No, you are wrong, and I know (nearly all) of the hundreds of pages of baseball rules.
The fact that the 1B Ump didn't signal Bellhorn safe doesn't imply that he didn't touch first base -- umpires only signal a ruling when it is questionable... watch the 1B umpire the next time a player hits a single to the outfield or hits an extra base hit. He won't singal safe. Umpires do not signal "base touches" as safe, and if a player misses a base the umpire will not rule him out until a player/manager from the other team appeals to the umpire crew.
Since both runs counted, Bellhorn officially touched all four bases (even if he didn't actually touch 'em). Since Bellhorn officially touched all four bases, he touched first. Since Bellhorn was (a) safe at first and (b) not ruled out before the other baserunner crossed the plate, the other baserunner officially scored. These events happened before Bellhorn crossed the plate.
For the baserunner's run to count, Bellhorn had to (a) touch first, and (b) not get out until after (c) the runner touch home. Since all of those events did happen before Bellhorn touched home, the runs are added one at a time.
Again, check the 1999 event I reference. In fact, I'll google it for you... http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/baseballs_best/m lb_bb_gamepage.jsp?story_page=bb_99nlcs_gm5_atlnym complete with video and box score.
Note that the run did count, and that Ventura was credited with a single because he failed to continue around the bases.
---NY Times quote--- While the system seems ideal for congested streets like New York's, "we have no plans for the U.S.," said Jon Bucci, corporate manager for advanced technology at Toyota Motor Sales. "This is a very litigious society." ---NY Times quote---
So, to recap: the fact that the auto-parallel park will continue parking even if a 3 year old steps in the way is not a reason to withhold the feature. No, the threat of a lawsuit is the reason.
Seems to me like this is a classic example of why US lawsuits are a good thing (tm). They're preventing companies from rolling out products that could run over little kids without allowing the operator to override.
a baseball team can only score runs one at a time. Before scoring 11 runs, a team must score 10. In the case of the game in question, there was a runner on base when a home run was hit... but the runner on base must score before the batter does.
So, for a few seconds, there were exactly 10 runs. If, for whatever reason the batter didn't cross home plate, the score would have remained 10. That would never happen, right? Ask Robin Ventura about his NLCS Game 5 grand slam back in 1999. Once the runner on third touched home and RV touched first, he never bothered circling the bases.
In short: pudge is wrong -- the Red Sox did have 10 runs before they had 11. P.S. Bellhorn hit the home run to right field (not left) and it hit the right field foul pole, AKA the Pesky Pole. See how easy it is to mis-remember?
1. But I would want an aero agency (FAA, NASA, whatever) to regulate them while they're at risk of flying into something else, either in the Earth's atmosphere or outside of it. Wouldn't you?
2. I'd also want regulations providing for insurance for third parties. If my house gets hit by a piece of RichGuysTourSpace LLC, I'd like it repaired please.
3. Law enforcement? Absolutely. Merely being a passenger in a space-bound vehicle should require at least as much security as is forced upon the airlines. ID, bomb detection, etc.
4. EPA? In the same sense that other vehicles (like airplanes and cruise ships) are monitored, yup. Don't go dumping excessive toxicities in the environment please.
5. IRS? Only in the sense that all businesses gotta pay their fair share of taxes.
It turns out that requiring (2) might force (1) and (3) a la the free market. After all, I'd expect a lower risk of loss if the flight plan was cross-checked, and if the passengers were safe. (4) and (5) wouldn't be treated any differently than other similar industries. Surely, it's the job of Congress to at least investigate the possible problems before the happen though...
The two phrases simply don't mean the same thing. Sure, it might be an indicator... but you know what is an even bigger indicator? Finding out how that particular voting precinct leaned in aggregate on the most recent presidential, senate, and house voting.
Financial donations to political parties are a subset of political donations (PACs, volunteer time, etc). However, since its votes that count, and voting information is public, why not just use that?
If EVs were allocated as the study imagines, then Gore and Bush would have behaved very differently in 2000. They'd have spent much less time working hard for a few more votes in the suburbs of New Mexico, Florida, Missouri, Iowa, Tennessee, and Oregon.
