I remember gobs of people complaining about letting businesses get to be "too big to fail" back when the last administration started the process of bailing out financial companies. I'm curious as to just how many of those same folks will be showing up lauding this move -- and of those who don't, how they expect to prevent businesses from growing that large without regulatory action.
I agree with you that the lack of RFCOMM (and bluetooth in general) support for applications is too bad, and pretty wierd actually. [...] All I can do is wait and hope they add this to Android 2.0. The fact that I can rebuild the OS to fix that doesn't really help me.
It does help me, as it means I can build the rest of my app on a "real phone", then port it to the final public API when that becomes available. Then again, your project may be more time-critical -- mine is more of a hobby, so it can afford to be on hold for a while.
In any event, as RFCOMM was deferred to focus on A2DP, and A2DP is now released as of 1.5, I expect it plumbed through in the next release cycle.
New version will have nice 3d graphics almost as good as a console. Games suck on all the other phones
Funny you mention that -- Android includes an embedded OpenGL implementation.
I upgraded from a first-gen iPhone to an Android dev unit, and am generally quite pleased. It's unfortunate that support for the Bluetooth RFCOMM profile isn't exposed to application level yet -- but one of the things about Android is that it's reasonably straightforward to build a custom version of the firmware with the "hidden" flag turned off for those classes; on the iPhone, I'd just be waiting for 3.0, and then hoping they wouldn't require any device I want to make a serial connection to from my phone to be licensed as an iPhone accessory.
I've done a lot of startups, and every one of them failed -- and four out of five times, it wasn't for lack of technical excellence.
Getting sales, marketing, and operational execution right is both critical and very difficult. If the buyout offers you enough money you'll be in a better position next time you want to go start your own company -- think very, very hard about accepting the deal.
It's an 850bn$ package that's included in the budget projections, and largely composed of loans (ie. money we should eventually get back, maybe even with interest or profits) -- much better than a 665bn$ (and counting) unbudgeted war, which is money simply burned.
When a piece of music, or a play, enters the public domain, there are effects beneficial to the public:
Direct embodiments (sheet music, CDs, etc) become cheaper, and thus accessible to more of the public.
Derived works are easier (no licensing hassle) to create.
These have analogs here. Having a Free video card design means that low-end video cards can become that much cheaper (and that there's more room for new entrants into the very-low-end market), and that there's a common, available base on which new and innovative work can be done.
Re putting plastic over it -- the idea is that this piece of plastic is attached with epoxy, in such a way that it's not trivial (ie. requires tools, and even then will leave visible damage on the underlying surface) to remove.
now if can you tell me that this game/sim won't glorify or commemorate the actions of "our" boys in iraq then you're not just thick but you're a liar as well.
Maybe, Mr. Anonymous Coward, you should spend some time reading about why this game was controversial, rather than going on a general-purpose rant about how poorly the US has represented itself in Iraq. We all already know how poorly the US has represented itself in Iraq. 'Kay?
Read up on the business model -- they sell miles, not battery charge; customers who have to swap batteries too often get a rebate for the inconvenience.
IOW: The details have been dealt with already. Please do your homework.
Yes, but that's not what he said: "begs the question" is short for "beggars the question", which is a longstanding phrase with a completely distinct meaning (to beggar a question is to ask it in such a way as to strip all value from it). To beg for a question avoids overlap with this traditional usage.
This begs several questions. Is the above email genuine? If genuine, was the statement valid or was it an honest misstatement by a customer service person. If the quoted text is true, does Amazon in fact have a policy of excluding items that it considers porn, and was it this policy that was hacked?
No, it does not beg several questions, it raises them. Beggaring a question is a completely different thing. [end pedantry]
The quote from the customer service person was probably correct, inasmuch as the relevant content was inadvertently flagged as pornographic due to, as Amazon puts it, a ham-fisted cataloging error -- allegedly by Amazon's French office. I doubt that the customer service type exercised enough initiative to determine whether the flag was set correctly.
The exclusion of pornographic content was a new, intentional policy. The classification of sexual but non-pornographic content was an error.
