The 2011 budget was $3.8 trillion. The 2012 budget was $3.7 trillion. The proposed 2013 budget is $3.7 trillion. So in terms of the total amount of money the government is spending, the 1% increase is in fact an increase.
Given the huge deficits the government is running, we should be expecting a 20% cut to every program to balance the budget. So not only maintaining research spending but increasing it by 1% is a pretty positive outcome for those who receive research funding.
Picking and choosing one department whose funding profile fits your predetermined beliefs? Science spending encompasses lots of departments, not just the NSF. You have NIH, NASA, DOE, even the DoD has science-related projects they fund. (My apologies for using the same graphic in my other post - I can't find a GIF of more recent graphs on the AAAS website - they're all in PDFs.)
Well, for starters, he only asked to increase the budget for science in his last year in office. In previous years he had been cutting it.
He was only cutting it in later years because in his early years he raised it more than any other president in modern history. You see that huge spike from 2001-2004? That was Bush's doing (Obama is doing his best to maintain Bush's level of science spending). The ruckus over killing the superconducting super-collider and ban on embryonic stem cell research were just flash points those politically opposed to him used to mischaracterize his overall stance on science spending. Apparently they did their job really well on you.
The Republicans are very much anti-intellectual. You can pretend otherwise if that helps you sleep at night, but you are fooling yourself.
So in light of the facts I've just presented, care to reassess whether it's you who is fooling yourself? I despised Bush. Voted for the Democrat against him in both elections despite being a fiscal conservative. But his budgets were very much pro-science and research. Even adjusting for growth of the economy (federal science R&D spending as percent of GDP), Bush's science spending was significant increases. Do you want to know who cut science spending the most? Clinton. But I'm guessing you're one of those people who give Clinton all the credit for balancing the budget, while giving the Republicans who controlled the House and Senate at the same time all the blame for cutting science spending.
Stop doing businees in and with China, entirely.
Bring manufacturing and jobs back to your home country/state and improve your own damn economy./radical concept I know.
You're mistaken in thinking that doing business with China is the reason those manufacturing jobs left. It's not. Income disparity between different regions of the world is the cause. If those manufacturing contracts were pulled out of China, they'd just end up going to Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, etc.
Those manufacturing jobs aren't coming back until most of the rest of the world is at or near developed nation income levels. By which point pretty much all manufacturing is going to be done by robots anyway. Stop trying to revive the past, start trying to reshape the country for a better future.
No, what you're describing is the public perception. What he's describing is the reality. Most of the big-name "computer manufacturers" aren't really hardware manufacturers. Apple's laptops are designed and made by Quanta. Apple gives them some guidelines and requests some modifications, but the design and manufacturing is done by Quanta. Ever wonder why some of the HP laptops look a lot like MacBooks? It's not because HP is copying Apple. Quanta is also the primary original design manufacturer for HP. Literally the same Taiwanese people who designed and manufactured the Macbooks also designed and manufactured those HPs.
The same goes for other products. The iPod and iPad by now I think most people know are made by Foxconn. Who designs them is still uncertain. The big name sellers and the OEMs/ODMs are very reluctant to publicly discuss who makes what. The CPUs in their mobile devices are made by Samsung, though it looks like Apple is burning that bridge and is trying to design their very own ARM CPU for their next gen products.
So Apple is essentially a middle-man. Someone who comes up with an idea, hires a outside companies to work out the design details and manufacturing, then assembles and imports it, and sells it under their brand name. A parts assembler. A marketing company. Many other companies you may think are hardware companies do this too. IBM used to make their Thinkpads in-house, but as near as I can tell Lenovo has outsourced most of their laptop production to ODMs. A lot of Sony's low-end and mid-grade laptops are made the same way. Dell just orders the different parts of their desktop computers, and assembles them before shipping it off to you.
But some of them do have their own design, fab, and production facilities. Dell designs their own motherboards and cases (and tests them pretty extensively - it's extraordinarily difficult to put together a custom PC that's as quiet as a Dell business desktop). Sony's high-end laptops are designed and built at their facilities in Japan. The same for the sensors for their cameras, which they also sell to other companies (most of the other digital camera "manufacturers" use Sony sensors - a huge opportunity Kodak missed because they didn't have silicon fabbing experience). So they're very much a hardware company.
I'd characterize Apple as a software and online services company first (OS X, iOS, and iTunes are their bread and butter), marketing/assembling second, and hardware a distant third.
at all of the firms I know engineers at, they punch an hourly clock and are charged vacation time when they don't make 40 hours in week. A true salaried worker should be paid a fixed sum per week, staying late when a task is down to the wire, but at the same time leaving early (or for part of the day) when waiting on data or between projects.
If the company has government contracts, they're required to track how many hours each engineer on the project works, even if they're salaried. e.g. When a company wins a DoD contract for $X, they're not given the money as a lump sum. $Y is allocated to labor, and the government cuts the check based on how many worker-hours the company documents. So at least that part of it you can blame on the government bean-counters. Personally I think setting milestones with payments only at those milestones encourages more productivity. But that's not what the government wants, and whatever the government wants it gets.
(14G$ / 2.2GW) doesn't sound like a good price point to me, with the price of solar being at $3/watt and falling (assuming "AC Watts" have the same energy as "DC Watts"). Why so pricey?