In the old system, had Gore bagged 1000 more votes in Florida, he'd have swung the election by 50 evs (FL had 25 in 2000, and Gore's gain would have been Bush's loss). Under your study, an extra 1000 votes for Gore meant squat.
So... Gore acted appropriately, fighting for those 1000 votes. With proportional evs, he'd surely have acted differently.
Not only would the players (Gore and Bush) acted differently, but voters surely would have acted differently as well. To simply change the allocation of evs while ignoring the fact that the actions of all players in the game would have been different under different rules is entertaining, but not enlightening.
Cool data -- but not useful for analysis. To make the claim that "Bush would have won anyway" is simply preposterous -- and about 50% likely to be correct.
So what if Google News doesn't make money? If it's another great product by Google (tm?), then it still reinforces the idea that google does great things.
The financial return from the news portion doesn't have to come in dollars. It can simply come from "good will" and "brand value." Those are items that show up on the balance sheet too.
[rumor]Perhaps google will buy out a news entity in the future[/started]
Firstly, thank you for responding to our questions.
The name "Green Party" conjures images of a party interested in environmental concerns. Of course, environmental legislation isn't the only issue to have environmental impacts; international trade and energy policy both have substantial environmental ramifications. However, it seems some Green issues aren't environmentally related. For example, while I too believe that gender equity and diversity are good values, why are they part of The Green Party's Ten Key Values, given they don't appear to be substantially related to environmental issues?
Why does it seem that the Green Party takes on issues that aren't related to "green-ness"? Is it essential for a modern US political party to have a stance on every issue, even those not seemingly related to core beliefs?
in Medicare and Social Security could greatly increase the chances that the US can weather the retirement "storm."
1. Increase retirement age, perhaps by 3 months a year. Doing so over a period of 16 years would help to stretch out retirement time -- more months of tax payments, fewer months of social security payments.
2. Increase the ceiling. Right now, the income ceiling is $87,000. After that, you're not taxed teh 6.2%. While the ceiling rises every year (IIRC), it could rise a whole lot faster. Crank it up by $3000 a year for five years. Those extra funds would certainly help.
3. Scale down payments. Hey -- social security isn't a pension fund; it's a safety net incase everything else in your life goes bankrupt. Scale down payments, and hope that welfare and other social services can pick up the slack.
4. Work hard to reduce medical expenses. This is a huge problem and incredibly complex. I suspect that improving public health (reducing smoking, alcohol abuse, fat-assedness, etc.) would help tremendously. Working on decreasing the price of perscription drugs is a help, but it's drops in the very big bucket.
5. Put a Medicare tax on stuff that makes people sick. Cigarettes, booze, and restaurants would be a great start. Why should some Americans get to enjoy a butt, a beer, and a double burger -- and then enjoy health care paid for by those who treat their bodies better. Drinking, smoking, and eating crap food is part of the American way... but those doing the enjoying should be paying their fair share for their future added costs.
6. Encourage Americans (and anybody else) to buy savings bonds. With increased demands on US bonds, it'll help keep the borrowing rate artificially low; it's a bit like refinancing the US mortgage with lower interest rates.
Ultimately, the US has got to figure out a way to spend less, tax more, and keep the economy churning. I don't think a single massive change is ever going to happen; instead, it will require 30 years of real responsibility and sacrifice by our elected officials to work to get the government in the black.
I expect that it would be hard to find a mate who differed on substantial social issues, such as abortion, firearms, tolerance, and religious-moral grounds.
However, if the differences are fiscal, than you can simply live life together and lobby your representatives differently.
Methinks that Christian conservative GOPers and Peacenik Dems might not work out so easily, but fiscally minded folks would hardly notice.
Overtime laws exist because businesses wanted them. It came with the 40 hour work week. You see, unions were strong and getting stronger 100 years ago. They were winning 35 hour work weeks. Management pushed for labor protection laws in an effort to cut their losses to unions and to undercut the labor machine by giving them some of what they wanted.
It worked. Labor unions maintained influence, but haven't been nearly as strong as they would have been had management not made concessions country-wide in the form of overtime laws.
So... you can thank management for overtime laws, circa 100 years ago. Methinks if overtime laws disapeared, you'd see a surge in union membership... something that I doubt you'd be very interested in.
