$2.95M goes a lot further in South Korea. Instead of sending all that money abroad, they'll be funding their own people to install, configure and develop FOSS for Korean needs. I'm willing to bet that even handsome wages in Korea are a lot cheaper than their western equivalents.
Burger King employees don't speak a different language. You don't need to buy a phrase book to have a hope of ordering a Whopper and Fries. The same is also true in McDonalds, Wendys and many other smaller burger establishments.
Now imagine that instead of a phrasebook, you had to buy a universal translator. And the only people that made them was the burger vendors ; the translator is expensive enough that you'd really only want to buy one. And they don't work as well in the other big chains, and forget using it at Honest Als Burger Shack. And Pizza Hut? Ahahaha.
You're pretty much gonna have to eat Whoppers. The language of burger flippers is complicated, some say deliberately so, and people have a hard time deciphering it. Now, some of the other establishments produce translators that work on BurgerKing-ese. But they're not perfect (although in some cases their grammar is technically better). It would be so much easier if they had access to a proper BK dictionary.
But BK don't want that. They want people to keep buying Whoppers, and avoid the other chains because they speak a "funny" language (some of them don't even have pretty menus!) Now some politos are pestering them. They don't want them to give away the secret recipe (although it's not really a secret anymore, and there are a lot of people who say that the other chains have better sandwiches, or even prefer grilling their own). They don't have to give away the secret recipe ; they just have to make it easier for people to order burgers.
I guess Microsoft are a bit like Burger King ; they do want us to keep buying Whoppers....
The BBC governor recently announced plans to make all of the BBC archives available on download to the public. Alas, this was shortly before he resigned, and I've heard little news of it since.
I believe there were some ideas about keeping it to license payers only, but in practice I can't see how this could be enforced without DRM.
A plank of the proposed distribution mechanisms was P2P technologies. Another plank is the Dirac codec, a wavelet-based video compression codec the BBC has open-sourced.
Somehow, you can't imagine purely commercial concerns even contemplating such things.
I have my concerns over this re-organisation. While the stated aims are laudable (I'm sick of programming gems like "Pets Win Prizes by Changing Which Rooms they Swap Wives In"), I think it likely that this is a calculated move to decrease the popularity of the BBC to the point where a more direct assualt could succeed.
People joke about things that would make them leave the country, like the election of a particular idiot, or the passing of a particular law. I think the demise or emasculation of the BBC would be one reason I'd consider exile from Britain. Long Live Auntie Beeb!
What justifies the belief that because someone makes a lot of money they eventually reach a point where you (your defintion) consider them too wealthy, and so whatever they've worked hard on should become free?
The fact that, after you reach a certain point, the money isn't going to improve your quality of life any? You may as well be trying to get a highscore on Galaxian for all the worth it brings to your life.
On the other hand, that does money represent an awful lot of resources that poorer people could be using.
I'm not saying that this makes copyright theft legal (of course it doesn't - the copyright holders helped to make the laws). I'm not saying that the people indulging in copyright infringement are the same as those needy people who could do with more resources - quite the opposite, they can obviously afford broadband and a nifty computer. But I am pointing out, that for a lot of those people, they enjoy this kind of content but don't see the reason to help the people at the top of the money pyramid increase their "highscore".
I have cable. I am not motivated to watch it. The cable box is present because it's part of my phone/broadband package. It's actually located under my desk in my office (because when I moved in, I had no television, just a TV card). I have no extra channel packages beyond basic.
Here's the thing : there *are* things on cable I'd like to watch. I like movies. I like Sci-fi. But I can't stomach paying for TV which has a 1:3 commercial ratio, and I don't want a channel bundle where I'll only watch one out of maybe five channels ; why the hell should I pay for content I don't watch?
So this seems an ideal solution to me. More democratic and better value for money. To be honest, even with the huge number of people who presently watch "reality" TV, can you actually imagine people pro-actively purchasing it? With any luck, that kind of dross would dry up and be reduced to a minority viewership (which is all it would need to stay afloat, given its low production cost/value).
There's still room for big companies in this model. They could continue to produce pilots and broadcast them FTA. "Want to see more of this? Push your red button / visit a website and buy some points in the production company!" In fact, it's hard to see how a fan group could produce a show from the ground up.
We fund the production of these shows anyway, through our cable/satellite fees, and through the ad budgets of the products we buy. Wouldn't it be better if we could just be more direct about where our money was going?