Nuclear historically has a 0.9 capacity factor. That is, over a year, the power generated by a 2.2 GW plant is equivalent to a 0.9*2.2 = 1.98 GW plant operating at 100% continuously. The difference is due to downtime for refueling, inspections, maintenance, etc. So that's $14G / 1.98 GW = $7.07 per Watt of production.
Solar has a capacity factor of about 0.15. It drops to about 0.11 in New England, gets as high as 0.19 in the desert Southwest. For the U.S. overall it's about 0.15. Europe is at a slightly higher latitude so is probably lower (I haven't seen EU averages). The difference from peak capacity is due to night, cloudy days, angle of the sun, dust building up on the panels, etc. So $3/W of installed solar capacity works out to $20 per Watt of production.
That's because it's a misnomer that more efficiency = less energy used. It turns out that for many applications the more efficient you become at creating and using energy, the more energy that gets used. In other words, energy efficiency and energy use are positively correlated (high energy efficiency -> high energy use), not negative correlated as most people assume.
Theoretically, wealth taxes are one of the most progressive taxes out there which also give the best economic incentives for growth. Income taxes discourage earning money, sales taxes discourage consumption, capital gains taxes distort / discourage investment.[...]
It doesn't work for three reasons:
Wealth taxes don't work for one simple reason - they're inherently unfair. You're taxing people for saving money, not for earning it. So with a wealth tax, you can have a case where two people earn the exact same amount of money, but the one who saves it ends up paying more taxes than the one who spends it. e.g. Dave and Frank each earn $50k in a year and pay 20% income tax. Of the remaining $40k, they spend $20k on necessities. The remaining $20k Dave blows on electronic toys and entertainment. Frank spends $10k on toys and entertainment, but has the temerity to save $10k for a down payment on a house. For this you tax Frank an extra wealth tax. Despite having the same income, Frank ends up paying more overall taxes than Dave, all because he tried to plan ahead save some money to better his future.
The thing most people who propose a wealth tax don't get is that if there is a universal income tax, wealth has already been taxed. Wealth is the accumulation of income, which means at some point in the past it was income, which means it has already been taxed (assuming there's an income tax). If you're unhappy with how much wealth rich people have, just raise their income tax or close loopholes so all their income is taxed. A wealth tax is absolutely the wrong way to go about it.
It's even impossible to make the units on a wealth tax consistent (unless it's a once-in-a-lifetime wealth tax, like a death tax). The units on income is $/yr. The units on an income tax is $/yr. So you can set the income tax to be a % of income. The units on a recurring wealth tax is $/yr. The units on wealth is $. So it's impossible to set a wealth tax to be a consistent % of wealth. The percentage you pay to a recurring wealth tax depends on your spending and saving habits, not just on how much wealth you have. That means unless you have some way to guarantee everyone's spending/saving habits are identical, a wealth tax will result in different % of taxation for people with identical incomes, credits, and deductions. Most reasonable people would say that's inherently unfair.
The few wealth taxes which exist (property and excise taxes) do not have taxing wealth as their purpose. Property taxes are aimed at encouraging people to find a good use for e.g. the plot of land they own in the downtown area of the city, instead of growing vegetables on it waiting for its value to appreciate. The more valuable the land, the higher the property tax, thus making low-income uses like vegetable growing economically unfeasible. You're forced to develop it into something worthy of its location, or sell it to someone who will. Excise taxes are aimed at offsetting the cost of regulating certain goods.
But only soft payloads like people need to be launched at less than 3-5Gs. Everything else you need to support them in space - food, air, water, fuel, electronics, space station module parts, etc. can easily survive the 100+ g of a railgun or gas gun launch. So you're still looking at an enormous cost savings.
I suspect part of the problem is that the carriers have spent decades doing everything they can to obfuscate their pricing. Everything from your phone service, data MB used, texts, phone subsidy, are tossed into one lump sum "monthly service charge". So when they have to ask themselves "exactly how much money are we making/losing per iPhone sold?" there's no clear answer.
I've long said cell phone bills need to be itemized. $x/mo for phone service, $y/mo for data, $z/mo for phone subsidy, etc. If they did that, and the iPhone with Apple surcharge were costing them $1000 vs. $500 for a top-line Android phone, they could just charge double the $z for iPhone customers.
Columbia was preventable had NASA not embraced the tree huggers and switched to a CFC free foam for the main fuel tank. The new foam had a higher porosity and poorer adhesion. Let's face it, there are not enough shuttle launches in a year to appreciably matter when it comes to CFC emissions from making the foam insulation, and the SRB exhaust is much worse for the environment anyway./rant
Normally I'm all for a rant against environmental extremism or pointless environmental symbolism. But CFCs were phased out globally as of 1994. Almost nobody made them anymore by 2001. It may simply have been that the CFC foam became too difficult to produce and too expensive to use, and the CFC-free foam was deemed a suitable replacement without fully considering the consequences of foam impacts.
But I don't see how this will work in a world where I can sell the object but still keep it at the same time.
