You sir, have made my day! I've been looking for a new MP3 player, but all the MP3 players I've looked for from "known" brands (Creative, iRiver, etc.) have all been, as you've stated, "overpowered". Thanks for pointing out this site to me, since the players here are far more within my price range.
If you tell a student something is easy, they are likely to believe you. Believing a subject is easy, they are more likely to follow through to mastery because they have been set up to expect success.
An equally likely outcome is that the person will find the task difficult, and will then blame you (or worse, blame themselves) for not being able to accomplish the "easy" task, when, in fact, the task is much more difficult than they were told. Such a reaction is equally likely to result in the person giving up and ending up with a bad attitude towards mathematics.
Frankly, I'd appreciate the grandparent's strategy more, though not for the same reasons that he or she elucidated. If someone is honest with me and tells me that a task is hard, I'm more likely to take that into consideration and proceed more carefully when it comes time to do the task. At the same time, I'm probably going to appreciate the person being honest with me and telling me that the task was going to be difficult, as opposed to trying to trick me by telling me that the task was going to be easy.
Or, alternatively, colleges could have their own entrance exams to filter out the kids who don't know what you need to know to go to that school.
Indeed, that is the way it works in much of the rest of the world. And, one could argue that it sort of works that way here too - where the SAT and the ACT are "common entrance exams" shared by the colleges.
I don't have a source for this, but IIRC, Jack Daniels is the best-selling Whisk(e)y in Scotland.
Well, sure. Just like Budweiser is the best selling beer in the 'States. Just because its the best selling doesn't mean its the best. More likely, its what people buy to drink while they save their money for the real good stuff:)
Well, on the (admittedly few) occasions I have used a Mac, logging into GMail via Safari has always led me to the "basic HTML" version of the site. Turning off the browser check caused GMail to not render at all. So, I don't know what kind of JavaScript/CSS GMail uses, but everything works fine on Internet Explorer and Firefox but is broken on Safari, Konqueror and Opera.
To be fair though, there's little evidence that lack of standards compatibility has actually hurt Microsoft in any measurable way. It wasn't lack of standards compatibility that broke Internet Explorer's hold on the web browser market, it was the realization that allowing the web browser to have lots of hooks into the OS (via ActiveX and the like) was a bad idea from a security perspective.
So, I guess my point is, so what if Internet Explorer 8 doesn't meet the Acid3 test until 2012? If you absolutely need that functionality, you'll tell your users to use Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, or one of the numerous other browsers out there. And besides, its not like any other browser passes Acid3 either. Last I checked, the closest was Opera, and it still hadn't made it through the entire test suite.
Those satellites should beam the energy to receiving stations in Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia, at which point they should be fed into the global power grid.
Wouldn't we need to build a global power grid first? Secondly, why should we entrust our energy infrastructure to a set of countries that aren't exactly known for their political stability and lack of corruption? Third, even if these countries could be forcibly given non-corrupt governments, is it really a good idea to entrust only three countries with something that the rest of the world depends on? Wouldn't that just lead to another cartel, just like OPEC?
Methinks your brilliant plan hasn't been fully thought out.
I'm no big fan of the pharmaceutical industry and would like to see many reforms (starting with patent reform) but this idea that they can't charge a fair price for their product is absurd.
And what is a fair price for a drug? It is the price a perfectly competitive free market will bear. Here in the US, we do not have a perfectly competitive free market for medicine, as the largest buyer (Medicare) is legally prohibited from trying to negotiate deals with the drug companies. In a perfectly competitive market, that restriction would not be there.
I agree that drug companies should be allowed to charge fair prices for their product. However, I also think that consumers (or their representatives) should be allowed to negotiate with the drug companies to get the best possible deal. If that cuts into the profits that drug companies make, well tough - that's the same capitalism that all sorts of non-drug businesses have to put up with on a day to day basis. I see no reason why drug companies shouldn't be forced to compete like every other industry out there.
but only a really incompetent manager would deliberately seek out employees with such qualities. generally, people who actually have talent & ability don't need to stab their co-workers in the back or be manipulative to secure their own position or rise through the ranks in a healthy organization.
Well of course, no sane manager would hire someone who backstabs coworkers. The entire point of backstabbing your coworkers is that you don't get caught. Is it virtuous? Of course not. Is it effective? Well, according to this article, perhaps it is.
Luxembourg's high population density comes from the fact that the entire country is smaller than the greater Los Angeles metro area, not because it has an especially large population.
Not exactly. Originally, the first-world was NATO and its allies. The second world was the Warsaw Pact and its allies. The third world was everyone else. By this definition, both India and Yugoslavia were third world, despite having massively different socioeconomic conditions.
Of course, after the end of the Cold War, the second-world ceased to exist, leaving us with the first world of the West, and the third world containing everyone else.
