So long as they continue to act as a distributor it is correct to call them one. That they also operate their own retail network does not take away from the distribution/wholesale function. If a time comes when there are no downstream buyers (like your store), then yes, they would no longer deserve that name. But clearly the economics of being a small town/city store (regardless of product) are different than those of one in a large metro area where even at reduced margins, higher sales allow the business to continue.
My general observation is that most people are not willing to pay a premium, even if a store has 'value added'. A small book shop or hardware store, where the employees are stable and knowledgeable about the products they sell has a hard time competing (even staying in business) with the chain store selling at lower prices using unhelpful staff (with high turnover). This is as much a function of the distribution model as it is of the consumers and their utility functions.
Sorry, but if the comic book distributor model is the more economically viable, then your firm should go out of businesses. Nothing personal at all, its just the economic reality of it and you state it yourself. The publishers do not want to be bothered selling small numbers of copies to stores like yours as it inflates their costs and reduces their margins, thus they sell to the distributor/wholesaler. If that does not leave enough additional margin for a further downstream seller (and I'm not talking just comic books now), then that is where things stop and end consumers by from the distributor.
The obsession of three groups - blacks, jews and "progressive" whites over "hate" speech, "racism" and "discrimination" is tired and old. Grow up and get over the fact that, for whatever their reasons, some people just don't like you and never will. Nobody ever guaranteed you a world in which everybody loves each other and sings Kumbaya. So your feelings are hurt. Or you feell "threatened". Know what? My feelings get hurt every day. And I feel "threatened" when I walk or drive through certain areas. I don't go running to the cops or my congress critter to "protect" me unless something actually happens. And we certainly already have enough laws on the books to cover every imaginable form of violence.
And as I'm sure to be downmodded, I might as well add this: If twitter were around in 2004 (or even 2000), would this type of analysis be done looking for racicsm and hate speech directed against the white candidate? Really?
Perhaps our progressive friends should spend a little more time in the hood and hear what is said about whites (and even other minority groups). They might be shocked to find that minorities are just as good at hating on others, other minorities included.
That is why it is called a market. If there was external demand for your (and other) ex-MSFT employees services, they would not be able to hire replacements at a lower wage. Do you recall the dotcom bubble? Insane amounts of money were tossed at anyone who could spell HTML. Not making this personal or anything, I sympathize with anyone who has lost a job and as a result must take a lower paying one. But this about much more than 'evil corp makes big profits and laysoff employees.' The commanding lead that the US once had in the technical fields and their staffing has dwindled to the point where workers can no longer command a premium compared to their peers from other locations (yes that is a general statement and sure there are exceptions.)
You should try thinking too. Over the long run stock performance is correlated to profits. Companies that do not make money ultimately fail. Companies which do not make money do not grow. Why have people gone batshit over Apple the past 8 years? Because they liked Steve Jobs? In the case of Amazon, while they have bounced around making and losing small amounts of money, they have also reinvested large sums of cash into their business. Ultimately though, to justify the stock price they will at some point need to turn that investment into hard dollars or else guess where the stock will go?
And I again remind people that if you have a 401K or are part of a pension plan (now a days mostly unions), your retirement money is mostly in equities.
As to CEO salaries, the US is not the only place with high salaries for CEOs, though people also have a very limited selection of information about CEO salaries. Very few make the megabucks complete with government sanctioned golden parachutes. A quick look shows salary.com reporting a median of $731K, probably not the millions that you were expecting. Thats not to say there aren't any, of course there are, usually among the very large companies where the average (not median) is just below $10M. CEO's like Apples and a few others do pull that average up.
What about higher COSTS for business which get passed on to ALL consumers? And don't cry me a river about corporate profits as I suggest you go look to see what is in your 401k or other retirement plan - public or private. The sad reality is that the US can no longer command the wages it once could, whether thats in tech or in digging ditches.
