Yes, but the bridge, while long, is underwater. Money contractors may work for bananas but the quality of the work still isn't there especially on maritime projects.
Takeovers are about reducing competition and increasing market share so the don't need to compete. One serious flaw in capitalism is that companies don't want to compete because it's difficult and generally not very profitable.
TV stations leased the band, they didn't buy it. It's owned by the public as in public airwaves. The public took it back and they can lease it out again.
Obama got credit for this in the headline but he isn't behaving as if this were his project so the only jackass here is you with your childish, ignorant Chairman Mao comment. You made the world a little dumber today.
I don't support a moratorium because the other off shore drillers are likely to repeat what is clearly starting to look like shoddy work by BP. I think we need this break to rebuild the Minerals Management Service so they can do a better job regulating these drilling operations. It's starting to look like this disaster is another example of how industry can't regulate itself. The theory was that the financial industry and others wouldn't take on ridiculous risks and cut corners to make a little more money but just isn't the case.
We've spent far too long with a government that didn't believe in governing and every regulation they couldn't scrap wasn't enforced by people who were either intentionally incompetent (Brownie'd) or people who were on a revolving door situation with the industry they were tasked with regulating.
We'll be a generation cleaning up this mess and these disasters aren't over.
The liability limit won't be capped if (when) BP is found negligent but all of that is a long way down the road. The point is BP was almost surely going to pay more than $75 million in liability for this. This also wasn't really a matter of law as much as an agreement that BP didn't have to take. BP would have been well within their rights to say no and the US government was well within its rights to tell BP they'd never get another drop of oil out of a US well ever again and sell the US government another drop of fuel. That's completely reasonable as I wouldn't trust BP to drill in the US under the measly threat of a $75 million liability.
My sister's cat is going to feel pretty silly about gnawing through all of her umbilical cords and eating the placentas. Next time I'll be sure to let Mittens know about the stem cells.
The Kindle doesn't do Facebook or IM so it is not going to work well for what people are doing in class with computeresque devices. The iPad types too slow, netbooks have too small of a screen to really read on, and most laptops are too bulky and don't have a great battery life. Fix those issues and you should be set classroom use.
I like it when web developers use them as it makes it convenient to ad-block a lot of ads on a site at once. It's possible that isn't what they had in mind.
It does help you get a job and keep it when times are hard. The unemployment rate for high school graduates is about twice the rate for college graduates in this recession.
'If people want to go out and get a master's degree in history and then cut down trees for a living, that's fine. But I don't think the public should be subsidizing it.'"
People don't generally want to do that. People generally want a decent wage so they can provide for their family, eventually buy a house, have health insurance so they lose everything they've worked for (or lose a family member) because you can't afford medical care, and they want to retire some day. Getting an education was a good way to accomplish that once upon a time but globalization and competing with emerging economies means we'll ultimately need to become accustomed to a lower standard of living.
Apple chose to only sell under one carrier and while the iPhone is clearly a very successful product they risk losing developers to a platform with more customers and a less obnoxious development situation.
With citizens so busy these days they should form a counsel to promote the public interest when public lands or other resources are used. Since those cables cross state lines for the purposes of trade we should make it federal. This idea of yours to make a Counsel of Federal Trade is a grand idea indeed.
Since the FCC spent a long time shirking any of their duties that didn't include punishing the odd dirty word or errant nipple on the public airwaves or sifting through the small mountain of automated emails from nutty parents groups it may be a while before they are up to doing any meaningful work.
This project sounds like a non-nuclear deterrent for the new junior members of the nuke club.
1. An attack on Russia or China from us wouldn't just look like one missile so as long as we only agree to shoot one or two at a time and Russia and China agree to monitor for that then they could be convinced that we're just trying to prevent nuclear war and they can hold up the threat of retaliation to keep this whole MAD thing going.
2. Maintaining bomber bases and aging bombers throughout the world and aircraft carriers near the Arabian peninsula and the north pacific probably costs a whole lot more money than dusting off a couple of old minuteman sites and refitting them.
