Sort of. The only times I saw these in Staples, they were $4.99 each. For a bunch of second run "test" titles. Nothing I wanted to watch.
Redbox works at around $1.00 $5 for a piece of crap movie, No thanks. I even considered buying one, then keeping it in a CO2 or nitrogen atmosphere, but there weren't any movies that I wanted to watch, at any price.
Although, it would be cool to have your DVD player in an acrylic box, with dry ice effects every time you open it.
Investments in lobbyists and campaign donations have the highest return rate of anything companies can buy. Check out How Much Would It Cost To Buy Congress Back From Special Interests? for some numbers to consider. I also like their suggestion that the required uniform for all lobbyists should be a clown suit.
I like the clown suit idea, but I question the cost effectiveness of lobbying. During the Jack Abramof (sp?) hearings, it was disclosed that he took millions from some Indian tribes, and they got squat. Mostly people just look at the bribery "successes", because that's what gets politicians caught. How many times does a congressperson take some money and delivery nothing of any importance, or "deliver" a vote that would have gone that way anyway?
Can the ROI of lobbying really be measured.
Neither has anyone else. Such a test doesn't exist. Any competent Psychologist can game any psychological test. Even fMRI has to be "interpreted", so it's validity has been questioned.
Politicians are always attempting to be experts at everything. This failure is magnified when they start talking about the Internet, because on the Internet, everyone's an expert.
Right?
On the other hand, when they want an expert in something like the damage caused by coal mining, they'll bring in a coal mining executive, because, hey, who has more experience with coal mining than a CEO?
If you had a central clearing house where a bill's serial number could be checked, it wouldn't have to be digitally signed. When a bill tries to enter the system from a new place, the secret service could be dispatched. You wouldn't have to track every bill, just a sampling. Every bank and ATM that dispenses money could record and forward the serial numbers.
Feynman also demonstrated that the Challenger disaster might have been caused by faulty O-rings by dipping one into his ice-water, using a C-Clamp to test it.
That, and it's "Zombie-Feynman" in the comic. Let's zombify you, and see if you don't lose some rigor. (mortis that is)
"When I was in school, there wasn't a single teacher that had any idea how to start and run a small business. (Except, perhaps for the ones that left to do just that, and they weren't teaching business)"
Of course not, a teacher is a teacher is a teacher, they are interchangeable professionals and can teach anything to anybody - as long as you make sure you give them a copy of the text book that has all the answers.
Sorry, I'm missing your point. Are you saying it's not reasonable to expect a school teacher to have real world experience?
Good point, normal kids should have normal role models and normal aspirations.
In my kid's school, when they study people, they study the outliers, Presidents, civil rights leaders, inventors. (Some never graduated school) My oldest has always earned straight 'A's, and always tests at 99 percentile. She *is* an outlier.
I don't have anything against people who graduated College. I have a CS degree and my wife has a PhD., but I won't discount a successful person that doesn't have the educational certifications.
I second what you say about sports stars. Being a genetic outlier doesn't tell a kid anything to help them if the child is not genetically gifted. But, I suspect that following the advice of Bill G. *could* be useful to someone starting a small business.
Wow, I've seen companies pay Millions of dollars for software that was buggy, difficult to use, and extremely dangerous. And then, once they've spent the millions, managers would require its use, and defend the purchased to the (corporate) death.
How would this work for a product that's so reliable and so easy for most end users to figure out that it doesn't need a lot of support/services/consulting?
Where I work, I've only see about two cases where the software I support actually had an issue in the last 6 years. All the other times I'm paid to be oncall to help other users of our system figure out their problems.
It's not good enough for a given piece of software to be perfect, you have to be able to prove that your system is working when everything else is broken. There's always a role for support for any non-trivial system. i.e. any system that is necessary to make money.
"Life expectancy of the blind is usually less than half that of someone with eyesight the same age."
That's according to http://www.cureblindness.org/world-blindness/ which probably includes lots of accidents which are non-health related deaths. (Wow, there's a concept. He's dead, but a *healthy* sort of dead.)
Why not have a few college dropouts teach at schools? (Assuming they are successful in some aspect of their lives)
The people who teach and lead in the school system, did well in the school system. Getting people for whom the current system works to teach and run the schools leads to a system just like it was before.
If you have a system that is running at 100% efficiency, as well as it can, then it makes sense to put the same kind of people in charge year after year. But if it isn't, then perhaps it's time to shake things up.
When I was in school, there wasn't a single teacher that had any idea how to start and run a small business. (Except, perhaps for the ones that left to do just that, and they weren't teaching business) Leadership was always mentioned as being important and necessary to get into a good university and do well in life, but there were zero classes in leadership. You were just supposed to learn it by osmosis.
1) Will the Billionaires try to make more people like themselves, or more worker drones?
2) If the Billionaires will freely give us the secrets to being Billionaires, do we want our kids to become Billionaires?