So.. X11 needs to be replaced with something shiny because of...? Seems the response most often stated is the code base is a mess. Why not just clean that up instead? And has others have noted here, remote usage is still important and no, VNC is not the same thing.
as they watch their counterparts mingle on social networking apps that are not available to them, take higher-resolution photos, and effortlessly navigate streets — and the Internet — with better GPS and faster browsing."
And I wonder which group is actually getting the work done they are supposed to be doing to collect a paycheck?
Yes and it seems like you are fucking clueless. The reason why "Missions are already competing for time and bandwidth, and the situation will only get worse." is because there are only a handful of facilities in the deep space network. Hmm.. how can we fix that at minimal cost? Lets see.... add big dish receiver. Add storage. Add routing to central servers/processing. Repeat as necessary. And do it on earth. Nah.. that would be just too damn cheap and boring. Put it on the darkside of the moon instead!
A supercomputer? On the moon? To relay deep space traffic? Gee I can only imagine how many tens of billions that will cost. Not like something couldn't be built on the earth for a fraction of the cost and complexity. Why is NASA even the one to run and build what amounts to a telecommunications network? They should be farming this out to industry.
Not only that, where is the obligation of google to not offer services other than search when they generate results for free? Unless these whiners like Yelp can show that google is purposely altering their search algo to downrank them they should just learn how to compete betere. Ironically I did a serach for oil change places in my area and the first listing was a review on yelp.
There are no barriers to entry for search either. Certainly google itself dethroned yahoo, excite, altavista, etc.
The more correct question to ask is.. would Mittens be any worse? At this point it is hard to envision anybody being worse on issues of civil liberties than has been Obama. Not only has he continued the Bush era wiretapping, he has expanded the programs reach and use (see recent ACLU report on pen registers and trap and trace). He has greatly expanded the powers of the FBI. And those are just a few of the things we actually know about. Since getting in office he has been totally down with everything Bush/Cheney did, backing them to the hilt in the courts. Frankly, I wonder at times if Cheney doesn't have a secret room in the west wing to consult from.
Yes, Gary Johnson would be the best choice but the argument that Obama would be better than Romney is laughable.
What charitable 1 percenters can’t do is assume responsibility—America’s national responsibilities: the care of its sick and its poor, the education of its young, the repair of its failing infrastructure, the repayment of its staggering war debts.
King is wrong. He can set up or help fund hospital and medical care for low-income people. He can fund a private school for low income students. He can indeed work with state and local governments to help fund a bridge or road repair. As to repayment of war debt, unfortunately our govt. lied when it last set up a "fund" for people to send money to thinking they were paying down the debt. Excess contributions afaik still go just to the general fund. In theory, its one big cookie jar so his extra donation should reduce future borrowing by that amount. In the end, thats the same thing.
So yes, King and others can do a lot more if they really wanted to. Let them determine how much more they think they should pay in taxes and then set up an administrative fund to place the money with those projects they think most needy.
As a very early adopter of Slak and one who used it for 15 years before moving to BSD I can say the primary attraction to me was it was the most 'unix' like of the distros. I put things where they should go, they looked like they should and it never got much involved in package management sticking with zipped tars (though it did have scripts to 'manage' those if you wanted). With slackware you could do a lot more on your own and with less fear of breaking something.
When I upgraded my last aging slackware mini-server I decided to give the BSDs a try and am now on FreeBSD and like it very much. Were I to move back to linux for my own use it would only be to slackware.
and other high profile rich Dems continously cry about how they don't pay enough in taxes, blah blah blah. Well, here's a suggestion: get together and fund the GBT. Or a few other projects that face the federal axe. Of course this will never happen, at least not until pigs fly in things other than airplanes.
No, I'm sorry, but no. To the contrary: currently, the peak electrical power usage is typically early afternoon. If electric cars charge overnight, when power is in oversupply, they fit superbly into the existing power structure.
If it turns out to be a problem that people plug in their cars at 6pm but the off-peak hours don't start until 10pm, that can be easily solved with a timer. Implementing a time-of-day dependent rate structure would also help, but no change in the grid itself is needed.