In other words, "All the antivirus, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems in the world won't help, if you don't hold your users (and your admins) accountable for their actions."
If that's the case, then wouldn't we be better off by lowering the overall tax rate and closing loopholes so that more corporations pay the stated tax rate, rather than using loopholes to pay a rate below the stated rate?
The reason places like Luxembourg, Cayman Islands, etc. can get away with charging low (or no) corporate tax is that those places are small and relatively lightly populated. Therefore, the government there doesn't have a whole lot of needs, and can get away with a light budget. The solution to this inequality, as others have suggested, is to close loopholes and make sure that corporations are paying their fair share of taxes, not to reduce the size of our government to that of Luxembourg.
Nobody wants to be sick, and nobody wants to die, and no one wants to go bankrupt from having to pay hospital bills either. The issue is that no one seems to know what the actual costs are of providing health care. All we have are biased numbers from various industries that are all intent on passing the blame onto someone else within the system.
Yet, we know that there must be inefficiency somewhere within the system, since other countries (like Britain, or Taiwan) are achieving statistically comparable outcomes while spending only a fraction of what we do? So where is the extra money going?
They might have developed some great technology with industry-wide implications to hit those marks (or maybe they didn't, I don't know), but that doesn't mean there's anything noteworthy about the goal of, "Go faster -- how much faster? A little faster than the last guy!"
The Bugatti Veyron is a little more than a little faster than the next fastest car. Let's put it this way: the Veyron can hit 200, before the next fastest car (the McLaren F1) can hit 150.
Yeah, you could just have that set up in BIOS or something and just use that configuration, but that could be a pain, too.
It might be a pain for desktops, given that they're supposed to somewhat customizable, but, I don't see why having a fixed configuration burned into the BIOS would be inappropriate for laptops. After all, its not like users are going to go in and change the motherboard or graphics chipsets on a laptop.
Yeah, you'd have to allow for external add-on hardware like USB sticks, etc., but, even today, the OS takes care of that, rather than the BIOS.
At many companies, these fixed costs are over 50% of total compensation cost. If employers stopped offering these large fixed-cost benefit packages, they could afford to hire enough workers to get the job done (and as a side benefit, their employees would be free to choose how to spend their money).
You think management wants the situation to be this way? Management wants the situation to be like the one you describe as well, as that would make planning hiring and firing much easier. Its just that, if you stop offering things like health care and 401(k) and other side benefits, the people that apply for your open positions are the bottom of the barrel dregs that you don't want to hire.
Frankly, we're all just tiptoeing around the true elephant in the room - the fact that health care costs have grown unsustainably. If health care costs are passed to the employers, we end up with the present situation - employers are afraid to hire for fear of taking the health care costs, and ask more of their existing workforce. If we pass those costs to the employees, we'll see a dramatic rise in bankruptcies and uncollectable emergency room visits as people put off getting medical treatment until their diseases are nigh-incurable. If the costs are passed to the government, we'll either see massive tax increases, or a rise in the public debt (and a corresponding rise in interest rates).
The only real way to ensure continued economic growth (past the end of the current crisis) is to deflate this health-care bubble in a controlled fashion. What the best way is to do that is still not clear, but it is clear that something must be done before the health care industry bankrupts the rest of the economy.
At the very least, you have to accept that its far from a foregone conclusion that the Community Reinvestment Act was a major contributor to the propagation and securitization of subprime mortgages.
Not really. If you look at the amount the Japanese government spent during their downturn, it was much less as a proportion of the total economy than American government expenditures during the New Deal. Secondly, due to political instability, the expenditures varied a great deal from year to year, as different parties and politicians rotated in and out of power. This lack of stability robbed what fiscal stimulus there was of its power, as companies hoarded the cash that was given to them, since political change made planning for the future precarious.
Also, regarding your sig, how did war end communism? As I see it, communism imploded due to it not being able to keep up with Western capitalism's higher productivity, not due to any real military confrontation.
How did any government regulation directly cause the current crisis? I can see several reasons that government regulation indirectly caused this mess (like encouraging the use of Credit Default Swaps to move risk off bank balance sheets), but there aren't any government regulations that forced banks to engage in the risky practices that resulted in this mess.
Regarding your idea, I think a viable model would be to set up a prize system, by which various office suites are compared on technical and UI measures, and the publisher of the best one gets a prize. Even if the prize itself wasn't big enough to motivate a big company like Microsoft, the publicity resulting from a victory in a head-to-head contest might.
Present value theory and opportunity cost are pieces of fundamental economic theory. They're not necessarily tied to "Reaganomics" or any other public policy doctrine in any discernible way.
Slashdot Mirror
As I recall, ATI opened the source and specifications for their drivers on September 10, 2007. How do you figure that ATI is still a closed standard?
