For Windows PCs, pretty much, yeah. Windows PCs have no profit net. Even with crudware and Microsoft comarketing incentives the average OEM loses money any given year, making it up with their other business lines like software or services, servers, networking or storage. It's not my definition. It's the IRS.
The IRS presumes that an activity is carried on for profit if it makes a profit during at least three of the last five tax years, including the current year — at least two of the last seven years for activities that consist primarily of breeding, showing, training or racing horses.
The truth is that formatting a document is a solved problem. It has been a solved problem for 25 years. For a long time we rewarded Microsoft for moving the buttons by buying the same software over again, but we are starting to wise up to the fact that there is no real difference except for the moved buttons. Grown wise to this they're trying to shift to a subscription model but we are mostly not buying it.
Big Blue pulled off a miracle and survived. That never happens. It's not going to happen for Microsoft. It's great being Caesar, but the retirement plan really sucks.
Although I can imagine it I prefer not to subject my psyche to such terror, so I don't imagine it. Some of it has leaked, and I pity the poor fools who bothered to read it. There are things you can't unsee.
I would prefer Leo Apothaker, Carly Fiorina, Stephen Elop, Jim Balsillie, Jerry Yang, Ron Johnson (of JC Penney) and Susan G. Komen - for about 9-18 months each. Any order will do. At the end of that we might be safe.
Gates left because he won. He dropped out of college and turned his hobby into the largest pile of privately acquired wealth on Earth. He was the Alpha Geek. Game over.
He could sit there atop his treasure like Smaug and wait for a hero to come, or he could parley it into a new game - and that is what he is on about now. His "Giving Pledge" had rounded up commitments of well over $125 Billion for charity by August 2010, making him also the most successful philanthropist in all of human history - the Alpha Giver - as well. By now that pile of giving may be higher than Microsoft's entire market capitalization. If he keeps at it the pile may swell so much that it is never beaten. He's got his eye on banishing Malaria and many other ills that have always plagued mankind to the pages of history - forever - saving untold millions of lives throughout all the rest of human history.
Compared to that running a company is small potatoes.
Remember, the process is Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Implied is the prevention of progress you don't control: to burn the fields that feed your enemy, and everybody is your enemy.
We're talking about jobs where geezers are retiring. Nobody retires from.com jobs as a geezer. They quit, cash out, opt out, are laid off or are forced out a-la Microsoft's Stack Ranking while they're still in their 30's. There is no retirement in private sector tech. If you're old enough to worry about that, you're on your way out.
Or your state's IT department, or one of your state's many agencies. Or the federal government or its myriad arms. Or any city/county that's been around for a while. All of these have IT geezers who are ready to go fishing forever. You are trying to find nettles in a field of berries.
Not really. I used to believe people gave a shit, but really - they don't. Most people really don't care. Even if the accused is accused of something they do every day they will sit on the jury and convict because the specific circumstance doesn't apply to them, because the prosecutor is so persuasive about how the specific way the accused is claimed to have done it is a criminal act, and take the lesson to mind their ways ever after about that specific way. Until they are in the dock proclaiming that it is not fair to people who were like them and will convict them too for failing to observe a different specific nuance of imaginary property in an exquisitely specific different way.
This is an odd game where the combatants define the rules dynamically after the fact. For a decade after play ends the outcome is in doubt. The only real way to win is not to play. Or to be one of the many lawyers who get hourly fees to contest the outcome.
In my mind it's just one symptom of the cancer of lawyers infesting the body public. Class action laywers have given up even the pretense of giving their clients a coupon for a discount toward their opponent's products in settlement as justification for their disproportionate share of the penalty, and now collect without compensating the victims at all. In cases like Prenda they generate their own plaintiffs, respondents and misdeeds to generate profits out of whole cloth.
It is not fair. It is not right. But this is how it is, and unless people unite to fight it this is... hey, Wilfred's next season dropped on Netflix. BRB.