(NB - I live in the UK, where public-broadcast television is not universally crap, and the commercial/content ratio is much higher on the FTA commercial channels).
On the other hand, there's potentially tremendous variance in the source material.
My thought was to apply a hash to the SSN before storing it - if everyone uses a different key to generate their hashes, you gain the benefits of using SSN as an identifier.
- No-one has to record or remember multiple ID numbers - Everyone is using a familiar data structure
Without the disadvantages
- No-one, including people with direct access to the data, can steal a list of SSNs from the database. - Or cross-tie the records to other databases for "Synergistic Market Analysis" (unless they use the same crypto keys as their partners).
At last count, there were a little over 5.1M.net domains registered.
ICANN's projected budget for 2003-2004 was in the region of $6M, and they looked pretty close to be breaking even.
What the holy badger-fuck are they going to do with another $3.8M? A 63% budget increase? Is the internet going to get 63% bigger? Or are they going to try to have 63% more fun? (from this looks of this, they need to try......)
The US government were originally so afraid of PGP that they imprisoned its author for "trafficing arms". It's probably the most peer-reviewed encryption software in the world.
I'd rather trust PGP than any government-recommended scheme any day. Take Clipper ; the inbuilt key escrow killed it from day one - even PHBs were not going to bend over for that one, given the record of gov.us in the matter of taking foreign trade secrets by surveillance and using them to benefit domestic companies.
It was liver. Kidneys are very, very complicated. Whereas livers are merely very complicated. To produce functional kidney, you'd have to reproduce a complex three dimensional plumbing arrangement that's basically natures reverse-osmosis desalination plant. Liver, on the other hand, is more like a coffee filter that happens to also manufacture digestive fluids, and is relatively simple in comparison.
A pilonidal cyst is an accumulation of hair and infected sebaceous secretions that occurs under the skin in the natal cleft (i.e. - your butt crack).
It stinks unpleasantly and is generally caused by having a fat sweaty arse that you sit upon all day. Often occurs in jeep drivers in hot climates.
This kind of error would generally not occur in Visual Basic applications, as the 16-bit Integer type IS inherently signed, but the runtime also checks for overflows on every arithmetic operation.
To reproduce this behaviour, you'd either have to uncheck certain compiler options (which are rarely turned off, and to my knowledge not available in Access Basic), or do all your mathematics with bitwise arithmetic routines that are tedious and difficult to write in VB.
A short test reveals that this is the case ; with overflow checks off, Integer rolls around as described. But the code refuses to run in debug mode ; the compiler options do not apply.
It's far more likely that the code responsible for this is written in C/C++, as overflow checks are easier to ignore.
Of course, it's possible that some idiot has turned off the overflow checks in the hope of seeing some tangible performance gain.
The largest problem with the NHS infrastructure is their application base, rather than their server platforms, although many of those are antiquated beyond belief.
I mean, this is an organisation that only recently ditched X.400 email. Most of their practices are either paper-based, or use outmoded legacy systems that no-one understands anymore, because the coders responsible for their creation have been downsized long ago.
Hardly anything is designed with interoperability in mind ; I have personally resorted to screen-scraping chunks of VT100 terminal output because the other supplier had no handle on their ancient pathology system (and possibly didn't even have the sourcecode).
The resistance to change is enormous, and not without justification; the overall experience of NHS professionals of IT projects is bad.
And why? Healthcare is almost certainly one of the most challenging problem domains for IT projects in existence. Not only does it require the reliability and robustness of the banking industry, the informational complexity of the subject matter exceeds most other problem domains in human usage. Even the everyday things like the prescription and administration of drugs are horrendously complex ; the computerisation of a full medical record is something that I would describe as more challenging than a dozen Manhattan Projects.
In all, this is an area where the potential benefits are tremendous - even a small reduction of the estimated 70% of working time that a junior doctor spends doing paperwork instead of caring for patients would be an enormous boon. An hour a week saved per ward (very realistic even with basic electronic prescribing systems) essentially amounts to an average sized hospital getting a free doctor. In a cash-strapped, overburdened NHS, every little thing helps.
The potential for public benefit is enormous, and I would suggest that this should be a matter for public research. Instead of pouring these funds into the pockets of shareholders of enormous foreign companies, gov.uk should found a number of public projects, all bound over to interoperate freely, all open-source, and trial them.
