The difference between an elevator in a skyscraper and a space elevator is that the elevator in the skyscraper has a building around it while the space elevator is just a big cable. The space elevator is held up by the fact that part of the cable (possibly with a counterweight at the end) is actually far enough away that angular momentum is pulling it *away* from the earth. It's the tension between gravity pulling it down and angular momentum pulling it up that makes it work. Break that into segments and some segments will go away from the earth while others go down. If you tie the segments together, then you just have one long cable again (with joins that are either heavier or weaker than the rest of the cable; if we had a lighter and stronger material, we'd just make the whole cable out of it).
The World Trade Center system worked because the building was there and they attached the segments to the building. A space elevator is problematic because we simply don't have the ability to build a building that tall to hold up segments (if we did, we'd just make the building the cable and crawl up the side). Each segment would have to be self-supporting.
The minimum cable length (to be self supporting) is determined by the angular velocity of the earth, the radius from the center of the earth to the cable mount, and the mass of the earth. There is no way to make a shorter cable that is self supporting.
Your solution requires something to hold up the segments. We don't have that something. We are somewhat closer to being able to build a single cable of that length than we are to building a segmented solution (which requires something like anti-gravity). Further, if we did have the tech to build a segmented solution, we probably wouldn't need to do so. With anti-gravity, we'd just float up -- no elevator cable needed.
I think that what's confusing you is that in buildings, the cable pulls up the car (which is just a big box). In a space elevator, the "cable" has a role more like that of the elevator shaft or the rails of an incline. The elevator "car" is propelled by something else. Maybe they should change the name to something more static, like pillar, shaft, or stem.
"However, you can't compare the Chernobyl reactor to western reactors of that day and age and certainly not to new types of reactors with passive safety."
Another point is that they disregarded the existing safety precautions to run tests. Further, while running the tests, they completely replaced the normal personnel. At least with Three Mile Island, the accident was under normal operating conditions and started with a mechanical failure. With Chernobyl, they deliberately disabled the emergency cooling system and removed almost all the control rods.
W. Richard Stevens might not have been a novelist, but he wrote thousand page books with graphs and other illustrations using vi (not even vim).
"Swipe and rearrange multiple paragraphs"
This is a trivial task in vi. Really, an expert using vi is far more productive at tasks like this than someone using a GUI. The learning curve is steeper, but the end results is more impressive.
"alter mass indents and formatting"
Again, an expert can do this very easily and with much greater control using vi.
"See the results in real-time? Need that GUI."
Only in that you need to display the results as a picture. The GUI doesn't make this task any more real time. In fact, it actually makes this slower, *except* that it does it for you automatically and continually (I'm assuming that by GUI what you mean is actually WYSIWYG). Clearly, if the results are a picture, displaying them in a CLI is silly.
The thing is that a real expert does not need to continually display their results to see if they're correct. A real expert knows the effect of their formatting. The person who needs continual display is the lay person, who is unsure of the effects of what they just did or who is exploring to find out what effects various actions have. The tragedy of a GUI is that it never allows people to graduate from lay person to expert. Deleting a paragraph is just a few key strokes in vi. In a GUI, you have to
1. Stop typing.
2. Grab the mouse.
3. Select the beginning of the text.
4. Select the end of the text.
5. Either right click and navigate a menu or return to the keyboard (since most people mouse with the same hand as would hit the delete key).
With vi, this is something like ten keystrokes and does not require you to ever leave the keyboard.
I work with tech writers. The complaint that they give about their current tool is that it doesn't allow them to use keyboard shortcuts. Why? Because keyboard shortcuts work with typing and avoid the waste of time of switching to and from the mouse.
You may be right that no novelist would use anything other than a GUI tool. This is not because GUI tools make writing more productive. It's simply because they have always used a GUI tool. Actually, what they really need is a way to add vi key bindings to Word. Then, they could access the power of keyboard shortcuts that vi offers while still having the intuitiveness of a GUI based tool.
I'll add that to my list of open source tools to fund if I win the lottery.
All this is not to say that GUIs are useless. The point is that their strength is ease of presenting options and use of the full graphical capabilities for display. If you have a small set of oft repeated tasks that include typing free text, a text based interface allows for better optimization and workflow.
"What is required is a standardized way of describing the permissions which apply to a Web site or Web page so that it can be decoded by a dumb machine without the help of an expensive lawyer."
They already have this. It's called the robot.txt file. You can use it to tell search bots not to index you. This just seems to be a richer permissions model, that includes things like caching and excerpting options.
In the longer term, I agree that this hurts content providers more than Google. Overall, it makes the search index less useful. However, it makes the content unfindable. Content that uses this will simply be replaced by content that does not.
Why would Google pay to provide better search results for content? It would make more sense for them to pay for the content direct so that they could have an exclusive. Or for content to pay to appear in the search results, like with Yahoo.
"(WIndows 2000 Home Edition)...what? I presume you mean XP Home, or Win2K Professional."
More likely WinMe (Millenium edition). It was the home version of Windows released in 2000. Therefore it was Win 2000 Home. Completely wrong of course, WinMe was actually the last Window built on the 9x/Dos platform (rather than the NT/2000/XP platform), but it's still what people say.
Microsoft added to the confusion in that what they wanted to release in 2000 was what later became WinXP. They weren't able to finish it, so they rolled a bunch of changes back to the 9x platform and released them as WinMe. However, they promoted the planned 2000 Home until reality intruded and they realized they weren't going to deliver it in 2000.
It's Price of the Stock divided by the current Earnings per share (where earnings are calculated similarly to what most of us would call profit). Googling for P/E ratio found http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price-earnings ratio.asp among others.
A company that the market expects to grow about as quickly as the economy as a whole (around 3% per year), will have a P/E ratio in the teens. Google is around 56. This suggests that investors regard the present value of Google's expected future earnings to be around three to four times as large as a more mature company. If they quadrupled in size next year and were stable after that, that would justify those projections.