Now before you grab a shovel and bury that half-pound nuisance in your back yard, that's the uranium weight. Since there is binder and filler and stuff in that as well as the results of fission heat production (cesium, tritium and whatnot) and fissile uranium weight is typically only 3% of fuel rods, your actual weight of high-level nuclear waste to dispose of is 33x that, or 7.227 Kilos, or 16 pounds. Per person: man, woman, child. If you have usual the 2+3 nuclear family that's 80 pounds of crap that's never going to be safe in your lifetime to be put in a safe place for 100,000 years. Some of it is plutonium - one of the most toxic materials on Earth - which must also be protected from nation-states that desire it for weapons production, so budget for armed guards, hazard pay and regular audits of your 80LB bundle of joy - forever. That's just your share today. That top line figure grows by 3,000 metric tons per year.
Frankly here's the lie about fast reactors: Even in the utopian world where they work, can be built, deliver on their promises and create 100% of the world's electical power too cheap to meter - they don't need even 10% of our current spent fuel output, let alone the stores we've been saving up for 50 years. They could not consume the spent fuel ever.
Here we learn the value of ethically compromising the Vice President of the US, "Hollywood Joe" Biden, with campaign funds that amount to a trivial fraction of the advertising budget of a "content provider". That gives you private access that you can use to sell your ability to sculpt the empty minds of the populace to achieve desirable campaign objectives (fear of your opponent and his platform, adoration of you and yours) for the politico in return for certain valuable consideration like appointments of your former employees to posts as US Attorney (McBride) or influence over the enforcement of intellectual property law and foreign diplomacy (Dotcom, Swartz). These executive permits run so deep that they affect even the most secret arms of the US intelligence community. The US version of Agent 007 (Licensed to kill) becomes a spy for Steamboat Willy.
The question that remains is how the Intelligence Community, formerly possessed of great self-respect and pride, would sink so low as to be such a puppet to tools that in a byegone era they would be the puppetmaster of.
Since the LD50 is about 5,000 mSv, 50 hours of exposure to this water would kill half of the people so exposed, roughly, from acute radiation sickness. But let's not freak out. They only lost 300 tons of it and don't know where it went. They still have their other 800,000 tons and at the rate they are generating this stuff it will hardly be missed. Shoot, 300 tons of it trickles under the plant toward the sea on an average day without having ever been in a tank by their own estimate. It's just embarassing to have gone to the trouble to capture it and then lose it. No biggie. How about you volunteer to go out with a mop and bucket and police it up. You should be done in a week or two.
Well that's your problem, not theirs. It's not like you need EAS to access your Gmail. I'm sure whatever device you own has a web browser. Tech transitions can be difficult, but once maintaining EAS licensing becomes cost ineffective you can't expect them to continue it for a free service. If you are one of the customers they lose in the transition because you demand they not make the necessary change then, well, bye.
Yeah, she's crazy and I'm crazy for choosing her but frankly there's not a wide selection of women at my level of crazy. Basically psychosis and asocial atavism is an entry level requirement that makes mere hoarding simply a personality quirk. I was lucky to find one without multiple personality syndrome or schizophrenia, though lately I wonder...
Our kids are totally different terrors in their own right. Genius level intellect and no moral values whatsoever, by design. I fear for their peers a little sometimes. And then I laugh.
When what they give me for free is not as good as somebody else gives me for free, I might consider a change. But every year I keep this email address cements me more, as it is the way more people know me over time, so a better service would have to be considerably better after all these years of good service.
The benefit you gave by viewing an ad disappeared as soon as you forgot the ad. There is no persistence.
This reinforces my point. The schools pride themselves on failing out students only after they've engaged $150K in student debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy and without a degree cannot be repaid.
Well since Ivy League schools pride themselves on the dropout rates of people who are paying $50K/yr because they are hard, if this school has higher fail out rates they can claim they are harder than Harvard without doing as much harm to the failed-out students. Remember: student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy, and a degree does not promise a high-earning job.
Slashdot Mirror
For Windows PCs, pretty much, yeah. Windows PCs have no profit net. Even with crudware and Microsoft comarketing incentives the average OEM loses money any given year, making it up with their other business lines like software or services, servers, networking or storage. It's not my definition. It's the IRS.
The IRS presumes that an activity is carried on for profit if it makes a profit during at least three of the last five tax years, including the current year — at least two of the last seven years for activities that consist primarily of breeding, showing, training or racing horses.
