Sorry, I didn't mean to say if it was a typo, I know Britian is part of the EU, they have been a driving force behind it's expansion(it with Ireland are the only places to allow people in the new areas of the EU to move freely right from the get-go), I meant to say if Britain joined the Euro-zone. But even if the Euro is accepted in Britain, it stil isn't on a wide enough scale to make it very important. American dollars are accepted as legal tender in Canada, but that doesn't mean that it is Canada's currency.
I'm not sure that we would want to send people into space who volunteer for a mission knowing there is a 1/3 chance they will be consumed, and a 2/3 chance they will end up consuming manflesh. Maybe that dude from Germany who filmed him eating an anonymous lover would go, but would that be the best representitve of Earth? I hope not....
We as consumers benefit from outsourcing in the form of lower prices.
Ever heard of something called the global commodity trade? Didn't think so. While the price may lower for widget x, the fact that we have to buy commodities(oil being the most important) in a market that now has more competetion(since the overseas producer of widget x now wants to compete to buy the commodity) we also have increased the supply of dollars outside the country, thus made the value of the dollar weaker(supply versus demand). So while we save a little bit of money on widget x, we pay for it in oil. Still seem like a good deal?
Also you do ignore the economic reality that prices tend not to go down(and that is a good thing, because deflation is BAD on a macroeconomic sense). So those cheap prices you keep harping about are relatively meaningless and is just an excuse to outsource.
Is for countries worldwide to work towards eliminating "dollar dependence" The trade we have today isn't trade in any sense of the word, basically the US gives other countries little pieces of paper in exchange for manufactured goods, programming, call centers etc. If you ask me this isn't trade in any sense of the word. Because the US economy is the biggest economy in the world, the dollar is considered the most desirable and "safest" currency(Though if Britain joined the EU, the Euro will probably take it's place, but for the time being the UK isn't in a rush to join because of it's oil supplies, but I digress). This has introduced a world-wide "dollar dependency" ie every country in the world wants the most dollars possible(versus other currencies) to help it's economy grow. This worked out really well during Japan's economic miracle, because the Japanese could take their dollars and exchange it for anything(Canadian wood, Saudi oil), but look at Japan now. They are buying tons of dollars just to keep the yen as weak as possible(more yen to the dollar means Japanese products are cheaper). Now, Japan is just one country, a relatively small country at that. What happens when 3 billion others try this same thing? We are already seeing it, the value of the dollar is starting to fall. As the supply of dollars outside the US continues to skyrocket, each dollar is going to be worth less(supply and demand! Even the IMF said that America's huge trade and budget deficits are a threat to the world economy) So what happens when India, who bases a lot of their growth on exports to the US finds out that the dollar is worthless? Some argue that they could just transition to exporting to Japan, Europe(which they do now, but on a very small scale) But these countries will also be dealing with the falling dollar. Also, transitions do not happen overnight. Not to mention that OPEC prices it's oil in dollars too.
My opinion is that if the US opens it's market to the rest of the world, the rest of the world should reciprocate. This is most definately not the case. So all you people scream free trade, but to me, the trade is anything but free. The US should use it's considerable infuence to pressure these countries to open up their markets and move towards a more balanced approach to trade, ie trade goods for goods, services for services, instead of trading little pieces of paper.
Another thing that should give you pause is that China herself is running a trade deficit. It seems like it's the fashionable thing to do...
Not exactly right, China actually does run a small trade surplus worldwide(only $15 bil, compare with Japan, whose trade surplus is HUGE), thus outside the US they run about $100 billion deficit. Actually, China's manufacturing isn't that complex. They are usually the assembly line, importing all the parts from other places in Asia, for example memory from Korea and CPUs from Japan. China is receiving a lot of foriegn direct investment, it's interesting to note that a large part of their growth isn't directly export related(compared to Japan's and to a lesser extent India), but in turning 1.3 billion people into consumers.
Actually, part of the neo-con philosphy is a hardline stance against dictators, especially China. However, this is probably the only part of the hard line neo-con philosophy that Bush has not adopted. And he has actually received criticism from other neo-cons about it. One of the reasons why he hasn't had a hard line stance is because a large part of our budget deficit(which was brought on by tax cuts and expensive wars) is funded by China. Also a reason why the US has only recently brought up it's first suit against China in the WTO.