But unlikely to happen, with the corporates back-handing government so effectively. With the recent funding changes for NHS IT, the funds are effectively placed in the hands of a very few huge monolithic corporations, who then decide who to subcontract to. As a result, smaller, more innovative companies are either shoved out of their niche, bought out, or try to compete on an equal footing with the giants and get crushed in the scrum. Money will haemorrhage into the pockets of foreign shareholders (iSoft, Schlumberger-Sema, etc.).
Yet another reason I'm glad I no longer work for the NHS.
You cannot employ people at almost 10-50 times a higher rate than your target market to produce a increase in profits and share price.
Entirely true, and a shame that companies never realise this about their own executives before they start outsourcing.
Goods, services, we'll boil all these down to the same concept of "value". Now then, a few basic assumptions.
There is a limited amount of value that can be extracted from a human worker. In order to take value from a human, you must pay him value. The amount of value the person is prepared to work for varies with his circumstances ; this is usually linked to location.
In order to have value to exchange for labour, you must sell goods or services.
The people who buy goods and services do so with value that they earn doing their job.
If the company is paying less value for labour, the workers cannot afford to buy products for the same price ; the price must go lower.
The company can only decrease the cost of its products by reducing their quality to a certain degree ; below a certain level of quality, the product becomes essentially worthless.
Therefore the company must decrease their costs in other ways. The primary way to do this is to reduce the number of paid workers required to produce the product through automation, or to reduce the cost of each workers labour where automation is impractical or more costly than the benefits.
The company is therefore paying still less value to the workers.
Other companies must follow suit in order to be competitive.
When the value that the company is willing to pay its workers drops below the value that domestic workers are willing to work for (or below the legal minimum wage), the company must move its operations to a locality where the workers will accept less for their labour.
The value that the company once fed into the economy through paying workers has now departed to another locality.
Other companies in the domestic locality will now have lower sales because the ex-workers of company X can no longer afford to buy their products.
They do the same thing in order to reduce their costs.
Rinse, repeat.
This will continue to accelerate until something bad happens. As companies move more of their labour into "slave" economies, where the workers cannot hope to afford the products they are producing, the value drains in two directions. A small amount to the sweatshops, and the bulk upwards to the shareholders, who will presumably be the only people who can afford to purchase the products of their companies.
So effectively, you will have a class of people who tell a whole bunch of other people what to do, and reap all the rewards of their labour, without giving them shit for their trouble. This is a slave economy. It differs from todays economy only in terms of scale ; instead of the bulk of people being self-employed (as blacksmiths and other autonomous tradesmen), we mostly all work for entities that are not striving for our causes, but theirs.
In fact, as far as I can make out, the US has laws that require a business to excercise all due diligence to maximise value for it's shareholders, and other considerations be damned. So the very law of the land says "Thou shalt fuck thy fellow man over for a percentage".
And this is the "Land of the Free and Home of the Brave?"
The best way so far of capturing wax recordings and the like is to run the disk under a high-resolution scanner and use a piece of software to render the image of the grooves as a waveform ; this involves no physical wear of the medium.
In fact, I'd think that a commercial version of this could well catch on for old-timers with large vinyl collections....
Standard/. conspiracy theory follows : It's all a plot by Microsoft.
ISO can tie a standard down in a tangled mess of beaurocracy ; while this might bring credibility it also runs the risk of preventing OOo evolving its formats as fast as it would like to.
Which is something that M$ sure would like, as OOo is now getting to the point where it can start to compete with MS Office.
To dispel your assertation that the primary purpose that people trade in US dollars is to obtain value from US industry:-
The largest use of the US Dollar in foreign markets is the purchase of oil - in fact, for a long time the US Dollar has been the de facto currency of oil trading, mostly because of its perceived stability.
The US has consequently benefited tremendously ; because money is traded for resources, every US dollar that is outside the US means that resources have entered the US. The fact that many people hold large reserves of US dollars for oil trading purposes means that the US has been able to substantially expand its currency base without devaluing that currency - even where the trades are not strictly part of the US economy, the fact that those traders had to exchange something of value for US dollars just to get in the game means that the US effectively gets a free loan of resources just for printing some greenbacks.
So the US dollar is mostly not perceived for it's value in buying goods from US businesses, it's mostly for it's value in buying oil from Saudis! In fact, this makes the US dollar overvalued as a currency.