Btw, I think that one of the reasons why Google keeps spinning off these unprofitable secondary projects is that it gives them a chance to evaluate and train new hires. Further, it helps them keep existing hires motivated and engaged while not losing their historical knowledge. I.e. even if they don't make money from the projects themselves, these projects give them training and retention advantages. This is especially important now, as going public increased the wealth of their engineers. This makes it harder to retain people, especially those who started early, have the most knowledge, and who accumulated the most stock.
"In the current GPL, it makes the statment that it will be subjected to any future versions of the GPL."
1. "In the current GPL, it makes the statment..." is incorrect. Some license *users* have future version provisions in their statement that they are using the license. This is not part of the GPL itself. It is simply a suggested way of using the GPL.
2. "...that it will be subjected to any future versions of the GPL" is wrong. When a user says "This software may be distributed under the GPL version 2 and future versions" it just means that they are giving permission for you to redistribute under whatever GPL version (2 or greater) that you choose.
Even if this software is distributed this way (which is FSF/Stallman recommended), it doesn't matter terribly if the software can't meet the provisions of future version(s). If it doesn't, you simply can't redistribute under the future version. You can still distribute under the current version (assuming it currently meets those requirements). Licensing in this way expands your options.
"They have been defeated at times (Bob, Ultimate TV and their internet-on-TV box are examples, they died pretty quietly)"
I'm not sure that any of those are good examples. They aren't product lines that Microsoft abandoned, just projects. No one else is doing Bob or Web TV. Ultimate TV has been replaced by Windows Media Center.
Bob was an alternative Windows interface. Seeing as how Windows is still around, I wouldn't say that they were "defeated" -- just wrong about which direction their product was going to take. If Bob was defeated, it was defeated by Windows. They continue to persist in this market.
Similarly Ultimate TV has been replaced by Windows XP Media Center Edition. They continue to persist in the market.
Web TV was an outside company. They had a product that might possibly develop into a low cost alternative to MS Windows. Microsoft bought it and killed it. The death of Web TV was in no way a failure for Microsoft. In fact, it is probably a better example of the lack of government regulation on Microsoft (how was Microsoft allowed to buy a direct competitor despite *already* having a monopoly?).
"Both realized that you had to have some sort of human-interest story as the core,"
The difference between the Ellison screen play and the actual I, Robot movie is that the Ellison screen play stayed with the basic subject of the book. Yes, he added the whole idea of a journalist looking for Susan Calvin. However, that did not detract from Asimov's themes; it just tied them together. This allowed Ellison to relatively faithfully include the short stories from the book. Did he cut stuff? Sure. Did he add stuff? Sure. However, overall, the screenplay was consistent with what Asimov actually wrote.
While as a movie, I don't think that the I, Robot movie was that bad, it was horrible in its relation to Asimov's work, much like Starship Troopers and the Earthsea mini-series. Some issues:
1. The Will Smith character had more in common with Lije Bailey than anyone from the I, Robot stories. Why not do a Lije Bailey story instead?
2. The revolt of the robots? Where is that in Asimov's work?
3. A robot that successfully chose between saving two humans? In Asimov's work, the robot's "brain" would have fried. Particularly with a human ordering it to pick the other human. The depiction of a robot as a heartless calculator is the opposite of what Asimov actually wrote (although having the human character think of a robot that way is absolutely consistent).
4. Bridget Moynahan as Susan Calvin? Gratuitous shower scene stolen from Ellison's screenplay (which had a separate character for just that purpose).
5. The zeroeth law was moved from much later (robots had already been banned from Earth).
6. Hate of prosthetics? Powerful idea. Unrelated though.
Despite so many ideas in Asimov's work, the movie had to create new ideas? Why call it I, Robot? Why not call it the Laws of Robotics or simply Robot? The movie had much the same relationship to Asimov's work that Total Recall had to "We'll Remember for You Wholesale." Why not make their own title with a simple nod to the master?
By contrast, Ellison did not add ideas. He added glue and connectors. He took a loosely related anthology and linked the pieces together. He needed romance for Hollywood, so he added characters to provide it without interfering with what he took from Asimov's work. Ellison's interpretation was a triumph of adapting from book to script.
The actual movie simply demonstrated how Hollywood doesn't get it. It failed to capture any of the logic or emotion of Asimov's original work. It had a few incidences of almost accidental congruence (the Three Laws) but reinterpreted them in its own fashion. It's sort of like someone read the cliff notes of Asimov's body of work and then wrote a script about the ones that they found interesting, adding their own twists.
"in the short term a poor person can put gas in their car and eat."
Only if they don't get laid off because they are now too expensive too employ.
The same kind of arguments discussed for child care apply equally well to transportation:
Car pool instead of solo Bus (transit) instead of car Live within walking distance of work
"We could have gone a bit longer without raising it had we not entered Iraq. The gas price increases are the real problem."
So the government makes a bad decision and punishes business for it? Wouldn't it make more sense for the government to pay for it? E.g. by upping the Earned Income Tax Credit and personal deductions? Note that if the US increased the gas tax, the increase would only partly be passed on to consumers. A $2 per gallon increase might increase gas prices by $1. Why not do that and then rebate the money back in tax credits. That would put the pressure on oil companies, who are benefiting from the war, rather than businesses which are already being hit by higher transportation costs.
500 gallons per person usage (googled and rounded). $2 tax per gallon; $1 per gallon price increase. Sounds like a $500 tax credit (payable; i.e. so someone who doesn't pay taxes could still get the tax credit, preferably as a chang in withholding that increases their regular paychecks) would roughly balance the effect. Increase to $600 and we have improved things. Plus, we still have another $300 or so per person to fund programs that encourage car pooling, transit, or moving close to work.
Admittedly, that's very rough estimates. Others have done real studies on the impacts of such taxes and credits and could give better estimates.
"When you increase the amount of money a poor person has, it goes right back into the economy for products and services."
And that's better? If we shift money from savings to consumption, it causes inflation. Inflation causes the Fed to cut back on the money supply. As a result, we have less savings and higher prices. Again, this is a remnant of a gold based currency. With gold, money was a limited commodity and one had to work within what it offered. With paper money, this becomes irrelevant. Not enough consumption? Print more money and redistribute it via tax breaks and welfare payments. That addresses the problem *directly* rather than try to push it off onto business.