Now that I am done with the factual part of my post, I'll do a little rant: I really don't think building up such a massive debt to China is good for the US in the long run. After they have bought enough bonds they can always threaten the US with a massive selloff which would push interest rates through the roof, severly hurting the US(and global) economy. Doesn't anyone else thing this is a bad idea?!
I don't really think so. The systems are probably designed to scare more than anything else. Other posters have commented about the culture of the Chinese, which catches most of them. The cameras might not even be that effective(seems kind of difficult to monitor, and they already have police officers who walk around and look at what people are viewing), but my bet is people don't know that. They will be very afraid of what might happen if they get caught. Safety seems more important than freedom to a large section of the population, just look at the US.
Shamelessly promotes its own mascot abuse agenda. Forcing a mascot penguin to race, how pointlessly cruel. Then distributing it for free, allowing anyone to participate, and then distributing the source to allow coders to do whatever they please with this cuddly little penguin. Stop the madness!
While it's not always comforting to know these things can be factored, at least we can take comfort in knowing that *most* hackers/spooks don't exactly have a 100 node server farm laying around just dying to crack your keys.
While that may be true, there is still a significant chance that, with less hardware, the hacker can always get "lucky" and be able to use less computing power to "guess" the factorization. For instance, a hacker could just start with a prime number that is an arbitrary distance from the square root and just use less computing power to keep on guessing(guessing distributes very well, but it is incredibly inneficient). The same calculations that show the maximum amount of time that guarentee them the key also show there is a good chance they could stumble upon it.
A while back, a local radio station in Pittsburgh(WXDX, one of the 6 radio stations that got fined over the whole Howard Stern thing) about 5 or 6 years ago, before stream rippers even were common, used to stream the radio station so you could hear it anywhere. However, not to long after they started it, someone(assuming the RIAA) forced them to stop streaming is because of, "copyright issues" they said they were working to try to get it back up, as far as I know, they never did.
Was this at all offset by any other governments? Seems kind of pricy for research that will freely be shared worldwide, though from the representations Americans get in the news, you have to wonder if they can really trust the data gathered from something built by products of one of the supposedly worst education systems in the world:P
It's actually a LOT more than labor. If it was just labor you would see a lot more diversity in where we get our products(like in garments) However, unlike garment manufacturing, which does not require a lot of resources, other, "heavier" manufacturing does cost a lot more resources, which China has plenty of. In fact, only last year China finally became a net importer instead of exporter of oil. Combine that with China's lax labor and the fixed exchange rate, that is the real reason China is the choice of manufacturers. If it were labor alone, American productivity would actually make the US cheaper.
We're going to have to start competing on price and that basically means devaluation of the currency.
Well, since our beloved Reagan decided to trash Jimmy Carter's energy independce projects so many years ago, and nobody(including Clinton) decided to start it up again, devaluating the currency means oil prices skyrocket. That is why I think if Americans truly value their future, they will vote for Kerry, he plans to start R&D centers(in the US, GASP!). The Bush tax cut, embrace of free trade, and no desire to cut our oil dependence will mean we cannot devaluate our currency. To all the free trade idealougues, I hope you enjoy your gas prices while you drive to Wal-Mart to pick up your chinese products. in all the free trade rhetoric I read about "cheaper prices" I never heard them say the inevitable increase in oil prices to be a good thing, but one of the reason prices have skyrocketed is that for the first time China became a net importer instead of exporter of gasoline, and now we have to compete with China and India for gasoline. So all the money we save on our IT and molded plastic garbage now gets payed at the pump. The losers are 99% of the American people, the winners are a few uber rich.
Which is why we need to make a trade policy that says, "If we buy stuff off you, you have to buy something off of us, or we impose tariffs" simple as that.
Clippy: "It looks like you are trying to compile the gimp, did you know the GPL was written by Carl Marx, you don't want to be un-American do you? If you need help embracing capitalism, please ask me."
Is IEEE now going to make a new standard based on this frequency? And of course, once they do the rest of the world will have to play with their frequencies to accomidate it, but maybe that isn't all bad.
Something else the tinfoil-hat-crowd keeps forgetting is that driving is, almost by definition, done *in public*. *Anyone* has the right to observe you by whatever means they wish. This is *not* "two-consenting-adults-in-their-own-bedroom" stuff we're talking about here
What if your car is your bedroom?
iTunes Music Store sales, which provide zero or very little profit to Apple, IIRC, but which sure improve the sales of iPods.