Now, more recently, people have been moving to trade for oil in Euros. The US has been opposed to this, not suprisingly, because sooner or later it's going to have to make good on all those free loans. People are going to want the value of all those US dollars back, and the only way of getting *real* value for them, as you pointed out, it to buy goods and services from US industry, which means that a large amount of "value" will have to rapidly depart the country.
The Foundation series also acknowledged the chaotic element internally, by later introducing a Second Foundation, educated in the ways of Psycho-History, and manipulating the political climate to maintain the integrity of the Seldon Plan.
To prevent the conclusion becoming a somewhat dull statistical inevitability, Asimov also introduced a true anomaly, the Mule, who could basically mind-control people, building up an Empire in the process. They only get The Plan back on track after some excitingly improbably risk taking.
I'd agree (and so did Asimov) that predictability is an illusion (or at least, more of an illusion the further into the future you look). But control is very real, and it takes a significant anomaly (like the Mule) to break control. As goverments and other powerful bodies become more adept at exercising control over the masses, it will only be the unexpected coming from left-of-field that serves to reduce that control.
This is a simplification : the Seldon Plan required the populace of the galaxy to be ignorant about Psycho-History so that their actions could be truly statistically determined. While the bulk of the population at present is ignorant of the kinds of trickery used to garner their vote, there always exists a significant minority that is aware of what is going on. Now, more than ever, that minority has the means to spread the word about this.
You have to be kidding. The only world source of Helium, is oddly enough, the atmosphere, because it's inert ; it doesn't form ores or compounds, and it's a gas. So it's distrubuted evenly over the surface over the whole planet.
The USA might presently have more plants to extract it from the air than anyone else, but the technology to do so is hardly rocket science and I'm sure the Chinese can knock together a few helium plants in short order.
**** potential spoiler ****
I always thought the deconstruction of Crichton and Aeryn into small red chunks was a hint ; It would make sense that the writers would have time to respond to being canned by the network. It looked to me like they were taken apart to be reconstructed at a later time, and that this was a giant hint that they might be doing that with the sets and props as well, as well as being a quiet thumbing-of-the-nose at the SciFi channel.
if the SP is designed correctly, the database has pre-optimized the query plan at compile-time and runtime execution is therefore much faster.
Actually, this isn't true of MSSQL2000. It was true of SQL7, which cached the execution plan as you describe, but SQL2k caches the plan in memory on first execution and flushes it periodically ; this isn't just true of stored procedures, which are now only stored as text, but applies to any statement executed by the db. This basically removes execution plan caching as an incentive to use stored procedures in SQL2k.
And coupons for things that they want you to start buying. Do you really think they're doing you a favour? There's no way they are making a loss on "sale" prices, so the more generous-looking the offer, the more they're screwing you by default.
- I didn't have to give out my name or address to get the card, so it's anonymous data
- The data from my purchases helps them run their store better, so everyone's happy
Well, no. The data from your purchases helps them ditch "unprofitable" customers, so they ain't happy.
Around 1999, the supermarket industry got wise that the larger part of their profit was being made from a small minority of customers, ones that buy high profit items (like premium ice-cream). The card data lets them profile what the "profitable" shopper buys, and they send coupons and stock the shelves to please them. In the mean time, they try and discourage "unprofitable" customer by shrinking shelfspace for the lines that they buy, and the "profit" guys don't. Because of this, they don't really care what your name is (like they ever did as long as they got your money). They just want to know your profile and work out whether they still want you as a customer.
It doesn't take an Einstein to work out that the end result is to phase out the cheap, low margin, staples that the lower income bracket depend on in favour of Haagen-Daaz and Organic Cider. So after stamping out the local Ma and Pa stores with agressive pricing of these basic goods, they want to be absolved of the responsibility of providing them because they have a low margin.
In the UK, this is fairly mild at present. You get a percentage discount (as redeemable coupons) and the odd (targetted) product coupon. Some lines have extra "points" on them but the price stays the same whether you have a card or not. I hear in the US some stores pretty much enforce the uptake of these cards by using punitive prices on some basic goods - like offering the "sale price" pretty much where it was before but raising the no-card price to a silly level. Although the UK market does have a number of synergistic loyalty cards that cover several outlets (e.g. Shopping + Fuel + Electric + Others).