What are you smoking? First off you completely ignore that more electric power must be produced. From.. coal? oil? nuclear? Oh right.. solar and wind. Good luck with that one! Per the link below, for every 3 EV Leafs you put on the road you are adding the equivalent of another household. Sorry, that energy has to come from somewhere.
Second, do you seriously believe that you can constrain the behavior of a sufficiently large number of owners to only charge when overall electric demand is low? Hey EVs are better! You can only 'gas up' after 10PM, not when you want or need to!
And third, this still ignores the effects on local grids. Demand may be low now at those hours but once you drop your EVs on, that goes out the window. And as the link below notes, neighborhoods have varying ability to handle those spikes in demand. And we already know that applies to regional grids as well.
As another poster pointed out, you are basically advocating people own two cars unless by chance they fit into precisely the range of an ev 99% of the time. Besides the cost, that is why the fail in the US market. You follow up with mention of a hybrid, well and good but you are speaking about saving about 250 gallons, give or take, in gasoline a year. That won't make up the price difference on many of those vehicles and leaves unstated the significant additional cost of dealing with the batteries and additional electrical components when it comes time to junk the car.
And of course, the far larger unsaid is the giant fail that EVs are on the power grid were they to be widely adopted. Ignoring the question of sourcing of raw materials for the necessary power, the grid in most major metro areas is barely able to handle today's peak demands.
Vote for Johnson. If there is a market it will be served and competition will drive down the costs. We are finally seeing this, at least the early stages, but only after it was clear that NASA was leaving the business.
Er... what good are those stats? Is your commute to work to only driving you do? Do you ownly make one trip in the car each day? What is more important are a) median daily use and b) the dispersion about the mean. If 25% of the time I am going to be driving well beyond the electric range the car is worthless, even if my 'average' trip is within that range.
Slashdot Mirror
So long as they continue to act as a distributor it is correct to call them one. That they also operate their own retail network does not take away from the distribution/wholesale function. If a time comes when there are no downstream buyers (like your store), then yes, they would no longer deserve that name. But clearly the economics of being a small town/city store (regardless of product) are different than those of one in a large metro area where even at reduced margins, higher sales allow the business to continue.
My general observation is that most people are not willing to pay a premium, even if a store has 'value added'. A small book shop or hardware store, where the employees are stable and knowledgeable about the products they sell has a hard time competing (even staying in business) with the chain store selling at lower prices using unhelpful staff (with high turnover). This is as much a function of the distribution model as it is of the consumers and their utility functions.
Sorry, but if the comic book distributor model is the more economically viable, then your firm should go out of businesses. Nothing personal at all, its just the economic reality of it and you state it yourself. The publishers do not want to be bothered selling small numbers of copies to stores like yours as it inflates their costs and reduces their margins, thus they sell to the distributor/wholesaler. If that does not leave enough additional margin for a further downstream seller (and I'm not talking just comic books now), then that is where things stop and end consumers by from the distributor.
The obsession of three groups - blacks, jews and "progressive" whites over "hate" speech, "racism" and "discrimination" is tired and old. Grow up and get over the fact that, for whatever their reasons, some people just don't like you and never will. Nobody ever guaranteed you a world in which everybody loves each other and sings Kumbaya. So your feelings are hurt. Or you feell "threatened". Know what? My feelings get hurt every day. And I feel "threatened" when I walk or drive through certain areas. I don't go running to the cops or my congress critter to "protect" me unless something actually happens. And we certainly already have enough laws on the books to cover every imaginable form of violence.
And as I'm sure to be downmodded, I might as well add this: If twitter were around in 2004 (or even 2000), would this type of analysis be done looking for racicsm and hate speech directed against the white candidate? Really?
Perhaps our progressive friends should spend a little more time in the hood and hear what is said about whites (and even other minority groups). They might be shocked to find that minorities are just as good at hating on others, other minorities included.