You aren't selling the MP3. You're selling the license to legally listen to it. Licenses and contracts get sold and traded all the time, and they don't physically exist. Yes they're usually (but not always) written on paper, but if you lose or destroy the original, a copy is usually a sufficient substitute. And if you sell the rights contained in the contract to someone else, there's no problem with you retaining a copy of the MP3. Just like if I sell my garden hose to my neighbor, I may still have access to it but I no longer own the rights to use it (without his permission).
Yes I'm aware contracts can have non-transferable clauses. I'm actually fine with that if it would force the RIAA (and MPAA) to decide whether they're selling a product or a license. Right now they're trying to have it both ways; treating it like a product when it suits them ("You scratched your CD? Tough, buy a new one."), and treating it like a license when it suits them ("You can't sell it!"). Nail it down so it's one or the other, and a lot of these issues we're arguing over simply disappear. They're not thorny issues created because digital files are something new which the law has never had to deal with. They're thorny issues created because of the RIAA's self-contradictory stance on what exactly it is they're selling.
Is the 4g tech itself power hungry? Mine seems to have battery trouble even when I'm stationery and the 4g signal is strong.
Most 4G tech is using OFDMA. It achieves higher data rates than CDMA by using heavier signal processing to extract the data signal destined for your phone out of all phones in a cell. Previously this processing required too much power for a mobile device. But low-power CPU tech has advanced enough to where it's realistic to use it on a phone. As processor power requirements drop, the power needed for 4G will likewise drop.
News flash. All the Android phones with 4G let you turn it off when you don't need/want it. I usually leave my 4G off unless I know I'm going to do something data-intensive.
Given a choice between having a feature you can turn on and off at will, and not having the feature, the better choice is always having the feature. An iPhone 4S with 4G would've had exactly the same battery life as the 4G-less iPhone 4S, but you would've been able to get 4G data speeds whenever you felt the tradeoff in battery life was worth it.
Maybe Apple left it off because they couldn't get it working in time. Or maybe they ran into delays with licensing. Or maybe they couldn't secure enough parts. Or maybe the cynics are right and they did it so 4S owners would have a reason to upgrade to the iPhone 5. But they most certainly did not do it because it was better for their customers. That's pure PR spin which you're swallowing up hook, line, and sinker.
NASA's budget for the current and previous years are available online. I happen to agree that manned spaceflight is (was) mostly pork, but there were only a few years in the last 25 where it ate up >50% of NASA's budget. It's not as big a part of NASA's budget as you're making it out to be. Unmanned exploration missions are the second biggest chunk (the remainder being terrestrial research and educational outreach). So it is pretty inevitable that some of them will be cut or scaled back as well.
The meme started out as $random_big_tech_company could buy all the RIAA companies. Which is true - the record companies average something like only $13 billion a year in revenue. Their entire industry is small potatoes compared to even a moderate-sized tech company
Somewhere along the way, people began to substitute RIAA with MPAA, then MAFIAA. That's false - the movie industry is much, much larger than the record industry. (Incidentally, you should be pricing just the subdivisions which make movies when talking about the MPAA, not the parent company.)
Generally though, slashdotters see the RIAA as much more evil than the MPAA. I mean they're both on the wrong side of the copyright debate, but the movie industry at least prices a 90 minute Blu-ray/DVD for ~$20 which took a staff of thousands to make. They have a thriving movie rental business model, as well as a pay per view model (essentially streamed movies). They're adapting to new technology and developments in their business. Maybe not in ways we always agree with, but at least they're trying.
The record industry OTOH wants about ~$15 for a 45 minute CD album which took a staff of a few dozen to make. They fought tooth and to kill DATs (succeeded) and MP3s (failed). And the royalties they "negotiated" with Internet streaming companies are so ridiculously high it basically drove them out of business. Of the two branches of the *AA, the RIAA is much, much worse. Which is why the meme about tech companies just buying them out began.
In any event, every Android app is required to save its state when it is not in the foreground, so it can be restarted either from memory, or from the filesystem, exactly where it left off. It doesn't really matter whether the app is in memory or not, or whether you think you have no free memory... or not. It's the operating system's job to handle that for you. This is not an Apple ][, after all, this is a modern OS that's fully capable of managing its own resources.
I get how Android's memory management works. But it would be really nice if I, the phone's owner, had some say in all this. I have 125 apps on my phone. Probably excessive, but the phone has space for it and I use most of them from time to time. Unfortunately it's an older phone so only has 512 MB of RAM.
My phone went into this state of constantly unloading apps from memory because the number of apps claiming to the OS that they needed to be constantly running exceeded the available free memory. Apps like Market, Amazon App Store, wireless hotspot, an office doc reading app, MP3 player, etc. None of these apps need to be running. They're probably just checking for updates, and I'd be fine if they just checked whenever I ran them. But the OS completely trusts them when they tell it they need to run. Because I have no say in whether they run, they'd constantly load/unload each other from memory to do whatever it is they do, killing my battery life and slowing down my phone.
I've tried a couple memory managers which claimed they would allow me to stop selected apps from auto-starting. But it's been hit and miss. Eventually I resorted to using Titanium Backup to freeze wayward little-used apps (basically making Android think the app isn't installed). I need to unfreeze them when I use them, which takes more time. But having to do that once every few days beats having a constantly unresponsive phone.
The same problem exists on desktop OSes like Windows. But there I can run msconfig or modify rc.* to manually remove apps which try to pre-load themselves even if they don't need to be.