(Yes, this has long passed as a moderated opportunity)
$15/hour, eh? That may or may not be close to the nominal salary, but don't forget:
* payroll taxes
* HR hiring/firing
* training
* uniforms
* vehicles
* vehicle maintainance and gas
* pension
* managers overseeing the meter readers
* managers overseeing them
* paid holidays and vacation time
All of these cost extra. A rough rule of thumb (depending on industry) is to double the salary to account for the overhead. That doesn't include materials (vehicle & maintainance), just the cost of the employee.
But in addition to the (hypothetial) water meters, they could work out a deal with the elec company for the elec meters. Control traffic lights. Have sensors below manholes and on poles. Count vehicles. Put low bit rate cameras in all sorts of monitoring areas, very cheaply.
Having ubiquitous infrastructure can result in lots of cool improvements, at little additional cost.
Don't let people "piggyback" into the dorms. Most dorms have keyed entrance somehow. If you use your key to get into the dorm/hallway, and somebody comes up behind you, make sure they belong on the hall. If he's going to visit a friend, either make him call their friend from the locked side of the door, or escort him to their friends room (and back out if nobody's home).
Simply put, don't let folks who don't live in your hall onto your hall. This will either (a) make you very unpopular, or (b) result in a culture shift on your hallway to one of security. Odds are, (a) will occur.
Such is the price you pay for having high priced stuff.
One possible ramification of this idea is that journals will be less apt to accept papers related to gov't sponsored research. In some industries this would be impossible; other industries, however, do have a healthy amount of non gov't sponsored research.
So -- will some areas soon have journals less likely to accept gov't funded papers as a result of this proposal? If so, will gov't funding become less desirable?
Perhaps Congress should use it's Library as a "mirror" of gov't funded research journal articles instead of engaging in price control?
It would be nice if they could (a) increase the number, and (b) increase the monetary value of the awards. But, with what money?
I have no idea (and I did read a bit) how they manage their money, other than their 503(c) status and necessary government reporting. Do they have an endowment, or do they rely on annual donations to cover the annual (and quarterly) awards?
I would hope they have an endowment. If so, It'd be nice to know how one could make small (less than $100!) donations to the endowment. After all, if lots of little guys would start giving to funds like this*, than they could give out mo'bigger awards, resulting in more media coverage as well as help fund good coders in future projects.
So... do they have an endowment? Do they accept small donations to help fund this endowment? Anybody got details?
One of the reasons we don't hear about Monsanto and Lockheed Martin is that they don't want us to hear about them.
Monsanto is the antithesis of the family farm. They genetically engineer seeds and plants. They sell chemicals that pollute the land. They browbeat farmers into using buying their products or paying in court.
Lockheed? They recieve oodles of taxpayer dollars to build bigger bombs. Approximately half the country thinks this is a bad idea, and furthermore, raising the public's awareness of Lockheed products can only lead to more investigations by journalists and more oversight by Congress. That's just not good for business.
These companies do spend tons of money on research, much of it directly taken from tax coffers. They don't want attention for the same reasons that anybody who is up to no good doesn't want attention.
If I walk to a retailer and buy something, I pay sales tax -- but no shipping and handling. If I order something online, I pay no sales tax -- but I do pay shipping and handling.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. The reality is that warehouses have a lower per unit cost structure due to effeciencies, but have to pay to ship. When one cost is lower than the other, blammo. I think you'll find that most people who purchase new items online don't do it to save a "few pennies." They either do it to save tens of dollars, because they can't purchase the item locally anyway, or as a convenience.
In short, compete to offer your customers the lowest price/best service combination, or just STFU. The community will be better off either way.
This may sound corny, but I'm of the opinion that somebody who donates 10% of their meager substainance is far more generous than somebody that gives away 90% of his luxury, leaving him with, well, luxury.
It's nice that Gates is giving away money -- even if it was obtained dishonestly/unethically/illegally. However, to applaud his gifts is a bit silly methinks. The money he gives has little value to him, in the sense that it cannot be used to greatly improve his quality of life. Therefore, his gifts have cost him little.
So, from my perspective: he gives away plenty of money, but isn't at all generous with it.