A lot more goes into make a 'super' computer than just a bunch of cpus and some ram.
That is why it is called a market. If there was external demand for your (and other) ex-MSFT employees services, they would not be able to hire replacements at a lower wage. Do you recall the dotcom bubble? Insane amounts of money were tossed at anyone who could spell HTML. Not making this personal or anything, I sympathize with anyone who has lost a job and as a result must take a lower paying one. But this about much more than 'evil corp makes big profits and laysoff employees.' The commanding lead that the US once had in the technical fields and their staffing has dwindled to the point where workers can no longer command a premium compared to their peers from other locations (yes that is a general statement and sure there are exceptions.)
You should try thinking too. Over the long run stock performance is correlated to profits. Companies that do not make money ultimately fail. Companies which do not make money do not grow. Why have people gone batshit over Apple the past 8 years? Because they liked Steve Jobs? In the case of Amazon, while they have bounced around making and losing small amounts of money, they have also reinvested large sums of cash into their business. Ultimately though, to justify the stock price they will at some point need to turn that investment into hard dollars or else guess where the stock will go?
And I again remind people that if you have a 401K or are part of a pension plan (now a days mostly unions), your retirement money is mostly in equities.
As to CEO salaries, the US is not the only place with high salaries for CEOs, though people also have a very limited selection of information about CEO salaries. Very few make the megabucks complete with government sanctioned golden parachutes. A quick look shows salary.com reporting a median of $731K, probably not the millions that you were expecting. Thats not to say there aren't any, of course there are, usually among the very large companies where the average (not median) is just below $10M. CEO's like Apples and a few others do pull that average up.
What about higher COSTS for business which get passed on to ALL consumers? And don't cry me a river about corporate profits as I suggest you go look to see what is in your 401k or other retirement plan - public or private. The sad reality is that the US can no longer command the wages it once could, whether thats in tech or in digging ditches.
So.. X11 needs to be replaced with something shiny because of...? Seems the response most often stated is the code base is a mess. Why not just clean that up instead? And has others have noted here, remote usage is still important and no, VNC is not the same thing.
And I wonder which group is actually getting the work done they are supposed to be doing to collect a paycheck?
Yes and it seems like you are fucking clueless. The reason why "Missions are already competing for time and bandwidth, and the situation will only get worse." is because there are only a handful of facilities in the deep space network. Hmm.. how can we fix that at minimal cost? Lets see.... add big dish receiver. Add storage. Add routing to central servers/processing. Repeat as necessary. And do it on earth. Nah.. that would be just too damn cheap and boring. Put it on the darkside of the moon instead!
A supercomputer? On the moon? To relay deep space traffic? Gee I can only imagine how many tens of billions that will cost. Not like something couldn't be built on the earth for a fraction of the cost and complexity. Why is NASA even the one to run and build what amounts to a telecommunications network? They should be farming this out to industry.
And what % of the revenues in the smartphone market? And what about patent abuse?
Not only that, where is the obligation of google to not offer services other than search when they generate results for free? Unless these whiners like Yelp can show that google is purposely altering their search algo to downrank them they should just learn how to compete betere. Ironically I did a serach for oil change places in my area and the first listing was a review on yelp.
There are no barriers to entry for search either. Certainly google itself dethroned yahoo, excite, altavista, etc.
The more correct question to ask is.. would Mittens be any worse? At this point it is hard to envision anybody being worse on issues of civil liberties than has been Obama. Not only has he continued the Bush era wiretapping, he has expanded the programs reach and use (see recent ACLU report on pen registers and trap and trace). He has greatly expanded the powers of the FBI. And those are just a few of the things we actually know about. Since getting in office he has been totally down with everything Bush/Cheney did, backing them to the hilt in the courts. Frankly, I wonder at times if Cheney doesn't have a secret room in the west wing to consult from.
