That's pretty much it. JEDEC required all participants to disclose any patents or pending patents on technology being discussed. That was the whole point of JEDEC - so memory manufacturers could weigh the technical merits of ideas against their licensing costs, and decide together whether or not it should go into the next standard. Rambus did not disclose, causing some ideas they had (secretly) patented to wind up in the standard under the assumption that there was no licensing cost.
The courts actually found that Rambus was in breach of contract for violating JEDEC's membership guidelines this way. The problem was, that was just a contractual violation, not a legal one. JEDEC's guidelines did not specify what sort of punishment should befall any company which did secretly patent the technology under discussion. So even though RAMBUS was guilty of breach of contract, the only recourse left to JEDEC was to kick Rambus out. The patents, despite being obtained through or having their importance magnified by deceit, were still legally sound.
Basically, JEDEC relied on the honor code for its members to behave. Rambus took advantage of that to secretly misbehave and screw everyone over. Unfortunately, the anti-trust investigations into memory price fixing came soon after, and under the two-front assault most of the memory manufacturers settled with Rambus, which allowed them to drag this on for as long as it has.
That is actually exactly what's at stake. Imagine a future where replicator technology is commonplace. We'll be freed from the shackles of cost being linked to the amount of labor and expertise needed to manufacture a physical object. The only limit is going to be materials cost and our imaginations.
So we could have a world where anyone can own a car for the just cost of the metal and plastic needed to construct it. But it won't happen if it's illegal to download the design of said car without paying a $20,000 license fee to Ford, who still holds its 150 year copyright and whose patent portfolio prevents anyone who is not also a big auto company from legally selling you a design.
To paraphrase the ST:TNG episode, the decision we come to in the coming decade or two regarding software patents, copyright extensions and enforcement will extend far beyond music, movies, and software. It will redefine to what degree access to cheap manufactured products can improve the standard of living of the human race. Expanding them for some (IP creators), savagely curtailing them for others (consumers). Are we prepared to condemn the billions who come after us to servitude and slavery by making sure no idea with contemporary value ever makes it into the public domain?
This is our chance to make law. Let's make it a good one.
Remember why the dotcom bubble burst? Because, despite all the brilliant ideas everyone had, the infrastructure was two copper wires, all the neat tricks to get 5Mbps were still in development, and so many technologies ran into the bandwidth wall.
Erm, I had cable modem service with MediaOne in 1998 at 3 Mbps. By 2000 they upgraded it to 5 Mbps though I was actually getting 6 Mbps. There was a minor scandal as some hackers figured out how to unlock them to get the full 30 Mbps speeds the modems were capable of (crowding out their neighbors' bandwidth). My cell phone at the time could do a 150 kbps data connection.
The dotcom bubble burst because most of the ideas were stupid. Venture capitalists were so caught up in the hype over the "Information Superhighway" that they were willing to throw money at anything that ended in.com.
Nearly 100,000 millionaires pay lower tax rates than middle class
If you actually read the article you linked to, you find that it says nearly 100,000 millionaires (about 24% of people with AGI over $1 million) pay a lower tax rate than 10% of those with moderate income (folks with income under $100k). So basically, 100,000 people making over $1 million pay a lower tax rate (how much lower is not specified) than 1 in 10 of the middle class, and pay a higher rate than 9 in 10 of the middle class.
Somehow this has become warped into "100,000 millionaires pay lower tax rates than the middle class." Phrased in a way that implies that they pay a lower tax rate than all the middle class. In reality the problem is not that big, and all that's needed to correct it is a tweak to the alternative minimum tax.
and capital gains (gambling on the stock market and commodity futures) has half the tax rate as a working person's income tax
No it doesn't. Long term capital gains tax is flat. The working person's income tax is graduated (as is short term capital gains). A graduated tax rate means the highest rate you pay is not your actual overall rate. If you're in the 28% bracket, that does not mean you fork over 28% of your pay to the government. Your actual tax rate is significantly lower than your tax bracket.
Best case capital gains tax rate is 15% (well, 0% if you make less than $33,950, but those people wouldn't be considered rich).
Worst case Federal income tax is:
0% of $5,700 (standard deduction)
10% of the next $8,350
15% of the next $25,600
25% of the next $48,300
28% of the next $89,300
33% of the next $201,400
35% of anything else
That means the true income tax rate is:
0% at $8,350
5.9% at $14,050
11.8% at $39,650
15% at $52,375
19.0% at $87,950
23.6% at $172,250
28.6% at $378,650
30% at $486,230
So you have to make at least $52,375 for your true income tax rate to be higher than the 15% capital gains tax rate. And you have to be making at least $486,230 for the 15% capital gains tax rate to be half your true income tax rate.
According to the IRS the median AGI in 2008 was $33,048, or $38,748 after adding in the standard deduction, which corresponds to a 11.1% tax rate. Additional IRS stats show that $40k AGI ($45,700 minimum gross income) corresponds to the 58th percentile, and a 14.0% true tax rate. So the 15% capital gains tax rate is higher than the true income tax rate for 6 out of every 10 Americans.
