>>They should be collaborating to make a Mars colony instead so we can get our eggs out of one basket. >>
This is a sci-fi pipe dream. Lets say our one basket breaks -- humanity is "#$"#ed, period. A colony of 20,000 people or even a million (and where is the capacity to shuttle them to Mars, I wonder? As a species we can put, what, 25 to 50 bodies in space at any given time at the moment? It would bankrupt the world to get sufficient craft capacity to get a million into space at anything like the current rates) will die out pretty quickly after the connection to earth is severed. Heck, no nations on earth are self-sustainable anymore, and we don't have the constraint of living in an environment which is lethal to us by default.
What happens to the colony's power supply needs after their connection with Earth goes down? What are they using, nukes? Great plan -- do we know if there is any uranium on Mars? Nope? Oh, well, that could be a slight problem then if the yearly uranium shipment gets interrupted. Maybe there is uranium, great, all we need to do is dig it up. And process it. That just requires a huge mass of heavy machinery and some chemists, no problem, just 1900s technology after all.
Ah, but those heavy machinery needed to be created in factories, which require big inputs of metals, plastics, and fossil fuels. Oh, no fossil fuels on Mars... shootskie. Well, we'll make them out of Unobtanium that the UN can research if we only fund their Mars colony basic research. OK, so we've got Unobtanium steamshovels and are trying to mine pitchblende. Now we've got to get it back from the mine to wherever we've got our processing center.
Oh, problem, Mars isn't crisscrossed with ocean shipping lines, highways, and airports. Well, no problem, we'll build trucks out of Unobtanium and power them with fossil fuels... aww, shoot. OK, ethanol Unobtanium trucks. Aww, shoot, there is no Kansas on Mars. No Kansas means no freaking fields of corn husks which we can afford to turn into ethanol to fatten influential Congresscritters pockets and fill up our Unobtanium trucks.
OK, we'll use hydrogen powered Unobtanium trucks -- I'm sure the UN can figure out how to lick the hydrogen problem despite the fact that its been 10 years away for the last 30 here on earth. So we've got our hydrogen powered Unobtanium trucks, which we can fill up by just combining some of that power we've got with cheap, abundant, liquid water.
Oh wait, liquid water is neither cheap or abundant on Mars. Heh, my mistake. Well, they've got polar ice. So all we need to do is to have an ice mining center at the polar ice caps, to melt the ice, to use it to power our unobtanium trucks, to transport the uranium, mined using unobtanium steam shovels, to power the colony. That only involves a couple hundred thousand workers employed in an intricately complex dance of related industries to provide power. Now, the next problem: what are our workers going to do to prevent tooth decay? Brush and floss regularly, no problem. Well, small problem: there are no tooth brushes on Mars. But hey, how hard can it be to make a toothbrush...
(For further ruminations of this nature, see "I, Pencil", which is a pro-capitalism attack on command economies. The thesis is that even the simplest of tasks, like producing a common pencil, requires too many inputs for one person to comprehend much less command. You can find a copy here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/760868/post s . I chose the toothbrush above because Soviet Russia once had none of them for a year because the bureacracy in charge of making consumer goods forgot to make them, and without a market to correct the deficiency everyone just had to do without.)
>>
They should be collaborating to make a Mars colony instead so we can get our eggs out of one basket.
>>
This is a sci-fi pipe dream. Lets say our one basket breaks -- humanity is "#$"#ed, period. A colony of 20,000 people or even a million (and where is the capacity to shuttle them to Mars, I wonder? As a species we can put, what, 25 to 50 bodies in space at any given time at the moment? It would bankrupt the world to get sufficient craft capacity to get a million into space at anything like the current rates) will die out pretty quickly after the connection to earth is severed. Heck, no nations on earth are self-sustainable anymore, and we don't have the constraint of living in an environment which is lethal to us by default.
What happens to the colony's power supply needs after their connection with Earth goes down? What are they using, nukes? Great plan -- do we know if there is any uranium on Mars? Nope? Oh, well, that could be a slight problem then if the yearly uranium shipment gets interrupted. Maybe there is uranium, great, all we need to do is dig it up. And process it. That just requires a huge mass of heavy machinery and some chemists, no problem, just 1900s technology after all.