It's worth noting that higher gas prices are already creating inflationary pressure. Increasing the inflationary pressure seems more likely to lead to recession than benefit.
It goes beyond the danger of a tariff war. While the simple economic response is that if something is more expensive it occur less, it is just as possible that a price increase would *increase* outsourcing. Why?
The whole point of outsourcing is that one country wants money from the other country. Let's say that they want $10 (US example is easiest to do with my character set; make numbers into millions or billions if you want to be more realistic). Now, we add a 25% tax. Does that drop the amount that they want to $8? No. It doesn't affect the amount that they want at all. Instead, it increases the amount that they have to sell to $12.50, so that they still get $10. Now, instead of displacing $10 worth of jobs, they are displacing $12.50. You've actually made the problem worse, rather than better.
There are two more sensible places to focus changes:
1. You could simply print $10 and give it to them. Since it is $10 in your currency, you (as the government) can do this for next to nothing (particularly if it's just electronic balances anyway). However, this can cause problems if they intend to spend the $10 on goods that your country produces (of course, if they are doing that, then why not outsource the work and move the people from the outsourced jobs to producing the desirable export goods?).
2. You can figure out why they want the $10 and make your currency less desirable. This can be complicated, but it would address the *problem* (that another country wants your currency but not your goods) where legislation focused on imports and outsourcing does not.
The fundamental problem with a lot of analysis of this is that the economics discussed was developed when there was a single global currency, called gold. Much of this analysis does not work the same when we go to multiple currencies. In particular, the $8 would have been closer to the result under a single currency. Under the multiple currency system, the value of the two currencies changes so that $10 buys what $12.50 would have gotten previously.
A lot of people will say things like "as you would have learned in econ 101" which are true but misleading. In econ 101, you would have learned the single currency case because that's what's covered in econ 101. Multiple currencies are studied in higher level econ courses because they are harder (at my alma mater, econ 500 was the introductory trade course and 1500 was the one that actually used real math). Further, they introduce less intuitive behavior, for example that an *export* tax may be more effective than an *import* tax at reducing imports.
"there are a lot of people who don't see the point of even trying for a minimum wage job because they can't afford the child care or transportation or whatever that it would cost them to hold the job in the first place."
How does increasing the minimum wage fix this? Note that child care is usually a minimum wage job and is labor intensive. Increase the child care costs and you increase the wage needed to pay for child care...
Increasing the minimum wage has three effects:
1. It puts pressure on employers to cut costs, possibly by cutting workers.
2. It puts pressure on employers to increase prices.
3. It pulls employees from alternative locations. For example, someone who is currently going to school might find it worth it to take an $8/hour job where $5.15 was not worth it. Someone who has a higher pressure $9/hour job might take a pay cut to have a low pressure, $8/hour job.
If employers aren't paying enough for people to pay their bills, is that really the employer's fault? Or is society's fault for making bills so expensive that they can't be paid? Rather than unfunded mandates as to how much an employer should pay an employee, wouldn't it make more sense for the government to take responsibility for the problems that it has caused? Consider child labor laws for example.
Traditionally, child care was not a separate expense that required a special professional to address. Instead, child care was provided by the members of the families involved. In particular, they'd take kids around with them in their work. Kids had chores and responsibilities. Modernly, the government does not allow this.
Now, I'm not arguing against child labor laws. My point is that regulation is the wrong tool to use to finance other unfunded regulations. If societally we feel that parents should not be able to take their kids to work with them, then society should also step up and help fund solutions to the resulting problems. For example, if you have six single mothers without child care, who are stuck on welfare as a result, why not pay one of the single mothers to provide child care for the other five? Or rotate the child care such that each mother cares for the other five's kids one day a week?
Note that part of the problem is more unfunded regulation. Child care providers are often required to be licensed and zoning regulations make it difficult for individuals to provide care out of their houses. Yet, it's perfectly all right to have unlicensed parents with even more kids...
"Requiring two languages just to display the document is a ridiculous and cumbersome dirty hack."
No, it's a natural evolution of the model. The dirty hack was to try to embed the display code in the markup.
You use XML (in the form of XHTML) to store the data. You use the CSS to control the display. Since the two are actually different languages, you can't mix them. This allows you to swap out the CSS for different CSS and get a completely different look. Check out http://csszengarden.com/ for some examples of the power of this model.
The other thing that you can do is swap out the raw data and use the same CSS file. I don't have an example site for that, but it is a potential use. If you add javascript into the mix (a third language), you can get wondrous things. Properly used, it makes designers more productive. Instead of building ten million font tags, they can just make all elements the same class (with the same font).
If you want to have a single language, you can. Just call it image map. Use only two HTML tags: map (plus area of course) and img. Make the entire page an image and make various regions clickable with the image map.
I think that the issue is tainted data. First, they take the top hundred tech companies. Then, they divide them into those that did well and those that did not. As a result, when they hired the CEO, those that did not do well were, on average, bigger than those that did do well. Why? Because if a company was at the bottom of the top 100 and did not do well, they fell off. The companies that are still there were bigger than the average tech company last year. Companies that did do well were smaller last year.
I think that the "study" basically says that bigger companies pay their CEOs more, which is not exactly insightful. IBM pays their CEO more than Adobe's? Really?
To get real data, they should have taken the top hundred companies from *last* year and seen how they did this year. They also might want to consider doing something like dividing CEO salary by last year's revenues. That would better control for the differences in size between companies like IBM and Adobe.
IBM: $12 million salary out of $96 billion revenue = 1/8000
Adobe: $1.9 million salary out of $1.9 billion revenue = 1/1000
Note: revenue numbers may not be from last year; too lazy to find details in google links.
It looks like Chizen is actually paid better per dollar of revenue than Palmisano is.
"Find an insurance company that insists on helmets and seatbelts, and charges more to those who ride without them"
You're thinking about the wrong insurance company. It's not the helmetless motorcyclist's insurance company that gets sued. It's the other vehicle's insurance company. Further, it's not the insurance company that gets to decide damages; it's the courts. Since the government (through the court system) determines damages, it needs to be the government that collects the extra money. Which it does by creating helmet laws and ticketing the people who don't obey them.