Fun story. While I was at MIT/Sea Grant working on robot submarines, we'd lay an array of underwater beacons for navigation. To conserve power, they'd listen for a certain sequence of sounds from the sub, then reply back with their unique ping. The sub could measure the time it took to receive each unique ping, and thus determine its position by using the ping times and knowledge of where the beacons were. Kind of an underwater GPS. The beacons could last a year or more when used like this, which was a big deal because it was really annoying to locate and retrieve one just to load it with a fresh battery.
On one particular deployment, we left the beacons because we were planning to return a few months later. When we got back, the beacons weren't working. We retrieved them and all the batteries were dead. So we recharged the batteries and redeployed them. After our tests were over, we left the beacons again. When we returned a couple months later, they were all dead again.
Eventually we figured it out. The dolphins in the area had figured out the sound sequence used to make the beacons respond (probably just listened in on our sub). They thought it was pretty cool to get an acoustic response every time they used that code, so they'd been merrily chirping away during those months, draining our batteries.
I so want Google, or Apple or Amazon or all of them combined, to buy (via hostile takeover) one of the remaining big "record" companies. Then they can fire all of the management and show the surviving companies what companies that are really innovative can do in the music industry.
I don't think that will work. Look what happened to Sony. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Sony was synonymous with quality (if overpriced) electronics. Stereos, portable tape players, VCRs (Sony was on the side of the VCR in Sony vs. Universal, aka the Betamax case), etc.
In 1987, Sony bought Universal/TriStar and CBS/COlumbia Records. Compared to Sony Electronics, the revenue from these media companies was a drop in the bucket. But a funny thing happened - the tail started wagging the dog. The new Sony Pictures/Music Entertainment divisions began dictating to Sony Electronics, rather than the other way around. Have you ever wondered why Apple captured the MP3 player market instead of Sony, the inventor of the Walkman? It's because Sony Music insisted on any Sony MP3 player being crippled with DRM. The initial Sony MP3 players wouldn't even play MP3s - you had to convert to their proprietary DRM-encrusted format.
IMHO the problem is the people running these media companies. They're rooted in a dying business model, and too closed-minded to think of any other way to sell music/movies. If you buy the media company, you buy these people, and they will do everything they can to preserve the business model they grew up with, even if that means fighting their new owners.
These companies need to die while under the control of these people to really drive home the point that their business model is obsolete. Buying them and firing them won't work. They'll think they lost their job because some open-source twit who happened to run a successful Internet company had an axe to grind against them, and the remaining ones will fight even harder to "prove" that their old ways still work. Something like iTunes (or Amazon or GoogleTunes) taking over the market and driving these media distribution companies out of business and into irrelevance is exactly what needs to happen.
I think you overestimate it by a tad. There's no flocking, just over a million immigrants a year. If you look at immigrants per year per head of population, the US comes in 31st. Just above most Western European countries, but way below Australia or Canada. Europe as a whole has a lot more immigrants per year than America does, and that includes Eastern Europe.
America hasn't been the promised land for a long time, and not that many people pick it out as the ideal place to live. It's just because American media doesn't cover any international news or events that Americans themselves don't realize this.
You're conflating two things - desirability as an immigration destination, and ease of immigration - and attributing both their effects to desirability as an immigration destination.
I'm only familiar with Canada so I'll use it as an example. It's a helluva lot easier to immigrate to Canada than to the U.S. When Hong Kong reverted to Chinese control, a lot of its residents tried to immigrate to the U.S., were declined, and immigrated to Canada instead which gladly accepted them. An immigration visa to Canada can be had in 1-3 years, and you can apply for Canadian citizenship after residing there just 3 years. Wait times for a green card in the U.S. are 4-5 years for favored countries, even longer for other countries. And you have to have lived in the U.S. for 5 years before you can apply for citizenship. The U.S. just makes it a lot harder to immigrate than other countries. Heck, it's a helluva lot easier just to get a tourist visa to Canada than to the U.S.
False. You can get it if you quit, but you have to have a very good reason for quitting and you have to take steps to rectify the issue first.
It's really up to the examiner at the EDD who is handling the particular case. While I was handling payroll, we hired someone for our landscaping crew on an hourly wage. We scheduled him 5 days a week for 6-8 hours a day, for the entire month. He worked for the first week, took off during lunch on the first day of the second week, and we never saw him again until a month later when he showed up to collect his paycheck. Unfortunately the staff member who gave him his check didn't follow my instructions to have him see me regarding his employment status. The entire time, the manager of the landscaping crew was begging us to replace him because he was having had to work most of the month a man down. So about 5 weeks after the last day he showed up for work (6 weeks after we hired him), we marked him in our records as voluntarily quit and hired a replacement.
A month later, I got a letter from the EDD saying he was filing for unemployment against us. Since he'd only worked with us a week, the amount was trivial, but based on principle I made copies of our work schedules showing when he was supposed to work, his time card showing the days he showed up, wrote a letter explaining how he hadn't shown up for work for over a month, and we'd tried repeatedly to contact him at the phone numbers he left without success. So we had decided he had quit and hired a replacement.