These recordings give us a good idea how crazy Copyright law has become. Under current copyright law, recordings made prior to 1978 but which weren't published until after 1978 fall under modern copyright terms. For personal works that's life of the author + 70 years. But fo anonymous and pseudonymous works (e.g. various performances recorded by the Edison company), it's 95 years after publication, or 120 years if not published. Since these recordings were never published, they fall under the 120 year term.
In other words, the 1889 recording of Otto von Bismark finally entered the public domain in 2009.
It's been tried before, but doesn't always work as intended. Welchia was apparently released by a white hat to secure machines against Blaster, but its aggressive use of network scans to find other potentially vulnerable systems ended up being more of a headache than Blaster on some networks.
The most interesting analogy for me are the communists in Russia: a lot of the people voting for the communists now have actually first-hand experience of what the old-school communists were like, and what life was like under them. To them, that life was better than what they have now. The only way that is possible is if they focus on only the good parts, and completely forget the bad parts.
This is completely normal psychology. If people were as good at remembering the bad things as they are at remembering the good, women who went through the pain of childbirth once would refuse to ever have a second baby. And the human race would die off because having one child per couple means our population is halved every generation.
Can you believe that the Internet was once considered a place to escape identity? Where anonymity reigned? It's pretty amazing in retrospect how quickly that changed
Anonymity didn't really arrive on the Internet until 1993, when AOL joined. AOL users were allowed to pick up to 5 pseudonyms as their email address (because one AOL account might be shared by an entire family). In retrospect, that change was really quick - a span of a couple years and pretty much everyone was allowed to pick whatever they wanted as a username.
Personally, I think anonymity is the proverbial genie that's been let out of the bottle - it's gonna be really, really hard to put it back in. But a non-anonymous Internet isn't something new; it was the norm a mere 2+ decades ago. The funny thing is that when AOL joined, a lot of people were saying that anonymity would be the death of the Internet due to spam (it was already polluting Usenet), flame wars, posers, etc. When e-commerce was first taking off, people were questioning how online stores would ever be able to validate a customer's real identity when everyone was effectively anonymous behind self-selected usernames. Now the tables have turned and people are saying having your real identity known online will be the death of the Internet.
The Internet has survived both extremes, so it's reasonable to think that it will also survive anything in between.
Disclaimer: I am an engineer, though I did take a couple legal courses.
Engineers deal with a fairly static set of rules. The laws of physics do not change from decade to decade. Most of the problems we deal with can be approached and solved (or approximated) by math. Sometimes very complex math, but it's still something you can program into a computer, feed some numbers as input, and get answers as output. So in most cases you can search out the solution space algorithmically to find optimal solutions.
Law is an attempt to codify a rather amorphous and malleable concept - what society thinks is right and wrong. It's not static, and because it's constantly changing it requires constant updates. The requirements to change the law, from number of legislators' votes, to the President's signatures, to court approval, are there to regulate the rate at and degree to which it can change.
The reason for a case law system rather than a statutory law system is that, unlike engineering problems, it's often difficult or impossible to algorithmically determine an optimal solution to a social problem. In order to optimize you need to evaluate, and in the social domain every individual has their own valuation for everything. Different valuations means there is no single optimal solution - a solution optimal by one valuation is likely not optimal by a different valuation.
One of the most effective solutions man has discovered for these types of difficult problems is to just throw a bunch of possible solutions out there and see what sticks. Capitalism basically does this. It's impossible to come up with one algorithm which distills all the different ways to evaluate a product - utility, reliability, aesthetics, trendiness, resale value, etc - into a single measure - a price. So every store is free to set their own price. The ones who set too high never sell, the ones who set too low sell out but don't make much money, and the ones who set it about right make lots of money from sales thus allowing them to buy more inventory to sell more. The "right price" here isn't set by any individual store or shopper. It's set by society overall, which decides what to buy and what not to buy.
That's what case law does. One judge decides a case one way. Another judge decides a similar case a different way. Both get published, people debate about it. When a third judge gets a similar problem, the lawyers point out the two prior decisions, and present arguments for why the second judge's solution was better. The third judge takes it under advisement and makes his decision, thus adding his reasoning to this type of case. etc.
It's this body of work which builds consensus and determines law, and allows the law to change with the times. It also harnesses the brainpower of the entire population of lawyers and judges to try to find an amicable solution. Instead of having a handful of lawyers deciding what's the best law and setting it in stone, you have all the lawyers and judges in your system working on figuring out the best law. Is it messy and complex? Yes. But like capitalism, in most cases it arrives more quickly at the most effective solution under multiple valuation systems.
That said, there are areas where this could be optimized. As you point out, the tax code is a mess (primarily due to lobbyists inserting their paid-for tax breaks). But the types of problems law attempts to solve are very different from the types of problems engineers attempt to solve. With an engineering problem, I prioritize conflicting specifications (e.g. weight vs. strength vs. flexibility vs. price) according to the needs of the client. This allows for a relatively straightforward solution. But in law the order of prioritization itself is always up for debate.
If it works like google.com, you'll be able to circumvent it by plugging in the country code for the site you really want. e.g. When I was living in Canada and wanted Canadian search results I could just go to google.com, which would redirect to google.ca. But if I wanted U.S.-centric results, I could just search on google.us.