* Ratio of (Songs available on MS)/(Songs available on iTunes)? * Time until MS intertwines their store with their desktop? * Time until Blumenthal of CT goes after them? * Time until an EU commish goes after them? * This whole brainfart of theirs joins Bob in the graveyard?
* The percentage of downloads that head right to static IPs in dormrooms -- the artists would get paid by them, via their universities (after all, $45 per year per student payment to not have to deal with the RIAA harassing the sysadmin of a univ is a good deal). Besides -- they'd just charge the students via fees anyway.
* That ISPs will market this in with their products. Using lots of bandwidth? The ISP monitors you to determine if you've signed up for their (+$5 for music) plan. If you aren't and you've got lots of.mp3 files flying by, than the ISP makes a nice little bounty by turning you in to the collection agency.
Between universities and ISPs, methinks that there would be payment from the users responsible for the majority of downloaded files. The majority of users? I don't know -- perhaps that as well.
His buildup is fine, but his conclusion is off by a mile and a half.
Firstly, he claims that our bandwidth and disk space aren't free... welp, he's right, but only barely. The marginal cost of the additional disk space, CPU cycles, bandwidth, etc is virtually zero, but certainly positive. Yet then he claims that a spammer's costs are zero. What about their computers? Email addresses? Bandwidth? Hard drive space? Those certainly aren't less costly than the same types of resources for each individual recipient.
But, more to the point -- why filters will make reduce spam by effecting the marketplace:
1. The filters have forced the spammers to degrade their own salespitch. By being forced to include extra characters, poor spelling, lousy grammar, etc in an effort to circumvent filters, they are serving to reduce their own credibility. By doing so, they are making their advertising less likely to attract any particular customer. Therefore, their response rate of the folks who might respond to spam is reduced, making spam less profitable.
2. By making spam filters more and more effective and easy to administer, they will find their way to more and more people's mail clients. For many of the new adoptees of filters, it won't be because the new users sought out the filter; it will be simply because the filter was part of the email program they happen to be using. Some of these folks are in the set of "spam-responders", that is, folks that might respond to spam. So, as filters proliferate, they will end up filtering spam away from potential customers -- again, reducing response rates and hence profitibility of spammers.
So, there's two ways where spam filters will reduce overall levels of spam by using the powers of economics against the spammer. Reduce the liklihood that somebody will respond to a spammed message by reducing it's quality, and reduce the liklihood that a potential customer will even see the email in the first place. Sure, the recipient will bear some costs in the short term, but the long term results will be less and less spam overall.
I wouldn't demand a dime. I'd stroll in and ask for a table. Order a nice meal and immediately walk out, having left a note on the table saying something like:
Ten minutes ago, I got a text message to try this place out. So I did. I didn't like it, and left. Had I not gotten a text message on my phone, I'd have never come in here and wasted your restaurant's time and money.
Please don't waste mine.
A few dimes aren't enough -- a few dinners just might be.
I bought x (x < 1000) when it was $3.60 a share. This wasn't a financial investment. This was a show of support -- financial activism, if you will.
The way I see it, if folks that believe in open source software start to buy up some stock in companies that support open source software (directly or indirectly), than those companies will get a bit of a boost in share price. Who cares?
Welp, in the case of Red Hat (at $4 a share), boosting the price by even a few percentage points helps keep it out of penny stock territory, and brings it on the radar of more and more investors. A little momentum, a good press release, and sure enough... the stock is close to $20 a share now. Just like nearly all open source programmers are contribute a drop or two into the open source ocean, a single investor tacks on minisucle fractions of a penny to share price. While in OSS development many eyes make bugs shallow, on Wall Street many investors can collectively drive the price of the stock.
So, 5% of my portfolio consists of stocks that are entirely political -- solely to support open source companies. I don't seek to profit from them, although they tend to make money anyway if the trades are timed well. If all/.ers with jobs did the same, we could have a collective impact on Wall Street; the impact would significantly benefit the software in which we believe.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you are wrong, and I know (nearly all) of the hundreds of pages of baseball rules.
m lb_bb_gamepage.jsp?story_page=bb_99nlcs_gm5_atlnym
The fact that the 1B Ump didn't signal Bellhorn safe doesn't imply that he didn't touch first base -- umpires only signal a ruling when it is questionable... watch the 1B umpire the next time a player hits a single to the outfield or hits an extra base hit. He won't singal safe. Umpires do not signal "base touches" as safe, and if a player misses a base the umpire will not rule him out until a player/manager from the other team appeals to the umpire crew.
