Actually, the US and OECD (european) numbers are quite comparable, and the US actually has slightly more restrictive criteria for what constitutes part time vs full time work. See http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/06/art2full.pdf for an overview.
from 1960 to 2000, US unemployment rates improved from relatively high to the lowest among the G7
Generally speaking the US has a per-capita GDP about 30-50% higher than that of the major European countries. If Sweden were a US state it would rank in per capita GDP around that of Mississippi or Alabama.
SV has an inherent advantage as a first mover. (Please, don't mod me down for using buzzwords.) Any new SV would have to compete with the original, and the original already works and has market share.
Industries often cluster around certain areas. Autos around Detroit, Aerospace clustered in LA for a time, gun maufacture in the Conneticuit river valley in the 19th century. Some of it appears to be simply random; that's where the industry inventors got their start. Seattle has lots of Microsoft jobs because that's where Bill and Paul grew up. As the industry grew the spin-off companies started to feed off each other, and employees or their knowledge could shift from company to company. They developed into a place where you could find _anything_ happening in the industry.
If you wanted to replicate SV you'd need a couple major research universities, and some way to keep everything relatively compact, within maybe a 100-150 mile radius. The geography of the bay area helps out on that score. It compresses everyone in the industry into a fairly small, incenstuous area. If you want to have a meeting with someone you can drive somewhere and meet them for lunch. You need people with multiple skills, including science, management, and finance. Probably also no one dominate company. That turns the place into a company town, and cuts down on cross-fertilization.
Nope. The President can declassify _anything_. If he wants to inform the world that we have broken the codes of the Iranians, he can. He can't be over-ruled by some GS-5 security official.
The assumption is that the President is in a position to weigh and balance any conflicting pressures--the public benefit of, say, revealing Iranian documents that were transmitted only via some encrypted link vs. the knowledge that doing so would compromise the intelligence source.
Yep. I can't see the cable companies and ISPs being happy about their networks being lit up for something they don't make a profit on. All the clients on the networks suddenly becoming servers is not in their business plan, I think.
Yep. But I think the move to generic Intel may be more along the lines of 18 months from now.
The Leopard release will probably include virtualization, so you can run XP or Vista alongside OS X. ("Leopard changes its spots"--get it?) Seen in this light, the Bootcamp software is just a way to get users comfortable with the idea of running Windows on a Mac. In 2007 they will probably be able to have an XP or Vista window on their OS X desktop.
The release after that, call it Lion (king of the jungle--get it?) runs on the tier one OEM boxes, like Dell, HP, etc. Once Vista ships the major feature list will probably be frozen in place for years; it took MSFT five years to go from XP to Vista, after all. That would give a more agile competitor like Apple some room to innovate while MSFT's development process is Dilbertized.
The existence of an alternative OS would make the big box vendors very happy. It would give them someone to play off of MSFT; "Cut your price by five bucks a copy or I'll sell more OS X boxes". Of course they'd be doing the same thing to Apple. The box vendors are selling hardware, so they're mostly agnostic about the software. (Though Dell would have to set up a parallel user support structure in Bangalore.)
By the end of the Monday meeting, Diebold engineers convinced the county commissioners the discrepancies in the machines' memory are the result of testing and of additional printing fonts.
A third party modifies the software configuration of the machines? I'd certainly hope that Diebold would audit the machines after that.
As for there being no scientific studies showing a connection between genetics and personality:
"Scientists in Minnesota studying twins maintain that there is a strong correlation between genetics and religious faith. " --Science & Technology News, May 2, 2005.
And, as the very article being discussed mentions, there are certain brain chemicals that are associated with higher levels of trust.
It isn't FUD if it's true. Kos backs losers, and in so doing leads his minions to waste resources on losing causes.
Worse, in the hermetically sealed world of Kos they only talk to each other, reinforcing their own worldview. The problem is that most Americans don't share it.
The Navy and Marine Corps are attempting to roll out Navy/marine Corps Internet, NMCI. The idea is to have tightly configured clients, centralized management, and centralized security, all of it essentially run by contractors. Maybe, _maybe_ the listed sites got on the firewall list for NMCI. They do maintain a list of blocked URLs. Or maybe the sites were using something forbidden by NMCI. As I recall they block Active Vex.