The truth is that formatting a document is a solved problem. It has been a solved problem for 25 years. For a long time we rewarded Microsoft for moving the buttons by buying the same software over again, but we are starting to wise up to the fact that there is no real difference except for the moved buttons. Grown wise to this they're trying to shift to a subscription model but we are mostly not buying it.
Big Blue pulled off a miracle and survived. That never happens. It's not going to happen for Microsoft. It's great being Caesar, but the retirement plan really sucks.
Although I can imagine it I prefer not to subject my psyche to such terror, so I don't imagine it. Some of it has leaked, and I pity the poor fools who bothered to read it. There are things you can't unsee.
I would prefer Leo Apothaker, Carly Fiorina, Stephen Elop, Jim Balsillie, Jerry Yang, Ron Johnson (of JC Penney) and Susan G. Komen - for about 9-18 months each. Any order will do. At the end of that we might be safe.
Gates left because he won. He dropped out of college and turned his hobby into the largest pile of privately acquired wealth on Earth. He was the Alpha Geek. Game over.
He could sit there atop his treasure like Smaug and wait for a hero to come, or he could parley it into a new game - and that is what he is on about now. His "Giving Pledge" had rounded up commitments of well over $125 Billion for charity by August 2010, making him also the most successful philanthropist in all of human history - the Alpha Giver - as well. By now that pile of giving may be higher than Microsoft's entire market capitalization. If he keeps at it the pile may swell so much that it is never beaten. He's got his eye on banishing Malaria and many other ills that have always plagued mankind to the pages of history - forever - saving untold millions of lives throughout all the rest of human history.
Compared to that running a company is small potatoes.
Remember, the process is Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. Implied is the prevention of progress you don't control: to burn the fields that feed your enemy, and everybody is your enemy.
If it doesn't turn a net profit after five years it isn't a business. It's a hobby.
Strokes grey beard - tell me more, young AC.
[Citation needed]. Specifically a situation where people in general give a shit, rather than unique powerless individuals.
The opportunity for bad actors is ripe, it is true. It looks like Strawberry Fields forever to them.
We're talking about jobs where geezers are retiring. Nobody retires from .com jobs as a geezer. They quit, cash out, opt out, are laid off or are forced out a-la Microsoft's Stack Ranking while they're still in their 30's. There is no retirement in private sector tech. If you're old enough to worry about that, you're on your way out.
Or your state's IT department, or one of your state's many agencies. Or the federal government or its myriad arms. Or any city/county that's been around for a while. All of these have IT geezers who are ready to go fishing forever. You are trying to find nettles in a field of berries.
If you're in tech now the geezers are finally going to let you move up by retiring.
Not really. I used to believe people gave a shit, but really - they don't. Most people really don't care. Even if the accused is accused of something they do every day they will sit on the jury and convict because the specific circumstance doesn't apply to them, because the prosecutor is so persuasive about how the specific way the accused is claimed to have done it is a criminal act, and take the lesson to mind their ways ever after about that specific way. Until they are in the dock proclaiming that it is not fair to people who were like them and will convict them too for failing to observe a different specific nuance of imaginary property in an exquisitely specific different way.
This is an odd game where the combatants define the rules dynamically after the fact. For a decade after play ends the outcome is in doubt. The only real way to win is not to play. Or to be one of the many lawyers who get hourly fees to contest the outcome.
In my mind it's just one symptom of the cancer of lawyers infesting the body public. Class action laywers have given up even the pretense of giving their clients a coupon for a discount toward their opponent's products in settlement as justification for their disproportionate share of the penalty, and now collect without compensating the victims at all. In cases like Prenda they generate their own plaintiffs, respondents and misdeeds to generate profits out of whole cloth.
It is not fair. It is not right. But this is how it is, and unless people unite to fight it this is ... hey, Wilfred's next season dropped on Netflix. BRB.
Knock yourself out. Let's assume you're American.
(PDF) In the United States, the national inventory of commercial spent nuclear fuel amounts to nearly 70,000 metric tons, which is stored at 75 sites in 33 states
For simple math that's 219 grams per person.
