Surely no corporation would undertake an initiative like this, especially on this scale, as the profits would be far too long term and unlikely.
Maybe that's because we don't sell our cities to corporations? Conversely, if all cities were owned by corporations, we might see more diversity, as the corporations differentiated their products to get higher prices.
Governments tend to be bad at innovating, because there is no real way to investigate the effectiveness of the minority view (which is where most innovation lies). By contrast, in a market, the holders of the minority view have the option of leaving the corporation and starting their own company. Governments are good at focusing resources, so their rare successes tend to be big ones.
Looking at your Wikipedia list, China's per capita CO2 output is 3.84 tonnes/year vs the USA at 20.4.
US population - 305 million.
Chinese population - 1.325 billion.
I make that 6222 million tonnes generated by the US versus 5088 million by China - certainly getting closer, but by no means overtaking yet.
That was from 2004 (the Wikipedia data is old). The other link is from 2007. I.e. in 2004, China was behind the US. In 2007 (and presumably still in 2008), China has passed the US.
US cities do have "Park and Rides". I personally have used the ones in Pittsburgh (called "Park and Ride") and Boston. When I was in Seattle, they were considering building a monorail, and one of the controversial aspects was the lack of "Park and Rides". The reasons were similar to those of your parent.
The best place to put a "Park and Ride" is somewhere where cars already park, like a shopping mall. Since shopping malls are busier in the evening and on weekends (when people don't use a "Park and Ride"), they often have spare space during the day. This avoids the problem of having a special stop just for the "Park and Ride" that doesn't support nearby residential development.
The pygtk library doesn't compete with the Visual Studio stack. It's part of the solution, but not the whole solution. Your parent was pointing out that Visual Basic comes with the entire stack:
1. IDE 2. Language/Compiler 3. Debugger 4. Language bindings 5. OS bindings
In and of itself, VB does not come with an OS, but it does offer very good integration with Microsoft Windows. By contrast, pygtk itself is only the language bindings. It chooses the compiler (Python) and the OS bindings (gtk), but it doesn't provide them. One might create a bundled product that includes pygtk, but pygtk is not that product.
Also, if I choose to use Visual Studio, I'm not limited to just VB. It also integrates with C++. With pygtk, the C++ integration is a separate library.
It's true that there are alternatives to Visual Studio for Microsoft Windows development. However, there is no equivalent of the Visual Studio stack for Linux development. The closest would be Zend for web applications (where, incidentally, Linux is not only competitive but ahead). There is nothing in the desktop application space.
the GPL doesn't stop a competitor forking the project and gaining a competitive advantage developing extra features in house (obviously not distributing back to the world).
It's true that the GPL does not prevent a competitor from using your software without giving undistributed changes back. However, that's a bad idea with a GPLed program. What inevitably happens is that someone else develops a new version of the GPLed program and the company that did an in house mod now has to either port the in house feature or lose out on the advantages of the new version (or give up their in house feature). Over time, they lose all the advantages of the saved development (from using open source rather than rolling their own).
Even worse, what if the GPLed version eventually gets similar features to what the company developed in house? Now the company has to spend money porting their data from their version to the GPLed version or maintain a fork. Further, by allowing someone else to develop the feature, they have lost the ability to control the functionality and get that perfect fit to their own needs.
If you modify open source code, it is to your advantage to contribute the changes back. By doing so, you get others to share in the cost of maintaining your changes. If you do not, then you have to bear the full burden yourself.
At my last job, half my work was porting things from old, in house programs to newer programs based on open source. Yes, if they had contributed their in house programs as open source, they would have lost the competitive advantage of access to the program. However, in return, they would not have later been forced to take on the cost of porting. In my experience, the cost of porting was as great, if not greater, then the cost of the original development. Further, because of their choice in route, they lost out on the ability to define the open source products and on the features that appeared in open source before they did the port.
The word "republic" simply means there's no monarch. The word "democracy" means that the government be it monarchy or republic, is subject to (dis)approval of the people.
The US founders meaning of republic was that there would be a government by representatives rather than by direct democracy, by a true federation (where the central government's power is derived from that of the component states), or by a monarchy or dictatorship. The word has evolved somewhat, as countries have found it useful to call themselves republics even if it would not accord with how the US founders used the word.
While your definition does have support, it's not as cut and dry as you make it. It is one definition of several, not the only acceptable definition of the word.
What you are claiming as "fragmentation" is more correctly known as a "fork".