You might argue that it should simply charge up front and allow people to continue to ride without a helmet. The problem with that is who decides who pays? You end up with two classes of people: one that must wear helmets and can be ticketed for not wearing a helmet; another that does not have to wear helmets. That means that every time police officers see someone riding a motorcycle without a helmet, they have to check the registration (or worse, pull over the rider and check their license). It's actually cheaper to ban and then enforce on everyone.
The other possibility would be to allow insurance companies to not pay for damages caused by not wearing a helmet. However that makes the system much more complicated and difficult to adjudicate. For example, how do we handle the problem of the care being needed now but the court case not occurring until later? How do we determine what portion of the damages would have occurred with the helmet?
"The point you're missing is that, somewhere in the transaction, value is destroyed."
No, you're the one missing the point. The US prints dollars which are used as the global currency. As a result, we get a seignorage fee. This is basically the difference between the cost of producing a dollar and a dollar. Since most dollars used in international trade are never printed, the seignorage fee is very close to a dollar.
Now, how do the dollars get to the global economy? There are basically two ways:
1. We can buy foreign stuff. A side benefit is that we get foreign stuff.
2. We can give it away.
Now, what happens if we stop printing the global currency or start giving it away rather than buying stuff with it? Yes, the trade deficit goes away. However, the trade deficit wasn't the problem. The problem is that domestic producers are closing. Why do they close? Because foreign producers are more efficient at making product. If we eliminate the trade deficit, it will push foreign prices higher and will make our exports cheaper. Net result? An increase in exports (imports are a wash; quantity goes down but price increases).
Now, does an increase in exports mean that people who were laid off will now go back to their jobs? No. At *best*, they would get new jobs. Why? Because the areas that will be doing well are not those where the layoffs occurred.
At the same time, you add new inflationary pressures. Import prices are up, forcing prices of assembled products up. Standard of living falls, because we have less stuff (quantity of imports is down even if total value has stayed the same). Further, we have to create less money, as we are no longer dumping so much of it overseas. This is a pure, dead weight loss.
Anyway, the point that you're missing is that money itself is inherently without value. People give it value by accepting it in exchange for goods and services. Therefore, a trade deficit is essentially foreign countries accepting something that we create for free (money) in exchange for something that costs them labor and natural resources to create. We didn't lose value in that; we gained value.
Now, the long term effects of this are less clear. Since we continue to accept dollars, what happens if the global economy switches to something else? E.g. euros? People stop being interested in exchanging goods for dollars (it's better to exchange goods for the more fungible currency). Over time, people will want to trade their dollars for euros or goods that they can exchange for euros. This triggers the same problem as previously. Inflation.
On the bright side, the transition does not have to be immediate. It could conceivably happen over a period of time.
"the only feature I've found useful that firefox lacks the the ability to save tables in web page as Excel sheets."
If you have Excel (at least the Office version that I use at work), you can do that without IE7. Admittedly, under the hood, it's probably using IE. However, it would be using IE6, because I don't have IE7 installed at work. Anyway, I can do this without actively opening a web browser, only clicking on buttons in Excel.
"However, when dealing with the outside world, I believe it to be most respective and professional to wear professional attire that is appropriate to that correspondence."
In this case, his primary purpose was recruiting. In particular, he wanted to recruit really smart people. Really smart people know that clothes are irrelevant to the job (unless the job is to model clothes or work at IBM). Thus, the appropriate professional attire is (drum roll please) jeans and a t-shirt. Those are the clothes most likely to be appealing to the kind of people that are at a university and that Google wants.
Another way of looking at it is that Google is really interested in hiring from the same group of people who might want to become professors. Such people are notoriously uninterested in the wrapping. As such, it may be more valuable to Google to project a casual attitude (and attire) than to be respectfully professional. In fact, they might even find it advantageous to not hire people like you who are over impressed by clothes. Why? Because you may look down on your scruffily dressed but brilliant colleagues. Maybe Google would be better off if you went to IBM (famous for their uptight dress; in part because they are professionals who deal with business people).
I think that your insight (dressing appropriately is best) is correct. I think that you are misinterpreting what was appropriate to the situation.
Do you think it should be legal for one movie studio to copy a currently-in-theatres blockbuster that cost some other studio $100M to produce and market, and then to sell a trivially edited version to theatres at a fraction of the normal price?
That isn't what is going on here.
The post you replied to didn't say it was. They said that was the inevitable consequence of allowing this sort of thing.
No it isn't inevitable. If the legal requirement is that you have to buy a full version of the movie first, then that wouldn't work. It's obvious that it's illegal to make two copies from one. They bought an original copy; they modified the copy (which required replacement in this case); they sold the modified copy and tossed the original. That is not a model that supports "sell a trivially edited version to theatres at a fraction of the normal price." No one is claiming that their editing of the work means that they don't have to pay the original producer for it.
"Whenever commercials come on TV, I SWITCH TO ANOTHER CHANNEL without commercials."
Which of course is why they should be *ENCOURAGING* fast forward, as studies have shown that people who fast forward through commercials have better retention than people who don't. People who don't fast forward through commercials quickly learn to switch channels, take food breaks, take bathroom breaks, talk to other people, etc.
Of course, as Harlan Ellison noted, comparing media executives' brains to artichokes is an insult to artichokes.
"The EU fine will increase the marginal cost, driving the price up."
No, it won't. The marginal cost is the cost of adding one more unit of production. The EU fine won't have any effect on that, as the fine doesn't vary by production. It's a fixed cost. Fixed costs only matter in perfect competition not with monopolies nor even monopolistic competition (unless the fixed costs eat up *all* of the profit; then bankruptcy occurs).
It is worth noting that in my previous post, I wrote revenue where I should have written profit. Mea culpa.
Slashdot Mirror
The difference between an elevator in a skyscraper and a space elevator is that the elevator in the skyscraper has a building around it while the space elevator is just a big cable. The space elevator is held up by the fact that part of the cable (possibly with a counterweight at the end) is actually far enough away that angular momentum is pulling it *away* from the earth. It's the tension between gravity pulling it down and angular momentum pulling it up that makes it work. Break that into segments and some segments will go away from the earth while others go down. If you tie the segments together, then you just have one long cable again (with joins that are either heavier or weaker than the rest of the cable; if we had a lighter and stronger material, we'd just make the whole cable out of it).