3. Right now this is probably for North Korea and Iran. It also has the advantage of being difficult to retaliate against assuming we replace easy to attack bomber bases with a few very fast missiles.
Sure, the government makes mistakes but they've also helped bring us cleaner and safer food, cleaner and safer water, and cleaner and safer air. They had to did these things because unregulated private industry was all too comfortable poisoning people to save a little money and they'd still be doing it if they could get away with it.
It's fair to argue over the details behind the new regulation but the financial services industry earned these modest restrictions because they've proven that they are, as an industry, completely unable to reign in the sorts of behavior that led to this crisis.
We've reformed the tax code before to simplify it and it bloats back up. The reason it bloats back up has to do with getting those last few votes on a close bill. One of the things the voting public tends to measure the success of representatives and senators by is not only how much federal money they can bring home but by how much money they can keep from going to the feds by adding a few more special provisions to the tax code. You can't just reform the tax code without reforming how changes are made to the tax code later or we'll be right back where we started.
As for the IT angle, the managers at the IRS are scared of automating a decade’s long process because computers can greatly improve the efficiency of many things like screwing up a couple million tax returns on a bad afternoon. It doesn't help much that the tax code has significant changes every year and the IRS is almost universally demonized so getting resources and good support is probably difficult.
I think it's so much worse than that. With the Zune/HD and and it's new phone offerings Microsoft is trying to out-Apple Apple and they are terrible at it. Not only do they come out with hardware that is a generation behind what Apple has out in the market:
- big old iPod (a few years later) big old Zune
- skinny iPod (a few years later) skinny Zune
- iPod touch (a couple of years later) Zune HD
- iPhone (a couple of years later) this thing
Not only are they late to market copycats but they don't execute nearly as well as Apple. While the hardware is arguely a bit better in the Zune HD compared to an iPod touch there aren't many apps for it because they've made it nearly as hard, if not harder, for third parties to release apps for the Zune HD and they don't have the marketshare to pull off that kind of douchebaggery. The postion they should have taken is what Google did with the Nexus 1 and make it easier to develop and release software for it. One of Microsoft/PC strengths in the early days was that it was a more open development platform than what Apple had to offer.
I don't think there is real hope of Microsoft's new phone really competing with the iPhone or Nexus 1 but if they really want to make a go of it get then they need mindshare. To do that they start with the Zune HD if that's the platform they're going to build on by adding a microphone, adding speech to text, sponsoring a Skype client, adding a camera, and give developers something more interesting to do than make yet another twitter client.
From what I've seen with these kinds of projects we tend to start off with a very complicated yet somehow vague mandate. Hospitals spin their wheels trying to become compliant and generally do a poor rush job at the last minute. When this becomes painfully obvious the deadline is extended and everyone eventually does a somewhat adequate job at becoming more or less compliant most of the time.
In sort it works like every other giant IT project and we're still in phase 1.
We do seem to be in a period of diminishing returns with the top-of-the-line consumer PC hardware. Argueably we're at a point where it's difficult to add more performance to a single core and from the benchmarks I've seen suggest that we're getting to a point where adding more cores isn't helping that much for most consumer PC use.
The biggest challenges we have today are getting more processing performance from less electricity because we're running more things on batteries and quiet computers for the home theater (which tends to mean fanless which tends to mean less heat which tends to mean less electricity) and I don't see that going away. The prime motivator for high-end PC hardware is high-quality gaming and that is a shrinking market as publishers focus on console development because of piracy.
Western children today are inheriting a legacy of squandered resources, environmental destruction, and increased global competition. Their futures have been mortgaged time and again by their predecessors. I'd like to think that these are things they could work through enlightened cooperation but in a time of shortage a generation of more aggressive, less warm and fuzzy kids might fare better.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but the bridge, while long, is underwater. Money contractors may work for bananas but the quality of the work still isn't there especially on maritime projects.
somehow it seems really important to know which of my house's orifices my toilet is connected to.