Forking is when you make changes in the source code to cause different behavior. Fragmentation is when identical source code has different behavior on different systems. Do an RPM search on RPMFind, and you will find multiple copies of the same version of the software compiled for different distributions. That's fragmented.
LSB is about creating a standard core. For those packages which comply with the LSB standard, users should experience (guaranteed is probably too strong a word to use here) the same behavior on all compliant distributions.
It's worth noting that the open source BSDs are also fragmented: OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc. Being open source does not prevent fragmentation, although it is a countering force.
Err...yes, because Amazon's last auction site worked so well. Have you noticed that eBay is becoming more like Amazon? Payments to go through eBay's payment processor (PayPal). Greater concentration on fixed price (Buy It Now). Seller based browsing. Amazon had all those things first.
Amazon already competes with eBay in online selling. Do they really need a variable price mechanism as well? It's one of those areas that scales naturally to a monopoly. Sellers want to run single auctions that maximize the buyers (more potential buyers means a higher top bid).
Auctions is actually a niche market. It works best for unique objects, where the seller does not know how much a buyer is willing to pay. One of the challenges for eBay in recent years is that many of the people who have used auctions would really prefer a fixed price setting but have had to use auctions because that was the only place they could find their product.
In far more countries than Amazon and selling through both auctions and fixed price, eBay's earnings are still lower than Amazon. Amazon would be better off launching in a new country (e.g. India or Australia) rather than trying to invade the auction market.
The reason for Checkout By Amazon is simple. Amazon is moving to a model where people can pick and choose what Amazon services to use in selling their product. There's the Amazon Advantage program, where the product is in Amazon's warehouse, discoverable on Amazon's site, paid for through Amazon's checkout system, and shipped by Amazon (possibly bundled with other items). However, if people prefer, they can purchase those services separately:
3. Pay through Amazon's payment processor. Amazon already had Simple Pay. It used to be called the Honor System. Checkout by Amazon is new only in that one couldn't use it separately previously but had to list the item on Amazon's site.
Amazon is also different from eBay in that it offers listing on defined pages where all listings of a certain product are on the same page. This is the reverse of the auctions model, where every listing is essentially its own product. Discovery is expensive and hard. Payment is straight forward by comparison. As such, if you want to see an eBay competitor, you should look for a company that is competitive in search rather than in payment. Amazon currently does not have that kind of search, and it would be expensive for them to develop it (with no guarantee of success, see A9, where years of development failed to produce results).
Customer SSNs should be treated as transitory data, used for the initial credit application (or whatever) and then discarded. Something else should be used as the long-term "customer number."
The problem is that it needs to be something else that won't change and that the customer can remember. I.e. it can't be an ID that you make, because customers will forget those. It can't be something like a phone number or an address, because those can change. Customer name is too prone to duplicates.
Having a policy and making employees aware of the policy are important, but the most important piece is testing. You hire an outside firm who comes in and looks for ways to compromise systems or data. If they find anything, you fix the hole (possibly by firing an employee but more likely by improving the system).
Little things, like monitoring who dumps database results to files or runs sudo commands, can make a big difference here. Creating good data manipulation tools so that users do not have to compromise security or privacy to get the data that they need is also helpful. Creating sandboxes for private data (you can dump the data to a file, but only on special machines for that purpose).
Reestablish the tried and true apprentice program used for thousands of years. Set up local tradesmen as masters, with the ability to give certification to students. Students would work for 2 years, then graduate with their apprenticeship done.
Two years may not be enough. For example, the local electrician's union has a five year apprenticeship.
That's not what I mean. I mean, what if you've decided that you want to become an automobile mechanic, and then at the age of 18 you suddenly decide you want to become an aerospace engineer. If you have the proven intelligence for it then this is no problem in the US. If you want to try something like this in France then you are essentially doomed. You may be able to pull it off if you are really accomplished, but it's vastly more difficult.
If you are taking classes appropriate for an auto mechanic (e.g. general math, shop, etc.), and try to switch to classes that support being an aerospace engineer (calculus, physics, etc.) mid-stream, that won't work well in the US either.
You have more flexibility in college, but usually what this means is that you spend more time in school (because a bunch of your classes end up wasted). My father took five years to get his bachelor's because he switched from philosophy after his fifth semester. He ended up with a degree in English because many of the prerequisites were the same, but it still took an extra year.
Even in the US, I couldn't get financial aid when I tried to switch schools when I was nineteen. Financial aid was offered straight out of high school but disappeared once I picked a school.