This is actually quite a common myth, they actually make about 30 cents a song, the comment about them breaking even was about(at that point) the fact that the amount of songs they have sold have basically covered development, server, and ad costs. Almost all of that is fixed costs, so they will have economy of scale. The store can become very profitable if it is able to sell a lot of songs.
Because in the end, offshore outsourcing is going to spurn both the people doing the work and doing the outsourcing, in addidtion to the people who lost their job. Automation is used to cut down costs, which makes people much more efficient, and in the end, although it does displace workers, in the long run it makes us all better off. However, offshoring falls victim to the "currency fallicy", ie it is cheaper(for the time being) to do this in MY currency. However, in terms of real resources(which is what economics is supposed to be about, money is just the most convient form of trading resources) so as the offshored currency values appreciates wages rise, etc, it will end up costing the company and world economy more than if the company had invested in the R&D to make the automatic programmer.
Well, a system to deflect/destroy the asteroid would cost a LOT of money, and despite like you said that there would be scientific breakthroughs etc associated with this, in these times of record deficits, nobody wants to be the one who boasts spending all this money on something that seems like a far off event to most people, they want government spending on something more tangible. However, these people who do not want to spend any money would be the ones pointing fingers at scientists and asking why they cannot do anything about it. I suppose it's one of those paradoxical things, people want the benefits of scientific research, but at the same time don't want to spend any money on it.
The well connected criminals don't get caught, organized crime is HUGE in Japan, and since the gangs are VERY politically connected, police only do token raids on the Yakuza to show the citizens that they are devoted to busting crime. Prostitution is illegal, but there are prostitutes EVERYWHERE! It's run by the Yakuza, so the police do nothing about it. Though the police do seem interested in busting some of the growing number of foreign gangs in Japan(mostly Chinese and Korean).
Slashdot Mirror
for making my poop smaller so it flushes down the toilet?
Sorry, I didn't mean to say if it was a typo, I know Britian is part of the EU, they have been a driving force behind it's expansion(it with Ireland are the only places to allow people in the new areas of the EU to move freely right from the get-go), I meant to say if Britain joined the Euro-zone. But even if the Euro is accepted in Britain, it stil isn't on a wide enough scale to make it very important. American dollars are accepted as legal tender in Canada, but that doesn't mean that it is Canada's currency.
I'm not sure that we would want to send people into space who volunteer for a mission knowing there is a 1/3 chance they will be consumed, and a 2/3 chance they will end up consuming manflesh. Maybe that dude from Germany who filmed him eating an anonymous lover would go, but would that be the best representitve of Earth? I hope not....
We as consumers benefit from outsourcing in the form of lower prices.
Ever heard of something called the global commodity trade?
Didn't think so. While the price may lower for widget x, the fact that we have to buy commodities(oil being the most important) in a market that now has more competetion(since the overseas producer of widget x now wants to compete to buy the commodity) we also have increased the supply of dollars outside the country, thus made the value of the dollar weaker(supply versus demand). So while we save a little bit of money on widget x, we pay for it in oil. Still seem like a good deal?
Also you do ignore the economic reality that prices tend not to go down(and that is a good thing, because deflation is BAD on a macroeconomic sense). So those cheap prices you keep harping about are relatively meaningless and is just an excuse to outsource.
Is for countries worldwide to work towards eliminating "dollar dependence" The trade we have today isn't trade in any sense of the word, basically the US gives other countries little pieces of paper in exchange for manufactured goods, programming, call centers etc. If you ask me this isn't trade in any sense of the word. Because the US economy is the biggest economy in the world, the dollar is considered the most desirable and "safest" currency(Though if Britain joined the EU, the Euro will probably take it's place, but for the time being the UK isn't in a rush to join because of it's oil supplies, but I digress). This has introduced a world-wide "dollar dependency" ie every country in the world wants the most dollars possible(versus other currencies) to help it's economy grow. This worked out really well during Japan's economic miracle, because the Japanese could take their dollars and exchange it for anything(Canadian wood, Saudi oil), but look at Japan now. They are buying tons of dollars just to keep the yen as weak as possible(more yen to the dollar means Japanese products are cheaper). Now, Japan is just one country, a relatively small country at that. What happens when 3 billion others try this same thing? We are already seeing it, the value of the dollar is starting to fall. As the supply of dollars outside the US continues to skyrocket, each dollar is going to be worth less(supply and demand! Even the IMF said that America's huge trade and budget deficits are a threat to the world economy) So what happens when India, who bases a lot of their growth on exports to the US finds out that the dollar is worthless? Some argue that they could just transition to exporting to Japan, Europe(which they do now, but on a very small scale) But these countries will also be dealing with the falling dollar. Also, transitions do not happen overnight. Not to mention that OPEC prices it's oil in dollars too.