A couple weeks later, the EDD wrote back saying that their decision was that we had fired him, so he qualified for unemployment. Whatever. The amount wasn't worth my time to fight it.
He means per capita. So China's high population would dilute the tax per person.
Unfortunately for OP, the US is not the highest emitter by that metric. Australia, Canada, and a host of other small oil-producing countries equal or exceed it. Furthermore, if you divide by average household income (ability to pay a tax per capita), the U.S. drops even further down the list.
It's just plain stupid that some businesses collect sales tax, while other businesses don't.
That was never the case.
All businesses should be paying the exact same tax, under the same laws. Anything else is extremely unfair.
It is already fair. If a business sells to someone in the same state, it collects sales tax. If it sells to someone outside the state, it doesn't collect sales tax. It doesn't matter if the business is a brick and mortar store, or an online website. The same rule applies equally to both.
The problem is that (1) stores vary greatly in ratio of in-state to out-of-state sales, and (2) states vary greatly in the amount of sales tax they charge.
Technology-wise, it looks like a great little device, but I just don't see it selling in worthwhile numbers. $499 for the tablet itself puts it squarely in "Why should I buy this instead of an iPad?" territory
Also note that non-Apple products get much steeper discounts at retail. The original Transformer ($399 retail) could widely be bought for $350, and occasionally dipped as low as $320. The biggest sale I've seen on a new Apple product was 10%, and those are exceedingly rare. Normally you're lucky to get a $499 iPad 2 for $480.
and $650 for the tablet and keyboard puts it into "Why should I buy this and not a regular laptop?" land.
I'm tired of arguing this with people who "don't get" tablets. They're selling by the tens of millions. Obviously there's something to them that you don't see that makes people willing to fork out near-laptop prices for less-than-laptop features. If you don't understand their appeal, then that's something you need to figure out for yourself. Not for tens of millions of people to suddenly "come to their senses" and see them as the waste of money you think they are.
I personally don't use one and prefer a full-powered laptop, but I help a lot of family and friends shop for computers and can see why the tablets appeal to them. There's also a cross-demographic whose computing needs are met by a tablet, but who would also like a full keyboard and trackpad for occasional data entry without losing the tablet form factor or having to buy/sync two devices. That's who the Transformer is aimed at.
Long-term, I think this (and the Atrix) are the future of mobile computing. The CPU, memory, and storage will sit in your cell phone. The display and keyboard will be separate devices which connect (physically at first, but eventually wirelessly) to create a "tablet" or a "laptop". If you can live with a 4" display when leaving your house, just bring your phone. If you will be doing something which needs a bigger screen, bring the display to create a "tablet". If you'll be doing a lot of data entry on your trip, bring the display and keyboard/trackpad/mouse to create a "laptop".
Exactly. The whole tiff over Flash support was blown up by the media and marketing to be way bigger than it really was. It wasn't some huge clash over the viability of Flash. Everyone knew Flash was on its way out. Before the Apple/Flash spat, most slashdotters constantly derided Flash. And Google has done far more to build HTML5 into a viable replacement for Flash than Apple ever did.
Where the players differed was how to make the transition. Google/Android's approach was customer-centric. Let the users and website developers decide how quickly or slowly the web should transition away from Flash. Apple's approach was self-centric. They decided Flash had to go, they knew better than their users and web developers, so they enforced it on their devices. Apple has a long history of aggressively phasing out technologies they feel are destined for obsolescence, even if they're still being used. The 3.5" floppy, removing support for PowerPC binaries starting with Snow Leopard a mere 3 years after transitioning to Intel, and currently getting rid of optical drives.
All of what happened and is happening to Flash is utterly mundane, with all the players acting just like they usually do. Not some grand "A was right and B was wrong" conflict.
The problem is that EU wants to do the RIGHT thing, America does not want to get burned, and China wants to trash the west at any and all costs.
Assuming the chart in TFA is accurate (admittedly from the US DOE), doesn't this refute the EU stance on the Kyoto Protocol, and validate the U.S. stance that any meaningful reduction treaty had to include developing nations? Looking at those lines, it seems even if Kyoto had been ratified by everyone and everyone had hit their 1990-level reduction targets, it would have been rendered almost completely meaningless by the massive increase in emissions from China and India.
On top of that, the Nook Color is programmed to try to boot off the microSD card first. So "hacking" it is just writing a CM7 boot image to a microSD card, putting it in, and restarting the tablet. If you ever want to go back to the original Nook Color experience, just reboot it without the card.
Any word on if the new Nook Tablet has the same feature?
It's worse than that. "We'll take away regular bandwidth that other customers have already paid for, and give it to you instead if you pay us extra."
I have no problem with them charging extra if they're going to add bandwidth and sell it to people who pay extra. But if they're going to implement this without increasing bandwidth, they're robbing Peter to pay Paul, without compensating Peter for the decreased bandwidth they're subjecting him to. Unlike regular economics, network bandwidth is a zero-sum game if the carriers aren't taking steps to increase it.
