes across as a good thing. They need to show that they're combing through vast amounts of data, and by extension being very intrusive in the process. But that doesn't mke their system inherently more effective, because most of the data they're combing through can't actually give you a useful basis for identifying suspects.
Of course, the long failure life leads to a very annoying problem for those of us with older cars: by the time something does break, you can't always get a replacement. There's always going to be someone producing or remanufacturing old metal parts. But if a computer IC burns out and the manufacturer gave up on it five years ago, you're SOL.
The major issue with high-tech components in cars is they can't be repaired, only replaced. If your transmission breaks, a low pay tech can figure that out and make the appropriate repairs, or get new parts then send the current ones off for rebuilding.
If your ABS computer breaks, you need a new ABS computer and the old one is scrap. Not really hard to diagnose because of the onboard computer diangostics, not hard to fix. But it is expensive as hell. It leads to a market in designing interfaces for the onboard diagnostic computers, but that's an outsourced job assuming an American company is even making the interface to begin with.
From what they said about the energy transfer of the system, it sounds to me like a bit of handwaving about transient and steady-state operation. Seems like he used permanent magnets to provide a sort of momentum to the motor which must be overcome at startup, but which will keep the sucker turning on seemingly very little energy. The same effect could be achieved by simply adding a great deal of mass to the system. As long as the journalists aren't paying attention during the transient phase (and when do they ever) it would seem like magic once it finally gets up to speed.
Sort of like how if you carry a big heavy rock to the top of the hill, you can then input a small amount of energy to push it over and watch the huge kinetic energy output. But you have to carry it up first.
Clear Channel dropped him in response to government fines. Said fines came in response to behavior by Stern that the FCC had on previous occasions deemed non-obscene. The new decisions followed Stern's criticisms of government policy in an election year.
Certainly not an air tight case, I'll grant you. But it does have a bad smell to it.
The same holds for most computer "records." Server logs, text logs, emails, phone records can all be altered at any time without the possibility of later discovery. About the only thing that can't be altered untraceably on computers is digital copies of analog files (movies, sound, etc), and those can be doctored pretty darn well. I believe this is why police were referred to as video-taping these chat sessions as well as using text logs.
Of course, many judges either wouldn't know or wouldn't care that the evidence is completely unreliable and would admit text logs as gospel.
From what I've seen, most savings in electronics manufacture overseas is in environmental costs. The cheap and dirty ways of printing circuits produce some truly nasty mojo that would never be allowed in many countries. That's why you'll see a lot of that going to places like Malaysia, not even China or India. The new European standards about electronics material content for import may have some effect on that, but we'll have to wait and see.
The other point to consider is the relative amount of money going to labor in the industry to begin with. Electronics manufacture relies heavily on automation. After all, no matter how cheap they are you can't have sweatshop kids producing circuit traces for a microprocessor. The equipment is specialized, and it's going to come from the same place regardless, so that cost is more or less static. You just have the setup costs for the factory and the shipping cost for the gear, which will usually offset each other for outsourcing.
No, there won't be a price drop. Prices are established by the market, not arbitrarily set by the manufacturer. A Ford Focus will cost as much as people are willing to pay for it, given demand and supply. Moving the plant to El Salvador changes neither supply nor demand. You aren't opening a new consumer base, and you aren't getting yourself a way to fulfill previously unfilled demand. It only lowers the price of making the good, thus increasing the profit margin.
I'd say it seems outsourcing CAN work both ways. Japan is a good example of where outsourcing does work. Two nations with strong trade ties both derive benefits from outsourcing labor. Japan doesn't just get cheap products, they get more market access for their goods as well.
But look at somewhere like El Salvador. If you ship a car plant there, we get cheaper prices on labor. But we don't get the subsequent increase in revenues because El Salvador doesn't represent a good market for American cars. So the net effect is to push down wages at home and ship our investment capital overseas. The benefit that gets touted is usually prices, but the truth is that most goods maintain price levels because they were within the public's buying envelope anyways. It's only the high end luxury goods that get their prices lowered.
This is why bilateral, negotiated trade is the way to go. It doesn't make sense to have the same trade policy with every country.
But isn't the current trend to move the offshore jobs from India to even crappier places in South America? It's not like the people in a lot of these jobs actually have to speak English, that's just a nicety. As long as a few local management are bilingual everything generally works out. Sure, India will keep the tech support jobs. Until computer voice recognition can run down the scripts then tell you it's someone else's fault.
