Problem with seaweeds is that a lot of them are actually cooperative algae (like kelp). A heavy rain causes a pond to overflow or a seagull leave a pond with some stuck to its feathers and now it's in the wild. I hope that the petroleum-excreting algae continue to be utter failures for that reason.
It's not going to matter one bit, someone in charge of a Black Budget in the Pentagon is going to think it's a good idea. Remember what the Pentagon did when Commander-In-Chief President Clinton directly ordered the military to stop all work on bio-weapons? Renamed the project, moved it to the Black Budget, and didn't even skip a beat.
If one ignores the consumer releases that rule doesn't hold up at all. Windows 3.11, Windows for Workgroups, was truly transformative in the work space. NT 3.51, with its domain structure, authentication, groups and NTFS was also transformative to the office network. NT 4.0 was a step up, but Windows 2000 server and workstation with Active Directory and Group Policies were also another giant leap forward. XP/Server 2003 and Server 2008 have been incremental, as has Win 7. I've so far been spared the annoyance of dealing with Server 2012/Win8, but I haven't heard much boasting about advances there.
This. I've worked on the MS campus quite a few times over the years and there are a lot of brilliant, dedicated people who work there. We didn't have a dedicated area to work in so generally set up shop in the common areas, and ended up overhearing a **LOT** of complaints about incompetent and clueless management. Dilbert-level stupid shit, guys who would give the PHB and Catbert a run for their money. Not to mention Ballmer's insane annual review process, which had team members volunteering to rotate the 'failing' rating among them to keep the team from being destroyed.
Once again, the MBA Disease strikes deeply at US businesses.
To be truthful, 90% of every version of Office since 4.3 has been wasted on 90% of end users. I do more complex things than most people, and I really can't justify using an office suite for something more complex than extracting data from a database and throwing it in a pivot table. Anything more than that really should be done with specialized tools. I'm not really sure what a "better office suite" would look like.
Don't confuse the Libertardians with facts. Five or six decades ago municipal monopolies were granted to cable companies because it was the only way to guarantee that local taxpayers could get the service installed (competition existed then, no one was going to install expensive infrastructure that took 20 years to amortize any other way). Either they haven't figured out that those monopolies went away decades ago, or else it just makes too good a sound bite to abandon just because it's wrong.
That's the potable water, they're not irrigating open fields with it (that's where most of the wastewater goes if I'm not mistaken.) Ask Palestinians about water and you'll get a different story.
"The West Bank's main resource of natural water is groundwater from the Mountain Aquifer, most of it derived from rainfall and snowmelt on the Palestinian side of the Green Line. Israel abstracts about 80% of it.[8] In Gaza, the only source of natural fresh water is the Coastal Aquifer, which is heavily over-exploited and salinated as the result of seawater intrusion. The development of seawater desalination is hampered by the blockade of the Gaza Strip . . . Israel extracts more water from the West Bank than agreed in the Oslo Accord, while Palestinian abstractions were within the agreed range. Contrary to expectations under Oslo II, the water actually abstracted by Palestinians in the West Bank has dropped between 1999 and 2007. Due to the Israeli over-extraction, aquifer levels are near the point where irreversible damage is done to the aquifer. Israeli wells in the West Bank have dried up local Palestinian wells and springs."
Actually I was originally told about the Palestinian water situation by an Israeli, a "settler", who was quite proud of it.
When we lived in Peru our water came from a faucet down the street, you become very conscious of every drop you use when you have to carry it in a bucket for two blocks. My wife, myself and our 8 year-old nephew went through an average of 4 gallons/day normal usage, plus about 15 gallons on (hand washed) laundry day. I wouldn't expect USAians to live that way of course, but that's not an unreasonable amount of water to use.
Uh, no. Israel exports food from the desert by tapping irreplaceable 'fossil water' deposited during the last ice age. Wells in the Palestinian territories are dropping by as much as a meter a year (and they need permission from the IDF to deepen them), and on the coast salt water is intruding on the wells (the Gaza desalination plant is one of the IDF's first targets every time the bomb). Some urban areas of Israel desalinate water, but no one is doing it with thorium reactors and the very, very small amount of desalinated water used in agriculture is used in greenhouses that (because of the cost) go to great lengths to recapture and recycle as much as possible. No one is irrigating fields with it.
Actually it appears that the gene for red hair present in Neanderthals is different than the gene causing red hair in Cro Magnons and their descendents. Parallel evolution, apparently. There are other genes though, and they tend to be more prevalent in European populations than elsewhere. Denesovian genes are also present in European and Asian populations, and an influx from another 'unknown' hominid as well is found in several Asian populations. The book 'Children of the Ice Age' brings up some of that, although I think the red hair gene was in a Scientific American article a few months back.
