The Winston-Salem/Forsyth County public school system had a security system of some sort for years where the password for all the teachers was "teach". This was a pretty well-known "secret" among the student body. It might have mattered if you couldn't have snuck around half the lame restrictions anyway with some selective right-clicking on folders in the 'Save' and 'Open' dialog boxes of IE or Notepad.
Honestly, arguments about the value of human capital aside, I really don't think that this is going to make a significant dent in the world's population growth one way or another.
There are some things that a court could be expected to say are reasonable in a contract. Three-figure monetary penalties are one example. "Your immortal soul" isn't.
Well, almost every Unix developer uses Perl for glue code, and almost every Microsoft developer will use VS2010, and if you're programming a Mac, I don't see how you could be sufficiently non-erudite to use anything but Erlang.
See, part of the problem asking a question like "Was there a Big Bang?" is that people assume that if the answer is "yes" the next step is someone going "AND THEREFORE ALL RELIGION IS A SHAM AND A DECEITFUL LIE, YOU IGNORANT UNWASHED UNEDUCATED BACKWARDS SUBHUMAN! Burn all churches! Shred the Bibles and sterilize the Christians! Mwuahahahahaha!" because in day-to-day "debates" (and by that I mean "arguments") - because in day to day debates (and by 'debates' I mean 'shouting matches'), some lesser form of that rhetoric usually does come next (and some small exposure to the rest of that rhetoric fuels the imagination).
So framing such a question doesn't appear a matter of science vs religion, it's a matter of militant-atheists-wielding-science vs religion. And I for one am glad that the NSF isn't trying to assert a cultural standard of science to the exclusion of religion. We have a First Amendment, you may have noticed, which would prohibit it as well.
Whether the demand is filled by 3D printers, or multi-axis CNC machines, or nanotechnology, or all three in competition, or all 3 in combination, or something else entirely, one thing I know for sure; the prices of production equipment will fall.
The "nanotechnology" advances of the next couple decades are going to come in the form of materials-science improvements (a nano-coating to your windshield to repel rain, or fancy LEDs with carbon-nanotubes somehow increasing performance due to $physics, or something silly like that) and not in the form of microscopic robots that eat robot-food and collectively poop out a bike helmet. That prospect, besides being fundamentally impractical, has a variety of current obstacles which we probably cannot anticipate being solved in the next few years, including manufacture of the robots and powering them without melting/frying them all to a crisp or having power distribution apparatus that takes up so much space that they're not nano-robots anymore. (The cooperative-robot-control issues are possibly solvable by then, though scalability to millions of robots would be a concern; other concerns like the materials of the robot and micro-assembly of the robots and the fragility of the assembly of things might see some strides eventually, but I'm doubtful for the time being.)
It's not that you deserve free apps, but society deserves them, because the marginal cost of a new copy of an app is basically zero. Charging money for general-purpose software is a sign that there's an economic inefficiency somewhere and that society could be better off, theoretically somehow.
Of course, if you replace that with some system like "all software is free by law" you probably will get a different sort of economic inefficiency, because not many people will be writing the apps, at least in the short run. Don't you love economic problems without easy answers? (cf. also: geographic monopoly).
My little sister actually had a summer internship with the Wake Forest Center for Regenerative Medicine. One of the things she would do is basically give puncture wounds to mice. After this experience, she apparently didn't want to be a researcher anymore.
A car is kind of a marginal place for WiFi - it's limited to passengers and people who are parked. At least with the regular MiFi you can take it with you somewhere else, which would make it more suitable for the "mobile professional" or even the family vacation. Is this service going to cost something like $60/mo as well? That'd be a little steep - it probably makes sense for the carpool/vanpool circuit, but that's not what I'd call a massive market opportunity or anything. Maybe if you knock a few tens of dollars off the monthly price, or did some sane metered-bandwidth offering (not that too many of those are actually available) I could see it...
Which people like to make fun of, but it can be handy to have a desk in your car that you use while parked when you have a few minutes and don't have a coffee shop or something nearby to step into.