That's the trade off for getting someone else to pay for your education; you lose the flexibility to say what education you get.
My favorite story about this was the game where all the commands were of the form "verb noun" where only the first four letters counted. The correct action was to "scream bear" which caused the bear to run away. However, if you got really frustrated at trying to guess the correct command and wrote "screw bear" instead, the bear also ran away.
The guy who wrote the article said that he was rather surprised at that result...
Foreign countries paying Americans to build arms for them brings in capital that didn't exist here.
No it doesn't. It brings in goods. The only way for foreign countries to get American dollars is to send us goods (or get us to give them the money for free). All exporting does is give us more money to buy foreign goods. Since the American dollar is the de facto world currency (and the world economy is growing), we run a trade deficit. Increasing our exports does not reduce that trade deficit; instead, it increases our imports.
Ironically, the thing that brings foreign capital to the US is Americans buying foreign goods. Because there is an advantage to holding one's money in the world currency, foreign investors take their import profits and invest them in the US. This tends to cause bubbles (dot com, housing, etc.) when times are good, as foreign investors have a lot of US dollars to invest then. Later, when times are bad, the US imports less and foreign investors have less money to invest, causing a bust.
This is why the US should consider a national wealth tax. Currently, about $13 trillion of $50 trillion in US wealth is held by foreigners. A modest 1% (10 mill) tax would raise about $130 billion from foreigners and could be offset by income tax reductions (or a conversion from an income tax to a consumption tax) for domestic investors. Thus, something revenue neutral for domestic tax payers could still add an additional $130 billion in tax revenue. A wealth tax also makes more sense as a revenue source for defense spending than an income tax does.
A wealth tax would discourage foreign investment, increasing the US's internal investment. Further, it would reduce the loopback effect of booms by increasing the tax as the value increases (rather than waiting until the profit is taken via a sale). Note that foreign investors do not pay taxes on their US capital gains to the US (and may or may not pay it in their own country) but would still have to pay the wealth tax.
When did your parent say anything about using PVs for heating? Use more direct solar to heat systems instead. They're already economically sensible, and they still displace the use of oil furnaces.
Also, Pickens made the excellent point that reducing usage of natural gas for generating electricity would allow for increased use in cars. Even more natural gas is used for heating than generating electricity. Solar heating would be helpful in that sense as well (by freeing up natural gas to use in cars that would otherwise burn gasoline).
I wondered the same thing at first, but on further reflection, I'm not sure that Cuil has good synergy with Microsoft. Microsoft has loads of unproven technology available to it. It's weakness is proven internet technology. Yahoo search helps Microsoft because it's proven to draw market share. It would be easy for Microsoft to add Live search's market share to Yahoo's.
Better partners might be Amazon or eBay. Cuil describes itself as content based search. Content based search is heavily subject to spam. Amazon and eBay already have trust analysis for their sellers. Further, their search space is more limited than the internet. Buyers on Amazon/eBay aren't searching for ways to configure password restrictions on Apache sites, just looking for products.
Amazon already has an associates program and hefty web services aimed at buyers. Cuil (or whomever) could easily launch their own search index for the site. If it works, they could talk with Amazon about getting direct access to information (e.g. notices of new products as they are added to the site).
If Google's only way of making money - ad revenue - dries up, or is severely reduced (which I honestly think is going to happen in time),
Why do you think that? Television ad revenues continue to climb. Why would internet search ad revenues fall? It's actually a better market for advertising. With television, you throw up money and hope that business comes to you. Further, even if you get the business, there's no real way to connect the advertising with results. With internet ads, you can only pay for actual visitors to your site (pay per click) or even actual purchases.
Google's ad revenues will eventually stop their ridiculous rate of growth, but I don't see any reason for them to fall.
I suspect that we'll replace centralized search engines with individualized search engines (e.g. the sci-fi AIs that read every publication for the last day and show you just the news that you want) before we make advertising unprofitable. The fundamental problem is that anything that would deprecate advertising (e.g. a perfect shopping agent) would also deprecate search. Further, search is the easier of the two to do well. The analysis of the data is simpler (since search can rely on the user to evaluate the results).
The difference between Google and Microsoft is that Google's market (internet searches) is growing while Microsoft's market (desktop operating system and office suite) is stagnant (although very profitable). Microsoft is no longer a growth stock. It's not dying; it's just turned into the establishment.
Meanwhile, usage of the internet is growing. Google's market share may not be growing, but the overall size of the market is. Google's current revenues do not justify their current stock price, but their current revenues do justify their stock price when it was about 240. Projecting revenues to double is not unthinkable -- after all, they've doubled in the last two years or so.