Re-hire the WebOS team that they just fired, develop a world class, well engineered budget tablet to take the low ground away from Apple, and stay in the market for LONGER THAN SIX WEEKS
The whole fire sale of the Touchpad was odd. Normally when you EOL a product, you gradually lower the price so they'll sell out over a few months. With the Touchpad, they went straight for the lowest clearance pricing, resulting in all stock selling out in a matter of days. I really suspect there's a company politics story buried in all this - someone(s) at HP wanted WebOS and the Touchpad dead, and wanted it to leave such a black mark on the company that it could never be revived.
Judging nuclear power's safety by a first generation reactor design that was built nearly 40 years ago, and that despite a M9 earthquake and 15m tsunami has not killed anyone, and is predicted to eventually cause up to 100 deaths from cancer is foolish. It's like judging hydro power by the dams that have burst and flooded and killed thousands
The worst power generation-related accident in history was the cascade failure of a series of hydroelectric dams. It killed nearly a quarter million people, damaged or destroyed 6 million buildings, and forced the evacuation of 11 million residents. Basically, it was as bad as or worse than the tsunami in Japan.
In stark contrast to nuclear accidents, it is almost never brought up as an argument against hydroelectric power.
Small pendulums are a poor method to measure g. The common formula for the period, T = 2pi sqrt(L/g) is derived using the approximation that sin(theta) = theta for small theta. That is, the formula assumes the angular displacement of the pendulum is small.
When a student is given a small pendulum to measure, they usually give it a large displacement to make measurement easier. This violates the above assumption, and thus the pendulum's period will not match that predicted by the common formula. Most early rigorous work with pendulums used massive devices taller than a house to try to minimize this error (as well as reducing air resistance by slowing the velocity).
If people were the main source of nourishment for mosquitoes, then yes. But they're not. If you use this to discourage mosquitoes from biting humans, they will happily get blood from other animals, resulting in no evolutionary pressure to pass light barriers.
I'd argue the App Store is worse than Wall Street. The finance industry accounts for 21% of GDP, only a small fraction of which is excess profit siphoned off by greedy WS executives to line their pockets. With the App Store, 30% of all transactions are siphoned off by Apple to line their pockets.
To that, I would add that the whole point of publishing in a journal is to ask fellow scientists: "Hey, I did this and this is what happened. Can you try it too and see if you get the same result?" If his (interesting/important) results were simply taken at face value and never confirmed nor challenged, then the failing was with his peers, not the journal.
If you read my second link, you'll see GE is building 4 MW direct drive turbine systems. Yeah, 4 megawatts. As efficiency continues to scale up, you'll see windfarm nameplate capacity rival the largest coal and nuclear plants.
This is a common mistake - comparing peak (nameplate) capacity to peak capacity. For actual power generation rates throughout the year, you have to multiply by capacity factor.
For nuclear, capacity factor is about 0.9. That is if a nuclear reactor has a peak generating capacity of 1 GW, throughout the year it will on average generate 900 MW (after factoring downtime for maintenance, inspections, refueling, testing, etc).
For wind, capacity factor is about 0.2-0.25 for land-based wind farms. Certain high-wind areas of the earth can hit 0.3-0.4 (Scotland, coastal Spain, various offshore). But for most land-based wind, you're doing pretty good if you can hit 0.25. So a 4 MW turbine will on average generate 1 MW throughout the year, and you'd need 900 of them to replace the 1 GW nuclear reactor.
The rule of thumb for large wind turbines is about $1 million per MW, so your 900 4MW turbines will cost you a cool $3.6 billion to construct before loans, while the 1 GW nuclear reactor will be about $1-$2 billion. (I exclude the cost of batteries/energy storage for wind because nuclear and wind/solar/hydro complement each other. Nuclear is great for base load, but sucks for varying load. Wind/solar/hydro suck for base load, but are great for varying load. The best strategy involves building both nuclear and renewable electrical generation.)
Based on electricity generating efficiency and fatality rate, I'd order that list:
Hydro, geothermal, nuclear, solar thermal, wind, natural gas (if obtained as a byproduct), solar PV, diesel, coal.
Wind and solar have the big disadvantage of having to collect very disperse energy. A single solar panel or windmill does not seem to be much of a threat. But to replace a single nuclear plant you'd need 10-15 thousand wind turbines, or several tens of square km of solar panels. Once you normalize for that difference in scale, the "small green footprint" and perceived safety of those two (there have been at least two wind-related deaths since March 11) mostly evaporate. That's why I rate them below nuclear.
I rate natural gas so high because methane is a natural byproduct of petroleum drilling. Even if we abandon petroleum as an energy source, we will still need to drill it because we use it to make plastics. Methane is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2, so as long as methane is produced as a byproduct of petroleum, we are better off burning it than just releasing it into the atmosphere. And as long as we're burning it, might as well generate some electricity from it. And as fossil fuels go, it's very clean (just a single carbon per four hydrogen).