Top that with the cost of relocation, the fact that the Indian market already provides fairly ample amounts of trained labor, and the fact that as an American you are going to be at a significant disadvantage trying to work within the social framework there, and you've got a very unattractive option. Oh, and don't forget that you won't be earning enough to ever move back and not be pitifully poor.
I think using my master's degree to shill cars for a living in the States sounds a tad better.
The question about legal P2P is this: Why should I pay money for the songs AND provide expensive upstream bandwidth to the system, AND get chewed out by my ISP/netadmin for resource use, when I can pay for the song and only use downstream to pull it off the service's computers? This could work, but the prices would have to be marked down dramatically, and the seervices would have to get ISPs to sign on and stop labelling anyone who uses their already metered upstream as a war criminal. I don't see that happening, not until upstream bandwidth becomes much cheaper.
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There's another distinction: liability. Doctors are a good example, but it's true of many professionals, especially self-employed ones. You are liable for any suits levied against you. You have to carry an enormous insurance load to cover you. No matter how well they do their job, their personal assets are always at risk.
The incorporated rich, on the other hand, are bulletproof. You can sue the corporation, but their personal assets are almost always off limits. So no matter how bad a job Bill Gates does, no matter how directly any problems are his fault, you can bet the worst that will happen is that shareholders will get hosed while he runs off to the Caymans with enough cash to buy a country.
No they didn't. Your taxes were deferred for an indeterminate period until the debts incurred to pay off the reductions come due. At which point you will have to pay back not only the reduction, but interest rates well in excess of the rate of inflation. The government did not reduce your taxes, they took out a high interest loan in your name. It's one thing when you have to do that for economic stability, but as an electoral gimmick it's terrible public policy.
The "tax reductions" we're seeing now are every bit as real as the "free money" people get with a credit card.
We could put wifi repeaters in every car, put a solar powered unit (with a battery back, of course) on every street corner, build them into streetlights. Once they get small enough, every cellphone, pager, and PDA could be a repeater and the entire national voice network could go VOIP in a giant P2P network.
Of course, then we have to find a way to pay for it all. But hey, people need wifi access at rest stops and such. I mean, what are you going to do if you're out of internet access range for a few hours?
True, but there is a great deal of difference between developing the material and developing the application. Just making the nanotubes doens't allow you to make a memory card out of them. I would be rather interested in how much research has been put into memory-holding, write/read times, memory density, interference and the like before deciding to switch over to NRAM.
That a hacker will necromance your password off the hard drive, or that you'll get a keylogging spyware installation? To avoid the first you need to never store your password, to avoid the second you need to always store it. Sure, we could all go to scratch pads couple with retinal scans, but nobody's going to pay for that infrastructure.
Bottom line, patch your software, get a firewall, be carfeul about opening email, don't use IE or Outlook, and do virus/spyware scans regularly. You'll be safe from all but the most determined hackers, and they don't care about your password.
Don't forget that for the normals, free is synonomous with paying for the service through price increases in other areas. There are hoards of people (and I use the word in its most flexible sense) that will gladly pay $10 for a cup of coffee because that coffee shop has "free" high speed wifi, which they need to check their text based email every ten minutes for fresh spam.
Especially if someone tells them that helps their cell phone reception.
No, no there are not. There are some veggie burgers that taste slightly less like raw sewage than others, but there are no good veggie burgers. You want a vegetarian hamburger, make it with a grilled portabello or maybe some fried eggplant. Or here's a crazy idea, try eating a vegetarian dish instead of making believe you're eating meat.
The veggie burger is just an outgrowth of the health nut obsession with evangelizing those of us who eat meat. Carrot chips and wood shavings are not going to taste as good as dead cow, no matter how hard you try.
What often gets missed in these debates is that the mere fact of stopping that aging process, or at least slowing it a great deal, is not the same as living forever. You will still get hit by a car, get shot, catch a nasty virus, or slip in the tub sooner or later. You just won't have to deal with the various nasty bits of growing old while you're waiting for it to happen. Realistically, I imagine that the average human lifespan would only increase marginally due to such technology.
And if you wind up living a few hundred years and it gets boring, it's not like you can't jump off a bridge.
The average WiFi user was tech savvy too, back when only us computer geeks used it. But now that Best Buy is convincing people they need WiFi to hook up their printers, things are not so secure. Once a technology goes into mass use, the onus for security and functionality rapidly shifts to the manufacturer instead of the user. Unfortunately, most companies just shrug off these problems until we start seeing catastrophic side effects.