Most of the criticism of three strikes laws that I have seen comes from the complaint that they over punish minor crimes. For example, the theft of a bag of potato chips or a few chocolate chip cookies. However, the point that is often missed there is that the three strikes law is not to get exceptionally dangerous criminals off the streets but to get repeat criminals off the streets. These people got caught committing minor crimes for their third strike, but the real problem was that they continued to commit crimes and most likely would have continued to commit more crimes.
Why is changing your mind considered normal for average people, absolutely vital for scientists, but a mortal sin for politicians?
Because people vote for politicians based on their positions. If politicians can change their minds, then I should be able to change my vote.
There are potential fixes for this, but most of them have their own problems. For example, we now have the technology to support more frequent voting. What if the Presidency were a monthly position? Of course, then a President would have a hard time handling temporary problems (e.g. the '81 recession).
Another example, if you legalize bribery, you could make politicians give back bribes where they didn't fulfill the conditions. E.g., if you donated $100 to Obama to not vote for any bill with telecom immunity, you could get a refund now. Some would argue that this is selling votes, but that happens in the existing system. In a legalized system, people would have to register the purpose of the bribe (so as to claim the refund later). That would at least increase transparency.
Yes, but it is time that India starts to play fair. The west has created many open trade policies. India is doing a china action back at all the other countries. They have total protectionism in place.
If protectionism doesn't work, then what would? Well, how about a tax structure based on property (what foreign investors have) rather than income (what domestic workers have). Currently, the US sells off assets to pay for consumption. This causes a trade deficit, as the assets aren't counted in the trade flow (while the consumption is).
Taxing property would tend to discourage investment. This can be counteracted by shifting from income taxes to consumption taxes. A side effect of this would be to allow the tax on property to vary independently from that of consumption. This is good in that during a recession, what we do is try to counteract the natural tendency to save by encouraging consumption. Our current method is to make it easier to borrow money. Unfortunately, if we make it to easy to borrow money, we get a bubble (currently housing; previously dot com), as some people borrow the money to invest rather than to consume.
Since we would have the ability to tax consumption separately from investment, we would have the ability to simultaneously expand the money supply (by issuing more money) and to control inflation (by taxing consumption). Or we could combat deflation by reducing the tax on consumption and increasing the tax on property.
At the same time, we take out much of the current complexity of the tax code, which gives special treatment to income from investment (e.g. capital gains) and costs of investing (e.g. depreciation). We also take away the incentive for speculation (e.g. buying a stock in the hope that the stock price will go up, even though the stock itself is not income producing).
This kind of plan would work uniquely well for the US. As the printer of the de facto world currency, the US has more stable prices of assets relative to the dollar than do other countries. This allows the US to do riskier investments than other countries. When that's an investment in a biotech firm that may or may not produce anything useful, that's good. When it's a speculation in a piece of property, it's bad in that it drives up prices in the US. A property tax reduces the incentive to long term speculation on non-income producing assets, as the speculator now has to pay taxes based on the price paid rather than the income produced. Interestingly, it doesn't reduce the incentive to risk money by loaning as much as it reduces the incentive to buy. This allows for a continuation of higher investment in risky activities (in the form of loans) while reducing speculation in assets.
Another thing that taxing investment and consumption separately allows is the use of different taxes for different outlays. For example, it makes sense for defense and law enforcement to be paid by property taxes, as defense and law enforcement are most valuable to those with lots of property. It makes sense for welfare and social security to be paid out of consumption taxes, as both increase consumption.
Slashdot Mirror
It is selling like crazy
For anyone who wants a citation, look at Amazon's Wii page. It's still not in stock on a regular basis, and Amazon has a policy that only limited quantities can be sold to a single person (presumably to prevent third parties from buying consoles and then reselling them with markup).
Surely no corporation would undertake an initiative like this, especially on this scale, as the profits would be far too long term and unlikely.
Maybe that's because we don't sell our cities to corporations? Conversely, if all cities were owned by corporations, we might see more diversity, as the corporations differentiated their products to get higher prices.
Governments tend to be bad at innovating, because there is no real way to investigate the effectiveness of the minority view (which is where most innovation lies). By contrast, in a market, the holders of the minority view have the option of leaving the corporation and starting their own company. Governments are good at focusing resources, so their rare successes tend to be big ones.
Looking at your Wikipedia list, China's per capita CO2 output is 3.84 tonnes/year vs the USA at 20.4.