Now before you grab a shovel and bury that half-pound nuisance in your back yard, that's the uranium weight. Since there is binder and filler and stuff in that as well as the results of fission heat production (cesium, tritium and whatnot) and fissile uranium weight is typically only 3% of fuel rods, your actual weight of high-level nuclear waste to dispose of is 33x that, or 7.227 Kilos, or 16 pounds. Per person: man, woman, child. If you have usual the 2+3 nuclear family that's 80 pounds of crap that's never going to be safe in your lifetime to be put in a safe place for 100,000 years. Some of it is plutonium - one of the most toxic materials on Earth - which must also be protected from nation-states that desire it for weapons production, so budget for armed guards, hazard pay and regular audits of your 80LB bundle of joy - forever. That's just your share today. That top line figure grows by 3,000 metric tons per year.
Frankly here's the lie about fast reactors: Even in the utopian world where they work, can be built, deliver on their promises and create 100% of the world's electical power too cheap to meter - they don't need even 10% of our current spent fuel output, let alone the stores we've been saving up for 50 years. They could not consume the spent fuel ever.
Here we learn the value of ethically compromising the Vice President of the US, "Hollywood Joe" Biden, with campaign funds that amount to a trivial fraction of the advertising budget of a "content provider". That gives you private access that you can use to sell your ability to sculpt the empty minds of the populace to achieve desirable campaign objectives (fear of your opponent and his platform, adoration of you and yours) for the politico in return for certain valuable consideration like appointments of your former employees to posts as US Attorney (McBride) or influence over the enforcement of intellectual property law and foreign diplomacy (Dotcom, Swartz). These executive permits run so deep that they affect even the most secret arms of the US intelligence community. The US version of Agent 007 (Licensed to kill) becomes a spy for Steamboat Willy.
The question that remains is how the Intelligence Community, formerly possessed of great self-respect and pride, would sink so low as to be such a puppet to tools that in a byegone era they would be the puppetmaster of.
Since the LD50 is about 5,000 mSv, 50 hours of exposure to this water would kill half of the people so exposed, roughly, from acute radiation sickness. But let's not freak out. They only lost 300 tons of it and don't know where it went. They still have their other 800,000 tons and at the rate they are generating this stuff it will hardly be missed. Shoot, 300 tons of it trickles under the plant toward the sea on an average day without having ever been in a tank by their own estimate. It's just embarassing to have gone to the trouble to capture it and then lose it. No biggie. How about you volunteer to go out with a mop and bucket and police it up. You should be done in a week or two.
Until the spent fuel is disposed of it isn't you paying for that nuclear power. It is your children and grandchildren.
Well that's your problem, not theirs. It's not like you need EAS to access your Gmail. I'm sure whatever device you own has a web browser. Tech transitions can be difficult, but once maintaining EAS licensing becomes cost ineffective you can't expect them to continue it for a free service. If you are one of the customers they lose in the transition because you demand they not make the necessary change then, well, bye.
Yeah, she's crazy and I'm crazy for choosing her but frankly there's not a wide selection of women at my level of crazy. Basically psychosis and asocial atavism is an entry level requirement that makes mere hoarding simply a personality quirk. I was lucky to find one without multiple personality syndrome or schizophrenia, though lately I wonder...
Our kids are totally different terrors in their own right. Genius level intellect and no moral values whatsoever, by design. I fear for their peers a little sometimes. And then I laugh.
When what they give me for free is not as good as somebody else gives me for free, I might consider a change. But every year I keep this email address cements me more, as it is the way more people know me over time, so a better service would have to be considerably better after all these years of good service.
The benefit you gave by viewing an ad disappeared as soon as you forgot the ad. There is no persistence.
This reinforces my point. The schools pride themselves on failing out students only after they've engaged $150K in student debt that cannot be discharged in bankruptcy and without a degree cannot be repaid.
Well since Ivy League schools pride themselves on the dropout rates of people who are paying $50K/yr because they are hard, if this school has higher fail out rates they can claim they are harder than Harvard without doing as much harm to the failed-out students. Remember: student loans are not dischargeable in bankruptcy, and a degree does not promise a high-earning job.
An artist knows his tools and materials. CS training gives him that. It doesn't give him art, but it is essential to his art.