I'd think that the answer was pretty obvious, but it doesn't seem to be. You make widgets, you're producing. You manage people who make the widgets, you still have a part in their production. You hand off all the work and all of the management to someone else and lie in the sun on the beach all day, what are you producing? Empty beer bottles, not widgets. Your company may be merrily producing widgets by the trainload, but you aren't. You sell the company to me, I sit in the next beach chair, I'm not producing widgets either. I walk into the factory, start doing something related to the factory's function, and now I'm taking part in production.
I'm really not clear on why this is such a difficult concept. Speculating in stocks, currency, food, minerals, whatever, is not a productive operation, you're not actually making anything. At the end of his 80 hour work week what has the stockborker actually produced? A kindergarten student planting sunflower seeds has grown something. Accumulating wealth is not the same as being productive.
the original purchaser wouldn't have purchased had they not known there was a secondary-sale market
That's a relatively new development, and one which points up the strictly speculative nature of stocks today. The traditional model of stock ownership was to purchase the stock with the intention that dividends would pay for the purchase over time. That was why one held stocks for long periods, it took a while to pay them off and actually start making money on them. It's only been since the stock boom of the '90s that one purchased stocks with the idea that the way to make money on them was to pump the price up and then dump them on someone else before the next crash in a game of financial 'musical chairs'.
Stocks and Bitcoins have exactly the same value: whatever some other person will pay you for it. Your 100 shares of NetJ.com produce nothing. Half a century ago if you owned stock you had a voice in the company's operations and generally received some portion of the company's profit, you could actually be viewed as a partial owner in the company, but those days are long gone. Today that 100 shares gets you no say in how the company is run, no portion of any profits, and if it closes tomorrow you don't even get a share of whatever value the company is liquidated for.
If I offer to sell you 1/100th of my garden for $10 and tell you up front that 1) you have no say over what (if anything) I plant, 2) you don't get any portion of anything that I grow, 3) if I sell my produce you don't get any of the money, 4) if I sell my property tomorrow you don't get any part of the sale price, would you be eager to buy? After all you're buying a share of ownership of the means of production!
FWIW, I think Bitcoin is an even dumber idea than that of modern stock ownership.
I don't give a flying flip if you own 0.001% of NetJ.com, did you PRODUCE anything with that purchase? No. You seem to confuse being wealthy with being productive, the two have nothing to do with each other. Paris Hilton may be rich but I have trouble coming up with anything of value that she produces. Fertilizer, I suppose.
Go buy 100 shares of NetJ.com and tell my what you have produced. Some broker made a pittance, and that's it. And just what does that 100 shares get you, besides a piece of paper (or more likely a collection of electrons) that proclaims you their proud owner? Can you tell the company management what to do? No. Do you get part of the company's revenue? Almost certainly not. If the company closes its doors tomorrow do you get as much as a stick of furniture? Nope. Its only value to you is the amount you can sell it for. Maybe you'll be able to sell that 100 shares tomorrow for 10x what you paid today, or maybe 1/10. You're just gambling, producing nothing real, just some paper profits if you're lucky or well-informed.
Your stock ownership PRODUCES absolutely nothing. You might get rich by it, but you haven't actually made anything.
I build a pie factory and sell you 1/8th of it, did you produce anything? Other than a paycheck for whatever lawyers and realtors were involved, no. My point stands, stock ownership has nothing to do with actually producing anything. Stockholders are nothing more than the biggest, fattest group of gambling addicts in our society today, producing nothing of value to anyone but revenues for the casinos (aka stock exchanges).
And stock ownership has nothing to do with actually producing anything but paychecks for stockborkers. If I sell you 1/8th of the pie I just baked did you actually produce anything? No.
Hmm. Meant to type 'stockbroker', but that's actually more fitting . . .
It's a myth that Adam Smith seemed to believe at least (currently wading through the morass of his logic swamp). Until the conquest of Mexico and Peru by the Spanish barbarians gold and sliver were pretty much equal in value in Europe.
Most of them also believe that they should somehow receive those basic service without being taxed to pay for them. I suppose the military should go back to looting the countryside to support itself or something.
Slashdot Mirror
And leave in their will . . .
Imagine how long that would take to wind through probate court.
Problem with seaweeds is that a lot of them are actually cooperative algae (like kelp). A heavy rain causes a pond to overflow or a seagull leave a pond with some stuck to its feathers and now it's in the wild. I hope that the petroleum-excreting algae continue to be utter failures for that reason.