You sir, have made my day! I've been looking for a new MP3 player, but all the MP3 players I've looked for from "known" brands (Creative, iRiver, etc.) have all been, as you've stated, "overpowered". Thanks for pointing out this site to me, since the players here are far more within my price range.
If you tell a student something is easy, they are likely to believe you. Believing a subject is easy, they are more likely to follow through to mastery because they have been set up to expect success.
An equally likely outcome is that the person will find the task difficult, and will then blame you (or worse, blame themselves) for not being able to accomplish the "easy" task, when, in fact, the task is much more difficult than they were told. Such a reaction is equally likely to result in the person giving up and ending up with a bad attitude towards mathematics.
Frankly, I'd appreciate the grandparent's strategy more, though not for the same reasons that he or she elucidated. If someone is honest with me and tells me that a task is hard, I'm more likely to take that into consideration and proceed more carefully when it comes time to do the task. At the same time, I'm probably going to appreciate the person being honest with me and telling me that the task was going to be difficult, as opposed to trying to trick me by telling me that the task was going to be easy.
Or, alternatively, colleges could have their own entrance exams to filter out the kids who don't know what you need to know to go to that school.
Indeed, that is the way it works in much of the rest of the world. And, one could argue that it sort of works that way here too - where the SAT and the ACT are "common entrance exams" shared by the colleges.
I don't have a source for this, but IIRC, Jack Daniels is the best-selling Whisk(e)y in Scotland.
Well, sure. Just like Budweiser is the best selling beer in the 'States. Just because its the best selling doesn't mean its the best. More likely, its what people buy to drink while they save their money for the real good stuff :)
Well, on the (admittedly few) occasions I have used a Mac, logging into GMail via Safari has always led me to the "basic HTML" version of the site. Turning off the browser check caused GMail to not render at all. So, I don't know what kind of JavaScript/CSS GMail uses, but everything works fine on Internet Explorer and Firefox but is broken on Safari, Konqueror and Opera.
To be fair though, there's little evidence that lack of standards compatibility has actually hurt Microsoft in any measurable way. It wasn't lack of standards compatibility that broke Internet Explorer's hold on the web browser market, it was the realization that allowing the web browser to have lots of hooks into the OS (via ActiveX and the like) was a bad idea from a security perspective.
So, I guess my point is, so what if Internet Explorer 8 doesn't meet the Acid3 test until 2012? If you absolutely need that functionality, you'll tell your users to use Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, or one of the numerous other browsers out there. And besides, its not like any other browser passes Acid3 either. Last I checked, the closest was Opera, and it still hadn't made it through the entire test suite.
Those satellites should beam the energy to receiving stations in Brazil, Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia, at which point they should be fed into the global power grid.
Wouldn't we need to build a global power grid first? Secondly, why should we entrust our energy infrastructure to a set of countries that aren't exactly known for their political stability and lack of corruption? Third, even if these countries could be forcibly given non-corrupt governments, is it really a good idea to entrust only three countries with something that the rest of the world depends on? Wouldn't that just lead to another cartel, just like OPEC?
Methinks your brilliant plan hasn't been fully thought out.
I'm no big fan of the pharmaceutical industry and would like to see many reforms (starting with patent reform) but this idea that they can't charge a fair price for their product is absurd.
And what is a fair price for a drug? It is the price a perfectly competitive free market will bear. Here in the US, we do not have a perfectly competitive free market for medicine, as the largest buyer (Medicare) is legally prohibited from trying to negotiate deals with the drug companies. In a perfectly competitive market, that restriction would not be there.
I agree that drug companies should be allowed to charge fair prices for their product. However, I also think that consumers (or their representatives) should be allowed to negotiate with the drug companies to get the best possible deal. If that cuts into the profits that drug companies make, well tough - that's the same capitalism that all sorts of non-drug businesses have to put up with on a day to day basis. I see no reason why drug companies shouldn't be forced to compete like every other industry out there.
but only a really incompetent manager would deliberately seek out employees with such qualities. generally, people who actually have talent & ability don't need to stab their co-workers in the back or be manipulative to secure their own position or rise through the ranks in a healthy organization.
Well of course, no sane manager would hire someone who backstabs coworkers. The entire point of backstabbing your coworkers is that you don't get caught. Is it virtuous? Of course not. Is it effective? Well, according to this article, perhaps it is.
Luxembourg's high population density comes from the fact that the entire country is smaller than the greater Los Angeles metro area, not because it has an especially large population.
Not exactly. Originally, the first-world was NATO and its allies. The second world was the Warsaw Pact and its allies. The third world was everyone else. By this definition, both India and Yugoslavia were third world, despite having massively different socioeconomic conditions.
Of course, after the end of the Cold War, the second-world ceased to exist, leaving us with the first world of the West, and the third world containing everyone else.