So if the blog you want to read is on blogspot.com.au, and blogspot.com for your country redirects to blogspot.com.nk which has censored the blogspot.com.au article, you can still reach it directly via blogspot.com.au.
Of course if your country has blocked blogspot.com.au, then you still can't read it. But then it's your country's fault, not Google's.
It's an interesting solution to the "how do I make one website which complies with all countries' laws?" conundrum. While it would be cool for a company to "stick it to the man" and thumb their noses at repressive governments, I don't think that's realistic, nor would I call it evil for a foreign company/individual to fail to stick up for my rights. Freedom has to be earned, from within. If it's given by outsiders, it's not treasured, and may be discarded by the wayside. This way, if you see a bunch of people talking about an article on blogspot.com.au and it's not showing up for you on blogspot.com.nk, and you go to blogspot.com.au and find the site blocked, at least you know that your country/ISP is censoring.
Slashdot Mirror
The 2011 budget was $3.8 trillion. The 2012 budget was $3.7 trillion. The proposed 2013 budget is $3.7 trillion. So in terms of the total amount of money the government is spending, the 1% increase is in fact an increase.
Given the huge deficits the government is running, we should be expecting a 20% cut to every program to balance the budget. So not only maintaining research spending but increasing it by 1% is a pretty positive outcome for those who receive research funding.
Picking and choosing one department whose funding profile fits your predetermined beliefs? Science spending encompasses lots of departments, not just the NSF. You have NIH, NASA, DOE, even the DoD has science-related projects they fund. (My apologies for using the same graphic in my other post - I can't find a GIF of more recent graphs on the AAAS website - they're all in PDFs.)
He was only cutting it in later years because in his early years he raised it more than any other president in modern history. You see that huge spike from 2001-2004? That was Bush's doing (Obama is doing his best to maintain Bush's level of science spending). The ruckus over killing the superconducting super-collider and ban on embryonic stem cell research were just flash points those politically opposed to him used to mischaracterize his overall stance on science spending. Apparently they did their job really well on you.
So in light of the facts I've just presented, care to reassess whether it's you who is fooling yourself? I despised Bush. Voted for the Democrat against him in both elections despite being a fiscal conservative. But his budgets were very much pro-science and research. Even adjusting for growth of the economy (federal science R&D spending as percent of GDP), Bush's science spending was significant increases. Do you want to know who cut science spending the most? Clinton. But I'm guessing you're one of those people who give Clinton all the credit for balancing the budget, while giving the Republicans who controlled the House and Senate at the same time all the blame for cutting science spending.
You're mistaken in thinking that doing business with China is the reason those manufacturing jobs left. It's not. Income disparity between different regions of the world is the cause. If those manufacturing contracts were pulled out of China, they'd just end up going to Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, etc.
Those manufacturing jobs aren't coming back until most of the rest of the world is at or near developed nation income levels. By which point pretty much all manufacturing is going to be done by robots anyway. Stop trying to revive the past, start trying to reshape the country for a better future.
Direct link which bypasses the digg encapsulation (which doesn't work with noscript):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/feb/13/whitney-houston-album-price
No, what you're describing is the public perception. What he's describing is the reality. Most of the big-name "computer manufacturers" aren't really hardware manufacturers. Apple's laptops are designed and made by Quanta. Apple gives them some guidelines and requests some modifications, but the design and manufacturing is done by Quanta. Ever wonder why some of the HP laptops look a lot like MacBooks? It's not because HP is copying Apple. Quanta is also the primary original design manufacturer for HP. Literally the same Taiwanese people who designed and manufactured the Macbooks also designed and manufactured those HPs.
The same goes for other products. The iPod and iPad by now I think most people know are made by Foxconn. Who designs them is still uncertain. The big name sellers and the OEMs/ODMs are very reluctant to publicly discuss who makes what. The CPUs in their mobile devices are made by Samsung, though it looks like Apple is burning that bridge and is trying to design their very own ARM CPU for their next gen products.
So Apple is essentially a middle-man. Someone who comes up with an idea, hires a outside companies to work out the design details and manufacturing, then assembles and imports it, and sells it under their brand name. A parts assembler. A marketing company. Many other companies you may think are hardware companies do this too. IBM used to make their Thinkpads in-house, but as near as I can tell Lenovo has outsourced most of their laptop production to ODMs. A lot of Sony's low-end and mid-grade laptops are made the same way. Dell just orders the different parts of their desktop computers, and assembles them before shipping it off to you.
But some of them do have their own design, fab, and production facilities. Dell designs their own motherboards and cases (and tests them pretty extensively - it's extraordinarily difficult to put together a custom PC that's as quiet as a Dell business desktop). Sony's high-end laptops are designed and built at their facilities in Japan. The same for the sensors for their cameras, which they also sell to other companies (most of the other digital camera "manufacturers" use Sony sensors - a huge opportunity Kodak missed because they didn't have silicon fabbing experience). So they're very much a hardware company.
I'd characterize Apple as a software and online services company first (OS X, iOS, and iTunes are their bread and butter), marketing/assembling second, and hardware a distant third.