The World Trade Center system worked because the building was there and they attached the segments to the building. A space elevator is problematic because we simply don't have the ability to build a building that tall to hold up segments (if we did, we'd just make the building the cable and crawl up the side). Each segment would have to be self-supporting.
The minimum cable length (to be self supporting) is determined by the angular velocity of the earth, the radius from the center of the earth to the cable mount, and the mass of the earth. There is no way to make a shorter cable that is self supporting.
Your solution requires something to hold up the segments. We don't have that something. We are somewhat closer to being able to build a single cable of that length than we are to building a segmented solution (which requires something like anti-gravity). Further, if we did have the tech to build a segmented solution, we probably wouldn't need to do so. With anti-gravity, we'd just float up -- no elevator cable needed.
I think that what's confusing you is that in buildings, the cable pulls up the car (which is just a big box). In a space elevator, the "cable" has a role more like that of the elevator shaft or the rails of an incline. The elevator "car" is propelled by something else. Maybe they should change the name to something more static, like pillar, shaft, or stem.
"However, you can't compare the Chernobyl reactor to western reactors of that day and age and certainly not to new types of reactors with passive safety."
Another point is that they disregarded the existing safety precautions to run tests. Further, while running the tests, they completely replaced the normal personnel. At least with Three Mile Island, the accident was under normal operating conditions and started with a mechanical failure. With Chernobyl, they deliberately disabled the emergency cooling system and removed almost all the control rods.
See http://www.chernobyl.co.uk/causes.html
AC said: "Hmm, are slaves etitled [sic] to own anything? I mean, you sell yourself and your new master collects the money right back!"
r ef/slavery/slavery.html
That's why you sell yourself in the future. E.g. you get the million dollars now and they get you as a slave after a year.
Also, it's worth noting that in the US, slaves could own things separately. For example, it was possible for slaves to buy themselves by working side jobs. Googling found mention of this at http://memory.loc.gov/learn/features/timeline/exp
"Attack of the Mutant Camels"
That was my first thought too.
Lode Runner, Boulder Dash, original Bard's Tale...I might actually buy one of those game console thingies if it had all that.
Any Amiga games? E.g. Battle Chess or Pirates?
The Atari 5200 version of Centipede was great too.
"writing a 200-400 page novel wouldn't dream of using anything but a high-powered text-editor."
l -Networking/dp/0131411551/
http://www.amazon.com/Unix-Network-Programming-Vo
W. Richard Stevens might not have been a novelist, but he wrote thousand page books with graphs and other illustrations using vi (not even vim).
"Swipe and rearrange multiple paragraphs"
This is a trivial task in vi. Really, an expert using vi is far more productive at tasks like this than someone using a GUI. The learning curve is steeper, but the end results is more impressive.
"alter mass indents and formatting"
Again, an expert can do this very easily and with much greater control using vi.
"See the results in real-time? Need that GUI."
Only in that you need to display the results as a picture. The GUI doesn't make this task any more real time. In fact, it actually makes this slower, *except* that it does it for you automatically and continually (I'm assuming that by GUI what you mean is actually WYSIWYG). Clearly, if the results are a picture, displaying them in a CLI is silly.
The thing is that a real expert does not need to continually display their results to see if they're correct. A real expert knows the effect of their formatting. The person who needs continual display is the lay person, who is unsure of the effects of what they just did or who is exploring to find out what effects various actions have. The tragedy of a GUI is that it never allows people to graduate from lay person to expert. Deleting a paragraph is just a few key strokes in vi. In a GUI, you have to
1. Stop typing.
2. Grab the mouse.
3. Select the beginning of the text.
4. Select the end of the text.
5. Either right click and navigate a menu or return to the keyboard (since most people mouse with the same hand as would hit the delete key).
With vi, this is something like ten keystrokes and does not require you to ever leave the keyboard.
I work with tech writers. The complaint that they give about their current tool is that it doesn't allow them to use keyboard shortcuts. Why? Because keyboard shortcuts work with typing and avoid the waste of time of switching to and from the mouse.
You may be right that no novelist would use anything other than a GUI tool. This is not because GUI tools make writing more productive. It's simply because they have always used a GUI tool. Actually, what they really need is a way to add vi key bindings to Word. Then, they could access the power of keyboard shortcuts that vi offers while still having the intuitiveness of a GUI based tool.
I'll add that to my list of open source tools to fund if I win the lottery.
All this is not to say that GUIs are useless. The point is that their strength is ease of presenting options and use of the full graphical capabilities for display. If you have a small set of oft repeated tasks that include typing free text, a text based interface allows for better optimization and workflow.
"What is required is a standardized way of describing the permissions which apply to a Web site or Web page so that it can be decoded by a dumb machine without the help of an expensive lawyer."
They already have this. It's called the robot.txt file. You can use it to tell search bots not to index you. This just seems to be a richer permissions model, that includes things like caching and excerpting options.
In the longer term, I agree that this hurts content providers more than Google. Overall, it makes the search index less useful. However, it makes the content unfindable. Content that uses this will simply be replaced by content that does not.
Why would Google pay to provide better search results for content? It would make more sense for them to pay for the content direct so that they could have an exclusive. Or for content to pay to appear in the search results, like with Yahoo.
"(WIndows 2000 Home Edition) ...what? I presume you mean XP Home, or Win2K Professional."
More likely WinMe (Millenium edition). It was the home version of Windows released in 2000. Therefore it was Win 2000 Home. Completely wrong of course, WinMe was actually the last Window built on the 9x/Dos platform (rather than the NT/2000/XP platform), but it's still what people say.
Microsoft added to the confusion in that what they wanted to release in 2000 was what later became WinXP. They weren't able to finish it, so they rolled a bunch of changes back to the 9x platform and released them as WinMe. However, they promoted the planned 2000 Home until reality intruded and they realized they weren't going to deliver it in 2000.