Since both runs counted, Bellhorn officially touched all four bases (even if he didn't actually touch 'em). Since Bellhorn officially touched all four bases, he touched first. Since Bellhorn was (a) safe at first and (b) not ruled out before the other baserunner crossed the plate, the other baserunner officially scored. These events happened before Bellhorn crossed the plate.
For the baserunner's run to count, Bellhorn had to (a) touch first, and (b) not get out until after (c) the runner touch home. Since all of those events did happen before Bellhorn touched home, the runs are added one at a time.
Again, check the 1999 event I reference. In fact, I'll google it for you... http://mlb.mlb.com/NASApp/mlb/mlb/baseballs_best/
complete with video and box score.
Note that the run did count, and that Ventura was credited with a single because he failed to continue around the bases.
From the article...
---NY Times quote---
While the system seems ideal for congested streets like New York's, "we have no plans for the U.S.," said Jon Bucci, corporate manager for advanced technology at Toyota Motor Sales. "This is a very litigious society."
---NY Times quote---
So, to recap: the fact that the auto-parallel park will continue parking even if a 3 year old steps in the way is not a reason to withhold the feature. No, the threat of a lawsuit is the reason.
Seems to me like this is a classic example of why US lawsuits are a good thing (tm). They're preventing companies from rolling out products that could run over little kids without allowing the operator to override.
Sure this is pedantic, but...
a baseball team can only score runs one at a time. Before scoring 11 runs, a team must score 10. In the case of the game in question, there was a runner on base when a home run was hit... but the runner on base must score before the batter does.
So, for a few seconds, there were exactly 10 runs. If, for whatever reason the batter didn't cross home plate, the score would have remained 10. That would never happen, right? Ask Robin Ventura about his NLCS Game 5 grand slam back in 1999. Once the runner on third touched home and RV touched first, he never bothered circling the bases.
In short: pudge is wrong -- the Red Sox did have 10 runs before they had 11. P.S. Bellhorn hit the home run to right field (not left) and it hit the right field foul pole, AKA the Pesky Pole. See how easy it is to mis-remember?
1. But I would want an aero agency (FAA, NASA, whatever) to regulate them while they're at risk of flying into something else, either in the Earth's atmosphere or outside of it. Wouldn't you?
2. I'd also want regulations providing for insurance for third parties. If my house gets hit by a piece of RichGuysTourSpace LLC, I'd like it repaired please.
3. Law enforcement? Absolutely. Merely being a passenger in a space-bound vehicle should require at least as much security as is forced upon the airlines. ID, bomb detection, etc.
4. EPA? In the same sense that other vehicles (like airplanes and cruise ships) are monitored, yup. Don't go dumping excessive toxicities in the environment please.
5. IRS? Only in the sense that all businesses gotta pay their fair share of taxes.
It turns out that requiring (2) might force (1) and (3) a la the free market. After all, I'd expect a lower risk of loss if the flight plan was cross-checked, and if the passengers were safe. (4) and (5) wouldn't be treated any differently than other similar industries. Surely, it's the job of Congress to at least investigate the possible problems before the happen though...
The two phrases simply don't mean the same thing. Sure, it might be an indicator... but you know what is an even bigger indicator? Finding out how that particular voting precinct leaned in aggregate on the most recent presidential, senate, and house voting.
Financial donations to political parties are a subset of political donations (PACs, volunteer time, etc). However, since its votes that count, and voting information is public, why not just use that?
Or, why not use an accurate title to the thread?
... tactics.
:( --
If EVs were allocated as the study imagines, then Gore and Bush would have behaved very differently in 2000. They'd have spent much less time working hard for a few more votes in the suburbs of New Mexico, Florida, Missouri, Iowa, Tennessee, and Oregon.
In the old system, had Gore bagged 1000 more votes in Florida, he'd have swung the election by 50 evs (FL had 25 in 2000, and Gore's gain would have been Bush's loss). Under your study, an extra 1000 votes for Gore meant squat.