If the company has government contracts, they're required to track how many hours each engineer on the project works, even if they're salaried. e.g. When a company wins a DoD contract for $X, they're not given the money as a lump sum. $Y is allocated to labor, and the government cuts the check based on how many worker-hours the company documents. So at least that part of it you can blame on the government bean-counters. Personally I think setting milestones with payments only at those milestones encourages more productivity. But that's not what the government wants, and whatever the government wants it gets.
Nuclear historically has a 0.9 capacity factor. That is, over a year, the power generated by a 2.2 GW plant is equivalent to a 0.9*2.2 = 1.98 GW plant operating at 100% continuously. The difference is due to downtime for refueling, inspections, maintenance, etc. So that's $14G / 1.98 GW = $7.07 per Watt of production.
Solar has a capacity factor of about 0.15. It drops to about 0.11 in New England, gets as high as 0.19 in the desert Southwest. For the U.S. overall it's about 0.15. Europe is at a slightly higher latitude so is probably lower (I haven't seen EU averages). The difference from peak capacity is due to night, cloudy days, angle of the sun, dust building up on the panels, etc. So $3/W of installed solar capacity works out to $20 per Watt of production.
That's because it's a misnomer that more efficiency = less energy used. It turns out that for many applications the more efficient you become at creating and using energy, the more energy that gets used. In other words, energy efficiency and energy use are positively correlated (high energy efficiency -> high energy use), not negative correlated as most people assume.
Wealth taxes don't work for one simple reason - they're inherently unfair. You're taxing people for saving money, not for earning it. So with a wealth tax, you can have a case where two people earn the exact same amount of money, but the one who saves it ends up paying more taxes than the one who spends it. e.g. Dave and Frank each earn $50k in a year and pay 20% income tax. Of the remaining $40k, they spend $20k on necessities. The remaining $20k Dave blows on electronic toys and entertainment. Frank spends $10k on toys and entertainment, but has the temerity to save $10k for a down payment on a house. For this you tax Frank an extra wealth tax. Despite having the same income, Frank ends up paying more overall taxes than Dave, all because he tried to plan ahead save some money to better his future.
The thing most people who propose a wealth tax don't get is that if there is a universal income tax, wealth has already been taxed. Wealth is the accumulation of income, which means at some point in the past it was income, which means it has already been taxed (assuming there's an income tax). If you're unhappy with how much wealth rich people have, just raise their income tax or close loopholes so all their income is taxed. A wealth tax is absolutely the wrong way to go about it.
It's even impossible to make the units on a wealth tax consistent (unless it's a once-in-a-lifetime wealth tax, like a death tax). The units on income is $/yr. The units on an income tax is $/yr. So you can set the income tax to be a % of income. The units on a recurring wealth tax is $/yr. The units on wealth is $. So it's impossible to set a wealth tax to be a consistent % of wealth. The percentage you pay to a recurring wealth tax depends on your spending and saving habits, not just on how much wealth you have. That means unless you have some way to guarantee everyone's spending/saving habits are identical, a wealth tax will result in different % of taxation for people with identical incomes, credits, and deductions. Most reasonable people would say that's inherently unfair.
The few wealth taxes which exist (property and excise taxes) do not have taxing wealth as their purpose. Property taxes are aimed at encouraging people to find a good use for e.g. the plot of land they own in the downtown area of the city, instead of growing vegetables on it waiting for its value to appreciate. The more valuable the land, the higher the property tax, thus making low-income uses like vegetable growing economically unfeasible. You're forced to develop it into something worthy of its location, or sell it to someone who will. Excise taxes are aimed at offsetting the cost of regulating certain goods.
But only soft payloads like people need to be launched at less than 3-5Gs. Everything else you need to support them in space - food, air, water, fuel, electronics, space station module parts, etc. can easily survive the 100+ g of a railgun or gas gun launch. So you're still looking at an enormous cost savings.
I suspect part of the problem is that the carriers have spent decades doing everything they can to obfuscate their pricing. Everything from your phone service, data MB used, texts, phone subsidy, are tossed into one lump sum "monthly service charge". So when they have to ask themselves "exactly how much money are we making/losing per iPhone sold?" there's no clear answer.
I've long said cell phone bills need to be itemized. $x/mo for phone service, $y/mo for data, $z/mo for phone subsidy, etc. If they did that, and the iPhone with Apple surcharge were costing them $1000 vs. $500 for a top-line Android phone, they could just charge double the $z for iPhone customers.
Normally I'm all for a rant against environmental extremism or pointless environmental symbolism. But CFCs were phased out globally as of 1994. Almost nobody made them anymore by 2001. It may simply have been that the CFC foam became too difficult to produce and too expensive to use, and the CFC-free foam was deemed a suitable replacement without fully considering the consequences of foam impacts.
You aren't selling the MP3. You're selling the license to legally listen to it. Licenses and contracts get sold and traded all the time, and they don't physically exist. Yes they're usually (but not always) written on paper, but if you lose or destroy the original, a copy is usually a sufficient substitute. And if you sell the rights contained in the contract to someone else, there's no problem with you retaining a copy of the MP3. Just like if I sell my garden hose to my neighbor, I may still have access to it but I no longer own the rights to use it (without his permission).