Alternatively, you can do it online, and casually multitask (chat with other people, check up on Facebook, and stuff like that). It's highly effective.
Yeah? What harm is that going to be? A bit of environmental contamination on the sea floor? That's harm, sure, but it's pretty tame as such things go. A full-scale nuclear explosion? Not actually on the table. Terrorists with submersibles and scuba gear bringing it up and disassembling the inoperative rusting hulk in some far-fetched attempt to reconstruct a nuclear bomb? That's not "harm", that's a Tom Clancy novel, and it's a dud because they shot their nuclear engineer before he warned them that their tritium needed to be purified from helium-3 so most of us are safe unless the President gets into a standoff with the Soviets and starts World War III.
Corporations may not be patriotic, but does "patriotic loyalty" demand that we take no steps to reduce our taxes? Is the government such an omnibenevolent entity that sending money elsewhere is morally repugnant? Hasn't the Supreme Court maintained that tax avoidance is not tax evasion, and that reduction of taxes within the scope that the law permits is A-OK not-morally-repugnant-at-all?
And where does all that tax savings go, anyway? Corporations themselves are frequently called "greedy" but they don't really have much need to accumulate tons of money for their own bank accounts; it's not like General Electric is saving up to buy a really nice condo for itself. Doesn't the money either go towards income for shareholders (which is taxed, except for those things like IRAs and ESAs that we've decided are noble and good) or investments into business somewhere (which will presumably generate income for shareholders in the future, and generates economic activity in the present?) What's the big deal about taxing money specifically while it's coming into the corporation?
If there's a flood of garbage content like this on their website, Amazon suffers from customer perceptions of reduced quality, harming the rest of their (potentially more-profitable) business.
On a vaguely-related note, the Steam "New Games" list would be a lot more interesting if every other entry weren't another $20 RailWorks add-on.
Yeah.... a minimum wage of $7.50/hr or whatever California charges these days should not be a big deal for a software-related company, especially next to what they have to pay full-time employees. Heck, IBM was paying me $18.75/hr for an internship right after my sophomore year of college.
And then someone splices onto an ethernet connection of the trusted network and brings the whole thing down. Which is easy, since that network is all over the place.
An air-gap solution is one quick and simple line of defense, sure. But I'd rather have real cryptographically-secure authentication on all the relevant systems than an air-gap defense.
God damn I am tired of people who've enjoyed the fruits of public spending and are now complaining about anybody else doing so.
God damn, I'm tired of people using this as an excuse to justify whatever god damn lame-ass public spending program they can dream up* and tax whomever it takes because they owe it to the rest of the country. And if they don't pay their "fair share" (which is as big as we say it is) they're being unpatriotic leeches. Doubly so for businesses who don't go out of their way to pay the taxes we think they should: how dare they engage in productive activity and make a profit for the people (rich jerks and retirement savings and university endowments alike) who put up billions of dollars to build the factories and warehouses and paid the software engineers to build the IT infrastructure and such. They should pay extra tax to my state because we deserve it and it's fair (*cough* hey north carolina, how's that amazon.com tax doing for ya?)
You know what? You guys had better count your lucky stars that we have as large income inequality in this country as we do, because if we didn't, you'd have to tax normal people out the nose to pay for all of this, and you'd find your party unelectable sooner or later. </rant>
(* this is not a criticism of this particular proposal, but of the "they owe society" attitude in general).
Let's walk through the math. In 2008 almost half of all state and local government expenditures, or an estimated $1.1 trillion, went toward the pay and benefits of public workers. According to the BLS, in 2009 the average state or local public employee received $39.66 in total compensation per hour versus $27.42 for private workers. This means that for every $1 in pay and benefits a private employee earned, a state or local government worker received $1.45.