Hate to say it, but Mexico had the same level of corruption long before the drug trade. My friends who drive down Baja on fishing trips always carry a wad of cash because if you don't pay off the Federales who decide to pull you over because one of them needs to buy his kid a birthday present, you're likely to spend most of your fishing trip in jail. The cartels ratcheted up the level of violence, but police and government officials taking bribes to look the other way have always been there. Legalizing drugs in the U.S. may make the cartel problem go away, but something else would just take its place. Anything which involves a lot of money changing hands in Mexico will eventually lead to violence due to the corruption.
The drug-related violence is a symptom, not the problem.
I don't get why there is this push away from the program menu we have been using for over 15 years.
It's pretty simple. Marketing does a survey, finds out that 99% of button-presses on a TV remote are channel up/do, volume up/down, and guide.
Correct response: Enlarge those three buttons, move them into the easiest to reach area of the remote.
Braindead response: Make those three buttons the entire front of the remote. Hide all other buttons behind a panel you have to remove with a screwdriver to access.
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That's pretty much it. JEDEC required all participants to disclose any patents or pending patents on technology being discussed. That was the whole point of JEDEC - so memory manufacturers could weigh the technical merits of ideas against their licensing costs, and decide together whether or not it should go into the next standard. Rambus did not disclose, causing some ideas they had (secretly) patented to wind up in the standard under the assumption that there was no licensing cost.
The courts actually found that Rambus was in breach of contract for violating JEDEC's membership guidelines this way. The problem was, that was just a contractual violation, not a legal one. JEDEC's guidelines did not specify what sort of punishment should befall any company which did secretly patent the technology under discussion. So even though RAMBUS was guilty of breach of contract, the only recourse left to JEDEC was to kick Rambus out. The patents, despite being obtained through or having their importance magnified by deceit, were still legally sound.
Basically, JEDEC relied on the honor code for its members to behave. Rambus took advantage of that to secretly misbehave and screw everyone over. Unfortunately, the anti-trust investigations into memory price fixing came soon after, and under the two-front assault most of the memory manufacturers settled with Rambus, which allowed them to drag this on for as long as it has.
That is actually exactly what's at stake. Imagine a future where replicator technology is commonplace. We'll be freed from the shackles of cost being linked to the amount of labor and expertise needed to manufacture a physical object. The only limit is going to be materials cost and our imaginations.
So we could have a world where anyone can own a car for the just cost of the metal and plastic needed to construct it. But it won't happen if it's illegal to download the design of said car without paying a $20,000 license fee to Ford, who still holds its 150 year copyright and whose patent portfolio prevents anyone who is not also a big auto company from legally selling you a design.
To paraphrase the ST:TNG episode, the decision we come to in the coming decade or two regarding software patents, copyright extensions and enforcement will extend far beyond music, movies, and software. It will redefine to what degree access to cheap manufactured products can improve the standard of living of the human race. Expanding them for some (IP creators), savagely curtailing them for others (consumers). Are we prepared to condemn the billions who come after us to servitude and slavery by making sure no idea with contemporary value ever makes it into the public domain?
This is our chance to make law. Let's make it a good one.
Erm, I had cable modem service with MediaOne in 1998 at 3 Mbps. By 2000 they upgraded it to 5 Mbps though I was actually getting 6 Mbps. There was a minor scandal as some hackers figured out how to unlock them to get the full 30 Mbps speeds the modems were capable of (crowding out their neighbors' bandwidth). My cell phone at the time could do a 150 kbps data connection.
.com.
The dotcom bubble burst because most of the ideas were stupid. Venture capitalists were so caught up in the hype over the "Information Superhighway" that they were willing to throw money at anything that ended in
If you actually read the article you linked to, you find that it says nearly 100,000 millionaires (about 24% of people with AGI over $1 million) pay a lower tax rate than 10% of those with moderate income (folks with income under $100k). So basically, 100,000 people making over $1 million pay a lower tax rate (how much lower is not specified) than 1 in 10 of the middle class, and pay a higher rate than 9 in 10 of the middle class.
Somehow this has become warped into "100,000 millionaires pay lower tax rates than the middle class." Phrased in a way that implies that they pay a lower tax rate than all the middle class. In reality the problem is not that big, and all that's needed to correct it is a tweak to the alternative minimum tax.
No it doesn't. Long term capital gains tax is flat. The working person's income tax is graduated (as is short term capital gains). A graduated tax rate means the highest rate you pay is not your actual overall rate. If you're in the 28% bracket, that does not mean you fork over 28% of your pay to the government. Your actual tax rate is significantly lower than your tax bracket.
Best case capital gains tax rate is 15% (well, 0% if you make less than $33,950, but those people wouldn't be considered rich).