Curiously, the Wal-Mart (Asda) stores in the UK are one of the few that don't have profiling cards. But I wouldn't be surprised if they were tying shopping records to one-way hashes of payment card info (or if anyone else was).
In the meantime, can you imagine the opportunities afforded by RFID? No more do they have to offer the semblance of "loyalty" to get their profile data - they can just tie the purchase logs to the RFID in your shoes. Chains that collaborate can start tying clothes preferences to food preferences to any other preference, tracking your movement through stores (no purchase required!), hell, even noting how long you pause in front of the rack of iPods, with sub-floor RFID pickups. (<Marketroid>"He stopped and drooled for 10 minutes today, send him another brochure!")
DataGlyphs can embed quite a lot more than a "don't copy" notice in document backgrounds. The uses for this kind of thing are manifold... not only could you use it to block reproduction, you could feasibly incorporate these into, say, the backdrops on documents, fairly unobstrusively. You could embed data for your own purposes, or more scarily, your application could embed information like a tracking GUID.
Much less pleasant than a copy-block, because there are no obvious signs of it going on.
Slashdot Mirror
$2.95M goes a lot further in South Korea. Instead of sending all that money abroad, they'll be funding their own people to install, configure and develop FOSS for Korean needs. I'm willing to bet that even handsome wages in Korea are a lot cheaper than their western equivalents.
Now imagine that instead of a phrasebook, you had to buy a universal translator. And the only people that made them was the burger vendors ; the translator is expensive enough that you'd really only want to buy one. And they don't work as well in the other big chains, and forget using it at Honest Als Burger Shack. And Pizza Hut? Ahahaha.
You're pretty much gonna have to eat Whoppers. The language of burger flippers is complicated, some say deliberately so, and people have a hard time deciphering it. Now, some of the other establishments produce translators that work on BurgerKing-ese. But they're not perfect (although in some cases their grammar is technically better). It would be so much easier if they had access to a proper BK dictionary.
But BK don't want that. They want people to keep buying Whoppers, and avoid the other chains because they speak a "funny" language (some of them don't even have pretty menus!) Now some politos are pestering them. They don't want them to give away the secret recipe (although it's not really a secret anymore, and there are a lot of people who say that the other chains have better sandwiches, or even prefer grilling their own). They don't have to give away the secret recipe ; they just have to make it easier for people to order burgers.
I guess Microsoft are a bit like Burger King ; they do want us to keep buying Whoppers....
I believe there were some ideas about keeping it to license payers only, but in practice I can't see how this could be enforced without DRM.
A plank of the proposed distribution mechanisms was P2P technologies. Another plank is the Dirac codec, a wavelet-based video compression codec the BBC has open-sourced.
Somehow, you can't imagine purely commercial concerns even contemplating such things.
I have my concerns over this re-organisation. While the stated aims are laudable (I'm sick of programming gems like "Pets Win Prizes by Changing Which Rooms they Swap Wives In"), I think it likely that this is a calculated move to decrease the popularity of the BBC to the point where a more direct assualt could succeed.
People joke about things that would make them leave the country, like the election of a particular idiot, or the passing of a particular law. I think the demise or emasculation of the BBC would be one reason I'd consider exile from Britain. Long Live Auntie Beeb!
Hell, VB6 supported differential access levels for property Get / Set routines ; I'm surprised, now that you point it out, that VB.NET and C# don't.
One of the features of VB6 I found useful!
The fact that, after you reach a certain point, the money isn't going to improve your quality of life any? You may as well be trying to get a highscore on Galaxian for all the worth it brings to your life.
On the other hand, that does money represent an awful lot of resources that poorer people could be using.
I'm not saying that this makes copyright theft legal (of course it doesn't - the copyright holders helped to make the laws). I'm not saying that the people indulging in copyright infringement are the same as those needy people who could do with more resources - quite the opposite, they can obviously afford broadband and a nifty computer. But I am pointing out, that for a lot of those people, they enjoy this kind of content but don't see the reason to help the people at the top of the money pyramid increase their "highscore".
I have cable. I am not motivated to watch it. The cable box is present because it's part of my phone/broadband package. It's actually located under my desk in my office (because when I moved in, I had no television, just a TV card). I have no extra channel packages beyond basic.