It's a government computer. You don't always get to go to sites like Wonkette, which is famous for sex jokes.
You wouldn't want to use SCTP to replace some UDP applications. Eg, FPS game state packets. If a packet got dropped you'd have to go through detection and resend, and it wouldn't matter because you'd have more recent game state by then, anyway.
Er, no. Housing inventory has been bloating for the last several months, and median prices have been drifting down. Affordability indexes are in the single digits, meaning you need a top 10% income to afford a media-priced house. Rents across the range of housing are about 1/2 of what it costs to buy.
BTW, the main reason the US exited Afghanistan in the wake of the war is that it was a negotiated aspect of the Soviet withdrawal. Part of the quid pro quo of getting the Soviets to leave was that the US had to stop covert and overt support for the Afghans. The US could have kept a hand in Afghanistan, but it would have prevented or delayed the exit of the Soviets, thus prolonging the war.
A quick google shows that the "omisions and distortions" author is a whacko tin foil had consipracy theorist who thinks a plane didn't hit the Pentagon. So I think your credibility just took a hit.
I don't blame Rumsfeld for not using email. In the modern world high government officials can expect to have everything they write subpoenaed and dragged into court at one time or another, where every ironic joke or indiscreet observation will be interpreted in the worst possible way. As a thought experiment, consider your email inbox for the last eight years being published on the web, where your family and friends can read it, and future employers will search it.
Um, no, Al Jazeera is not unbiased. It generally takes the Sunni piont of view, for example, while most of the Iraqi civilians are Shiite. That led al Jazeera to play footsie with the Sunnie insurgents, romaticizing their exploits and downplaying the effect of the terrorist attacks on the Iraqi civilians. Furthermore, shortly after the 2003 war several al Jazeera news officials were revealed to have been on Saddam's payroll.
You mean like by liberating tens of millions of muslims from despotic governments, as we did in Afghanistan and Iraq? Or stopping genocide in the Balkans, as we did in the 90's?
The idea that "poverty" is to blame is a non-starter. The profile for al Qaeda terrorists is quite often a muslim one or two generations removed from a rural background, with technical training, and upwardly mobile in the context of Arab society. Zarahiwi is a doctor, the ringleader of 9/11 was an urban planner with a Masters, and there are a high proprotion of engineers. Cultural anomie is a better proximate cause, particularly in the West, where 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants are often much more radical than their parents and grandparents.
Believe it or not, ideology and religious belief matters. The terrorists have a vision of the good, and they deeply and devoutly believe in it. In the West we've become so removed from religious sentiment that we find fanatical religious belief literally incomprehensible. So, as in your description above, we try to explain the world in terms of economics or social programs, which we _do_ understand. It's looking for the quarter under the streetlamp, where the light is better.
Encrypt your email traffic, so that even if it is intercepted it can't be read.
The government can still do some traffic analysis (they sniff headers rather than read the contents of the messages) and they can learn a lot from that, but such is life.
The lowest priced condo in my area is $400K, for which you get 800 sq ft and one bedroom. At 6% 30 year fixed and a $50K down payment that's $2,100 per month in mortgage payments. Taxes, homeowner association, and insurance will add several thousand a year to that. A comparable apartment in the same area (across the street, actually) rents for $1K. At a 30% marginal tax rate the mortgage deduction saves you perhaps $500 per month. Renting is more than $600 per month cheaper, probably $800 or more. Save and invest that.
Of course, house prices can (and are) going down. A 20% drop in house prices--which would return them to roughly 2003 levels--means you lose $80K. Your entire down payment is wiped out, and you're $30K underwater on the loan. Can you wait it out? Maybe. But a more typical appreciation rate of 3% per year means you'll have to stay there a very long time to recoup your money, assuming you don't get a new job and move, or pop out a couple kids and move to a different neighborhood, or get divorced.
That's at the low end of the market. A more typical starter SFH or larger condo would go for around $750K. A 20% drop there means you're out $150K. There's a very real probability that many people couldn't survive that without a bankruptcy. (In california there's a "single action" rule, meaning that the lender can only foreclose, not go after you for additional money, absent one of many exceptions, such as certain types of 2nd mortgages.) At the very least, even a well-paid household would be digging out of that for years.