BP might pay handsomely if you could find a highly unethical biologist to identify tarballs as a new sort of petroleum-based jellyfish.
Takeovers are about reducing competition and increasing market share so the don't need to compete. One serious flaw in capitalism is that companies don't want to compete because it's difficult and generally not very profitable.
TV stations leased the band, they didn't buy it. It's owned by the public as in public airwaves. The public took it back and they can lease it out again.
Obama got credit for this in the headline but he isn't behaving as if this were his project so the only jackass here is you with your childish, ignorant Chairman Mao comment. You made the world a little dumber today.
I don't support a moratorium because the other off shore drillers are likely to repeat what is clearly starting to look like shoddy work by BP. I think we need this break to rebuild the Minerals Management Service so they can do a better job regulating these drilling operations. It's starting to look like this disaster is another example of how industry can't regulate itself. The theory was that the financial industry and others wouldn't take on ridiculous risks and cut corners to make a little more money but just isn't the case.
We've spent far too long with a government that didn't believe in governing and every regulation they couldn't scrap wasn't enforced by people who were either intentionally incompetent (Brownie'd) or people who were on a revolving door situation with the industry they were tasked with regulating.
We'll be a generation cleaning up this mess and these disasters aren't over.
The liability limit won't be capped if (when) BP is found negligent but all of that is a long way down the road. The point is BP was almost surely going to pay more than $75 million in liability for this. This also wasn't really a matter of law as much as an agreement that BP didn't have to take. BP would have been well within their rights to say no and the US government was well within its rights to tell BP they'd never get another drop of oil out of a US well ever again and sell the US government another drop of fuel. That's completely reasonable as I wouldn't trust BP to drill in the US under the measly threat of a $75 million liability.
My sister's cat is going to feel pretty silly about gnawing through all of her umbilical cords and eating the placentas. Next time I'll be sure to let Mittens know about the stem cells.
The Kindle doesn't do Facebook or IM so it is not going to work well for what people are doing in class with computeresque devices. The iPad types too slow, netbooks have too small of a screen to really read on, and most laptops are too bulky and don't have a great battery life. Fix those issues and you should be set classroom use.
I like it when web developers use them as it makes it convenient to ad-block a lot of ads on a site at once. It's possible that isn't what they had in mind.
It does help you get a job and keep it when times are hard. The unemployment rate for high school graduates is about twice the rate for college graduates in this recession.
'If people want to go out and get a master's degree in history and then cut down trees for a living, that's fine. But I don't think the public should be subsidizing it.'"
People don't generally want to do that. People generally want a decent wage so they can provide for their family, eventually buy a house, have health insurance so they lose everything they've worked for (or lose a family member) because you can't afford medical care, and they want to retire some day. Getting an education was a good way to accomplish that once upon a time but globalization and competing with emerging economies means we'll ultimately need to become accustomed to a lower standard of living.
Apple chose to only sell under one carrier and while the iPhone is clearly a very successful product they risk losing developers to a platform with more customers and a less obnoxious development situation.
With citizens so busy these days they should form a counsel to promote the public interest when public lands or other resources are used. Since those cables cross state lines for the purposes of trade we should make it federal. This idea of yours to make a Counsel of Federal Trade is a grand idea indeed.
Since the FCC spent a long time shirking any of their duties that didn't include punishing the odd dirty word or errant nipple on the public airwaves or sifting through the small mountain of automated emails from nutty parents groups it may be a while before they are up to doing any meaningful work.
I say we send one up there and plug it in and point a webcam at it.
This project sounds like a non-nuclear deterrent for the new junior members of the nuke club.
1. An attack on Russia or China from us wouldn't just look like one missile so as long as we only agree to shoot one or two at a time and Russia and China agree to monitor for that then they could be convinced that we're just trying to prevent nuclear war and they can hold up the threat of retaliation to keep this whole MAD thing going.
2. Maintaining bomber bases and aging bombers throughout the world and aircraft carriers near the Arabian peninsula and the north pacific probably costs a whole lot more money than dusting off a couple of old minuteman sites and refitting them.