Here's the thing : there *are* things on cable I'd like to watch. I like movies. I like Sci-fi. But I can't stomach paying for TV which has a 1:3 commercial ratio, and I don't want a channel bundle where I'll only watch one out of maybe five channels ; why the hell should I pay for content I don't watch?
So this seems an ideal solution to me. More democratic and better value for money. To be honest, even with the huge number of people who presently watch "reality" TV, can you actually imagine people pro-actively purchasing it? With any luck, that kind of dross would dry up and be reduced to a minority viewership (which is all it would need to stay afloat, given its low production cost/value).
There's still room for big companies in this model. They could continue to produce pilots and broadcast them FTA. "Want to see more of this? Push your red button / visit a website and buy some points in the production company!" In fact, it's hard to see how a fan group could produce a show from the ground up.
We fund the production of these shows anyway, through our cable/satellite fees, and through the ad budgets of the products we buy. Wouldn't it be better if we could just be more direct about where our money was going?
(NB - I live in the UK, where public-broadcast television is not universally crap, and the commercial/content ratio is much higher on the FTA commercial channels).
On the other hand, there's potentially tremendous variance in the source material.
My thought was to apply a hash to the SSN before storing it - if everyone uses a different key to generate their hashes, you gain the benefits of using SSN as an identifier.
- No-one has to record or remember multiple ID numbers
- Everyone is using a familiar data structure
Without the disadvantages
- No-one, including people with direct access to the data, can steal a list of SSNs from the database.
- Or cross-tie the records to other databases for "Synergistic Market Analysis" (unless they use the same crypto keys as their partners).
ICANN's projected budget for 2003-2004 was in the region of $6M, and they looked pretty close to be breaking even.
What the holy badger-fuck are they going to do with another $3.8M? A 63% budget increase? Is the internet going to get 63% bigger? Or are they going to try to have 63% more fun? (from this looks of this, they need to try......)
The US government were originally so afraid of PGP that they imprisoned its author for "trafficing arms". It's probably the most peer-reviewed encryption software in the world.
I'd rather trust PGP than any government-recommended scheme any day. Take Clipper ; the inbuilt key escrow killed it from day one - even PHBs were not going to bend over for that one, given the record of gov.us in the matter of taking foreign trade secrets by surveillance and using them to benefit domestic companies.
It was liver. Kidneys are very, very complicated. Whereas livers are merely very complicated. To produce functional kidney, you'd have to reproduce a complex three dimensional plumbing arrangement that's basically natures reverse-osmosis desalination plant. Liver, on the other hand, is more like a coffee filter that happens to also manufacture digestive fluids, and is relatively simple in comparison.
A pilonidal cyst is an accumulation of hair and infected sebaceous secretions that occurs under the skin in the natal cleft (i.e. - your butt crack). It stinks unpleasantly and is generally caused by having a fat sweaty arse that you sit upon all day. Often occurs in jeep drivers in hot climates.
This kind of error would generally not occur in Visual Basic applications, as the 16-bit Integer type IS inherently signed, but the runtime also checks for overflows on every arithmetic operation.
To reproduce this behaviour, you'd either have to uncheck certain compiler options (which are rarely turned off, and to my knowledge not available in Access Basic), or do all your mathematics with bitwise arithmetic routines that are tedious and difficult to write in VB.
A short test reveals that this is the case ; with overflow checks off, Integer rolls around as described. But the code refuses to run in debug mode ; the compiler options do not apply.
It's far more likely that the code responsible for this is written in C/C++, as overflow checks are easier to ignore.
Of course, it's possible that some idiot has turned off the overflow checks in the hope of seeing some tangible performance gain.
I mean, this is an organisation that only recently ditched X.400 email. Most of their practices are either paper-based, or use outmoded legacy systems that no-one understands anymore, because the coders responsible for their creation have been downsized long ago.
Hardly anything is designed with interoperability in mind ; I have personally resorted to screen-scraping chunks of VT100 terminal output because the other supplier had no handle on their ancient pathology system (and possibly didn't even have the sourcecode).
The resistance to change is enormous, and not without justification; the overall experience of NHS professionals of IT projects is bad.
And why? Healthcare is almost certainly one of the most challenging problem domains for IT projects in existence. Not only does it require the reliability and robustness of the banking industry, the informational complexity of the subject matter exceeds most other problem domains in human usage. Even the everyday things like the prescription and administration of drugs are horrendously complex ; the computerisation of a full medical record is something that I would describe as more challenging than a dozen Manhattan Projects.