Ah, but those heavy machinery needed to be created in factories, which require big inputs of metals, plastics, and fossil fuels. Oh, no fossil fuels on Mars... shootskie. Well, we'll make them out of Unobtanium that the UN can research if we only fund their Mars colony basic research.
OK, so we've got Unobtanium steamshovels and are trying to mine pitchblende. Now we've got to get it back from the mine to wherever we've got our processing center. Oh, problem, Mars isn't crisscrossed with ocean shipping lines, highways, and airports. Well, no problem, we'll build trucks out of Unobtanium and power them with fossil fuels... aww, shoot. OK, ethanol Unobtanium trucks.
Aww, shoot, there is no Kansas on Mars. No Kansas means no freaking fields of corn husks which we can afford to turn into ethanol to fatten influential Congresscritters pockets and fill up our Unobtanium trucks. OK, we'll use hydrogen powered Unobtanium trucks -- I'm sure the UN can figure out how to lick the hydrogen problem despite the fact that its been 10 years away for the last 30 here on earth. So we've got our hydrogen powered Unobtanium trucks, which we can fill up by just combining some of that power we've got with cheap, abundant, liquid water.
Oh wait, liquid water is neither cheap or abundant on Mars. Heh, my mistake. Well, they've got polar ice. So all we need to do is to have an ice mining center at the polar ice caps, to melt the ice, to use it to power our unobtanium trucks, to transport the uranium, mined using unobtanium steam shovels, to power the colony. That only involves a couple hundred thousand workers employed in an intricately complex dance of related industries to provide power.
Now, the next problem: what are our workers going to do to prevent tooth decay? Brush and floss regularly, no problem. Well, small problem: there are no tooth brushes on Mars. But hey, how hard can it be to make a toothbrush...
(For further ruminations of this nature, see "I, Pencil", which is a pro-capitalism attack on command economies. The thesis is that even the simplest of tasks, like producing a common pencil, requires too many inputs for one person to comprehend much less command. You can find a copy here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/760868/post s )
... and you've got something going. I know exactly where my most effective PPC ads (Google/MSN) are for my small business: my Perfect Customer is
* late 20s/early 30s * female * elementary school teacher * teaches English/ESL * looking for an activity for teaching sight words * needs it for this Friday * searching during either her lunch hour, a prep period, or from home after she puts the kids to bed
I sell Bingo Card Creator (http://www.bingocardcreator.com), which conveniently has sight words bingo built into it. There are perhaps 100 people in the country who fit my Perfect Customer profile in any given week and I sell to about 3-4 of them.
Not that I'd do it, because its creepy, but if there were some way I could send a message to every one of my Perfect Customers on Tuesday saying "Are you too busy this week? I've got your Friday lesson done already. $24.95 and you'll be done in 3 minutes.", oh boy, the things I could do with that.
(P.S. What a wonderful age we live in where a small businessman like me can get hyper-targetted advertising for less than $100 a month, and KNOW it to be effective at driving sales.)
>>Why would anyone ship burnt disks rather than making them in the destination country?>>
Simple. You can have an industrial scale DVD burning operation in China operating in broad daylight, stamp enough DVDs to fill a cargo container (thats, ahem, "A lot"), and then move them to America to sell via the gray market. Marginal cost per DVD is far less than it would be trying to make them in America, because in the US you'd be using small setups, like some shareware writers have for servicing their customers, rather than commercial stamping services (which would say "Awwww hellllllllllll no" if you asked them to make a zillion pirated Pirates of the Carribean DVDs because they don't want the feds knocking on their door).
Its always fun saying "Mars has global warming" to a room full of people who consider themselves "educated enough to know that global warming denial is an unscientific crock". You first get a bit of laughter, and then about 15 seconds later the implication dawns on them, and they'll say the satellites were busted, the protocols unscientific, and that whatever boring astronomer produced the result must be a stooge for Big Carbon.