So... Gore acted appropriately, fighting for those 1000 votes. With proportional evs, he'd surely have acted differently.
Not only would the players (Gore and Bush) acted differently, but voters surely would have acted differently as well. To simply change the allocation of evs while ignoring the fact that the actions of all players in the game would have been different under different rules is entertaining, but not enlightening.
Cool data -- but not useful for analysis. To make the claim that "Bush would have won anyway" is simply preposterous -- and about 50% likely to be correct.
--too late for mod points
So what if Google News doesn't make money? If it's another great product by Google (tm?), then it still reinforces the idea that google does great things.
The financial return from the news portion doesn't have to come in dollars. It can simply come from "good will" and "brand value." Those are items that show up on the balance sheet too.
[rumor]Perhaps google will buy out a news entity in the future[/started]
Firstly, thank you for responding to our questions.
The name "Green Party" conjures images of a party interested in environmental concerns. Of course, environmental legislation isn't the only issue to have environmental impacts; international trade and energy policy both have substantial environmental ramifications. However, it seems some Green issues aren't environmentally related. For example, while I too believe that gender equity and diversity are good values, why are they part of The Green Party's Ten Key Values, given they don't appear to be substantially related to environmental issues?
Why does it seem that the Green Party takes on issues that aren't related to "green-ness"? Is it essential for a modern US political party to have a stance on every issue, even those not seemingly related to core beliefs?
in Medicare and Social Security could greatly increase the chances that the US can weather the retirement "storm."
1. Increase retirement age, perhaps by 3 months a year. Doing so over a period of 16 years would help to stretch out retirement time -- more months of tax payments, fewer months of social security payments.
2. Increase the ceiling. Right now, the income ceiling is $87,000. After that, you're not taxed teh 6.2%. While the ceiling rises every year (IIRC), it could rise a whole lot faster. Crank it up by $3000 a year for five years. Those extra funds would certainly help.
3. Scale down payments. Hey -- social security isn't a pension fund; it's a safety net incase everything else in your life goes bankrupt. Scale down payments, and hope that welfare and other social services can pick up the slack.
4. Work hard to reduce medical expenses. This is a huge problem and incredibly complex. I suspect that improving public health (reducing smoking, alcohol abuse, fat-assedness, etc.) would help tremendously. Working on decreasing the price of perscription drugs is a help, but it's drops in the very big bucket.
5. Put a Medicare tax on stuff that makes people sick. Cigarettes, booze, and restaurants would be a great start. Why should some Americans get to enjoy a butt, a beer, and a double burger -- and then enjoy health care paid for by those who treat their bodies better. Drinking, smoking, and eating crap food is part of the American way... but those doing the enjoying should be paying their fair share for their future added costs.
6. Encourage Americans (and anybody else) to buy savings bonds. With increased demands on US bonds, it'll help keep the borrowing rate artificially low; it's a bit like refinancing the US mortgage with lower interest rates.
Ultimately, the US has got to figure out a way to spend less, tax more, and keep the economy churning. I don't think a single massive change is ever going to happen; instead, it will require 30 years of real responsibility and sacrifice by our elected officials to work to get the government in the black.
I expect that it would be hard to find a mate who differed on substantial social issues, such as abortion, firearms, tolerance, and religious-moral grounds.
However, if the differences are fiscal, than you can simply live life together and lobby your representatives differently.
Methinks that Christian conservative GOPers and Peacenik Dems might not work out so easily, but fiscally minded folks would hardly notice.
(Too late for mod points)
Overtime laws exist because businesses wanted them. It came with the 40 hour work week. You see, unions were strong and getting stronger 100 years ago. They were winning 35 hour work weeks. Management pushed for labor protection laws in an effort to cut their losses to unions and to undercut the labor machine by giving them some of what they wanted.
It worked. Labor unions maintained influence, but haven't been nearly as strong as they would have been had management not made concessions country-wide in the form of overtime laws.
So... you can thank management for overtime laws, circa 100 years ago. Methinks if overtime laws disapeared, you'd see a surge in union membership... something that I doubt you'd be very interested in.