Price per Earnings
s ratio.asp among others.
It's Price of the Stock divided by the current Earnings per share (where earnings are calculated similarly to what most of us would call profit). Googling for P/E ratio found http://www.investopedia.com/terms/p/price-earning
A company that the market expects to grow about as quickly as the economy as a whole (around 3% per year), will have a P/E ratio in the teens. Google is around 56. This suggests that investors regard the present value of Google's expected future earnings to be around three to four times as large as a more mature company. If they quadrupled in size next year and were stable after that, that would justify those projections.
Btw, I think that one of the reasons why Google keeps spinning off these unprofitable secondary projects is that it gives them a chance to evaluate and train new hires. Further, it helps them keep existing hires motivated and engaged while not losing their historical knowledge. I.e. even if they don't make money from the projects themselves, these projects give them training and retention advantages. This is especially important now, as going public increased the wealth of their engineers. This makes it harder to retain people, especially those who started early, have the most knowledge, and who accumulated the most stock.
"In the current GPL, it makes the statment that it will be subjected to any future versions of the GPL."
1. "In the current GPL, it makes the statment..." is incorrect. Some license *users* have future version provisions in their statement that they are using the license. This is not part of the GPL itself. It is simply a suggested way of using the GPL.
2. "...that it will be subjected to any future versions of the GPL" is wrong. When a user says "This software may be distributed under the GPL version 2 and future versions" it just means that they are giving permission for you to redistribute under whatever GPL version (2 or greater) that you choose.
Even if this software is distributed this way (which is FSF/Stallman recommended), it doesn't matter terribly if the software can't meet the provisions of future version(s). If it doesn't, you simply can't redistribute under the future version. You can still distribute under the current version (assuming it currently meets those requirements). Licensing in this way expands your options.
"They have been defeated at times (Bob, Ultimate TV and their internet-on-TV box are examples, they died pretty quietly)"
I'm not sure that any of those are good examples. They aren't product lines that Microsoft abandoned, just projects. No one else is doing Bob or Web TV. Ultimate TV has been replaced by Windows Media Center.
Bob was an alternative Windows interface. Seeing as how Windows is still around, I wouldn't say that they were "defeated" -- just wrong about which direction their product was going to take. If Bob was defeated, it was defeated by Windows. They continue to persist in this market.
Similarly Ultimate TV has been replaced by Windows XP Media Center Edition. They continue to persist in the market.
Web TV was an outside company. They had a product that might possibly develop into a low cost alternative to MS Windows. Microsoft bought it and killed it. The death of Web TV was in no way a failure for Microsoft. In fact, it is probably a better example of the lack of government regulation on Microsoft (how was Microsoft allowed to buy a direct competitor despite *already* having a monopoly?).
"Both realized that you had to have some sort of human-interest story as the core,"
The difference between the Ellison screen play and the actual I, Robot movie is that the Ellison screen play stayed with the basic subject of the book. Yes, he added the whole idea of a journalist looking for Susan Calvin. However, that did not detract from Asimov's themes; it just tied them together. This allowed Ellison to relatively faithfully include the short stories from the book. Did he cut stuff? Sure. Did he add stuff? Sure. However, overall, the screenplay was consistent with what Asimov actually wrote.
While as a movie, I don't think that the I, Robot movie was that bad, it was horrible in its relation to Asimov's work, much like Starship Troopers and the Earthsea mini-series. Some issues:
1. The Will Smith character had more in common with Lije Bailey than anyone from the I, Robot stories. Why not do a Lije Bailey story instead?
2. The revolt of the robots? Where is that in Asimov's work?
3. A robot that successfully chose between saving two humans? In Asimov's work, the robot's "brain" would have fried. Particularly with a human ordering it to pick the other human. The depiction of a robot as a heartless calculator is the opposite of what Asimov actually wrote (although having the human character think of a robot that way is absolutely consistent).
4. Bridget Moynahan as Susan Calvin? Gratuitous shower scene stolen from Ellison's screenplay (which had a separate character for just that purpose).
5. The zeroeth law was moved from much later (robots had already been banned from Earth).
6. Hate of prosthetics? Powerful idea. Unrelated though.
Despite so many ideas in Asimov's work, the movie had to create new ideas? Why call it I, Robot? Why not call it the Laws of Robotics or simply Robot? The movie had much the same relationship to Asimov's work that Total Recall had to "We'll Remember for You Wholesale." Why not make their own title with a simple nod to the master?
By contrast, Ellison did not add ideas. He added glue and connectors. He took a loosely related anthology and linked the pieces together. He needed romance for Hollywood, so he added characters to provide it without interfering with what he took from Asimov's work. Ellison's interpretation was a triumph of adapting from book to script.
The actual movie simply demonstrated how Hollywood doesn't get it. It failed to capture any of the logic or emotion of Asimov's original work. It had a few incidences of almost accidental congruence (the Three Laws) but reinterpreted them in its own fashion. It's sort of like someone read the cliff notes of Asimov's body of work and then wrote a script about the ones that they found interesting, adding their own twists.
"in the short term a poor person can put gas in their car and eat."
Only if they don't get laid off because they are now too expensive too employ.
The same kind of arguments discussed for child care apply equally well to transportation:
Car pool instead of solo
Bus (transit) instead of car
Live within walking distance of work
"We could have gone a bit longer without raising it had we not entered Iraq. The gas price increases are the real problem."
So the government makes a bad decision and punishes business for it? Wouldn't it make more sense for the government to pay for it? E.g. by upping the Earned Income Tax Credit and personal deductions? Note that if the US increased the gas tax, the increase would only partly be passed on to consumers. A $2 per gallon increase might increase gas prices by $1. Why not do that and then rebate the money back in tax credits. That would put the pressure on oil companies, who are benefiting from the war, rather than businesses which are already being hit by higher transportation costs.
500 gallons per person usage (googled and rounded). $2 tax per gallon; $1 per gallon price increase. Sounds like a $500 tax credit (payable; i.e. so someone who doesn't pay taxes could still get the tax credit, preferably as a chang in withholding that increases their regular paychecks) would roughly balance the effect. Increase to $600 and we have improved things. Plus, we still have another $300 or so per person to fund programs that encourage car pooling, transit, or moving close to work.