My mother things BlueRay is a "new brand of DVD player, right?" I'd hate to be Amazon's customer service department explaining to people that they need to read carefully because the new Bond requires a new gadget to be able to play. Maybe if you beat somebody in a high-stakes poker game you'll be able to afford a BlueRay player... or at least the cable for one, which is a start.
As we all learned in college, words have meanings and deconstructing those meanings is the only worthwhile human pursuit. The UN excels at this. Take the situation in Darfur, for example. A simplistic person such as an American might look at 250,000 civilian deaths and conclude that its a "genocide". Silly American with your black and white views of the world! Learn to see shades of grey! While it is an easy mistake to make to call Darfur a genocide, everyone knows that only white people commit "genocide". When brown people kill black people its grey! Quoting from the UN report:
"In particular, the commission found that government forces and militias conducted indiscriminate attacks, including killing of civilians, torture, enforced disappearances, destruction of villages, rape and other forms of sexual violence, pillaging and forced displacement, throughout Darfur... These acts were conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, and therefore may amount to crimes against humanity... [But] The crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing..."
Phew, we dodged a bullet there! See, if there had been genocidal intent in those 250,000 murders, then we would have had to do something about it! But since there's no intent, there is no genocide, and we can just tut-tut about it a little and then get back to important things, like textual deconstruction! After all, the US firms practice of saying Last Mile instead of First Mile clearly has negative connotations for people living on it, and we wouldn't want to discourage people in places like Darfur by implying that their discursive status is to be dismissed as cavalierly as their lives! Then we can concentrate our efforts into the political and ideological reasons why people don't have Internet technology, and ignore those silly American corporations who persist on trying to find technical and financial solutions to the problem. (See the excellent breakdown in parent's article for the UN.) I mean, who expects something prosaic like *broadcasting* and *cheap, mass-produced hardware* to work at reaching the rural population? Its not like that worked for radio and television! No, we got radio and television deployed essentially everywhere by deconstructing the root political and ideological reasons for absence of television!
Seriously for a moment: you want Last Mile connectivity? Stop arguing about what its called, get the "development" eggheads out of the way, and tell American industry that there is money in it. Bam, they WILL find a path to the cheese. You don't even have to tell them there is money in it because they already know -- everyone is looking at bypassing the guys who own the physical networks and if you surmount the Last Mile problem then networks cease to become really impressive because you can't own the customers attached to them. The fact that surmounting that problem will also make for vastly cheaper infrastructure expenses for the portion of the world that isn't wired yet (which, if you're talking about broadband, includes most of the States!) is one of those happy accidents of progress. Capitalism: It Works.
Again? *yawn* Well, I guess third time's the charm.
(Mild sacrilege coming up: Jesus died to save the world from its sins and arose from the dead on the 3rd day. Jack Bauer died to save the world and was back on his feet in 20 minutes. And he's done it twice.)
They're custom-made from Lockheed Martin, spent 8 years in development each at a cost of $650 million, use military-grade titanium frames and have wheels made up of 65,000 tiny sheets of vulcanized rubber which are handmade and then painstakingly knit together to best resist wear-and-tear with the road. They're only used for serious scientific business, like carrying a mouse in the basket to see what the physiological changes are to a mouse riding a bicycle. It was determined that the changes are rather similar to what a mouse experiences in low-gravity: not much, and if you give him cheese he really couldn't care less.
Plans to retest using a hamster and sunflower seeds were scrapped after the bike was totaled in a training accident. (A NASA bicycle rider on loan from the Air Force attempted to take the bicycle over a 3 inch curb, which should have been within the 5 inch tolerance level of the suspension. Unfortunately, one of NASA's subcontractors designed for 5 cm tolerance level instead, and after the suspension exceeded tolerance it folded like only a $600 million can can.)
NASA is now submitting a proposal for a better, more expensive bicycle to continue their important scientific mission. $1 billion is slated for testing the suspension under a variety of stressful conditions, and as much as $2.50 is slated for experimental apparati for measuring the responses of the hamster.