My opinion is that if the US opens it's market to the rest of the world, the rest of the world should reciprocate. This is most definately not the case. So all you people scream free trade, but to me, the trade is anything but free. The US should use it's considerable infuence to pressure these countries to open up their markets and move towards a more balanced approach to trade, ie trade goods for goods, services for services, instead of trading little pieces of paper.
Another thing that should give you pause is that China herself is running a trade deficit. It seems like it's the fashionable thing to do...
Not exactly right, China actually does run a small trade surplus worldwide(only $15 bil, compare with Japan, whose trade surplus is HUGE), thus outside the US they run about $100 billion deficit. Actually, China's manufacturing isn't that complex. They are usually the assembly line, importing all the parts from other places in Asia, for example memory from Korea and CPUs from Japan. China is receiving a lot of foriegn direct investment, it's interesting to note that a large part of their growth isn't directly export related(compared to Japan's and to a lesser extent India), but in turning 1.3 billion people into consumers.
Actually, part of the neo-con philosphy is a hardline stance against dictators, especially China. However, this is probably the only part of the hard line neo-con philosophy that Bush has not adopted. And he has actually received criticism from other neo-cons about it. One of the reasons why he hasn't had a hard line stance is because a large part of our budget deficit(which was brought on by tax cuts and expensive wars) is funded by China. Also a reason why the US has only recently brought up it's first suit against China in the WTO.
Now that I am done with the factual part of my post, I'll do a little rant: I really don't think building up such a massive debt to China is good for the US in the long run. After they have bought enough bonds they can always threaten the US with a massive selloff which would push interest rates through the roof, severly hurting the US(and global) economy. Doesn't anyone else thing this is a bad idea?!
I don't really think so. The systems are probably designed to scare more than anything else. Other posters have commented about the culture of the Chinese, which catches most of them. The cameras might not even be that effective(seems kind of difficult to monitor, and they already have police officers who walk around and look at what people are viewing), but my bet is people don't know that. They will be very afraid of what might happen if they get caught. Safety seems more important than freedom to a large section of the population, just look at the US.
Shamelessly promotes its own mascot abuse agenda. Forcing a mascot penguin to race, how pointlessly cruel. Then distributing it for free, allowing anyone to participate, and then distributing the source to allow coders to do whatever they please with this cuddly little penguin. Stop the madness!
While it's not always comforting to know these things can be factored, at least we can take comfort in knowing that *most* hackers/spooks don't exactly have a 100 node server farm laying around just dying to crack your keys.
While that may be true, there is still a significant chance that, with less hardware, the hacker can always get "lucky" and be able to use less computing power to "guess" the factorization. For instance, a hacker could just start with a prime number that is an arbitrary distance from the square root and just use less computing power to keep on guessing(guessing distributes very well, but it is incredibly inneficient). The same calculations that show the maximum amount of time that guarentee them the key also show there is a good chance they could stumble upon it.
When my obscure relatives who were involved with shady deals die?
Just was not up to the high quality consumers expect of the Olsen twin's name. Who would have thought?
A while back, a local radio station in Pittsburgh(WXDX, one of the 6 radio stations that got fined over the whole Howard Stern thing) about 5 or 6 years ago, before stream rippers even were common, used to stream the radio station so you could hear it anywhere. However, not to long after they started it, someone(assuming the RIAA) forced them to stop streaming is because of, "copyright issues" they said they were working to try to get it back up, as far as I know, they never did.