The BLS study breaks down where that 45% premium comes from. It turns out that public employees earn salaries that are about one-third higher on average than what is provided to private workers per hour worked. But the real windfall for government workers is in benefits. Those are 70% higher than what standard private employers offer, as shown in the nearby table. Government health benefits are twice as generous as what workers employed by private employees earn. By the way, nearly this entire benefits gap is accounted for by unionized public employees. Nonunion public employees are paid roughly what private workers receive.
Slashdot Mirror
The Winston-Salem/Forsyth County public school system had a security system of some sort for years where the password for all the teachers was "teach". This was a pretty well-known "secret" among the student body. It might have mattered if you couldn't have snuck around half the lame restrictions anyway with some selective right-clicking on folders in the 'Save' and 'Open' dialog boxes of IE or Notepad.
Honestly, arguments about the value of human capital aside, I really don't think that this is going to make a significant dent in the world's population growth one way or another.
There are some things that a court could be expected to say are reasonable in a contract. Three-figure monetary penalties are one example. "Your immortal soul" isn't.
for sufficient definitions of "unconscionable contract".
That was a joke, son. Mostly about the Erlang...
not sure why it wasn't marked funny, though.
Well, almost every Unix developer uses Perl for glue code, and almost every Microsoft developer will use VS2010, and if you're programming a Mac, I don't see how you could be sufficiently non-erudite to use anything but Erlang.
Because historically speaking, eugenics programs haven't worked out all that well.
since you ask. kthxbye.
My understanding was that to make it safer, you make the time when both lights are red longer, don't just make a longer yellow.
And he's not interested in your fancy 3D stuff at all.
Some people never have any kids. They don't get any tax rebates either.
See, part of the problem asking a question like "Was there a Big Bang?" is that people assume that if the answer is "yes" the next step is someone going "AND THEREFORE ALL RELIGION IS A SHAM AND A DECEITFUL LIE, YOU IGNORANT UNWASHED UNEDUCATED BACKWARDS SUBHUMAN! Burn all churches! Shred the Bibles and sterilize the Christians! Mwuahahahahaha!" because in day-to-day "debates" (and by that I mean "arguments") - because in day to day debates (and by 'debates' I mean 'shouting matches'), some lesser form of that rhetoric usually does come next (and some small exposure to the rest of that rhetoric fuels the imagination).
So framing such a question doesn't appear a matter of science vs religion, it's a matter of militant-atheists-wielding-science vs religion. And I for one am glad that the NSF isn't trying to assert a cultural standard of science to the exclusion of religion. We have a First Amendment, you may have noticed, which would prohibit it as well.
The "nanotechnology" advances of the next couple decades are going to come in the form of materials-science improvements (a nano-coating to your windshield to repel rain, or fancy LEDs with carbon-nanotubes somehow increasing performance due to $physics, or something silly like that) and not in the form of microscopic robots that eat robot-food and collectively poop out a bike helmet. That prospect, besides being fundamentally impractical, has a variety of current obstacles which we probably cannot anticipate being solved in the next few years, including manufacture of the robots and powering them without melting/frying them all to a crisp or having power distribution apparatus that takes up so much space that they're not nano-robots anymore. (The cooperative-robot-control issues are possibly solvable by then, though scalability to millions of robots would be a concern; other concerns like the materials of the robot and micro-assembly of the robots and the fragility of the assembly of things might see some strides eventually, but I'm doubtful for the time being.)
It's not that you deserve free apps, but society deserves them, because the marginal cost of a new copy of an app is basically zero. Charging money for general-purpose software is a sign that there's an economic inefficiency somewhere and that society could be better off, theoretically somehow.
Of course, if you replace that with some system like "all software is free by law" you probably will get a different sort of economic inefficiency, because not many people will be writing the apps, at least in the short run. Don't you love economic problems without easy answers? (cf. also: geographic monopoly).
My little sister actually had a summer internship with the Wake Forest Center for Regenerative Medicine. One of the things she would do is basically give puncture wounds to mice. After this experience, she apparently didn't want to be a researcher anymore.