Not spontaneously, and a BMS (which no serious electric vehicle will ever not have, though they certainly vary in complexity) will have numerous safeguards to prevent external stimulus (ie. too much voltage applied) from causing catastrophic damage; the only case I'm aware of no BMS can handle (other, perhaps, than excessive external temperature beyond the BMS cooling system's ability to compensate -- yes, the Tesla has an air conditioning system for its battery pack) is an internal rupture and short -- and even then, the battery management system will attempt to reduce the level of catastrophe by venting the cells rather than letting them explode.
In short -- if you're buying something as large as an electric car, a lot of time, effort, engineering and cost will have gone into battery safety, much more than would have gone into a cheaper device. Perhaps some laptop batteries or cell phone batteries produced by the lowest bidder may be prone to being overcharged to dangerous levels, or have impurities at manufacturing time leading to internal ruptures, shorts and explosions -- but if you're paying for something on the high end of the market, a quality product without these limitations is a reasonable thing to expect. Quality control processes to avoid issues potentially leading to internal ruptures are known and well-understood; the question is simply implementation.
Also, keep in mind -- cars with faulty gas tanks leading to explosions wasn't always unheard of, either.
[If you're an engineer who works in this field -- corrections and clarifications welcome. I spent a fair bit of time doing research while looking to buy a LEV, but can't claim exhaustive knowledge].
Ahh; I see you're taking some of my rhetoric a bit literally; let me replace it with a more straightforward description of what's proposed.
Texas funds itself through sales taxes (~60% of state income) and property taxes (~40% of state income). This constitutes a partial refund of the former, not (in any form) of the latter. However, businesses making movies in Texas don't generally, as you say, "set up shop" -- they rarely buy property here, settle in, and use city services delivered to that property. Instead, they rent property (owned by someone else who is, presumably, already paying property taxes for services delivered to that location), hire people, spend money locally, shoot their film, and then leave.
Movies once shot here have moved to Louisiana or New Mexico, which refund 25% of sales taxes (and employment taxes paid wrt resident employees; Texas, by contrast, does not have a state income tax) and have landscapes able to stand in for the Texas region; these states have, after reviewing the financial effectiveness of these programs, seen fit to continue them. The Texas bill under consideration refunds 5% of in-state spending, leaving an effective 3.25% tax rate -- considerably lower, to be sure. However, as this is a targeted mechanism to get out-of-state funds into the Texas economy (whereupon they will be presumably be spent by the parties receiving them, and taxed during each such transaction), it makes sense to accept a discount in doing so.
I do assert that accepting an appropriately balanced reduction in tax rate in such a manner as to be focused on attracting out-of-state funds is likely to be wildly net-revenue-positive for the state. I do not assert that this specific bill, as presently implemented, is so balanced -- though my intuition certainly points in that direction, and the people employed to evaluate it on my behalf (the state legislature) so far seem to agree.
What is funny is how we keep hearing from Hollywood actors and directors how we should give more in taxes to help others.
I don't keep hearing that from Hollywood actors and directors. Maybe you're stereotyping those gosh-durned liberals again? [If providing counterexamples, don't forget the plurals! You specified more than one actor, and more than one director].
Huh? The Drafthouse shows movies (and does a damned fine job of it); it's companies making movies at issue here. Having a movie made is a great boost to the local economy -- while there are certainly locals who get relevant jobs, there are also a great many people involved who come, spend money, and leave. Since folks working on movies are largely temporary residents, related city services are largely paid for by the businesses housing them: If you travel somewhere on a business trip, the hotel you're at pays for the water, electricity, sewer, fire protection &c. you use while there.
This bill (which already passed the House) gives a rebate against sales taxes paid on in-state spending -- but all that money being spent, except the refunded taxes, stays in the local economy even after the folks working on the project go back home. I could see the objection if the focus were on local companies getting their state services at a discount -- but the way the movie industry works, that's generally not true around here. What's the down side?
The argument here is that the $1m tax break is $1m that, if we weren't providing the tax break, we wouldn't get at all, because the movie would be getting made elsewhere. Whatever we collect even after providing the break is thus gravy.