As no one has actually seen a Dragonball Z fight conclude, we have no way of knowing how long a typical fight seen would go on for. Personally my bet is that after a few trillion episodes the vibration from the copious yelling of the same three words over and over causes the scene to collapse in on itself like a Moebius strip. This suggests the unpleasant possibility that the typical Dragonball Z fight scene is infinite in length. The truth of this conjecture is a hotly debated unsolved problem in mathematics, and unraveling it has already cost seventeen grad students their lives, and burned out the department's DVD player. The DVD player was deeply mourned.
* You're in a much better position to evaluate my worth to the company than I am. (I *love* this one.) * I am sure we can come to something mutually satisfactory. What would you suggest? * I will entertain any offer commesurate with my skills and experience. (I don't like this one -- concentrate on them, not you.)
Ways to counteroffer:
* That figure could be workable with a few minor modifications to the contract. Lets table it for a moment and discuss... * I have a comparable offer in hand from another firm but would much rather work for $YOU. Does $YOU have any money in the budget to increase that offer so we can make this happen? (Note the phrasing: HR Man has an ego just like you do, and doesn't want to say "Oh no, we're poor" to justify paying you less. He works for a big, strong company for which an extra $X,000 is a drop in the bucket! Hah, take that, applicant who doubted our financial health!) * I could quite possibly be pleased with that number, depending on the other specifics of the offer. Where does this fit into the big picture? * I notice you have offered me a $PERK. That is not that important to me. Could we perhaps eliminate $PERK in favor of increasing my base compensation? * I notice that you have not offered me $PERK. I am rather more interested in it than I am in my base compensation number. What level of $PERK do you think would be appropriate? (listen) That is almost what I had in mind, but keeping in mind that I am accepting a lower base compensation in return for $PERK, perhaps we could do a little better. I know $PERK is cheaper for you than increasing my base compensation because $PERK doesn't cause my total cost of employment, for example taxes, future raises, and overhead, to increase linearly like base compensation does (listen). Sounds great.
These assume that the initial offer was roughly in line with your expectations. I once got offered $30,000 and poor benefits when I was expecting a package in the neighborhood of $55,000. That calls for a firm handshake and a "Thank you for your time, we'll be in touch."
Come on, you're stretching credibility a wee bit when you insinuate that Rummy managed to squirrel away 100 Microsofts worth of cash without anyone noticing there was an economic black hole eating up the equivalent of 1/2 of the American GDP or about 10% of the value of all goods and services produced on EARTH in any given year. Then again, your source is also stretching credibility a wee bit when they claim that the airplanes which hit the WTC were actually being remotely operated at the time by, who else, the Jooooooooooooooooooos. (Hey mods? Anyone actually READ the contents of those links? Typing in A HREF doesn't make it true, ya dolts!)
Dang, I wish I paid for the cheap, discounted space agency you apparently contract out to for great desktop backgrounds! The Cassini project actually will cost about 3.2 billion dollars. (Portions paid in Euros, because our friends in Europe decided that they, too, had too much taxpayer money on hand). See: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/faq/mission.cfm
(Incidentally, 3.2 billion is also how much karma I have lost for pasting that link on Cassini stories. Let no one say that I'm unwilling to sacrifice for science.)
They included a bit of bloatware with your OS called the System Idle Process. If you think Digg is thirsty for resources, wait until you see that bastard. On my 3 GHz development machine it regularly is chewing up 99% of the CPU, and I can't figure out how to disable it!...
SERIOUSLY. The marginal cost of the time you have spent worrying about this is already more than the marginal cost of extra eye candy, which is zero because your computer *will* burn those cycles or consume that RAM whether you want it to or not. (I can't understand why folks get upset about RAM usage. Oh no, IE/Firefox chews up 40MB as soon as you turn it on... out of the 1GB on my machine! Thats too much, I want to keep my memory free so I can look at the process monitor and be happy while waiting an age and a half for the stuff to load from disk.) Unless you routinely have your computer pegged at 100% utilization of some limiting resource, and if you are using a modern machine I can almost guarantee that you don't, saving a few hundred KB by not displaying the technological marvel that is a rotating GIF will not cause your machine to suddenly suffer a massive decrease in performance.