US population - 305 million.
Chinese population - 1.325 billion.
I make that 6222 million tonnes generated by the US versus 5088 million by China - certainly getting closer, but by no means overtaking yet.
That was from 2004 (the Wikipedia data is old). The other link is from 2007. I.e. in 2004, China was behind the US. In 2007 (and presumably still in 2008), China has passed the US.
Perhaps if China would stop subsidizing gasoline prices to keep them artificially low, their carbon footprint might go down (or at least slow in growth).
US cities do have "Park and Rides". I personally have used the ones in Pittsburgh (called "Park and Ride") and Boston. When I was in Seattle, they were considering building a monorail, and one of the controversial aspects was the lack of "Park and Rides". The reasons were similar to those of your parent.
The best place to put a "Park and Ride" is somewhere where cars already park, like a shopping mall. Since shopping malls are busier in the evening and on weekends (when people don't use a "Park and Ride"), they often have spare space during the day. This avoids the problem of having a special stop just for the "Park and Ride" that doesn't support nearby residential development.
Actually, that would be only half a circle, 2*pi is a full one, am i rite?
That depends on whether your unit is diameters (one pi) or radians (two pi).
The pygtk library doesn't compete with the Visual Studio stack. It's part of the solution, but not the whole solution. Your parent was pointing out that Visual Basic comes with the entire stack:
1. IDE
2. Language/Compiler
3. Debugger
4. Language bindings
5. OS bindings
In and of itself, VB does not come with an OS, but it does offer very good integration with Microsoft Windows. By contrast, pygtk itself is only the language bindings. It chooses the compiler (Python) and the OS bindings (gtk), but it doesn't provide them. One might create a bundled product that includes pygtk, but pygtk is not that product.
Also, if I choose to use Visual Studio, I'm not limited to just VB. It also integrates with C++. With pygtk, the C++ integration is a separate library.
It's true that there are alternatives to Visual Studio for Microsoft Windows development. However, there is no equivalent of the Visual Studio stack for Linux development. The closest would be Zend for web applications (where, incidentally, Linux is not only competitive but ahead). There is nothing in the desktop application space.
the GPL doesn't stop a competitor forking the project and gaining a competitive advantage developing extra features in house (obviously not distributing back to the world).
It's true that the GPL does not prevent a competitor from using your software without giving undistributed changes back. However, that's a bad idea with a GPLed program. What inevitably happens is that someone else develops a new version of the GPLed program and the company that did an in house mod now has to either port the in house feature or lose out on the advantages of the new version (or give up their in house feature). Over time, they lose all the advantages of the saved development (from using open source rather than rolling their own).
Even worse, what if the GPLed version eventually gets similar features to what the company developed in house? Now the company has to spend money porting their data from their version to the GPLed version or maintain a fork. Further, by allowing someone else to develop the feature, they have lost the ability to control the functionality and get that perfect fit to their own needs.
If you modify open source code, it is to your advantage to contribute the changes back. By doing so, you get others to share in the cost of maintaining your changes. If you do not, then you have to bear the full burden yourself.
At my last job, half my work was porting things from old, in house programs to newer programs based on open source. Yes, if they had contributed their in house programs as open source, they would have lost the competitive advantage of access to the program. However, in return, they would not have later been forced to take on the cost of porting. In my experience, the cost of porting was as great, if not greater, then the cost of the original development. Further, because of their choice in route, they lost out on the ability to define the open source products and on the features that appeared in open source before they did the port.
The word "republic" simply means there's no monarch. The word "democracy" means that the government be it monarchy or republic, is subject to (dis)approval of the people.
From the federalist papers: The two great points of difference between a democracy and a republic are: first, the delegation of the government, in the latter, to a small number of citizens elected by the rest; secondly, the greater number of citizens, and greater sphere of country, over which the latter may be extended.
The US founders meaning of republic was that there would be a government by representatives rather than by direct democracy, by a true federation (where the central government's power is derived from that of the component states), or by a monarchy or dictatorship. The word has evolved somewhat, as countries have found it useful to call themselves republics even if it would not accord with how the US founders used the word.
Your definition is 1a and the other definition is 1b of http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/republic
While your definition does have support, it's not as cut and dry as you make it. It is one definition of several, not the only acceptable definition of the word.
What you are claiming as "fragmentation" is more correctly known as a "fork".
Forking is when you make changes in the source code to cause different behavior. Fragmentation is when identical source code has different behavior on different systems. Do an RPM search on RPMFind, and you will find multiple copies of the same version of the software compiled for different distributions. That's fragmented.