Admittedly, that's very rough estimates. Others have done real studies on the impacts of such taxes and credits and could give better estimates.
"When you increase the amount of money a poor person has, it goes right back into the economy for products and services."
And that's better? If we shift money from savings to consumption, it causes inflation. Inflation causes the Fed to cut back on the money supply. As a result, we have less savings and higher prices. Again, this is a remnant of a gold based currency. With gold, money was a limited commodity and one had to work within what it offered. With paper money, this becomes irrelevant. Not enough consumption? Print more money and redistribute it via tax breaks and welfare payments. That addresses the problem *directly* rather than try to push it off onto business.
It's worth noting that higher gas prices are already creating inflationary pressure. Increasing the inflationary pressure seems more likely to lead to recession than benefit.
It goes beyond the danger of a tariff war. While the simple economic response is that if something is more expensive it occur less, it is just as possible that a price increase would *increase* outsourcing. Why?
The whole point of outsourcing is that one country wants money from the other country. Let's say that they want $10 (US example is easiest to do with my character set; make numbers into millions or billions if you want to be more realistic). Now, we add a 25% tax. Does that drop the amount that they want to $8? No. It doesn't affect the amount that they want at all. Instead, it increases the amount that they have to sell to $12.50, so that they still get $10. Now, instead of displacing $10 worth of jobs, they are displacing $12.50. You've actually made the problem worse, rather than better.
There are two more sensible places to focus changes:
1. You could simply print $10 and give it to them. Since it is $10 in your currency, you (as the government) can do this for next to nothing (particularly if it's just electronic balances anyway). However, this can cause problems if they intend to spend the $10 on goods that your country produces (of course, if they are doing that, then why not outsource the work and move the people from the outsourced jobs to producing the desirable export goods?).
2. You can figure out why they want the $10 and make your currency less desirable. This can be complicated, but it would address the *problem* (that another country wants your currency but not your goods) where legislation focused on imports and outsourcing does not.
The fundamental problem with a lot of analysis of this is that the economics discussed was developed when there was a single global currency, called gold. Much of this analysis does not work the same when we go to multiple currencies. In particular, the $8 would have been closer to the result under a single currency. Under the multiple currency system, the value of the two currencies changes so that $10 buys what $12.50 would have gotten previously.
A lot of people will say things like "as you would have learned in econ 101" which are true but misleading. In econ 101, you would have learned the single currency case because that's what's covered in econ 101. Multiple currencies are studied in higher level econ courses because they are harder (at my alma mater, econ 500 was the introductory trade course and 1500 was the one that actually used real math). Further, they introduce less intuitive behavior, for example that an *export* tax may be more effective than an *import* tax at reducing imports.
"there are a lot of people who don't see the point of even trying for a minimum wage job because they can't afford the child care or transportation or whatever that it would cost them to hold the job in the first place."
How does increasing the minimum wage fix this? Note that child care is usually a minimum wage job and is labor intensive. Increase the child care costs and you increase the wage needed to pay for child care...
Increasing the minimum wage has three effects:
1. It puts pressure on employers to cut costs, possibly by cutting workers.
2. It puts pressure on employers to increase prices.
3. It pulls employees from alternative locations. For example, someone who is currently going to school might find it worth it to take an $8/hour job where $5.15 was not worth it. Someone who has a higher pressure $9/hour job might take a pay cut to have a low pressure, $8/hour job.
If employers aren't paying enough for people to pay their bills, is that really the employer's fault? Or is society's fault for making bills so expensive that they can't be paid? Rather than unfunded mandates as to how much an employer should pay an employee, wouldn't it make more sense for the government to take responsibility for the problems that it has caused? Consider child labor laws for example.
Traditionally, child care was not a separate expense that required a special professional to address. Instead, child care was provided by the members of the families involved. In particular, they'd take kids around with them in their work. Kids had chores and responsibilities. Modernly, the government does not allow this.
Now, I'm not arguing against child labor laws. My point is that regulation is the wrong tool to use to finance other unfunded regulations. If societally we feel that parents should not be able to take their kids to work with them, then society should also step up and help fund solutions to the resulting problems. For example, if you have six single mothers without child care, who are stuck on welfare as a result, why not pay one of the single mothers to provide child care for the other five? Or rotate the child care such that each mother cares for the other five's kids one day a week?
Note that part of the problem is more unfunded regulation. Child care providers are often required to be licensed and zoning regulations make it difficult for individuals to provide care out of their houses. Yet, it's perfectly all right to have unlicensed parents with even more kids...
"Requiring two languages just to display the document is a ridiculous and cumbersome dirty hack."
No, it's a natural evolution of the model. The dirty hack was to try to embed the display code in the markup.
You use XML (in the form of XHTML) to store the data. You use the CSS to control the display. Since the two are actually different languages, you can't mix them. This allows you to swap out the CSS for different CSS and get a completely different look. Check out http://csszengarden.com/ for some examples of the power of this model.
The other thing that you can do is swap out the raw data and use the same CSS file. I don't have an example site for that, but it is a potential use. If you add javascript into the mix (a third language), you can get wondrous things. Properly used, it makes designers more productive. Instead of building ten million font tags, they can just make all elements the same class (with the same font).
If you want to have a single language, you can. Just call it image map. Use only two HTML tags: map (plus area of course) and img. Make the entire page an image and make various regions clickable with the image map.
Does the Blockbuster web site work in Firefox yet? When I tried it (two years ago?), I had to use IE to make the error messages show.
I think that the issue is tainted data. First, they take the top hundred tech companies. Then, they divide them into those that did well and those that did not. As a result, when they hired the CEO, those that did not do well were, on average, bigger than those that did do well. Why? Because if a company was at the bottom of the top 100 and did not do well, they fell off. The companies that are still there were bigger than the average tech company last year. Companies that did do well were smaller last year.
I think that the "study" basically says that bigger companies pay their CEOs more, which is not exactly insightful. IBM pays their CEO more than Adobe's? Really?