Its important to note that that bug was present *in simulation only*. My unit tests catch all sorts of nasty edge cases, including some which cause the system to drop huge chunks of the database -- that is what testing is for!
You *can* download from US iTunes. You just need an American address, an email account which is not the same as the one linked to your AussieTunes account, and a US payment method. For the American address, you can use the White House for all I care (or, if this scares you for some reason, use Google maps to pick out a city/state at random and use "1234 Maple Street" with the appropriate zipcode). The email can be whatever the heck you want. The payment method is the only tricky part, and its a lot less tricky thanks to eBay. You see, lots of people who get gift certificates but really wanted cash put them up on eBay and some other sites. Buy some gift certificates from eBay (at a discount to face value), get the codes mailed to you, use them to buy from iTunes. Since you aren't inputting a credit card they won't have the computer verify your address because there is nothing to verify it against.
I keep two iTunes accounts around, one for Japan and one for the US. Thankfully they don't do geotracking or anything, and they'll both happily integrate into the same iPod/iTunes/etc.
(Incidentally, the White House address:
The White House 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW Washington, DC 20500 )
Yep, its pretty easy to hit 50% *marginal* taxation as a self-employed individual in the US. 13.4% self employment tax, 28% federal rate, throw in a high taxing state like California and you're pretty well there. (Don't think you're getting off easy if you're not self employed though. Your company is paying that as a Medicare/SS contribution on your behalf. You never see it but it depresses the wages they're willing to offer you all the same.) This doesn't mean you'll experience 50% effective taxation, since parts of your wages are getting taxed at much lower rates. There are some countries you could live in though which have well in excess of 50% effective taxation... Sweden is one, for example. 60% and up, up, up.
You'll note I don't sell calculators. D'oh. In my defense, I guesstimate my personal tax burden as a third and wrote 30% to not have to worry about rounding error. *sigh*
Sellers already have to charge sales tax in some circumstances but for small non-corporate sellers compliance is nil. This is an income tax issue, though, not a consumption tax issue. For example, if I make say $50,000 a year and am hypothetically paying a marginal 30% on additional income, if my bosses give me a $5,000 raise I lose the first $1,600 or so to taxes. However, if my eBay business profits $5,000 and I don't declare it I get that $5,000 taxfree. (If I do declare it I actually end up paying MORE than $1,600 due to self-employment tax but thats another matter altogether.) I suppose you COULD raise prices to compensate for this but you can't call it a sales tax surcharge and, indeed, with the amount you'd have to raise prices people would likely go spare if you tried.
Signed,
Guy who actually did pay taxes on his web-based small business this year
>> If games have a blind spot about race, I'd have to admit that it's the appearance of Indians, Muslims, Sikhs and the other eastern peoples as "terrorists" in most situations. >>
Darn straight, we need to have more diversity among our terrorists or budding lesbian Latina Shinto suicide bombers will suffer from depressed self-esteem.
(Sidenote: Aladdin, in his zillion incarnations. The entire freaking cast of Prince of Persia. You can play as Tehran Airlines in Aerobiz, and if you manage to get past the fact that your region is in ceaseless war (because in real life that region is in ceaseless war) you can even make a profit at it -- it was my favorite "conquer the world" scenario after I got bored of winning with easy starts like Tokyo, New York, and London. I suppose Japanese RPGs have a distinct lack of Muslims but then again they have a distinct lack of Catholics, Jews, and people with hair which is not neon and spiky.)
"Only 2/16 engines work reliably, 2/3 of the wheels failed"... and its STILL better than anything Detroit makes. Now they're going to try crashing it into a planet to show NASA that they're not the only space agency capable of... crashing something into a planet. Japan was miffed when the European Space Agency got the drop on them last year and slammed something into the moon.
Mac OS X -- Your computer needs water which is dyed a special shade of plastic white, is only available from one manufacturer, and costs about double what water usually costs. On the plus side, you chuckle every time you see the iFlow ads.
Gentoo -- You spend all of your day running submerge.
Windows 95 -- Your water has frozen. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot.