Yes, Gary Johnson would be the best choice but the argument that Obama would be better than Romney is laughable.
and you'll get the new Ionmonkey engine. Or just switch to the nightly.
now has a whole new meaning..
Rumor has it you may need a little extra ear after that hit you took last week
King is wrong. He can set up or help fund hospital and medical care for low-income people. He can fund a private school for low income students. He can indeed work with state and local governments to help fund a bridge or road repair. As to repayment of war debt, unfortunately our govt. lied when it last set up a "fund" for people to send money to thinking they were paying down the debt. Excess contributions afaik still go just to the general fund. In theory, its one big cookie jar so his extra donation should reduce future borrowing by that amount. In the end, thats the same thing.
So yes, King and others can do a lot more if they really wanted to. Let them determine how much more they think they should pay in taxes and then set up an administrative fund to place the money with those projects they think most needy.
As a very early adopter of Slak and one who used it for 15 years before moving to BSD I can say the primary attraction to me was it was the most 'unix' like of the distros. I put things where they should go, they looked like they should and it never got much involved in package management sticking with zipped tars (though it did have scripts to 'manage' those if you wanted). With slackware you could do a lot more on your own and with less fear of breaking something.
When I upgraded my last aging slackware mini-server I decided to give the BSDs a try and am now on FreeBSD and like it very much. Were I to move back to linux for my own use it would only be to slackware.
and other high profile rich Dems continously cry about how they don't pay enough in taxes, blah blah blah. Well, here's a suggestion: get together and fund the GBT. Or a few other projects that face the federal axe. Of course this will never happen, at least not until pigs fly in things other than airplanes.
and then quickly moved on to Slackware for about 15 years before moving to NetBSD (briefly) and then FreeBSD where I remain today.
No, I'm sorry, but no. To the contrary: currently, the peak electrical power usage is typically early afternoon. If electric cars charge overnight, when power is in oversupply, they fit superbly into the existing power structure.
If it turns out to be a problem that people plug in their cars at 6pm but the off-peak hours don't start until 10pm, that can be easily solved with a timer. Implementing a time-of-day dependent rate structure would also help, but no change in the grid itself is needed.
What are you smoking? First off you completely ignore that more electric power must be produced. From.. coal? oil? nuclear? Oh right.. solar and wind. Good luck with that one! Per the link below, for every 3 EV Leafs you put on the road you are adding the equivalent of another household. Sorry, that energy has to come from somewhere.
Second, do you seriously believe that you can constrain the behavior of a sufficiently large number of owners to only charge when overall electric demand is low? Hey EVs are better! You can only 'gas up' after 10PM, not when you want or need to!
And third, this still ignores the effects on local grids. Demand may be low now at those hours but once you drop your EVs on, that goes out the window. And as the link below notes, neighborhoods have varying ability to handle those spikes in demand. And we already know that applies to regional grids as well.
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2012/02/15/city-grids-may-not-be-ready-for-electric-cars
As another poster pointed out, you are basically advocating people own two cars unless by chance they fit into precisely the range of an ev 99% of the time. Besides the cost, that is why the fail in the US market. You follow up with mention of a hybrid, well and good but you are speaking about saving about 250 gallons, give or take, in gasoline a year. That won't make up the price difference on many of those vehicles and leaves unstated the significant additional cost of dealing with the batteries and additional electrical components when it comes time to junk the car.
And of course, the far larger unsaid is the giant fail that EVs are on the power grid were they to be widely adopted. Ignoring the question of sourcing of raw materials for the necessary power, the grid in most major metro areas is barely able to handle today's peak demands.
Vote for Johnson. If there is a market it will be served and competition will drive down the costs. We are finally seeing this, at least the early stages, but only after it was clear that NASA was leaving the business.
Er... what good are those stats? Is your commute to work to only driving you do? Do you ownly make one trip in the car each day? What is more important are a) median daily use and b) the dispersion about the mean. If 25% of the time I am going to be driving well beyond the electric range the car is worthless, even if my 'average' trip is within that range.