In all, this is an area where the potential benefits are tremendous - even a small reduction of the estimated 70% of working time that a junior doctor spends doing paperwork instead of caring for patients would be an enormous boon. An hour a week saved per ward (very realistic even with basic electronic prescribing systems) essentially amounts to an average sized hospital getting a free doctor. In a cash-strapped, overburdened NHS, every little thing helps.
The potential for public benefit is enormous, and I would suggest that this should be a matter for public research. Instead of pouring these funds into the pockets of shareholders of enormous foreign companies, gov.uk should found a number of public projects, all bound over to interoperate freely, all open-source, and trial them.
But unlikely to happen, with the corporates back-handing government so effectively. With the recent funding changes for NHS IT, the funds are effectively placed in the hands of a very few huge monolithic corporations, who then decide who to subcontract to. As a result, smaller, more innovative companies are either shoved out of their niche, bought out, or try to compete on an equal footing with the giants and get crushed in the scrum. Money will haemorrhage into the pockets of foreign shareholders (iSoft, Schlumberger-Sema, etc.).
Yet another reason I'm glad I no longer work for the NHS.
You cannot employ people at almost 10-50 times a higher rate than your target market to produce a increase in profits and share price.
Entirely true, and a shame that companies never realise this about their own executives before they start outsourcing.
Goods, services, we'll boil all these down to the same concept of "value". Now then, a few basic assumptions.
There is a limited amount of value that can be extracted from a human worker. In order to take value from a human, you must pay him value. The amount of value the person is prepared to work for varies with his circumstances ; this is usually linked to location.
This will continue to accelerate until something bad happens. As companies move more of their labour into "slave" economies, where the workers cannot hope to afford the products they are producing, the value drains in two directions. A small amount to the sweatshops, and the bulk upwards to the shareholders, who will presumably be the only people who can afford to purchase the products of their companies.
So effectively, you will have a class of people who tell a whole bunch of other people what to do, and reap all the rewards of their labour, without giving them shit for their trouble. This is a slave economy. It differs from todays economy only in terms of scale ; instead of the bulk of people being self-employed (as blacksmiths and other autonomous tradesmen), we mostly all work for entities that are not striving for our causes, but theirs.
In fact, as far as I can make out, the US has laws that require a business to excercise all due diligence to maximise value for it's shareholders, and other considerations be damned. So the very law of the land says "Thou shalt fuck thy fellow man over for a percentage".
And this is the "Land of the Free and Home of the Brave?"
The best way so far of capturing wax recordings and the like is to run the disk under a high-resolution scanner and use a piece of software to render the image of the grooves as a waveform ; this involves no physical wear of the medium. In fact, I'd think that a commercial version of this could well catch on for old-timers with large vinyl collections....
Standard /. conspiracy theory follows : It's all a plot by Microsoft.
ISO can tie a standard down in a tangled mess of beaurocracy ; while this might bring credibility it also runs the risk of preventing OOo evolving its formats as fast as it would like to.
Which is something that M$ sure would like, as OOo is now getting to the point where it can start to compete with MS Office.
The largest use of the US Dollar in foreign markets is the purchase of oil - in fact, for a long time the US Dollar has been the de facto currency of oil trading, mostly because of its perceived stability.
The US has consequently benefited tremendously ; because money is traded for resources, every US dollar that is outside the US means that resources have entered the US. The fact that many people hold large reserves of US dollars for oil trading purposes means that the US has been able to substantially expand its currency base without devaluing that currency - even where the trades are not strictly part of the US economy, the fact that those traders had to exchange something of value for US dollars just to get in the game means that the US effectively gets a free loan of resources just for printing some greenbacks.
So the US dollar is mostly not perceived for it's value in buying goods from US businesses, it's mostly for it's value in buying oil from Saudis! In fact, this makes the US dollar overvalued as a currency.
Now, more recently, people have been moving to trade for oil in Euros. The US has been opposed to this, not suprisingly, because sooner or later it's going to have to make good on all those free loans. People are going to want the value of all those US dollars back, and the only way of getting *real* value for them, as you pointed out, it to buy goods and services from US industry, which means that a large amount of "value" will have to rapidly depart the country.
Less value means a lower quality of life.
To prevent the conclusion becoming a somewhat dull statistical inevitability, Asimov also introduced a true anomaly, the Mule, who could basically mind-control people, building up an Empire in the process. They only get The Plan back on track after some excitingly improbably risk taking.