Worst case Federal income tax is:
0% of $5,700 (standard deduction)
10% of the next $8,350
15% of the next $25,600
25% of the next $48,300
28% of the next $89,300
33% of the next $201,400
35% of anything else
That means the true income tax rate is:
0% at $8,350
5.9% at $14,050
11.8% at $39,650
15% at $52,375
19.0% at $87,950
23.6% at $172,250
28.6% at $378,650
30% at $486,230
So you have to make at least $52,375 for your true income tax rate to be higher than the 15% capital gains tax rate. And you have to be making at least $486,230 for the 15% capital gains tax rate to be half your true income tax rate.
According to the IRS the median AGI in 2008 was $33,048, or $38,748 after adding in the standard deduction, which corresponds to a 11.1% tax rate. Additional IRS stats show that $40k AGI ($45,700 minimum gross income) corresponds to the 58th percentile, and a 14.0% true tax rate. So the 15% capital gains tax rate is higher than the true income tax rate for 6 out of every 10 Americans.
Fun story. While I was at MIT/Sea Grant working on robot submarines, we'd lay an array of underwater beacons for navigation. To conserve power, they'd listen for a certain sequence of sounds from the sub, then reply back with their unique ping. The sub could measure the time it took to receive each unique ping, and thus determine its position by using the ping times and knowledge of where the beacons were. Kind of an underwater GPS. The beacons could last a year or more when used like this, which was a big deal because it was really annoying to locate and retrieve one just to load it with a fresh battery.
On one particular deployment, we left the beacons because we were planning to return a few months later. When we got back, the beacons weren't working. We retrieved them and all the batteries were dead. So we recharged the batteries and redeployed them. After our tests were over, we left the beacons again. When we returned a couple months later, they were all dead again.
Eventually we figured it out. The dolphins in the area had figured out the sound sequence used to make the beacons respond (probably just listened in on our sub). They thought it was pretty cool to get an acoustic response every time they used that code, so they'd been merrily chirping away during those months, draining our batteries.
I don't think that will work. Look what happened to Sony. Back in the 1970s and 1980s, Sony was synonymous with quality (if overpriced) electronics. Stereos, portable tape players, VCRs (Sony was on the side of the VCR in Sony vs. Universal, aka the Betamax case), etc.
In 1987, Sony bought Universal/TriStar and CBS/COlumbia Records. Compared to Sony Electronics, the revenue from these media companies was a drop in the bucket. But a funny thing happened - the tail started wagging the dog. The new Sony Pictures/Music Entertainment divisions began dictating to Sony Electronics, rather than the other way around. Have you ever wondered why Apple captured the MP3 player market instead of Sony, the inventor of the Walkman? It's because Sony Music insisted on any Sony MP3 player being crippled with DRM. The initial Sony MP3 players wouldn't even play MP3s - you had to convert to their proprietary DRM-encrusted format.
IMHO the problem is the people running these media companies. They're rooted in a dying business model, and too closed-minded to think of any other way to sell music/movies. If you buy the media company, you buy these people, and they will do everything they can to preserve the business model they grew up with, even if that means fighting their new owners.
These companies need to die while under the control of these people to really drive home the point that their business model is obsolete. Buying them and firing them won't work. They'll think they lost their job because some open-source twit who happened to run a successful Internet company had an axe to grind against them, and the remaining ones will fight even harder to "prove" that their old ways still work. Something like iTunes (or Amazon or GoogleTunes) taking over the market and driving these media distribution companies out of business and into irrelevance is exactly what needs to happen.
You're conflating two things - desirability as an immigration destination, and ease of immigration - and attributing both their effects to desirability as an immigration destination.
I'm only familiar with Canada so I'll use it as an example. It's a helluva lot easier to immigrate to Canada than to the U.S. When Hong Kong reverted to Chinese control, a lot of its residents tried to immigrate to the U.S., were declined, and immigrated to Canada instead which gladly accepted them. An immigration visa to Canada can be had in 1-3 years, and you can apply for Canadian citizenship after residing there just 3 years. Wait times for a green card in the U.S. are 4-5 years for favored countries, even longer for other countries. And you have to have lived in the U.S. for 5 years before you can apply for citizenship. The U.S. just makes it a lot harder to immigrate than other countries. Heck, it's a helluva lot easier just to get a tourist visa to Canada than to the U.S.
It's really up to the examiner at the EDD who is handling the particular case. While I was handling payroll, we hired someone for our landscaping crew on an hourly wage. We scheduled him 5 days a week for 6-8 hours a day, for the entire month. He worked for the first week, took off during lunch on the first day of the second week, and we never saw him again until a month later when he showed up to collect his paycheck. Unfortunately the staff member who gave him his check didn't follow my instructions to have him see me regarding his employment status. The entire time, the manager of the landscaping crew was begging us to replace him because he was having had to work most of the month a man down. So about 5 weeks after the last day he showed up for work (6 weeks after we hired him), we marked him in our records as voluntarily quit and hired a replacement.
A month later, I got a letter from the EDD saying he was filing for unemployment against us. Since he'd only worked with us a week, the amount was trivial, but based on principle I made copies of our work schedules showing when he was supposed to work, his time card showing the days he showed up, wrote a letter explaining how he hadn't shown up for work for over a month, and we'd tried repeatedly to contact him at the phone numbers he left without success. So we had decided he had quit and hired a replacement.