And of course on the coasts people who bought in the last three years are leveraged to the utter limits of their ability. An increase in their ARM, losing a job, and they're at the wall and facing foreclosure within months.
Wait 3-5 years and pick up the McMansions on the cheap.
Right now if you live on the coasts there's an excellent chance you'll lose money--a lot of it--if you buy real estate. In my area it costs about 1/2 as much to rent a place as to buy the same place, across the whole range of housing spiffyness. People who buy condos as "investments" are having to kick in more money on top of the rental income just to meet mortgage payments. They're nowhere close to making cash flow. The affordability index is in single digits, meaning you need a top 10% income to afford a median priced house. That doesn't leave much room for more appreciation.
The for-sale inventory is ballooning, and average house time on market is, too. Mortgage rates are creeping up, and a boatload of ARM mortgages are going to reset in 2006-2007. Prices are down a few percent from last spring's peak. I strongly suspect that the people who bought on interest-only mortgages in the last two years with little or no down are going to be upside down on their loans within the next 3-5 years. Perhaps by a lot. Housing is highly leveraged. If you put 10% down, and prices drop by 10%, you lose your entire down payment. With "starter" houses going for $750K around here, a 20% drop would mean you'd be out $150K.
Pay twice as much for housing and get massively more risk, not to mention a soul-crushing mortgage? No thanks. Maybe I've got an immature brain, but the housing market is irrational right now. I'll bide my time and pick up something on foreclosure in a few years.
Apple has the potential--potential to be a breakout in the desktop OS market as well. Let's suppose that Apple successfuly transitions to Intel, and has a four or five percent market share on the desktop, both of which are reasonably safe bets. How many copies of OS X could the sell if at that point they decided to sell on generic Intel boxes, or boxes from the major vendors such as Dell, HP, and Gateway? Yes, they'd put their own hardware sales under pressure. But they'd also have the potential to massively increase their market share, sell more copies of iLife and.Mac, and still have a backup revenue source of iPods.
Microsoft is famous for owning a legal private industry mint by controlling the OS. What happens if there's another vendor out there with a 15-20% market share in the desktop consumer OS market? What would their market valuation be?
According to Gartner Dataquest, Apple's US PC market share was at 3.7% in Q1 of 2005. It could well have gone up a bit since then. Apple's unit shiments were up 45% from 2004 to 2005. According to their 10Q, unit sales of macs were up 38% in FY 2005 over FY 2004.
Slashdot Mirror
My next Hollywood script pitch.
from 1960 to 2000, US unemployment rates improved from relatively high to the lowest among the G7
Generally speaking the US has a per-capita GDP about 30-50% higher than that of the major European countries. If Sweden were a US state it would rank in per capita GDP around that of Mississippi or Alabama.
SV has an inherent advantage as a first mover. (Please, don't mod me down for using buzzwords.) Any new SV would have to compete with the original, and the original already works and has market share.
Industries often cluster around certain areas. Autos around Detroit, Aerospace clustered in LA for a time, gun maufacture in the Conneticuit river valley in the 19th century. Some of it appears to be simply random; that's where the industry inventors got their start. Seattle has lots of Microsoft jobs because that's where Bill and Paul grew up. As the industry grew the spin-off companies started to feed off each other, and employees or their knowledge could shift from company to company. They developed into a place where you could find _anything_ happening in the industry.
If you wanted to replicate SV you'd need a couple major research universities, and some way to keep everything relatively compact, within maybe a 100-150 mile radius. The geography of the bay area helps out on that score. It compresses everyone in the industry into a fairly small, incenstuous area. If you want to have a meeting with someone you can drive somewhere and meet them for lunch. You need people with multiple skills, including science, management, and finance. Probably also no one dominate company. That turns the place into a company town, and cuts down on cross-fertilization.
Nope. The President can declassify _anything_. If he wants to inform the world that we have broken the codes of the Iranians, he can. He can't be over-ruled by some GS-5 security official.
The assumption is that the President is in a position to weigh and balance any conflicting pressures--the public benefit of, say, revealing Iranian documents that were transmitted only via some encrypted link vs. the knowledge that doing so would compromise the intelligence source.