Yes I'm aware contracts can have non-transferable clauses. I'm actually fine with that if it would force the RIAA (and MPAA) to decide whether they're selling a product or a license. Right now they're trying to have it both ways; treating it like a product when it suits them ("You scratched your CD? Tough, buy a new one."), and treating it like a license when it suits them ("You can't sell it!"). Nail it down so it's one or the other, and a lot of these issues we're arguing over simply disappear. They're not thorny issues created because digital files are something new which the law has never had to deal with. They're thorny issues created because of the RIAA's self-contradictory stance on what exactly it is they're selling.
Most 4G tech is using OFDMA. It achieves higher data rates than CDMA by using heavier signal processing to extract the data signal destined for your phone out of all phones in a cell. Previously this processing required too much power for a mobile device. But low-power CPU tech has advanced enough to where it's realistic to use it on a phone. As processor power requirements drop, the power needed for 4G will likewise drop.
News flash. All the Android phones with 4G let you turn it off when you don't need/want it. I usually leave my 4G off unless I know I'm going to do something data-intensive.
Given a choice between having a feature you can turn on and off at will, and not having the feature, the better choice is always having the feature. An iPhone 4S with 4G would've had exactly the same battery life as the 4G-less iPhone 4S, but you would've been able to get 4G data speeds whenever you felt the tradeoff in battery life was worth it.
Maybe Apple left it off because they couldn't get it working in time. Or maybe they ran into delays with licensing. Or maybe they couldn't secure enough parts. Or maybe the cynics are right and they did it so 4S owners would have a reason to upgrade to the iPhone 5. But they most certainly did not do it because it was better for their customers. That's pure PR spin which you're swallowing up hook, line, and sinker.
NASA's budget for the current and previous years are available online. I happen to agree that manned spaceflight is (was) mostly pork, but there were only a few years in the last 25 where it ate up >50% of NASA's budget. It's not as big a part of NASA's budget as you're making it out to be. Unmanned exploration missions are the second biggest chunk (the remainder being terrestrial research and educational outreach). So it is pretty inevitable that some of them will be cut or scaled back as well.
The meme started out as $random_big_tech_company could buy all the RIAA companies. Which is true - the record companies average something like only $13 billion a year in revenue. Their entire industry is small potatoes compared to even a moderate-sized tech company
Somewhere along the way, people began to substitute RIAA with MPAA, then MAFIAA. That's false - the movie industry is much, much larger than the record industry. (Incidentally, you should be pricing just the subdivisions which make movies when talking about the MPAA, not the parent company.)
Generally though, slashdotters see the RIAA as much more evil than the MPAA. I mean they're both on the wrong side of the copyright debate, but the movie industry at least prices a 90 minute Blu-ray/DVD for ~$20 which took a staff of thousands to make. They have a thriving movie rental business model, as well as a pay per view model (essentially streamed movies). They're adapting to new technology and developments in their business. Maybe not in ways we always agree with, but at least they're trying.
The record industry OTOH wants about ~$15 for a 45 minute CD album which took a staff of a few dozen to make. They fought tooth and to kill DATs (succeeded) and MP3s (failed). And the royalties they "negotiated" with Internet streaming companies are so ridiculously high it basically drove them out of business. Of the two branches of the *AA, the RIAA is much, much worse. Which is why the meme about tech companies just buying them out began.
I get how Android's memory management works. But it would be really nice if I, the phone's owner, had some say in all this. I have 125 apps on my phone. Probably excessive, but the phone has space for it and I use most of them from time to time. Unfortunately it's an older phone so only has 512 MB of RAM.
My phone went into this state of constantly unloading apps from memory because the number of apps claiming to the OS that they needed to be constantly running exceeded the available free memory. Apps like Market, Amazon App Store, wireless hotspot, an office doc reading app, MP3 player, etc. None of these apps need to be running. They're probably just checking for updates, and I'd be fine if they just checked whenever I ran them. But the OS completely trusts them when they tell it they need to run. Because I have no say in whether they run, they'd constantly load/unload each other from memory to do whatever it is they do, killing my battery life and slowing down my phone.
I've tried a couple memory managers which claimed they would allow me to stop selected apps from auto-starting. But it's been hit and miss. Eventually I resorted to using Titanium Backup to freeze wayward little-used apps (basically making Android think the app isn't installed). I need to unfreeze them when I use them, which takes more time. But having to do that once every few days beats having a constantly unresponsive phone.
The same problem exists on desktop OSes like Windows. But there I can run msconfig or modify rc.* to manually remove apps which try to pre-load themselves even if they don't need to be.
These recordings give us a good idea how crazy Copyright law has become. Under current copyright law, recordings made prior to 1978 but which weren't published until after 1978 fall under modern copyright terms. For personal works that's life of the author + 70 years. But fo anonymous and pseudonymous works (e.g. various performances recorded by the Edison company), it's 95 years after publication, or 120 years if not published. Since these recordings were never published, they fall under the 120 year term.
In other words, the 1889 recording of Otto von Bismark finally entered the public domain in 2009.
It's been tried before, but doesn't always work as intended. Welchia was apparently released by a white hat to secure machines against Blaster, but its aggressive use of network scans to find other potentially vulnerable systems ended up being more of a headache than Blaster on some networks.