A couple weeks later, the EDD wrote back saying that their decision was that we had fired him, so he qualified for unemployment. Whatever. The amount wasn't worth my time to fight it.
He means per capita. So China's high population would dilute the tax per person.
Unfortunately for OP, the US is not the highest emitter by that metric. Australia, Canada, and a host of other small oil-producing countries equal or exceed it. Furthermore, if you divide by average household income (ability to pay a tax per capita), the U.S. drops even further down the list.
That was never the case.
It is already fair. If a business sells to someone in the same state, it collects sales tax. If it sells to someone outside the state, it doesn't collect sales tax. It doesn't matter if the business is a brick and mortar store, or an online website. The same rule applies equally to both.
The problem is that (1) stores vary greatly in ratio of in-state to out-of-state sales, and (2) states vary greatly in the amount of sales tax they charge.
32 GB Transformer Prime - $499
32 GB iPad 2 - $599
16 GB Transformer - $399
16 GB iPad 2 - $499
16 GB iPad (if you can find one) - $399
Also note that non-Apple products get much steeper discounts at retail. The original Transformer ($399 retail) could widely be bought for $350, and occasionally dipped as low as $320. The biggest sale I've seen on a new Apple product was 10%, and those are exceedingly rare. Normally you're lucky to get a $499 iPad 2 for $480.
I'm tired of arguing this with people who "don't get" tablets. They're selling by the tens of millions. Obviously there's something to them that you don't see that makes people willing to fork out near-laptop prices for less-than-laptop features. If you don't understand their appeal, then that's something you need to figure out for yourself. Not for tens of millions of people to suddenly "come to their senses" and see them as the waste of money you think they are.
I personally don't use one and prefer a full-powered laptop, but I help a lot of family and friends shop for computers and can see why the tablets appeal to them. There's also a cross-demographic whose computing needs are met by a tablet, but who would also like a full keyboard and trackpad for occasional data entry without losing the tablet form factor or having to buy/sync two devices. That's who the Transformer is aimed at.
Long-term, I think this (and the Atrix) are the future of mobile computing. The CPU, memory, and storage will sit in your cell phone. The display and keyboard will be separate devices which connect (physically at first, but eventually wirelessly) to create a "tablet" or a "laptop". If you can live with a 4" display when leaving your house, just bring your phone. If you will be doing something which needs a bigger screen, bring the display to create a "tablet". If you'll be doing a lot of data entry on your trip, bring the display and keyboard/trackpad/mouse to create a "laptop".
Exactly. The whole tiff over Flash support was blown up by the media and marketing to be way bigger than it really was. It wasn't some huge clash over the viability of Flash. Everyone knew Flash was on its way out. Before the Apple/Flash spat, most slashdotters constantly derided Flash. And Google has done far more to build HTML5 into a viable replacement for Flash than Apple ever did.
Where the players differed was how to make the transition. Google/Android's approach was customer-centric. Let the users and website developers decide how quickly or slowly the web should transition away from Flash. Apple's approach was self-centric. They decided Flash had to go, they knew better than their users and web developers, so they enforced it on their devices. Apple has a long history of aggressively phasing out technologies they feel are destined for obsolescence, even if they're still being used. The 3.5" floppy, removing support for PowerPC binaries starting with Snow Leopard a mere 3 years after transitioning to Intel, and currently getting rid of optical drives.
All of what happened and is happening to Flash is utterly mundane, with all the players acting just like they usually do. Not some grand "A was right and B was wrong" conflict.
Assuming the chart in TFA is accurate (admittedly from the US DOE), doesn't this refute the EU stance on the Kyoto Protocol, and validate the U.S. stance that any meaningful reduction treaty had to include developing nations? Looking at those lines, it seems even if Kyoto had been ratified by everyone and everyone had hit their 1990-level reduction targets, it would have been rendered almost completely meaningless by the massive increase in emissions from China and India.
On top of that, the Nook Color is programmed to try to boot off the microSD card first. So "hacking" it is just writing a CM7 boot image to a microSD card, putting it in, and restarting the tablet. If you ever want to go back to the original Nook Color experience, just reboot it without the card.
Any word on if the new Nook Tablet has the same feature?
It's worse than that. "We'll take away regular bandwidth that other customers have already paid for, and give it to you instead if you pay us extra."
I have no problem with them charging extra if they're going to add bandwidth and sell it to people who pay extra. But if they're going to implement this without increasing bandwidth, they're robbing Peter to pay Paul, without compensating Peter for the decreased bandwidth they're subjecting him to. Unlike regular economics, network bandwidth is a zero-sum game if the carriers aren't taking steps to increase it.
The whole fire sale of the Touchpad was odd. Normally when you EOL a product, you gradually lower the price so they'll sell out over a few months. With the Touchpad, they went straight for the lowest clearance pricing, resulting in all stock selling out in a matter of days. I really suspect there's a company politics story buried in all this - someone(s) at HP wanted WebOS and the Touchpad dead, and wanted it to leave such a black mark on the company that it could never be revived.