In other words, "All the antivirus, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems in the world won't help, if you don't hold your users (and your admins) accountable for their actions."
If that's the case, then wouldn't we be better off by lowering the overall tax rate and closing loopholes so that more corporations pay the stated tax rate, rather than using loopholes to pay a rate below the stated rate?
Taxes are the price we pay for civilization.
The reason places like Luxembourg, Cayman Islands, etc. can get away with charging low (or no) corporate tax is that those places are small and relatively lightly populated. Therefore, the government there doesn't have a whole lot of needs, and can get away with a light budget. The solution to this inequality, as others have suggested, is to close loopholes and make sure that corporations are paying their fair share of taxes, not to reduce the size of our government to that of Luxembourg.
Nobody wants to be sick, and nobody wants to die, and no one wants to go bankrupt from having to pay hospital bills either. The issue is that no one seems to know what the actual costs are of providing health care. All we have are biased numbers from various industries that are all intent on passing the blame onto someone else within the system.
Yet, we know that there must be inefficiency somewhere within the system, since other countries (like Britain, or Taiwan) are achieving statistically comparable outcomes while spending only a fraction of what we do? So where is the extra money going?
They might have developed some great technology with industry-wide implications to hit those marks (or maybe they didn't, I don't know), but that doesn't mean there's anything noteworthy about the goal of, "Go faster -- how much faster? A little faster than the last guy!"
The Bugatti Veyron is a little more than a little faster than the next fastest car. Let's put it this way: the Veyron can hit 200, before the next fastest car (the McLaren F1) can hit 150.
Yeah, you could just have that set up in BIOS or something and just use that configuration, but that could be a pain, too.
It might be a pain for desktops, given that they're supposed to somewhat customizable, but, I don't see why having a fixed configuration burned into the BIOS would be inappropriate for laptops. After all, its not like users are going to go in and change the motherboard or graphics chipsets on a laptop.
Yeah, you'd have to allow for external add-on hardware like USB sticks, etc., but, even today, the OS takes care of that, rather than the BIOS.
At many companies, these fixed costs are over 50% of total compensation cost. If employers stopped offering these large fixed-cost benefit packages, they could afford to hire enough workers to get the job done (and as a side benefit, their employees would be free to choose how to spend their money).
You think management wants the situation to be this way? Management wants the situation to be like the one you describe as well, as that would make planning hiring and firing much easier. Its just that, if you stop offering things like health care and 401(k) and other side benefits, the people that apply for your open positions are the bottom of the barrel dregs that you don't want to hire.
Frankly, we're all just tiptoeing around the true elephant in the room - the fact that health care costs have grown unsustainably. If health care costs are passed to the employers, we end up with the present situation - employers are afraid to hire for fear of taking the health care costs, and ask more of their existing workforce. If we pass those costs to the employees, we'll see a dramatic rise in bankruptcies and uncollectable emergency room visits as people put off getting medical treatment until their diseases are nigh-incurable. If the costs are passed to the government, we'll either see massive tax increases, or a rise in the public debt (and a corresponding rise in interest rates).
The only real way to ensure continued economic growth (past the end of the current crisis) is to deflate this health-care bubble in a controlled fashion. What the best way is to do that is still not clear, but it is clear that something must be done before the health care industry bankrupts the rest of the economy.
Unfortunately for your argument, CRA loans had tighter regulations and were less likely to be securitized.
At the very least, you have to accept that its far from a foregone conclusion that the Community Reinvestment Act was a major contributor to the propagation and securitization of subprime mortgages.
Not really. If you look at the amount the Japanese government spent during their downturn, it was much less as a proportion of the total economy than American government expenditures during the New Deal. Secondly, due to political instability, the expenditures varied a great deal from year to year, as different parties and politicians rotated in and out of power. This lack of stability robbed what fiscal stimulus there was of its power, as companies hoarded the cash that was given to them, since political change made planning for the future precarious.
Also, regarding your sig, how did war end communism? As I see it, communism imploded due to it not being able to keep up with Western capitalism's higher productivity, not due to any real military confrontation.
How did any government regulation directly cause the current crisis? I can see several reasons that government regulation indirectly caused this mess (like encouraging the use of Credit Default Swaps to move risk off bank balance sheets), but there aren't any government regulations that forced banks to engage in the risky practices that resulted in this mess.
Regarding your idea, I think a viable model would be to set up a prize system, by which various office suites are compared on technical and UI measures, and the publisher of the best one gets a prize. Even if the prize itself wasn't big enough to motivate a big company like Microsoft, the publicity resulting from a victory in a head-to-head contest might.
Present value theory and opportunity cost are pieces of fundamental economic theory. They're not necessarily tied to "Reaganomics" or any other public policy doctrine in any discernible way.