Yep. I can't see the cable companies and ISPs being happy about their networks being lit up for something they don't make a profit on. All the clients on the networks suddenly becoming servers is not in their business plan, I think.
If Steve Jobs ran the computer industry the computers would $1000 more expensive, but would also work and not be as unpleasant as Windows.
Yep. But I think the move to generic Intel may be more along the lines of 18 months from now. The Leopard release will probably include virtualization, so you can run XP or Vista alongside OS X. ("Leopard changes its spots"--get it?) Seen in this light, the Bootcamp software is just a way to get users comfortable with the idea of running Windows on a Mac. In 2007 they will probably be able to have an XP or Vista window on their OS X desktop. The release after that, call it Lion (king of the jungle--get it?) runs on the tier one OEM boxes, like Dell, HP, etc. Once Vista ships the major feature list will probably be frozen in place for years; it took MSFT five years to go from XP to Vista, after all. That would give a more agile competitor like Apple some room to innovate while MSFT's development process is Dilbertized. The existence of an alternative OS would make the big box vendors very happy. It would give them someone to play off of MSFT; "Cut your price by five bucks a copy or I'll sell more OS X boxes". Of course they'd be doing the same thing to Apple. The box vendors are selling hardware, so they're mostly agnostic about the software. (Though Dell would have to set up a parallel user support structure in Bangalore.)
A third party modifies the software configuration of the machines? I'd certainly hope that Diebold would audit the machines after that.
As for there being no scientific studies showing a connection between genetics and personality: "Scientists in Minnesota studying twins maintain that there is a strong correlation between genetics and religious faith. " --Science & Technology News, May 2, 2005. And, as the very article being discussed mentions, there are certain brain chemicals that are associated with higher levels of trust.
Worse, in the hermetically sealed world of Kos they only talk to each other, reinforcing their own worldview. The problem is that most Americans don't share it.
It's a government computer. You don't always get to go to sites like Wonkette, which is famous for sex jokes.
You wouldn't want to use SCTP to replace some UDP applications. Eg, FPS game state packets. If a packet got dropped you'd have to go through detection and resend, and it wouldn't matter because you'd have more recent game state by then, anyway.
Er, no. Housing inventory has been bloating for the last several months, and median prices have been drifting down. Affordability indexes are in the single digits, meaning you need a top 10% income to afford a media-priced house. Rents across the range of housing are about 1/2 of what it costs to buy.
BTW, the main reason the US exited Afghanistan in the wake of the war is that it was a negotiated aspect of the Soviet withdrawal. Part of the quid pro quo of getting the Soviets to leave was that the US had to stop covert and overt support for the Afghans. The US could have kept a hand in Afghanistan, but it would have prevented or delayed the exit of the Soviets, thus prolonging the war.
A quick google shows that the "omisions and distortions" author is a whacko tin foil had consipracy theorist who thinks a plane didn't hit the Pentagon. So I think your credibility just took a hit.
If the war in Iraq has no connection to al Qaeda, why is one of the major insurgent forces in Iraq called "Al Qaeda in Iraq?"
I don't blame Rumsfeld for not using email. In the modern world high government officials can expect to have everything they write subpoenaed and dragged into court at one time or another, where every ironic joke or indiscreet observation will be interpreted in the worst possible way. As a thought experiment, consider your email inbox for the last eight years being published on the web, where your family and friends can read it, and future employers will search it.
Um, no, Al Jazeera is not unbiased. It generally takes the Sunni piont of view, for example, while most of the Iraqi civilians are Shiite. That led al Jazeera to play footsie with the Sunnie insurgents, romaticizing their exploits and downplaying the effect of the terrorist attacks on the Iraqi civilians. Furthermore, shortly after the 2003 war several al Jazeera news officials were revealed to have been on Saddam's payroll.
You mean like by liberating tens of millions of muslims from despotic governments, as we did in Afghanistan and Iraq? Or stopping genocide in the Balkans, as we did in the 90's?
The idea that "poverty" is to blame is a non-starter. The profile for al Qaeda terrorists is quite often a muslim one or two generations removed from a rural background, with technical training, and upwardly mobile in the context of Arab society. Zarahiwi is a doctor, the ringleader of 9/11 was an urban planner with a Masters, and there are a high proprotion of engineers. Cultural anomie is a better proximate cause, particularly in the West, where 2nd and 3rd generation immigrants are often much more radical than their parents and grandparents.