(Yes, this has long passed as a moderated opportunity)
$15/hour, eh? That may or may not be close to the nominal salary, but don't forget:
* payroll taxes
* HR hiring/firing
* training
* uniforms
* vehicles
* vehicle maintainance and gas
* pension
* managers overseeing the meter readers
* managers overseeing them
* paid holidays and vacation time
All of these cost extra. A rough rule of thumb (depending on industry) is to double the salary to account for the overhead. That doesn't include materials (vehicle & maintainance), just the cost of the employee.
But in addition to the (hypothetial) water meters, they could work out a deal with the elec company for the elec meters. Control traffic lights. Have sensors below manholes and on poles. Count vehicles. Put low bit rate cameras in all sorts of monitoring areas, very cheaply.
Having ubiquitous infrastructure can result in lots of cool improvements, at little additional cost.
Don't let people "piggyback" into the dorms. Most dorms have keyed entrance somehow. If you use your key to get into the dorm/hallway, and somebody comes up behind you, make sure they belong on the hall. If he's going to visit a friend, either make him call their friend from the locked side of the door, or escort him to their friends room (and back out if nobody's home).
Simply put, don't let folks who don't live in your hall onto your hall. This will either (a) make you very unpopular, or (b) result in a culture shift on your hallway to one of security. Odds are, (a) will occur.
Such is the price you pay for having high priced stuff.
One possible ramification of this idea is that journals will be less apt to accept papers related to gov't sponsored research. In some industries this would be impossible; other industries, however, do have a healthy amount of non gov't sponsored research.
So -- will some areas soon have journals less likely to accept gov't funded papers as a result of this proposal? If so, will gov't funding become less desirable?
Perhaps Congress should use it's Library as a "mirror" of gov't funded research journal articles instead of engaging in price control?
It would be nice if they could (a) increase the number, and (b) increase the monetary value of the awards. But, with what money?
I have no idea (and I did read a bit) how they manage their money, other than their 503(c) status and necessary government reporting. Do they have an endowment, or do they rely on annual donations to cover the annual (and quarterly) awards?
I would hope they have an endowment. If so, It'd be nice to know how one could make small (less than $100!) donations to the endowment. After all, if lots of little guys would start giving to funds like this*, than they could give out mo'bigger awards, resulting in more media coverage as well as help fund good coders in future projects.
So... do they have an endowment? Do they accept small donations to help fund this endowment? Anybody got details?
* as well as the EFF and other "goods"
One of the reasons we don't hear about Monsanto and Lockheed Martin is that they don't want us to hear about them.
Monsanto is the antithesis of the family farm. They genetically engineer seeds and plants. They sell chemicals that pollute the land. They browbeat farmers into using buying their products or paying in court.
Lockheed? They recieve oodles of taxpayer dollars to build bigger bombs. Approximately half the country thinks this is a bad idea, and furthermore, raising the public's awareness of Lockheed products can only lead to more investigations by journalists and more oversight by Congress. That's just not good for business.
These companies do spend tons of money on research, much of it directly taken from tax coffers. They don't want attention for the same reasons that anybody who is up to no good doesn't want attention.
I live in a city and don't own a car.
If I walk to a retailer and buy something, I pay sales tax -- but no shipping and handling. If I order something online, I pay no sales tax -- but I do pay shipping and handling.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. The reality is that warehouses have a lower per unit cost structure due to effeciencies, but have to pay to ship. When one cost is lower than the other, blammo. I think you'll find that most people who purchase new items online don't do it to save a "few pennies." They either do it to save tens of dollars, because they can't purchase the item locally anyway, or as a convenience.
In short, compete to offer your customers the lowest price/best service combination, or just STFU. The community will be better off either way.
This may sound corny, but I'm of the opinion that somebody who donates 10% of their meager substainance is far more generous than somebody that gives away 90% of his luxury, leaving him with, well, luxury.
It's nice that Gates is giving away money -- even if it was obtained dishonestly/unethically/illegally. However, to applaud his gifts is a bit silly methinks. The money he gives has little value to him, in the sense that it cannot be used to greatly improve his quality of life. Therefore, his gifts have cost him little.
So, from my perspective: he gives away plenty of money, but isn't at all generous with it.