LSB is about creating a standard core. For those packages which comply with the LSB standard, users should experience (guaranteed is probably too strong a word to use here) the same behavior on all compliant distributions.
It's worth noting that the open source BSDs are also fragmented: OpenBSD, FreeBSD, etc. Being open source does not prevent fragmentation, although it is a countering force.
Err...yes, because Amazon's last auction site worked so well. Have you noticed that eBay is becoming more like Amazon? Payments to go through eBay's payment processor (PayPal). Greater concentration on fixed price (Buy It Now). Seller based browsing. Amazon had all those things first.
Amazon already competes with eBay in online selling. Do they really need a variable price mechanism as well? It's one of those areas that scales naturally to a monopoly. Sellers want to run single auctions that maximize the buyers (more potential buyers means a higher top bid).
Auctions is actually a niche market. It works best for unique objects, where the seller does not know how much a buyer is willing to pay. One of the challenges for eBay in recent years is that many of the people who have used auctions would really prefer a fixed price setting but have had to use auctions because that was the only place they could find their product.
In far more countries than Amazon and selling through both auctions and fixed price, eBay's earnings are still lower than Amazon. Amazon would be better off launching in a new country (e.g. India or Australia) rather than trying to invade the auction market.
The reason for Checkout By Amazon is simple. Amazon is moving to a model where people can pick and choose what Amazon services to use in selling their product. There's the Amazon Advantage program, where the product is in Amazon's warehouse, discoverable on Amazon's site, paid for through Amazon's checkout system, and shipped by Amazon (possibly bundled with other items). However, if people prefer, they can purchase those services separately:
1. Store in Amazon's warehouse and ship with Amazon's discounts.
2. Discovery through Amazon's sites (if they don't use Amazon's checkout, they can't have a detail page but can still purchase a link from Amazon to their site that appears in search results and on other detail pages).
3. Pay through Amazon's payment processor. Amazon already had Simple Pay. It used to be called the Honor System. Checkout by Amazon is new only in that one couldn't use it separately previously but had to list the item on Amazon's site.
Amazon is also different from eBay in that it offers listing on defined pages where all listings of a certain product are on the same page. This is the reverse of the auctions model, where every listing is essentially its own product. Discovery is expensive and hard. Payment is straight forward by comparison. As such, if you want to see an eBay competitor, you should look for a company that is competitive in search rather than in payment. Amazon currently does not have that kind of search, and it would be expensive for them to develop it (with no guarantee of success, see A9, where years of development failed to produce results).
it has been running for 60 years! ( but we forgive them, it was built in 1958
Is it 2018 already? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wairakei#Geothermal_field confirms the 1958 date, so I suspect it has actually only been 50 years.
Customer SSNs should be treated as transitory data, used for the initial credit application (or whatever) and then discarded. Something else should be used as the long-term "customer number."
The problem is that it needs to be something else that won't change and that the customer can remember. I.e. it can't be an ID that you make, because customers will forget those. It can't be something like a phone number or an address, because those can change. Customer name is too prone to duplicates.
Having a policy and making employees aware of the policy are important, but the most important piece is testing. You hire an outside firm who comes in and looks for ways to compromise systems or data. If they find anything, you fix the hole (possibly by firing an employee but more likely by improving the system).
Little things, like monitoring who dumps database results to files or runs sudo commands, can make a big difference here. Creating good data manipulation tools so that users do not have to compromise security or privacy to get the data that they need is also helpful. Creating sandboxes for private data (you can dump the data to a file, but only on special machines for that purpose).
Reestablish the tried and true apprentice program used for thousands of years. Set up local tradesmen as masters, with the ability to give certification to students. Students would work for 2 years, then graduate with their apprenticeship done.
Two years may not be enough. For example, the local electrician's union has a five year apprenticeship.
That's not what I mean. I mean, what if you've decided that you want to become an automobile mechanic, and then at the age of 18 you suddenly decide you want to become an aerospace engineer. If you have the proven intelligence for it then this is no problem in the US. If you want to try something like this in France then you are essentially doomed. You may be able to pull it off if you are really accomplished, but it's vastly more difficult.
If you are taking classes appropriate for an auto mechanic (e.g. general math, shop, etc.), and try to switch to classes that support being an aerospace engineer (calculus, physics, etc.) mid-stream, that won't work well in the US either.