If my child grew up to be Warren Buffet, I wouldn't be too upset, but I don't want my kids to be or marry a Don Trump.
A side question is "Do the Billionaires really know how they got where they are, and can they teach it?" (If they inherited their initial money, they will have a hard time teaching kids how to do that.)
a modern high efficiency wood stove might sufficiently solve the problem to the point that it renders the solar stove unnecessary.
Also, a wood stove is a stored solar powered stove. You don't have to burn only wood in it, just woody material. Which comes from growing stuff in sunlight. One of the best converters of Sunlight to burnable biomass is hemp. You can use the fiber to make ropes/clothes/paper, then use the rest as fuel.
You can substitute mass for automatic control. As long as it heats up slowly, and cools slowly, manual temperature control is fine. On an outdoor brick/mud oven, you use a damper to control the amount of air that can get to the fire.
You'll have to wait for the Redigi case to play out. If the courts decide that downloaded music can't be sold used, they might also evaporate in a divorce. One downloaded song certainly can't be used by both parties after they separate.
The DEA imposes an artificial scarcity on a chemical, and the drug companies crank that though their models to maximize profit. What's the surprise here? That the DEA doesn't have any non-partisan economists on staff?
Yes, the total amount of the raw material might be enough for the demand, but people have been making fortunes profiting from local shortages since, like, forever.
The problem is that right after you don't buy into the hype (and expensive products), some less-than-cluefull employee will give out his/her password over the phone, or download and run some malicious attachment.
Please note that the expensive solution being sold won't work any better than your leopard amulet, but you might be able to keep your job if you bought the "Industry Leading Solution", because, hey, how could you have done better than that?
Don't hearing aids have magnetic detectors to work with telephones better? If that's the case with your hearing aids, you might be detecting high frequency magnetics that other people won't be able to hear.
Yes, that works too, but stay away from something that might be illegal in the target country.
I propose a new form of encryption called Turtles. Under Turtles when you decrypt an encrypted text, you get another text, that may or may not be the "real" text. You can then decrypt that, and get another text, on and on. The "Key", is knowing when to stop. (Implementation details are left to the reader)
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The problem is public acceptance.
Sort of. The only times I saw these in Staples, they were $4.99 each. For a bunch of second run "test" titles. Nothing I wanted to watch.
Redbox works at around $1.00 $5 for a piece of crap movie, No thanks. I even considered buying one, then keeping it in a CO2 or nitrogen atmosphere, but there weren't any movies that I wanted to watch, at any price.
Although, it would be cool to have your DVD player in an acrylic box, with dry ice effects every time you open it.
Is MINIX singnificantly easier to try new concepts and develop OS prototypes vs. GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, Mach, and others?
Is it easier to instrument? If you learn something from a test, is it applicable to the real world?
Serious answers only. What does Minix offer that GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, et. al. offer?
Investments in lobbyists and campaign donations have the highest return rate of anything companies can buy. Check out How Much Would It Cost To Buy Congress Back From Special Interests? for some numbers to consider. I also like their suggestion that the required uniform for all lobbyists should be a clown suit.
I like the clown suit idea, but I question the cost effectiveness of lobbying. During the Jack Abramof (sp?) hearings, it was disclosed that he took millions from some Indian tribes, and they got squat. Mostly people just look at the bribery "successes", because that's what gets politicians caught. How many times does a congressperson take some money and delivery nothing of any importance, or "deliver" a vote that would have gone that way anyway?
Can the ROI of lobbying really be measured.
Neither has anyone else. Such a test doesn't exist. Any competent Psychologist can game any psychological test. Even fMRI has to be "interpreted", so it's validity has been questioned.
Politicians are always attempting to be experts at everything. This failure is magnified when they start talking about the Internet, because on the Internet, everyone's an expert.
Right?
On the other hand, when they want an expert in something like the damage caused by coal mining, they'll bring in a coal mining executive, because, hey, who has more experience with coal mining than a CEO?
If you had a central clearing house where a bill's serial number could be checked, it wouldn't have to be digitally signed. When a bill tries to enter the system from a new place, the secret service could be dispatched. You wouldn't have to track every bill, just a sampling. Every bank and ATM that dispenses money could record and forward the serial numbers.
The Chinese are more aggressive when they catch your money mules.
Feynman also demonstrated that the Challenger disaster might have been caused by faulty O-rings by dipping one into his ice-water, using a C-Clamp to test it.
That, and it's "Zombie-Feynman" in the comic. Let's zombify you, and see if you don't lose some rigor. (mortis that is)
Of course not, a teacher is a teacher is a teacher, they are interchangeable professionals and can teach anything to anybody - as long as you make sure you give them a copy of the text book that has all the answers.
Sorry, I'm missing your point. Are you saying it's not reasonable to expect a school teacher to have real world experience?
Good point, normal kids should have normal role models and normal aspirations.