I'd agree (and so did Asimov) that predictability is an illusion (or at least, more of an illusion the further into the future you look). But control is very real, and it takes a significant anomaly (like the Mule) to break control. As goverments and other powerful bodies become more adept at exercising control over the masses, it will only be the unexpected coming from left-of-field that serves to reduce that control.
This is a simplification : the Seldon Plan required the populace of the galaxy to be ignorant about Psycho-History so that their actions could be truly statistically determined. While the bulk of the population at present is ignorant of the kinds of trickery used to garner their vote, there always exists a significant minority that is aware of what is going on. Now, more than ever, that minority has the means to spread the word about this.
So why aren't they?
You have to be kidding. The only world source of Helium, is oddly enough, the atmosphere, because it's inert ; it doesn't form ores or compounds, and it's a gas. So it's distrubuted evenly over the surface over the whole planet.
The USA might presently have more plants to extract it from the air than anyone else, but the technology to do so is hardly rocket science and I'm sure the Chinese can knock together a few helium plants in short order.
Adelman was an advisor on "Sneakers".
**** potential spoiler **** I always thought the deconstruction of Crichton and Aeryn into small red chunks was a hint ; It would make sense that the writers would have time to respond to being canned by the network. It looked to me like they were taken apart to be reconstructed at a later time, and that this was a giant hint that they might be doing that with the sets and props as well, as well as being a quiet thumbing-of-the-nose at the SciFi channel.
Actually, this isn't true of MSSQL2000. It was true of SQL7, which cached the execution plan as you describe, but SQL2k caches the plan in memory on first execution and flushes it periodically ; this isn't just true of stored procedures, which are now only stored as text, but applies to any statement executed by the db. This basically removes execution plan caching as an incentive to use stored procedures in SQL2k.
And coupons for things that they want you to start buying. Do you really think they're doing you a favour? There's no way they are making a loss on "sale" prices, so the more generous-looking the offer, the more they're screwing you by default.
A good site for this stuff.
- I didn't have to give out my name or address to get the card, so it's anonymous data
- The data from my purchases helps them run their store better, so everyone's happy
Well, no. The data from your purchases helps them ditch "unprofitable" customers, so they ain't happy.
Around 1999, the supermarket industry got wise that the larger part of their profit was being made from a small minority of customers, ones that buy high profit items (like premium ice-cream). The card data lets them profile what the "profitable" shopper buys, and they send coupons and stock the shelves to please them. In the mean time, they try and discourage "unprofitable" customer by shrinking shelfspace for the lines that they buy, and the "profit" guys don't. Because of this, they don't really care what your name is (like they ever did as long as they got your money). They just want to know your profile and work out whether they still want you as a customer.
It doesn't take an Einstein to work out that the end result is to phase out the cheap, low margin, staples that the lower income bracket depend on in favour of Haagen-Daaz and Organic Cider. So after stamping out the local Ma and Pa stores with agressive pricing of these basic goods, they want to be absolved of the responsibility of providing them because they have a low margin.
In the UK, this is fairly mild at present. You get a percentage discount (as redeemable coupons) and the odd (targetted) product coupon. Some lines have extra "points" on them but the price stays the same whether you have a card or not. I hear in the US some stores pretty much enforce the uptake of these cards by using punitive prices on some basic goods - like offering the "sale price" pretty much where it was before but raising the no-card price to a silly level. Although the UK market does have a number of synergistic loyalty cards that cover several outlets (e.g. Shopping + Fuel + Electric + Others).
Curiously, the Wal-Mart (Asda) stores in the UK are one of the few that don't have profiling cards. But I wouldn't be surprised if they were tying shopping records to one-way hashes of payment card info (or if anyone else was).
In the meantime, can you imagine the opportunities afforded by RFID? No more do they have to offer the semblance of "loyalty" to get their profile data - they can just tie the purchase logs to the RFID in your shoes. Chains that collaborate can start tying clothes preferences to food preferences to any other preference, tracking your movement through stores (no purchase required!), hell, even noting how long you pause in front of the rack of iPods, with sub-floor RFID pickups. (<Marketroid>"He stopped and drooled for 10 minutes today, send him another brochure!")
Much less pleasant than a copy-block, because there are no obvious signs of it going on.