You have more flexibility in college, but usually what this means is that you spend more time in school (because a bunch of your classes end up wasted). My father took five years to get his bachelor's because he switched from philosophy after his fifth semester. He ended up with a degree in English because many of the prerequisites were the same, but it still took an extra year.
Even in the US, I couldn't get financial aid when I tried to switch schools when I was nineteen. Financial aid was offered straight out of high school but disappeared once I picked a school.
That's the trade off for getting someone else to pay for your education; you lose the flexibility to say what education you get.
My favorite story about this was the game where all the commands were of the form "verb noun" where only the first four letters counted. The correct action was to "scream bear" which caused the bear to run away. However, if you got really frustrated at trying to guess the correct command and wrote "screw bear" instead, the bear also ran away.
The guy who wrote the article said that he was rather surprised at that result...
Foreign countries paying Americans to build arms for them brings in capital that didn't exist here.
No it doesn't. It brings in goods. The only way for foreign countries to get American dollars is to send us goods (or get us to give them the money for free). All exporting does is give us more money to buy foreign goods. Since the American dollar is the de facto world currency (and the world economy is growing), we run a trade deficit. Increasing our exports does not reduce that trade deficit; instead, it increases our imports.
Ironically, the thing that brings foreign capital to the US is Americans buying foreign goods. Because there is an advantage to holding one's money in the world currency, foreign investors take their import profits and invest them in the US. This tends to cause bubbles (dot com, housing, etc.) when times are good, as foreign investors have a lot of US dollars to invest then. Later, when times are bad, the US imports less and foreign investors have less money to invest, causing a bust.
This is why the US should consider a national wealth tax. Currently, about $13 trillion of $50 trillion in US wealth is held by foreigners. A modest 1% (10 mill) tax would raise about $130 billion from foreigners and could be offset by income tax reductions (or a conversion from an income tax to a consumption tax) for domestic investors. Thus, something revenue neutral for domestic tax payers could still add an additional $130 billion in tax revenue. A wealth tax also makes more sense as a revenue source for defense spending than an income tax does.
A wealth tax would discourage foreign investment, increasing the US's internal investment. Further, it would reduce the loopback effect of booms by increasing the tax as the value increases (rather than waiting until the profit is taken via a sale). Note that foreign investors do not pay taxes on their US capital gains to the US (and may or may not pay it in their own country) but would still have to pay the wealth tax.
When did your parent say anything about using PVs for heating? Use more direct solar to heat systems instead. They're already economically sensible, and they still displace the use of oil furnaces.
Also, Pickens made the excellent point that reducing usage of natural gas for generating electricity would allow for increased use in cars. Even more natural gas is used for heating than generating electricity. Solar heating would be helpful in that sense as well (by freeing up natural gas to use in cars that would otherwise burn gasoline).
I wondered the same thing at first, but on further reflection, I'm not sure that Cuil has good synergy with Microsoft. Microsoft has loads of unproven technology available to it. It's weakness is proven internet technology. Yahoo search helps Microsoft because it's proven to draw market share. It would be easy for Microsoft to add Live search's market share to Yahoo's.
Better partners might be Amazon or eBay. Cuil describes itself as content based search. Content based search is heavily subject to spam. Amazon and eBay already have trust analysis for their sellers. Further, their search space is more limited than the internet. Buyers on Amazon/eBay aren't searching for ways to configure password restrictions on Apache sites, just looking for products.
Amazon already has an associates program and hefty web services aimed at buyers. Cuil (or whomever) could easily launch their own search index for the site. If it works, they could talk with Amazon about getting direct access to information (e.g. notices of new products as they are added to the site).
If Google's only way of making money - ad revenue - dries up, or is severely reduced (which I honestly think is going to happen in time),
Why do you think that? Television ad revenues continue to climb. Why would internet search ad revenues fall? It's actually a better market for advertising. With television, you throw up money and hope that business comes to you. Further, even if you get the business, there's no real way to connect the advertising with results. With internet ads, you can only pay for actual visitors to your site (pay per click) or even actual purchases.
Google's ad revenues will eventually stop their ridiculous rate of growth, but I don't see any reason for them to fall.
I suspect that we'll replace centralized search engines with individualized search engines (e.g. the sci-fi AIs that read every publication for the last day and show you just the news that you want) before we make advertising unprofitable. The fundamental problem is that anything that would deprecate advertising (e.g. a perfect shopping agent) would also deprecate search. Further, search is the easier of the two to do well. The analysis of the data is simpler (since search can rely on the user to evaluate the results).