It's not going to matter one bit, someone in charge of a Black Budget in the Pentagon is going to think it's a good idea. Remember what the Pentagon did when Commander-In-Chief President Clinton directly ordered the military to stop all work on bio-weapons? Renamed the project, moved it to the Black Budget, and didn't even skip a beat.
If one ignores the consumer releases that rule doesn't hold up at all. Windows 3.11, Windows for Workgroups, was truly transformative in the work space. NT 3.51, with its domain structure, authentication, groups and NTFS was also transformative to the office network. NT 4.0 was a step up, but Windows 2000 server and workstation with Active Directory and Group Policies were also another giant leap forward. XP/Server 2003 and Server 2008 have been incremental, as has Win 7. I've so far been spared the annoyance of dealing with Server 2012/Win8, but I haven't heard much boasting about advances there.
This. I've worked on the MS campus quite a few times over the years and there are a lot of brilliant, dedicated people who work there. We didn't have a dedicated area to work in so generally set up shop in the common areas, and ended up overhearing a **LOT** of complaints about incompetent and clueless management. Dilbert-level stupid shit, guys who would give the PHB and Catbert a run for their money. Not to mention Ballmer's insane annual review process, which had team members volunteering to rotate the 'failing' rating among them to keep the team from being destroyed.
Once again, the MBA Disease strikes deeply at US businesses.
To be truthful, 90% of every version of Office since 4.3 has been wasted on 90% of end users. I do more complex things than most people, and I really can't justify using an office suite for something more complex than extracting data from a database and throwing it in a pivot table. Anything more than that really should be done with specialized tools. I'm not really sure what a "better office suite" would look like.
Don't confuse the Libertardians with facts. Five or six decades ago municipal monopolies were granted to cable companies because it was the only way to guarantee that local taxpayers could get the service installed (competition existed then, no one was going to install expensive infrastructure that took 20 years to amortize any other way). Either they haven't figured out that those monopolies went away decades ago, or else it just makes too good a sound bite to abandon just because it's wrong.
That's the potable water, they're not irrigating open fields with it (that's where most of the wastewater goes if I'm not mistaken.) Ask Palestinians about water and you'll get a different story.
"The West Bank's main resource of natural water is groundwater from the Mountain Aquifer, most of it derived from rainfall and snowmelt on the Palestinian side of the Green Line. Israel abstracts about 80% of it.[8] In Gaza, the only source of natural fresh water is the Coastal Aquifer, which is heavily over-exploited and salinated as the result of seawater intrusion. The development of seawater desalination is hampered by the blockade of the Gaza Strip . . . Israel extracts more water from the West Bank than agreed in the Oslo Accord, while Palestinian abstractions were within the agreed range. Contrary to expectations under Oslo II, the water actually abstracted by Palestinians in the West Bank has dropped between 1999 and 2007. Due to the Israeli over-extraction, aquifer levels are near the point where irreversible damage is done to the aquifer. Israeli wells in the West Bank have dried up local Palestinian wells and springs."
Actually I was originally told about the Palestinian water situation by an Israeli, a "settler", who was quite proud of it.
When we lived in Peru our water came from a faucet down the street, you become very conscious of every drop you use when you have to carry it in a bucket for two blocks. My wife, myself and our 8 year-old nephew went through an average of 4 gallons/day normal usage, plus about 15 gallons on (hand washed) laundry day. I wouldn't expect USAians to live that way of course, but that's not an unreasonable amount of water to use.
Uh, no. Israel exports food from the desert by tapping irreplaceable 'fossil water' deposited during the last ice age. Wells in the Palestinian territories are dropping by as much as a meter a year (and they need permission from the IDF to deepen them), and on the coast salt water is intruding on the wells (the Gaza desalination plant is one of the IDF's first targets every time the bomb). Some urban areas of Israel desalinate water, but no one is doing it with thorium reactors and the very, very small amount of desalinated water used in agriculture is used in greenhouses that (because of the cost) go to great lengths to recapture and recycle as much as possible. No one is irrigating fields with it.
Or a common everyday user who doesn't have the training, or whose training was inadequate/ineffectual, or for a different type of device.
Crap, then I left off the point I wanted to make: The only genetically "pure" human genome, without inclusions from other hominids, is African.
Actually it appears that the gene for red hair present in Neanderthals is different than the gene causing red hair in Cro Magnons and their descendents. Parallel evolution, apparently. There are other genes though, and they tend to be more prevalent in European populations than elsewhere. Denesovian genes are also present in European and Asian populations, and an influx from another 'unknown' hominid as well is found in several Asian populations. The book 'Children of the Ice Age' brings up some of that, although I think the red hair gene was in a Scientific American article a few months back.