Was this at all offset by any other governments? Seems kind of pricy for research that will freely be shared worldwide, though from the representations Americans get in the news, you have to wonder if they can really trust the data gathered from something built by products of one of the supposedly worst education systems in the world :P
It's actually a LOT more than labor. If it was just labor you would see a lot more diversity in where we get our products(like in garments) However, unlike garment manufacturing, which does not require a lot of resources, other, "heavier" manufacturing does cost a lot more resources, which China has plenty of. In fact, only last year China finally became a net importer instead of exporter of oil. Combine that with China's lax labor and the fixed exchange rate, that is the real reason China is the choice of manufacturers. If it were labor alone, American productivity would actually make the US cheaper.
We're going to have to start competing on price and that basically means devaluation of the currency.
Well, since our beloved Reagan decided to trash Jimmy Carter's energy independce projects so many years ago, and nobody(including Clinton) decided to start it up again, devaluating the currency means oil prices skyrocket. That is why I think if Americans truly value their future, they will vote for Kerry, he plans to start R&D centers(in the US, GASP!). The Bush tax cut, embrace of free trade, and no desire to cut our oil dependence will mean we cannot devaluate our currency. To all the free trade idealougues, I hope you enjoy your gas prices while you drive to Wal-Mart to pick up your chinese products. in all the free trade rhetoric I read about "cheaper prices" I never heard them say the inevitable increase in oil prices to be a good thing, but one of the reason prices have skyrocketed is that for the first time China became a net importer instead of exporter of gasoline, and now we have to compete with China and India for gasoline. So all the money we save on our IT and molded plastic garbage now gets payed at the pump. The losers are 99% of the American people, the winners are a few uber rich.
Which is why we need to make a trade policy that says, "If we buy stuff off you, you have to buy something off of us, or we impose tariffs" simple as that.
I was quoting clippy, if you really want to take your agression out on a paperclip, feel free.
Clippy: "It looks like you are trying to compile the gimp, did you know the GPL was written by Carl Marx, you don't want to be un-American do you? If you need help embracing capitalism, please ask me."
Is IEEE now going to make a new standard based on this frequency? And of course, once they do the rest of the world will have to play with their frequencies to accomidate it, but maybe that isn't all bad.
Something else the tinfoil-hat-crowd keeps forgetting is that driving is, almost by definition, done *in public*. *Anyone* has the right to observe you by whatever means they wish. This is *not* "two-consenting-adults-in-their-own-bedroom" stuff we're talking about here
What if your car is your bedroom?
iTunes Music Store sales, which provide zero or very little profit to Apple, IIRC, but which sure improve the sales of iPods.
This is actually quite a common myth, they actually make about 30 cents a song, the comment about them breaking even was about(at that point) the fact that the amount of songs they have sold have basically covered development, server, and ad costs. Almost all of that is fixed costs, so they will have economy of scale. The store can become very profitable if it is able to sell a lot of songs.
Because in the end, offshore outsourcing is going to spurn both the people doing the work and doing the outsourcing, in addidtion to the people who lost their job. Automation is used to cut down costs, which makes people much more efficient, and in the end, although it does displace workers, in the long run it makes us all better off. However, offshoring falls victim to the "currency fallicy", ie it is cheaper(for the time being) to do this in MY currency. However, in terms of real resources(which is what economics is supposed to be about, money is just the most convient form of trading resources) so as the offshored currency values appreciates wages rise, etc, it will end up costing the company and world economy more than if the company had invested in the R&D to make the automatic programmer.
Bit prefixes go by 1000 (10^2)
Your elementary school math teacher must be very upset right now!
Well, a system to deflect/destroy the asteroid would cost a LOT of money, and despite like you said that there would be scientific breakthroughs etc associated with this, in these times of record deficits, nobody wants to be the one who boasts spending all this money on something that seems like a far off event to most people, they want government spending on something more tangible. However, these people who do not want to spend any money would be the ones pointing fingers at scientists and asking why they cannot do anything about it. I suppose it's one of those paradoxical things, people want the benefits of scientific research, but at the same time don't want to spend any money on it.
The well connected criminals don't get caught, organized crime is HUGE in Japan, and since the gangs are VERY politically connected, police only do token raids on the Yakuza to show the citizens that they are devoted to busting crime. Prostitution is illegal, but there are prostitutes EVERYWHERE! It's run by the Yakuza, so the police do nothing about it. Though the police do seem interested in busting some of the growing number of foreign gangs in Japan(mostly Chinese and Korean).