Believe it or not, ideology and religious belief matters. The terrorists have a vision of the good, and they deeply and devoutly believe in it. In the West we've become so removed from religious sentiment that we find fanatical religious belief literally incomprehensible. So, as in your description above, we try to explain the world in terms of economics or social programs, which we _do_ understand. It's looking for the quarter under the streetlamp, where the light is better.
Encrypt your email traffic, so that even if it is intercepted it can't be read.
The government can still do some traffic analysis (they sniff headers rather than read the contents of the messages) and they can learn a lot from that, but such is life.
On the coasts it runs more like this:
The lowest priced condo in my area is $400K, for which you get 800 sq ft and one bedroom. At 6% 30 year fixed and a $50K down payment that's $2,100 per month in mortgage payments. Taxes, homeowner association, and insurance will add several thousand a year to that. A comparable apartment in the same area (across the street, actually) rents for $1K. At a 30% marginal tax rate the mortgage deduction saves you perhaps $500 per month. Renting is more than $600 per month cheaper, probably $800 or more. Save and invest that.
Of course, house prices can (and are) going down. A 20% drop in house prices--which would return them to roughly 2003 levels--means you lose $80K. Your entire down payment is wiped out, and you're $30K underwater on the loan. Can you wait it out? Maybe. But a more typical appreciation rate of 3% per year means you'll have to stay there a very long time to recoup your money, assuming you don't get a new job and move, or pop out a couple kids and move to a different neighborhood, or get divorced.
That's at the low end of the market. A more typical starter SFH or larger condo would go for around $750K. A 20% drop there means you're out $150K. There's a very real probability that many people couldn't survive that without a bankruptcy. (In california there's a "single action" rule, meaning that the lender can only foreclose, not go after you for additional money, absent one of many exceptions, such as certain types of 2nd mortgages.) At the very least, even a well-paid household would be digging out of that for years.
And of course on the coasts people who bought in the last three years are leveraged to the utter limits of their ability. An increase in their ARM, losing a job, and they're at the wall and facing foreclosure within months.
Wait 3-5 years and pick up the McMansions on the cheap.
Right now if you live on the coasts there's an excellent chance you'll lose money--a lot of it--if you buy real estate. In my area it costs about 1/2 as much to rent a place as to buy the same place, across the whole range of housing spiffyness. People who buy condos as "investments" are having to kick in more money on top of the rental income just to meet mortgage payments. They're nowhere close to making cash flow. The affordability index is in single digits, meaning you need a top 10% income to afford a median priced house. That doesn't leave much room for more appreciation. The for-sale inventory is ballooning, and average house time on market is, too. Mortgage rates are creeping up, and a boatload of ARM mortgages are going to reset in 2006-2007. Prices are down a few percent from last spring's peak. I strongly suspect that the people who bought on interest-only mortgages in the last two years with little or no down are going to be upside down on their loans within the next 3-5 years. Perhaps by a lot. Housing is highly leveraged. If you put 10% down, and prices drop by 10%, you lose your entire down payment. With "starter" houses going for $750K around here, a 20% drop would mean you'd be out $150K. Pay twice as much for housing and get massively more risk, not to mention a soul-crushing mortgage? No thanks. Maybe I've got an immature brain, but the housing market is irrational right now. I'll bide my time and pick up something on foreclosure in a few years.
Signals, as in Unix signals? kill sends a signal to the process controlling the socket.
/index.html
kill -SIGHUP 1234
If you want to send data to the process running on the socket, just use telnet
telnet foo.com 80
GET
Microsoft is famous for owning a legal private industry mint by controlling the OS. What happens if there's another vendor out there with a 15-20% market share in the desktop consumer OS market? What would their market valuation be?
According to Gartner Dataquest, Apple's US PC market share was at 3.7% in Q1 of 2005. It could well have gone up a bit since then. Apple's unit shiments were up 45% from 2004 to 2005. According to their 10Q, unit sales of macs were up 38% in FY 2005 over FY 2004.