* Ratio of (Songs available on MS)/(Songs available on iTunes)?
* Time until MS intertwines their store with their desktop?
* Time until Blumenthal of CT goes after them?
* Time until an EU commish goes after them?
* This whole brainfart of theirs joins Bob in the graveyard?
Consider:
.mp3 files flying by, than the ISP makes a nice little bounty by turning you in to the collection agency.
* The percentage of downloads that head right to static IPs in dormrooms -- the artists would get paid by them, via their universities (after all, $45 per year per student payment to not have to deal with the RIAA harassing the sysadmin of a univ is a good deal). Besides -- they'd just charge the students via fees anyway.
* That ISPs will market this in with their products. Using lots of bandwidth? The ISP monitors you to determine if you've signed up for their (+$5 for music) plan. If you aren't and you've got lots of
Between universities and ISPs, methinks that there would be payment from the users responsible for the majority of downloaded files. The majority of users? I don't know -- perhaps that as well.
His buildup is fine, but his conclusion is off by a mile and a half.
Firstly, he claims that our bandwidth and disk space aren't free... welp, he's right, but only barely. The marginal cost of the additional disk space, CPU cycles, bandwidth, etc is virtually zero, but certainly positive. Yet then he claims that a spammer's costs are zero. What about their computers? Email addresses? Bandwidth? Hard drive space? Those certainly aren't less costly than the same types of resources for each individual recipient.
But, more to the point -- why filters will make reduce spam by effecting the marketplace:
1. The filters have forced the spammers to degrade their own salespitch. By being forced to include extra characters, poor spelling, lousy grammar, etc in an effort to circumvent filters, they are serving to reduce their own credibility. By doing so, they are making their advertising less likely to attract any particular customer. Therefore, their response rate of the folks who might respond to spam is reduced, making spam less profitable.
2. By making spam filters more and more effective and easy to administer, they will find their way to more and more people's mail clients. For many of the new adoptees of filters, it won't be because the new users sought out the filter; it will be simply because the filter was part of the email program they happen to be using. Some of these folks are in the set of "spam-responders", that is, folks that might respond to spam. So, as filters proliferate, they will end up filtering spam away from potential customers -- again, reducing response rates and hence profitibility of spammers.
So, there's two ways where spam filters will reduce overall levels of spam by using the powers of economics against the spammer. Reduce the liklihood that somebody will respond to a spammed message by reducing it's quality, and reduce the liklihood that a potential customer will even see the email in the first place. Sure, the recipient will bear some costs in the short term, but the long term results will be less and less spam overall.
Worst.... movie.... ever
Seriously -- why didn't you just punch him in the face, and then yell something like This spammer just tried to kiss me!
You'd have had everybody on your side instantly, and even a night in jail would've been worth the satisfaction.
I wouldn't demand a dime. I'd stroll in and ask for a table. Order a nice meal and immediately walk out, having left a note on the table saying something like:
Ten minutes ago, I got a text message to try this place out. So I did. I didn't like it, and left. Had I not gotten a text message on my phone, I'd have never come in here and wasted your restaurant's time and money.
Please don't waste mine.
A few dimes aren't enough -- a few dinners just might be.
I bought x (x < 1000) when it was $3.60 a share. This wasn't a financial investment. This was a show of support -- financial activism, if you will.
/.ers with jobs did the same, we could have a collective impact on Wall Street; the impact would significantly benefit the software in which we believe.
The way I see it, if folks that believe in open source software start to buy up some stock in companies that support open source software (directly or indirectly), than those companies will get a bit of a boost in share price. Who cares?
Welp, in the case of Red Hat (at $4 a share), boosting the price by even a few percentage points helps keep it out of penny stock territory, and brings it on the radar of more and more investors. A little momentum, a good press release, and sure enough... the stock is close to $20 a share now. Just like nearly all open source programmers are contribute a drop or two into the open source ocean, a single investor tacks on minisucle fractions of a penny to share price. While in OSS development many eyes make bugs shallow, on Wall Street many investors can collectively drive the price of the stock.
So, 5% of my portfolio consists of stocks that are entirely political -- solely to support open source companies. I don't seek to profit from them, although they tend to make money anyway if the trades are timed well. If all