And, again, direct revenue isn't the whole picture -- funds spent by people while traveling to Texas to work is money that wouldn't be in our economy otherwise; it's not just the state government that gains.
Other locales have industry-specific tax cuts for the movie industry -- and since they did that, folks in that industry here have gotten considerably less work as filming moves elsewhere.
Charging people making movies in Texas less -- so we can be cost-competitive with other states -- is a net benefit; the movie industry brings in jobs, and the people working those jobs spend money, even if their employers do pay less of it to the state.
Because not taking budgetary reasons into account, one ends up with the most expensive healthcare system in the world, and (for poorer patients) lousy quality to boot? What does it matter if it's paid for via private insurance rather than taxes? The end result is still the same.
That said, I have personal reasons to be dissatisfied with the current state of affairs: My wife would likely have died of appendicitis shortly after we married had my employer not started offering health insurance just months before; she's from a poorer family, and their traditional solution to any such condition was to try to wait things out despite the pain; if insurance had not been available, she would have stayed home to avoid the risk of a second unpayable $11,000 emergency room bill (the first one, from before we married, stemmed from a simple but misdiagnosed case of food poisoning; attempts to confirm the initial, incorrect diagnosis involved two spinal taps). If we hadn't gotten her to the doctor when we did (without the many hours of waiting in line if the ER failed to triage the case correctly) -- and if the first doctor we saw hadn't been able to order imaging to identify the problem, it would almost certainly have burst, resulting in a condition with a much lower survival rate. I don't consider this situation (in which life-or-death decisions are made on the basis of current employment status) indicative of a reasonable state of affairs.
Therefore, actual child pornography should be illegal because a very illegal act had to be performed in order to create it.
Not necessarily; consider the case where the images were created by two consenting seventeen-year-olds; in many states, the act those images document would be legal.
Restricting the definition of child pornography to include only images documenting an illegal act would make a great deal of sense, and prevent abuses of the law such as the one resulting in the article we're all discussing.
It abused one or more children to have been recorded for subsequent whatever.
That justification -- while exactly the reason the genuine article should be illegal -- doesn't address the illegalization of virtual or simulated child porn, or cases like this (where if any abuse occurred it was self-abuse with no third party involved in the creation).
You might find Phantoms in the Brain an interesting read. One of the items he mentions is that scratching an area near the missing limb in terms of the part of the brain responsible for interpreting its signals may allow one to scratch an itch in a phantom.
Slashdot Mirror
I remember gobs of people complaining about letting businesses get to be "too big to fail" back when the last administration started the process of bailing out financial companies. I'm curious as to just how many of those same folks will be showing up lauding this move -- and of those who don't, how they expect to prevent businesses from growing that large without regulatory action.
It does help me, as it means I can build the rest of my app on a "real phone", then port it to the final public API when that becomes available. Then again, your project may be more time-critical -- mine is more of a hobby, so it can afford to be on hold for a while.
In any event, as RFCOMM was deferred to focus on A2DP, and A2DP is now released as of 1.5, I expect it plumbed through in the next release cycle.
Funny you mention that -- Android includes an embedded OpenGL implementation.
I upgraded from a first-gen iPhone to an Android dev unit, and am generally quite pleased. It's unfortunate that support for the Bluetooth RFCOMM profile isn't exposed to application level yet -- but one of the things about Android is that it's reasonably straightforward to build a custom version of the firmware with the "hidden" flag turned off for those classes; on the iPhone, I'd just be waiting for 3.0, and then hoping they wouldn't require any device I want to make a serial connection to from my phone to be licensed as an iPhone accessory.
I've done a lot of startups, and every one of them failed -- and four out of five times, it wasn't for lack of technical excellence.
Getting sales, marketing, and operational execution right is both critical and very difficult. If the buyout offers you enough money you'll be in a better position next time you want to go start your own company -- think very, very hard about accepting the deal.
It's an 850bn$ package that's included in the budget projections, and largely composed of loans (ie. money we should eventually get back, maybe even with interest or profits) -- much better than a 665bn$ (and counting) unbudgeted war, which is money simply burned.