It would be nice if Homeland Security could take a break from trying to find terrrorists by which shoelaces they buy to enforce technological security mandates. Unsecured WiFi networks all over the country are very useful to criminals and terrorists.
Fleet vehicles rack up more mileage, so they get a better return on investment with hybrids. Plus they're in a better position to absorb the increased up front costs than consumers. I've seen a lot more switchover to alternative fuel technologies and the like with fleet vehicles than the general public. Hopefully this will provide the needed incentive to get these technologies into commercially viable stages of development.
I'd say a better solution is to start telling people the having their shiny electronic gizmos (very) occasionally stolen is not the biggest concern facing mankind. By all means we should pursue and punish those involved, but at some point the marginal cost of lowering the crime rate outweighs the cost incurred by the crimes.
People need to learn the mentality that crime can actually be low enough. But try getting that through to a populace that can't be made to understand that life will always be imperfect.
No no no. Planes and cars should never crash. Nobody should get cancer from anything. Everything you eat should be good for you. Prolonging HIV patients' lives by years, even decades doesn't count because it's not a cure. We need to toss out our civil liberties because terrorism is doing a fraction of the damage of eating too much red meat.
Know what I don't get about the movie ticket idea? What the hell is the big problem with buying movie tickets conventionally? I mean, do they honestly believe people are so sheeplike they'll impulse buy tickets just because they walk past a poster?
Okay, dumb question.
But seriously, it's not like you can watch the movie at the poster. You have to go to the theater, where they sell the tickets anyways. So instead of buying some universal payment laptop and worrying about who has a "smart device" skimmer in their briefcase, why not just, I don't know, LEAVE THE FRIGGIN HOUSE FIVE MINUTES EARLIER AND BUY THE TICKET WHEN YOU GET THERE?!?!?! Or if you really have to involve futuristic technology in the process, buy the tickets online as above. It's not like there's been some huge gap in our purchasing ability and we were crying out for the ability to buy random crap in more convoluted ways.
I just wish I could get the same quality programming in the US for the much higher price we pay. Ah, the joys of the free market.
And by free market, I mean a tiny group of collusionary, racketeering, megalomaniacal jerks who bribe Congress to stifle any form of competition so they won't get their comeuppance for the miserable job they do.
Conversation with a paranoid nutcase, circa 1994:
"Man, the government is gonna put microchips in our clothes and take aerial photographs of our neighborhoods! They'll know everything about us!"
"Why would they do that? The information is completely useless."
"But they'll know EVERYTHING, man!"
Conversation with the Attorney General, circa 2004:
"Man, we're gonna put microchips in their clothes and take aerial photographs of their neighborhoods! We'll know everything about them!"
"Why would we do that? The information is completely useless."
"But we'll know EVERYTHING, man!"
Ah, how times change.
A large pool of false positives doesn't imply safety. Quite the opposite in fact, it means that the data you do return is of limited value and you wind up swamping investigators with more suspects than they can possibly investigate, or having them ignore the information entirely.
It would be much more useful if it returned only suspects with an EXTREMELY high likelihood of being terrorists, because that would give you good grounds to mount a real investigation. And when you find one real terrorist, the investigation will probably ferret out several others.
The reason they're using this godawful mess is that it's not that difficult to find the people with very high likelihoods. To justify a multi-billion dollar fee to Congress, they need to talk about how the system will ID suspects based on what they buy at McDonald's, and hope this comes across as a good thing. They need to show that they're combing through vast amounts of data, and by extension being very intrusive in the process. But that doesn't mke their system inherently more effective, because most of the data they're combing through can't actually give you a useful basis for identifying suspects.
Of course, the long failure life leads to a very annoying problem for those of us with older cars: by the time something does break, you can't always get a replacement. There's always going to be someone producing or remanufacturing old metal parts. But if a computer IC burns out and the manufacturer gave up on it five years ago, you're SOL.
The major issue with high-tech components in cars is they can't be repaired, only replaced. If your transmission breaks, a low pay tech can figure that out and make the appropriate repairs, or get new parts then send the current ones off for rebuilding.
If your ABS computer breaks, you need a new ABS computer and the old one is scrap. Not really hard to diagnose because of the onboard computer diangostics, not hard to fix. But it is expensive as hell. It leads to a market in designing interfaces for the onboard diagnostic computers, but that's an outsourced job assuming an American company is even making the interface to begin with.