A car is kind of a marginal place for WiFi - it's limited to passengers and people who are parked. At least with the regular MiFi you can take it with you somewhere else, which would make it more suitable for the "mobile professional" or even the family vacation. Is this service going to cost something like $60/mo as well? That'd be a little steep - it probably makes sense for the carpool/vanpool circuit, but that's not what I'd call a massive market opportunity or anything. Maybe if you knock a few tens of dollars off the monthly price, or did some sane metered-bandwidth offering (not that too many of those are actually available) I could see it...
Which people like to make fun of, but it can be handy to have a desk in your car that you use while parked when you have a few minutes and don't have a coffee shop or something nearby to step into.
Alternatively, you can do it online, and casually multitask (chat with other people, check up on Facebook, and stuff like that). It's highly effective.
Yeah? What harm is that going to be? A bit of environmental contamination on the sea floor? That's harm, sure, but it's pretty tame as such things go. A full-scale nuclear explosion? Not actually on the table. Terrorists with submersibles and scuba gear bringing it up and disassembling the inoperative rusting hulk in some far-fetched attempt to reconstruct a nuclear bomb? That's not "harm", that's a Tom Clancy novel, and it's a dud because they shot their nuclear engineer before he warned them that their tritium needed to be purified from helium-3 so most of us are safe unless the President gets into a standoff with the Soviets and starts World War III.
Corporations may not be patriotic, but does "patriotic loyalty" demand that we take no steps to reduce our taxes? Is the government such an omnibenevolent entity that sending money elsewhere is morally repugnant? Hasn't the Supreme Court maintained that tax avoidance is not tax evasion, and that reduction of taxes within the scope that the law permits is A-OK not-morally-repugnant-at-all?
And where does all that tax savings go, anyway? Corporations themselves are frequently called "greedy" but they don't really have much need to accumulate tons of money for their own bank accounts; it's not like General Electric is saving up to buy a really nice condo for itself. Doesn't the money either go towards income for shareholders (which is taxed, except for those things like IRAs and ESAs that we've decided are noble and good) or investments into business somewhere (which will presumably generate income for shareholders in the future, and generates economic activity in the present?) What's the big deal about taxing money specifically while it's coming into the corporation?
Much ado about nothing.
If there's a flood of garbage content like this on their website, Amazon suffers from customer perceptions of reduced quality, harming the rest of their (potentially more-profitable) business.
On a vaguely-related note, the Steam "New Games" list would be a lot more interesting if every other entry weren't another $20 RailWorks add-on.
Yeah.... a minimum wage of $7.50/hr or whatever California charges these days should not be a big deal for a software-related company, especially next to what they have to pay full-time employees. Heck, IBM was paying me $18.75/hr for an internship right after my sophomore year of college.
And then someone splices onto an ethernet connection of the trusted network and brings the whole thing down. Which is easy, since that network is all over the place.
An air-gap solution is one quick and simple line of defense, sure. But I'd rather have real cryptographically-secure authentication on all the relevant systems than an air-gap defense.
Hit Preview? what site do you think your'e on exactl?Y
God damn, I'm tired of people using this as an excuse to justify whatever god damn lame-ass public spending program they can dream up* and tax whomever it takes because they owe it to the rest of the country. And if they don't pay their "fair share" (which is as big as we say it is) they're being unpatriotic leeches. Doubly so for businesses who don't go out of their way to pay the taxes we think they should: how dare they engage in productive activity and make a profit for the people (rich jerks and retirement savings and university endowments alike) who put up billions of dollars to build the factories and warehouses and paid the software engineers to build the IT infrastructure and such. They should pay extra tax to my state because we deserve it and it's fair (*cough* hey north carolina, how's that amazon.com tax doing for ya?)
You know what? You guys had better count your lucky stars that we have as large income inequality in this country as we do, because if we didn't, you'd have to tax normal people out the nose to pay for all of this, and you'd find your party unelectable sooner or later. </rant>
(* this is not a criticism of this particular proposal, but of the "they owe society" attitude in general).