To get real data, they should have taken the top hundred companies from *last* year and seen how they did this year. They also might want to consider doing something like dividing CEO salary by last year's revenues. That would better control for the differences in size between companies like IBM and Adobe.
IBM: $12 million salary out of $96 billion revenue = 1/8000
Adobe: $1.9 million salary out of $1.9 billion revenue = 1/1000
Note: revenue numbers may not be from last year; too lazy to find details in google links.
It looks like Chizen is actually paid better per dollar of revenue than Palmisano is.
"You go to the free clinic and got your shots."
That works fine for curable STDs; not so good with herpes or AIDS (both are treatable but not curable).
"Find an insurance company that insists on helmets and seatbelts, and charges more to those who ride without them"
You're thinking about the wrong insurance company. It's not the helmetless motorcyclist's insurance company that gets sued. It's the other vehicle's insurance company. Further, it's not the insurance company that gets to decide damages; it's the courts. Since the government (through the court system) determines damages, it needs to be the government that collects the extra money. Which it does by creating helmet laws and ticketing the people who don't obey them.
You might argue that it should simply charge up front and allow people to continue to ride without a helmet. The problem with that is who decides who pays? You end up with two classes of people: one that must wear helmets and can be ticketed for not wearing a helmet; another that does not have to wear helmets. That means that every time police officers see someone riding a motorcycle without a helmet, they have to check the registration (or worse, pull over the rider and check their license). It's actually cheaper to ban and then enforce on everyone.
The other possibility would be to allow insurance companies to not pay for damages caused by not wearing a helmet. However that makes the system much more complicated and difficult to adjudicate. For example, how do we handle the problem of the care being needed now but the court case not occurring until later? How do we determine what portion of the damages would have occurred with the helmet?
"The point you're missing is that, somewhere in the transaction, value is destroyed."
No, you're the one missing the point. The US prints dollars which are used as the global currency. As a result, we get a seignorage fee. This is basically the difference between the cost of producing a dollar and a dollar. Since most dollars used in international trade are never printed, the seignorage fee is very close to a dollar.
Now, how do the dollars get to the global economy? There are basically two ways:
1. We can buy foreign stuff. A side benefit is that we get foreign stuff.
2. We can give it away.
Now, what happens if we stop printing the global currency or start giving it away rather than buying stuff with it? Yes, the trade deficit goes away. However, the trade deficit wasn't the problem. The problem is that domestic producers are closing. Why do they close? Because foreign producers are more efficient at making product. If we eliminate the trade deficit, it will push foreign prices higher and will make our exports cheaper. Net result? An increase in exports (imports are a wash; quantity goes down but price increases).
Now, does an increase in exports mean that people who were laid off will now go back to their jobs? No. At *best*, they would get new jobs. Why? Because the areas that will be doing well are not those where the layoffs occurred.
At the same time, you add new inflationary pressures. Import prices are up, forcing prices of assembled products up. Standard of living falls, because we have less stuff (quantity of imports is down even if total value has stayed the same). Further, we have to create less money, as we are no longer dumping so much of it overseas. This is a pure, dead weight loss.
Anyway, the point that you're missing is that money itself is inherently without value. People give it value by accepting it in exchange for goods and services. Therefore, a trade deficit is essentially foreign countries accepting something that we create for free (money) in exchange for something that costs them labor and natural resources to create. We didn't lose value in that; we gained value.
Now, the long term effects of this are less clear. Since we continue to accept dollars, what happens if the global economy switches to something else? E.g. euros? People stop being interested in exchanging goods for dollars (it's better to exchange goods for the more fungible currency). Over time, people will want to trade their dollars for euros or goods that they can exchange for euros. This triggers the same problem as previously. Inflation.
On the bright side, the transition does not have to be immediate. It could conceivably happen over a period of time.
"the only feature I've found useful that firefox lacks the the ability to save tables in web page as Excel sheets."
If you have Excel (at least the Office version that I use at work), you can do that without IE7. Admittedly, under the hood, it's probably using IE. However, it would be using IE6, because I don't have IE7 installed at work. Anyway, I can do this without actively opening a web browser, only clicking on buttons in Excel.
If you don't have Excel, why do you care?
"However, when dealing with the outside world, I believe it to be most respective and professional to wear professional attire that is appropriate to that correspondence."
In this case, his primary purpose was recruiting. In particular, he wanted to recruit really smart people. Really smart people know that clothes are irrelevant to the job (unless the job is to model clothes or work at IBM). Thus, the appropriate professional attire is (drum roll please) jeans and a t-shirt. Those are the clothes most likely to be appealing to the kind of people that are at a university and that Google wants.
Another way of looking at it is that Google is really interested in hiring from the same group of people who might want to become professors. Such people are notoriously uninterested in the wrapping. As such, it may be more valuable to Google to project a casual attitude (and attire) than to be respectfully professional. In fact, they might even find it advantageous to not hire people like you who are over impressed by clothes. Why? Because you may look down on your scruffily dressed but brilliant colleagues. Maybe Google would be better off if you went to IBM (famous for their uptight dress; in part because they are professionals who deal with business people).
I think that your insight (dressing appropriately is best) is correct. I think that you are misinterpreting what was appropriate to the situation.
"Whenever commercials come on TV, I SWITCH TO ANOTHER CHANNEL without commercials."
Which of course is why they should be *ENCOURAGING* fast forward, as studies have shown that people who fast forward through commercials have better retention than people who don't. People who don't fast forward through commercials quickly learn to switch channels, take food breaks, take bathroom breaks, talk to other people, etc.
Of course, as Harlan Ellison noted, comparing media executives' brains to artichokes is an insult to artichokes.
"The EU fine will increase the marginal cost, driving the price up."
No, it won't. The marginal cost is the cost of adding one more unit of production. The EU fine won't have any effect on that, as the fine doesn't vary by production. It's a fixed cost. Fixed costs only matter in perfect competition not with monopolies nor even monopolistic competition (unless the fixed costs eat up *all* of the profit; then bankruptcy occurs).
It is worth noting that in my previous post, I wrote revenue where I should have written profit. Mea culpa.