3. Right now this is probably for North Korea and Iran. It also has the advantage of being difficult to retaliate against assuming we replace easy to attack bomber bases with a few very fast missiles.
Sure, the government makes mistakes but they've also helped bring us cleaner and safer food, cleaner and safer water, and cleaner and safer air. They had to did these things because unregulated private industry was all too comfortable poisoning people to save a little money and they'd still be doing it if they could get away with it.
It's fair to argue over the details behind the new regulation but the financial services industry earned these modest restrictions because they've proven that they are, as an industry, completely unable to reign in the sorts of behavior that led to this crisis.
We've reformed the tax code before to simplify it and it bloats back up. The reason it bloats back up has to do with getting those last few votes on a close bill. One of the things the voting public tends to measure the success of representatives and senators by is not only how much federal money they can bring home but by how much money they can keep from going to the feds by adding a few more special provisions to the tax code. You can't just reform the tax code without reforming how changes are made to the tax code later or we'll be right back where we started.
As for the IT angle, the managers at the IRS are scared of automating a decade’s long process because computers can greatly improve the efficiency of many things like screwing up a couple million tax returns on a bad afternoon. It doesn't help much that the tax code has significant changes every year and the IRS is almost universally demonized so getting resources and good support is probably difficult.
I think it's so much worse than that. With the Zune/HD and and it's new phone offerings Microsoft is trying to out-Apple Apple and they are terrible at it. Not only do they come out with hardware that is a generation behind what Apple has out in the market:
- big old iPod (a few years later) big old Zune
- skinny iPod (a few years later) skinny Zune
- iPod touch (a couple of years later) Zune HD
- iPhone (a couple of years later) this thing
Not only are they late to market copycats but they don't execute nearly as well as Apple. While the hardware is arguely a bit better in the Zune HD compared to an iPod touch there aren't many apps for it because they've made it nearly as hard, if not harder, for third parties to release apps for the Zune HD and they don't have the marketshare to pull off that kind of douchebaggery. The postion they should have taken is what Google did with the Nexus 1 and make it easier to develop and release software for it. One of Microsoft/PC strengths in the early days was that it was a more open development platform than what Apple had to offer.
I don't think there is real hope of Microsoft's new phone really competing with the iPhone or Nexus 1 but if they really want to make a go of it get then they need mindshare. To do that they start with the Zune HD if that's the platform they're going to build on by adding a microphone, adding speech to text, sponsoring a Skype client, adding a camera, and give developers something more interesting to do than make yet another twitter client.
'morphed from valued, responsible executives into insubordinate and self-serving schemers
Apparently these lawyers don't think judges and juries know what executives are.
I don't care if my print job caused it. I am not cleaning that disgusting vein jam out of the printer!
From what I've seen with these kinds of projects we tend to start off with a very complicated yet somehow vague mandate. Hospitals spin their wheels trying to become compliant and generally do a poor rush job at the last minute. When this becomes painfully obvious the deadline is extended and everyone eventually does a somewhat adequate job at becoming more or less compliant most of the time.
In sort it works like every other giant IT project and we're still in phase 1.
We do seem to be in a period of diminishing returns with the top-of-the-line consumer PC hardware. Argueably we're at a point where it's difficult to add more performance to a single core and from the benchmarks I've seen suggest that we're getting to a point where adding more cores isn't helping that much for most consumer PC use.
The biggest challenges we have today are getting more processing performance from less electricity because we're running more things on batteries and quiet computers for the home theater (which tends to mean fanless which tends to mean less heat which tends to mean less electricity) and I don't see that going away. The prime motivator for high-end PC hardware is high-quality gaming and that is a shrinking market as publishers focus on console development because of piracy.
Western children today are inheriting a legacy of squandered resources, environmental destruction, and increased global competition. Their futures have been mortgaged time and again by their predecessors. I'd like to think that these are things they could work through enlightened cooperation but in a time of shortage a generation of more aggressive, less warm and fuzzy kids might fare better.