The difference between Google and Microsoft is that Google's market (internet searches) is growing while Microsoft's market (desktop operating system and office suite) is stagnant (although very profitable). Microsoft is no longer a growth stock. It's not dying; it's just turned into the establishment.
Meanwhile, usage of the internet is growing. Google's market share may not be growing, but the overall size of the market is. Google's current revenues do not justify their current stock price, but their current revenues do justify their stock price when it was about 240. Projecting revenues to double is not unthinkable -- after all, they've doubled in the last two years or so.
Yeah - the 3 strikes law in the states is working so well.
From wikipedia, "According to the California Dept. of Justice and the California Dept. of Corrections, for the ten years prior to the enactment of the '3 strikes law', homicide, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, and vehicle theft totaled 8,825,353 crimes, but for the ten years after the enactment of the law, these crimes dropped to 6,780,964." At best, opponents can argue that there have been similar drops in other locales that do not have three strikes laws.
Most of the criticism of three strikes laws that I have seen comes from the complaint that they over punish minor crimes. For example, the theft of a bag of potato chips or a few chocolate chip cookies. However, the point that is often missed there is that the three strikes law is not to get exceptionally dangerous criminals off the streets but to get repeat criminals off the streets. These people got caught committing minor crimes for their third strike, but the real problem was that they continued to commit crimes and most likely would have continued to commit more crimes.
Why is changing your mind considered normal for average people, absolutely vital for scientists, but a mortal sin for politicians?
Because people vote for politicians based on their positions. If politicians can change their minds, then I should be able to change my vote.
There are potential fixes for this, but most of them have their own problems. For example, we now have the technology to support more frequent voting. What if the Presidency were a monthly position? Of course, then a President would have a hard time handling temporary problems (e.g. the '81 recession).
Another example, if you legalize bribery, you could make politicians give back bribes where they didn't fulfill the conditions. E.g., if you donated $100 to Obama to not vote for any bill with telecom immunity, you could get a refund now. Some would argue that this is selling votes, but that happens in the existing system. In a legalized system, people would have to register the purpose of the bribe (so as to claim the refund later). That would at least increase transparency.
Yes, but it is time that India starts to play fair. The west has created many open trade policies. India is doing a china action back at all the other countries. They have total protectionism in place.
Yet India actually has a trade deficit. It's like protectionism doesn't work.
If protectionism doesn't work, then what would? Well, how about a tax structure based on property (what foreign investors have) rather than income (what domestic workers have). Currently, the US sells off assets to pay for consumption. This causes a trade deficit, as the assets aren't counted in the trade flow (while the consumption is).
Taxing property would tend to discourage investment. This can be counteracted by shifting from income taxes to consumption taxes. A side effect of this would be to allow the tax on property to vary independently from that of consumption. This is good in that during a recession, what we do is try to counteract the natural tendency to save by encouraging consumption. Our current method is to make it easier to borrow money. Unfortunately, if we make it to easy to borrow money, we get a bubble (currently housing; previously dot com), as some people borrow the money to invest rather than to consume.
Since we would have the ability to tax consumption separately from investment, we would have the ability to simultaneously expand the money supply (by issuing more money) and to control inflation (by taxing consumption). Or we could combat deflation by reducing the tax on consumption and increasing the tax on property.
At the same time, we take out much of the current complexity of the tax code, which gives special treatment to income from investment (e.g. capital gains) and costs of investing (e.g. depreciation). We also take away the incentive for speculation (e.g. buying a stock in the hope that the stock price will go up, even though the stock itself is not income producing).
This kind of plan would work uniquely well for the US. As the printer of the de facto world currency, the US has more stable prices of assets relative to the dollar than do other countries. This allows the US to do riskier investments than other countries. When that's an investment in a biotech firm that may or may not produce anything useful, that's good. When it's a speculation in a piece of property, it's bad in that it drives up prices in the US. A property tax reduces the incentive to long term speculation on non-income producing assets, as the speculator now has to pay taxes based on the price paid rather than the income produced. Interestingly, it doesn't reduce the incentive to risk money by loaning as much as it reduces the incentive to buy. This allows for a continuation of higher investment in risky activities (in the form of loans) while reducing speculation in assets.
Another thing that taxing investment and consumption separately allows is the use of different taxes for different outlays. For example, it makes sense for defense and law enforcement to be paid by property taxes, as defense and law enforcement are most valuable to those with lots of property. It makes sense for welfare and social security to be paid out of consumption taxes, as both increase consumption.