When a piece of music, or a play, enters the public domain, there are effects beneficial to the public:
These have analogs here. Having a Free video card design means that low-end video cards can become that much cheaper (and that there's more room for new entrants into the very-low-end market), and that there's a common, available base on which new and innovative work can be done.
Re putting plastic over it -- the idea is that this piece of plastic is attached with epoxy, in such a way that it's not trivial (ie. requires tools, and even then will leave visible damage on the underlying surface) to remove.
Maybe, Mr. Anonymous Coward, you should spend some time reading about why this game was controversial, rather than going on a general-purpose rant about how poorly the US has represented itself in Iraq. We all already know how poorly the US has represented itself in Iraq. 'Kay?
Read up on the business model -- they sell miles, not battery charge; customers who have to swap batteries too often get a rebate for the inconvenience.
IOW: The details have been dealt with already. Please do your homework.
Yes, but that's not what he said: "begs the question" is short for "beggars the question", which is a longstanding phrase with a completely distinct meaning (to beggar a question is to ask it in such a way as to strip all value from it). To beg for a question avoids overlap with this traditional usage.
No, it does not beg several questions, it raises them. Beggaring a question is a completely different thing. [end pedantry]
The quote from the customer service person was probably correct, inasmuch as the relevant content was inadvertently flagged as pornographic due to, as Amazon puts it, a ham-fisted cataloging error -- allegedly by Amazon's French office. I doubt that the customer service type exercised enough initiative to determine whether the flag was set correctly.
The exclusion of pornographic content was a new, intentional policy. The classification of sexual but non-pornographic content was an error.
Not spontaneously, and a BMS (which no serious electric vehicle will ever not have, though they certainly vary in complexity) will have numerous safeguards to prevent external stimulus (ie. too much voltage applied) from causing catastrophic damage; the only case I'm aware of no BMS can handle (other, perhaps, than excessive external temperature beyond the BMS cooling system's ability to compensate -- yes, the Tesla has an air conditioning system for its battery pack) is an internal rupture and short -- and even then, the battery management system will attempt to reduce the level of catastrophe by venting the cells rather than letting them explode.
In short -- if you're buying something as large as an electric car, a lot of time, effort, engineering and cost will have gone into battery safety, much more than would have gone into a cheaper device. Perhaps some laptop batteries or cell phone batteries produced by the lowest bidder may be prone to being overcharged to dangerous levels, or have impurities at manufacturing time leading to internal ruptures, shorts and explosions -- but if you're paying for something on the high end of the market, a quality product without these limitations is a reasonable thing to expect. Quality control processes to avoid issues potentially leading to internal ruptures are known and well-understood; the question is simply implementation.
Also, keep in mind -- cars with faulty gas tanks leading to explosions wasn't always unheard of, either.
[If you're an engineer who works in this field -- corrections and clarifications welcome. I spent a fair bit of time doing research while looking to buy a LEV, but can't claim exhaustive knowledge].
Ahh; I see you're taking some of my rhetoric a bit literally; let me replace it with a more straightforward description of what's proposed.
Texas funds itself through sales taxes (~60% of state income) and property taxes (~40% of state income). This constitutes a partial refund of the former, not (in any form) of the latter. However, businesses making movies in Texas don't generally, as you say, "set up shop" -- they rarely buy property here, settle in, and use city services delivered to that property. Instead, they rent property (owned by someone else who is, presumably, already paying property taxes for services delivered to that location), hire people, spend money locally, shoot their film, and then leave.
Movies once shot here have moved to Louisiana or New Mexico, which refund 25% of sales taxes (and employment taxes paid wrt resident employees; Texas, by contrast, does not have a state income tax) and have landscapes able to stand in for the Texas region; these states have, after reviewing the financial effectiveness of these programs, seen fit to continue them. The Texas bill under consideration refunds 5% of in-state spending, leaving an effective 3.25% tax rate -- considerably lower, to be sure. However, as this is a targeted mechanism to get out-of-state funds into the Texas economy (whereupon they will be presumably be spent by the parties receiving them, and taxed during each such transaction), it makes sense to accept a discount in doing so.