In my kid's school, when they study people, they study the outliers, Presidents, civil rights leaders, inventors. (Some never graduated school) My oldest has always earned straight 'A's, and always tests at 99 percentile. She *is* an outlier.
I don't have anything against people who graduated College. I have a CS degree and my wife has a PhD., but I won't discount a successful person that doesn't have the educational certifications.
I second what you say about sports stars. Being a genetic outlier doesn't tell a kid anything to help them if the child is not genetically gifted. But, I suspect that following the advice of Bill G. *could* be useful to someone starting a small business.
Wow, I've seen companies pay Millions of dollars for software that was buggy, difficult to use, and extremely dangerous. And then, once they've spent the millions, managers would require its use, and defend the purchased to the (corporate) death.
How would this work for a product that's so reliable and so easy for most end users to figure out that it doesn't need a lot of support/services/consulting?
Where I work, I've only see about two cases where the software I support actually had an issue in the last 6 years. All the other times I'm paid to be oncall to help other users of our system figure out their problems.
It's not good enough for a given piece of software to be perfect, you have to be able to prove that your system is working when everything else is broken. There's always a role for support for any non-trivial system. i.e. any system that is necessary to make money.
I've worked for many large companies, and none of them ever paid "list price". Nobody pays list. It'd be like paying sticker price on a new car.
Of course they all thought they were getting a discount for being so large. Similar to the "Lake Wobegon Effect", where every child is above average.
"Life expectancy of the blind is usually less than half that of someone with eyesight the same age."
That's according to http://www.cureblindness.org/world-blindness/ which probably includes lots of accidents which are non-health related deaths. (Wow, there's a concept. He's dead, but a *healthy* sort of dead.)
Should college dropouts rule our schools?
Why not have a few college dropouts teach at schools? (Assuming they are successful in some aspect of their lives)
The people who teach and lead in the school system, did well in the school system. Getting people for whom the current system works to teach and run the schools leads to a system just like it was before.
If you have a system that is running at 100% efficiency, as well as it can, then it makes sense to put the same kind of people in charge year after year. But if it isn't, then perhaps it's time to shake things up.
When I was in school, there wasn't a single teacher that had any idea how to start and run a small business. (Except, perhaps for the ones that left to do just that, and they weren't teaching business) Leadership was always mentioned as being important and necessary to get into a good university and do well in life, but there were zero classes in leadership. You were just supposed to learn it by osmosis.
Should billionaires rule our schools?
First answer these questions:
1) Will the Billionaires try to make more people like themselves, or more worker drones?
2) If the Billionaires will freely give us the secrets to being Billionaires, do we want our kids to become Billionaires?
If my child grew up to be Warren Buffet, I wouldn't be too upset, but I don't want my kids to be or marry a Don Trump.
A side question is "Do the Billionaires really know how they got where they are, and can they teach it?" (If they inherited their initial money, they will have a hard time teaching kids how to do that.)
a modern high efficiency wood stove might sufficiently solve the problem to the point that it renders the solar stove unnecessary.
Also, a wood stove is a stored solar powered stove. You don't have to burn only wood in it, just woody material. Which comes from growing stuff in sunlight. One of the best converters of Sunlight to burnable biomass is hemp. You can use the fiber to make ropes/clothes/paper, then use the rest as fuel.
This is correct.
You can substitute mass for automatic control. As long as it heats up slowly, and cools slowly, manual temperature control is fine. On an outdoor brick/mud oven, you use a damper to control the amount of air that can get to the fire.
Someone must be paying the lawyers just to hassle Linux generally and/or IBM specifically.
You'll have to wait for the Redigi case to play out. If the courts decide that downloaded music can't be sold used, they might also evaporate in a divorce. One downloaded song certainly can't be used by both parties after they separate.
The DEA imposes an artificial scarcity on a chemical, and the drug companies crank that though their models to maximize profit. What's the surprise here? That the DEA doesn't have any non-partisan economists on staff?
Yes, the total amount of the raw material might be enough for the demand, but people have been making fortunes profiting from local shortages since, like, forever.
The problem is that right after you don't buy into the hype (and expensive products), some less-than-cluefull employee will give out his/her password over the phone, or download and run some malicious attachment.
Please note that the expensive solution being sold won't work any better than your leopard amulet, but you might be able to keep your job if you bought the "Industry Leading Solution", because, hey, how could you have done better than that?
Don't hearing aids have magnetic detectors to work with telephones better? If that's the case with your hearing aids, you might be detecting high frequency magnetics that other people won't be able to hear.
Yes, that works too, but stay away from something that might be illegal in the target country.
I propose a new form of encryption called Turtles. Under Turtles when you decrypt an encrypted text, you get another text, that may or may not be the "real" text. You can then decrypt that, and get another text, on and on. The "Key", is knowing when to stop. (Implementation details are left to the reader)