This is completely normal psychology. If people were as good at remembering the bad things as they are at remembering the good, women who went through the pain of childbirth once would refuse to ever have a second baby. And the human race would die off because having one child per couple means our population is halved every generation.
The Internet was once a place where your real identity was also your online identity. The schools, companies, and organizations which comprised the Internet all voluntarily enforced a policy where each user's username was their real name, or anyone could easily figure it out from their username.
Anonymity didn't really arrive on the Internet until 1993, when AOL joined. AOL users were allowed to pick up to 5 pseudonyms as their email address (because one AOL account might be shared by an entire family). In retrospect, that change was really quick - a span of a couple years and pretty much everyone was allowed to pick whatever they wanted as a username.
Personally, I think anonymity is the proverbial genie that's been let out of the bottle - it's gonna be really, really hard to put it back in. But a non-anonymous Internet isn't something new; it was the norm a mere 2+ decades ago. The funny thing is that when AOL joined, a lot of people were saying that anonymity would be the death of the Internet due to spam (it was already polluting Usenet), flame wars, posers, etc. When e-commerce was first taking off, people were questioning how online stores would ever be able to validate a customer's real identity when everyone was effectively anonymous behind self-selected usernames. Now the tables have turned and people are saying having your real identity known online will be the death of the Internet.
The Internet has survived both extremes, so it's reasonable to think that it will also survive anything in between.
Disclaimer: I am an engineer, though I did take a couple legal courses.
Engineers deal with a fairly static set of rules. The laws of physics do not change from decade to decade. Most of the problems we deal with can be approached and solved (or approximated) by math. Sometimes very complex math, but it's still something you can program into a computer, feed some numbers as input, and get answers as output. So in most cases you can search out the solution space algorithmically to find optimal solutions.
Law is an attempt to codify a rather amorphous and malleable concept - what society thinks is right and wrong. It's not static, and because it's constantly changing it requires constant updates. The requirements to change the law, from number of legislators' votes, to the President's signatures, to court approval, are there to regulate the rate at and degree to which it can change.
The reason for a case law system rather than a statutory law system is that, unlike engineering problems, it's often difficult or impossible to algorithmically determine an optimal solution to a social problem. In order to optimize you need to evaluate, and in the social domain every individual has their own valuation for everything. Different valuations means there is no single optimal solution - a solution optimal by one valuation is likely not optimal by a different valuation.
One of the most effective solutions man has discovered for these types of difficult problems is to just throw a bunch of possible solutions out there and see what sticks. Capitalism basically does this. It's impossible to come up with one algorithm which distills all the different ways to evaluate a product - utility, reliability, aesthetics, trendiness, resale value, etc - into a single measure - a price. So every store is free to set their own price. The ones who set too high never sell, the ones who set too low sell out but don't make much money, and the ones who set it about right make lots of money from sales thus allowing them to buy more inventory to sell more. The "right price" here isn't set by any individual store or shopper. It's set by society overall, which decides what to buy and what not to buy.
That's what case law does. One judge decides a case one way. Another judge decides a similar case a different way. Both get published, people debate about it. When a third judge gets a similar problem, the lawyers point out the two prior decisions, and present arguments for why the second judge's solution was better. The third judge takes it under advisement and makes his decision, thus adding his reasoning to this type of case. etc.
It's this body of work which builds consensus and determines law, and allows the law to change with the times. It also harnesses the brainpower of the entire population of lawyers and judges to try to find an amicable solution. Instead of having a handful of lawyers deciding what's the best law and setting it in stone, you have all the lawyers and judges in your system working on figuring out the best law. Is it messy and complex? Yes. But like capitalism, in most cases it arrives more quickly at the most effective solution under multiple valuation systems.
That said, there are areas where this could be optimized. As you point out, the tax code is a mess (primarily due to lobbyists inserting their paid-for tax breaks). But the types of problems law attempts to solve are very different from the types of problems engineers attempt to solve. With an engineering problem, I prioritize conflicting specifications (e.g. weight vs. strength vs. flexibility vs. price) according to the needs of the client. This allows for a relatively straightforward solution. But in law the order of prioritization itself is always up for debate.
If it works like google.com, you'll be able to circumvent it by plugging in the country code for the site you really want. e.g. When I was living in Canada and wanted Canadian search results I could just go to google.com, which would redirect to google.ca. But if I wanted U.S.-centric results, I could just search on google.us.
So if the blog you want to read is on blogspot.com.au, and blogspot.com for your country redirects to blogspot.com.nk which has censored the blogspot.com.au article, you can still reach it directly via blogspot.com.au.
Of course if your country has blocked blogspot.com.au, then you still can't read it. But then it's your country's fault, not Google's.
It's an interesting solution to the "how do I make one website which complies with all countries' laws?" conundrum. While it would be cool for a company to "stick it to the man" and thumb their noses at repressive governments, I don't think that's realistic, nor would I call it evil for a foreign company/individual to fail to stick up for my rights. Freedom has to be earned, from within. If it's given by outsiders, it's not treasured, and may be discarded by the wayside. This way, if you see a bunch of people talking about an article on blogspot.com.au and it's not showing up for you on blogspot.com.nk, and you go to blogspot.com.au and find the site blocked, at least you know that your country/ISP is censoring.