I do assert that accepting an appropriately balanced reduction in tax rate in such a manner as to be focused on attracting out-of-state funds is likely to be wildly net-revenue-positive for the state. I do not assert that this specific bill, as presently implemented, is so balanced -- though my intuition certainly points in that direction, and the people employed to evaluate it on my behalf (the state legislature) so far seem to agree.
I don't keep hearing that from Hollywood actors and directors. Maybe you're stereotyping those gosh-durned liberals again? [If providing counterexamples, don't forget the plurals! You specified more than one actor, and more than one director].
Huh? I can't determine which numbers would be useful to refute your argument, because I don't see what it has to do with anything I said.
Huh? The Drafthouse shows movies (and does a damned fine job of it); it's companies making movies at issue here. Having a movie made is a great boost to the local economy -- while there are certainly locals who get relevant jobs, there are also a great many people involved who come, spend money, and leave. Since folks working on movies are largely temporary residents, related city services are largely paid for by the businesses housing them: If you travel somewhere on a business trip, the hotel you're at pays for the water, electricity, sewer, fire protection &c. you use while there.
This bill (which already passed the House) gives a rebate against sales taxes paid on in-state spending -- but all that money being spent, except the refunded taxes, stays in the local economy even after the folks working on the project go back home. I could see the objection if the focus were on local companies getting their state services at a discount -- but the way the movie industry works, that's generally not true around here. What's the down side?
The argument here is that the $1m tax break is $1m that, if we weren't providing the tax break, we wouldn't get at all, because the movie would be getting made elsewhere. Whatever we collect even after providing the break is thus gravy.
And, again, direct revenue isn't the whole picture -- funds spent by people while traveling to Texas to work is money that wouldn't be in our economy otherwise; it's not just the state government that gains.
Other locales have industry-specific tax cuts for the movie industry -- and since they did that, folks in that industry here have gotten considerably less work as filming moves elsewhere.
Charging people making movies in Texas less -- so we can be cost-competitive with other states -- is a net benefit; the movie industry brings in jobs, and the people working those jobs spend money, even if their employers do pay less of it to the state.
Since when was a tax reduction (which is precisely what Rep. Duke's bill is) a handout?
One is giving something; the other is reducing the amount you're (forcibly) taking.
Because not taking budgetary reasons into account, one ends up with the most expensive healthcare system in the world, and (for poorer patients) lousy quality to boot? What does it matter if it's paid for via private insurance rather than taxes? The end result is still the same.
That said, I have personal reasons to be dissatisfied with the current state of affairs: My wife would likely have died of appendicitis shortly after we married had my employer not started offering health insurance just months before; she's from a poorer family, and their traditional solution to any such condition was to try to wait things out despite the pain; if insurance had not been available, she would have stayed home to avoid the risk of a second unpayable $11,000 emergency room bill (the first one, from before we married, stemmed from a simple but misdiagnosed case of food poisoning; attempts to confirm the initial, incorrect diagnosis involved two spinal taps). If we hadn't gotten her to the doctor when we did (without the many hours of waiting in line if the ER failed to triage the case correctly) -- and if the first doctor we saw hadn't been able to order imaging to identify the problem, it would almost certainly have burst, resulting in a condition with a much lower survival rate. I don't consider this situation (in which life-or-death decisions are made on the basis of current employment status) indicative of a reasonable state of affairs.
Not necessarily; consider the case where the images were created by two consenting seventeen-year-olds; in many states, the act those images document would be legal.
Restricting the definition of child pornography to include only images documenting an illegal act would make a great deal of sense, and prevent abuses of the law such as the one resulting in the article we're all discussing.
That justification -- while exactly the reason the genuine article should be illegal -- doesn't address the illegalization of virtual or simulated child porn, or cases like this (where if any abuse occurred it was self-abuse with no third party involved in the creation).
You might find Phantoms in the Brain an interesting read. One of the items he mentions is that scratching an area near the missing limb in terms of the part of the brain responsible for interpreting its signals may allow one to scratch an itch in a phantom.
While I haven't kept up on this one, they were working on constructing production facilities within the US.
It's not like there aren't generally other things on the screen at the same time. Why do you notice?