I'd think that the answer was pretty obvious, but it doesn't seem to be. You make widgets, you're producing. You manage people who make the widgets, you still have a part in their production. You hand off all the work and all of the management to someone else and lie in the sun on the beach all day, what are you producing? Empty beer bottles, not widgets. Your company may be merrily producing widgets by the trainload, but you aren't. You sell the company to me, I sit in the next beach chair, I'm not producing widgets either. I walk into the factory, start doing something related to the factory's function, and now I'm taking part in production.
I'm really not clear on why this is such a difficult concept. Speculating in stocks, currency, food, minerals, whatever, is not a productive operation, you're not actually making anything. At the end of his 80 hour work week what has the stockborker actually produced? A kindergarten student planting sunflower seeds has grown something. Accumulating wealth is not the same as being productive.
the original purchaser wouldn't have purchased had they not known there was a secondary-sale market
That's a relatively new development, and one which points up the strictly speculative nature of stocks today. The traditional model of stock ownership was to purchase the stock with the intention that dividends would pay for the purchase over time. That was why one held stocks for long periods, it took a while to pay them off and actually start making money on them. It's only been since the stock boom of the '90s that one purchased stocks with the idea that the way to make money on them was to pump the price up and then dump them on someone else before the next crash in a game of financial 'musical chairs'.
Stocks and Bitcoins have exactly the same value: whatever some other person will pay you for it. Your 100 shares of NetJ.com produce nothing. Half a century ago if you owned stock you had a voice in the company's operations and generally received some portion of the company's profit, you could actually be viewed as a partial owner in the company, but those days are long gone. Today that 100 shares gets you no say in how the company is run, no portion of any profits, and if it closes tomorrow you don't even get a share of whatever value the company is liquidated for.
If I offer to sell you 1/100th of my garden for $10 and tell you up front that 1) you have no say over what (if anything) I plant, 2) you don't get any portion of anything that I grow, 3) if I sell my produce you don't get any of the money, 4) if I sell my property tomorrow you don't get any part of the sale price, would you be eager to buy? After all you're buying a share of ownership of the means of production!
FWIW, I think Bitcoin is an even dumber idea than that of modern stock ownership.
You're not the only Libertardian out there, nor are you really very representative of the ones that I have talked to IRL.
I don't give a flying flip if you own 0.001% of NetJ.com, did you PRODUCE anything with that purchase? No. You seem to confuse being wealthy with being productive, the two have nothing to do with each other. Paris Hilton may be rich but I have trouble coming up with anything of value that she produces. Fertilizer, I suppose.
Go buy 100 shares of NetJ.com and tell my what you have produced. Some broker made a pittance, and that's it. And just what does that 100 shares get you, besides a piece of paper (or more likely a collection of electrons) that proclaims you their proud owner? Can you tell the company management what to do? No. Do you get part of the company's revenue? Almost certainly not. If the company closes its doors tomorrow do you get as much as a stick of furniture? Nope. Its only value to you is the amount you can sell it for. Maybe you'll be able to sell that 100 shares tomorrow for 10x what you paid today, or maybe 1/10. You're just gambling, producing nothing real, just some paper profits if you're lucky or well-informed.
Your stock ownership PRODUCES absolutely nothing. You might get rich by it, but you haven't actually made anything.
I build a pie factory and sell you 1/8th of it, did you produce anything? Other than a paycheck for whatever lawyers and realtors were involved, no. My point stands, stock ownership has nothing to do with actually producing anything. Stockholders are nothing more than the biggest, fattest group of gambling addicts in our society today, producing nothing of value to anyone but revenues for the casinos (aka stock exchanges).
Mmmm . . . bacon . . .
And stock ownership has nothing to do with actually producing anything but paychecks for stockborkers. If I sell you 1/8th of the pie I just baked did you actually produce anything? No.
Hmm. Meant to type 'stockbroker', but that's actually more fitting . . .
You're an AC stupid, you don't get mod points.
It's a myth that Adam Smith seemed to believe at least (currently wading through the morass of his logic swamp). Until the conquest of Mexico and Peru by the Spanish barbarians gold and sliver were pretty much equal in value in Europe.
I can hear the rumble of exploding Rand Paul-fan brains from here . . .
Most of them also believe that they should somehow receive those basic service without being taxed to pay for them. I suppose the military should go back to looting the countryside to support itself or something.