From what they said about the energy transfer of the system, it sounds to me like a bit of handwaving about transient and steady-state operation. Seems like he used permanent magnets to provide a sort of momentum to the motor which must be overcome at startup, but which will keep the sucker turning on seemingly very little energy. The same effect could be achieved by simply adding a great deal of mass to the system. As long as the journalists aren't paying attention during the transient phase (and when do they ever) it would seem like magic once it finally gets up to speed.
Sort of like how if you carry a big heavy rock to the top of the hill, you can then input a small amount of energy to push it over and watch the huge kinetic energy output. But you have to carry it up first.
Clear Channel dropped him in response to government fines. Said fines came in response to behavior by Stern that the FCC had on previous occasions deemed non-obscene. The new decisions followed Stern's criticisms of government policy in an election year.
Certainly not an air tight case, I'll grant you. But it does have a bad smell to it.
The same holds for most computer "records." Server logs, text logs, emails, phone records can all be altered at any time without the possibility of later discovery. About the only thing that can't be altered untraceably on computers is digital copies of analog files (movies, sound, etc), and those can be doctored pretty darn well. I believe this is why police were referred to as video-taping these chat sessions as well as using text logs.
Of course, many judges either wouldn't know or wouldn't care that the evidence is completely unreliable and would admit text logs as gospel.
From what I've seen, most savings in electronics manufacture overseas is in environmental costs. The cheap and dirty ways of printing circuits produce some truly nasty mojo that would never be allowed in many countries. That's why you'll see a lot of that going to places like Malaysia, not even China or India. The new European standards about electronics material content for import may have some effect on that, but we'll have to wait and see.
The other point to consider is the relative amount of money going to labor in the industry to begin with. Electronics manufacture relies heavily on automation. After all, no matter how cheap they are you can't have sweatshop kids producing circuit traces for a microprocessor. The equipment is specialized, and it's going to come from the same place regardless, so that cost is more or less static. You just have the setup costs for the factory and the shipping cost for the gear, which will usually offset each other for outsourcing.
No, there won't be a price drop. Prices are established by the market, not arbitrarily set by the manufacturer. A Ford Focus will cost as much as people are willing to pay for it, given demand and supply. Moving the plant to El Salvador changes neither supply nor demand. You aren't opening a new consumer base, and you aren't getting yourself a way to fulfill previously unfilled demand. It only lowers the price of making the good, thus increasing the profit margin.
I'd say it seems outsourcing CAN work both ways. Japan is a good example of where outsourcing does work. Two nations with strong trade ties both derive benefits from outsourcing labor. Japan doesn't just get cheap products, they get more market access for their goods as well.
But look at somewhere like El Salvador. If you ship a car plant there, we get cheaper prices on labor. But we don't get the subsequent increase in revenues because El Salvador doesn't represent a good market for American cars. So the net effect is to push down wages at home and ship our investment capital overseas. The benefit that gets touted is usually prices, but the truth is that most goods maintain price levels because they were within the public's buying envelope anyways. It's only the high end luxury goods that get their prices lowered.
This is why bilateral, negotiated trade is the way to go. It doesn't make sense to have the same trade policy with every country.
But isn't the current trend to move the offshore jobs from India to even crappier places in South America? It's not like the people in a lot of these jobs actually have to speak English, that's just a nicety. As long as a few local management are bilingual everything generally works out. Sure, India will keep the tech support jobs. Until computer voice recognition can run down the scripts then tell you it's someone else's fault.
Top that with the cost of relocation, the fact that the Indian market already provides fairly ample amounts of trained labor, and the fact that as an American you are going to be at a significant disadvantage trying to work within the social framework there, and you've got a very unattractive option. Oh, and don't forget that you won't be earning enough to ever move back and not be pitifully poor.
I think using my master's degree to shill cars for a living in the States sounds a tad better.
The question about legal P2P is this: Why should I pay money for the songs AND provide expensive upstream bandwidth to the system, AND get chewed out by my ISP/netadmin for resource use, when I can pay for the song and only use downstream to pull it off the service's computers? This could work, but the prices would have to be marked down dramatically, and the seervices would have to get ISPs to sign on and stop labelling anyone who uses their already metered upstream as a war criminal. I don't see that happening, not until upstream bandwidth becomes much cheaper.