The worst power generation-related accident in history was the cascade failure of a series of hydroelectric dams. It killed nearly a quarter million people, damaged or destroyed 6 million buildings, and forced the evacuation of 11 million residents. Basically, it was as bad as or worse than the tsunami in Japan.
In stark contrast to nuclear accidents, it is almost never brought up as an argument against hydroelectric power.
Small pendulums are a poor method to measure g. The common formula for the period, T = 2pi sqrt(L/g) is derived using the approximation that sin(theta) = theta for small theta. That is, the formula assumes the angular displacement of the pendulum is small.
When a student is given a small pendulum to measure, they usually give it a large displacement to make measurement easier. This violates the above assumption, and thus the pendulum's period will not match that predicted by the common formula. Most early rigorous work with pendulums used massive devices taller than a house to try to minimize this error (as well as reducing air resistance by slowing the velocity).
If people were the main source of nourishment for mosquitoes, then yes. But they're not. If you use this to discourage mosquitoes from biting humans, they will happily get blood from other animals, resulting in no evolutionary pressure to pass light barriers.
I'd argue the App Store is worse than Wall Street. The finance industry accounts for 21% of GDP, only a small fraction of which is excess profit siphoned off by greedy WS executives to line their pockets. With the App Store, 30% of all transactions are siphoned off by Apple to line their pockets.
Whatever it is, it's not capitalism.
To that, I would add that the whole point of publishing in a journal is to ask fellow scientists: "Hey, I did this and this is what happened. Can you try it too and see if you get the same result?" If his (interesting/important) results were simply taken at face value and never confirmed nor challenged, then the failing was with his peers, not the journal.
This is a common mistake - comparing peak (nameplate) capacity to peak capacity. For actual power generation rates throughout the year, you have to multiply by capacity factor.
For nuclear, capacity factor is about 0.9. That is if a nuclear reactor has a peak generating capacity of 1 GW, throughout the year it will on average generate 900 MW (after factoring downtime for maintenance, inspections, refueling, testing, etc).
For wind, capacity factor is about 0.2-0.25 for land-based wind farms. Certain high-wind areas of the earth can hit 0.3-0.4 (Scotland, coastal Spain, various offshore). But for most land-based wind, you're doing pretty good if you can hit 0.25. So a 4 MW turbine will on average generate 1 MW throughout the year, and you'd need 900 of them to replace the 1 GW nuclear reactor.
The rule of thumb for large wind turbines is about $1 million per MW, so your 900 4MW turbines will cost you a cool $3.6 billion to construct before loans, while the 1 GW nuclear reactor will be about $1-$2 billion. (I exclude the cost of batteries/energy storage for wind because nuclear and wind/solar/hydro complement each other. Nuclear is great for base load, but sucks for varying load. Wind/solar/hydro suck for base load, but are great for varying load. The best strategy involves building both nuclear and renewable electrical generation.)
Based on electricity generating efficiency and fatality rate, I'd order that list:
Hydro, geothermal, nuclear, solar thermal, wind, natural gas (if obtained as a byproduct), solar PV, diesel, coal.
Wind and solar have the big disadvantage of having to collect very disperse energy. A single solar panel or windmill does not seem to be much of a threat. But to replace a single nuclear plant you'd need 10-15 thousand wind turbines, or several tens of square km of solar panels. Once you normalize for that difference in scale, the "small green footprint" and perceived safety of those two (there have been at least two wind-related deaths since March 11) mostly evaporate. That's why I rate them below nuclear.
I rate natural gas so high because methane is a natural byproduct of petroleum drilling. Even if we abandon petroleum as an energy source, we will still need to drill it because we use it to make plastics. Methane is a worse greenhouse gas than CO2, so as long as methane is produced as a byproduct of petroleum, we are better off burning it than just releasing it into the atmosphere. And as long as we're burning it, might as well generate some electricity from it. And as fossil fuels go, it's very clean (just a single carbon per four hydrogen).
Hate to say it, but Mexico had the same level of corruption long before the drug trade. My friends who drive down Baja on fishing trips always carry a wad of cash because if you don't pay off the Federales who decide to pull you over because one of them needs to buy his kid a birthday present, you're likely to spend most of your fishing trip in jail. The cartels ratcheted up the level of violence, but police and government officials taking bribes to look the other way have always been there. Legalizing drugs in the U.S. may make the cartel problem go away, but something else would just take its place. Anything which involves a lot of money changing hands in Mexico will eventually lead to violence due to the corruption.
The drug-related violence is a symptom, not the problem.
It's pretty simple. Marketing does a survey, finds out that 99% of button-presses on a TV remote are channel up/do, volume up/down, and guide.
Correct response: Enlarge those three buttons, move them into the easiest to reach area of the remote.
Braindead response: Make those three buttons the entire front of the remote. Hide all other buttons behind a panel you have to remove with a screwdriver to access.