Windows 98 -- Your water got some virii in it while you were searching for water sports. I swear, they should put a warning label around the English language some days. You now need to buy some chlorine from one of the numerous providers who specialize in cleaning up Microsoft's messes.
Windows XP SP2 -- Your water suddenly looks a whole lot like plastic Fisher Price toy, but with your newfound determination to never, ever again search for watersports your system is actually pretty secure. Slashdot still makes fun of you, but they're all wet.
Windows Vista -- It looks like you're trying to NAND 0 and 1 together. Do you want to permit this action?
Slashdot Mirror
*grumble grumble* I hate HTML coding.
t s . I chose the toothbrush above because Soviet Russia once had none of them for a year because the bureacracy in charge of making consumer goods forgot to make them, and without a market to correct the deficiency everyone just had to do without.)
>>They should be collaborating to make a Mars colony instead so we can get our eggs out of one basket. >>
This is a sci-fi pipe dream. Lets say our one basket breaks -- humanity is "#$"#ed, period. A colony of 20,000 people or even a million (and where is the capacity to shuttle them to Mars, I wonder? As a species we can put, what, 25 to 50 bodies in space at any given time at the moment? It would bankrupt the world to get sufficient craft capacity to get a million into space at anything like the current rates) will die out pretty quickly after the connection to earth is severed. Heck, no nations on earth are self-sustainable anymore, and we don't have the constraint of living in an environment which is lethal to us by default.
What happens to the colony's power supply needs after their connection with Earth goes down? What are they using, nukes? Great plan -- do we know if there is any uranium on Mars? Nope? Oh, well, that could be a slight problem then if the yearly uranium shipment gets interrupted. Maybe there is uranium, great, all we need to do is dig it up. And process it. That just requires a huge mass of heavy machinery and some chemists, no problem, just 1900s technology after all.
Ah, but those heavy machinery needed to be created in factories, which require big inputs of metals, plastics, and fossil fuels. Oh, no fossil fuels on Mars... shootskie. Well, we'll make them out of Unobtanium that the UN can research if we only fund their Mars colony basic research. OK, so we've got Unobtanium steamshovels and are trying to mine pitchblende. Now we've got to get it back from the mine to wherever we've got our processing center.
Oh, problem, Mars isn't crisscrossed with ocean shipping lines, highways, and airports. Well, no problem, we'll build trucks out of Unobtanium and power them with fossil fuels... aww, shoot. OK, ethanol Unobtanium trucks. Aww, shoot, there is no Kansas on Mars. No Kansas means no freaking fields of corn husks which we can afford to turn into ethanol to fatten influential Congresscritters pockets and fill up our Unobtanium trucks.
OK, we'll use hydrogen powered Unobtanium trucks -- I'm sure the UN can figure out how to lick the hydrogen problem despite the fact that its been 10 years away for the last 30 here on earth. So we've got our hydrogen powered Unobtanium trucks, which we can fill up by just combining some of that power we've got with cheap, abundant, liquid water.
Oh wait, liquid water is neither cheap or abundant on Mars. Heh, my mistake. Well, they've got polar ice. So all we need to do is to have an ice mining center at the polar ice caps, to melt the ice, to use it to power our unobtanium trucks, to transport the uranium, mined using unobtanium steam shovels, to power the colony. That only involves a couple hundred thousand workers employed in an intricately complex dance of related industries to provide power. Now, the next problem: what are our workers going to do to prevent tooth decay? Brush and floss regularly, no problem. Well, small problem: there are no tooth brushes on Mars. But hey, how hard can it be to make a toothbrush...
(For further ruminations of this nature, see "I, Pencil", which is a pro-capitalism attack on command economies. The thesis is that even the simplest of tasks, like producing a common pencil, requires too many inputs for one person to comprehend much less command. You can find a copy here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/760868/pos
>> They should be collaborating to make a Mars colony instead so we can get our eggs out of one basket. >> This is a sci-fi pipe dream. Lets say our one basket breaks -- humanity is "#$"#ed, period. A colony of 20,000 people or even a million (and where is the capacity to shuttle them to Mars, I wonder? As a species we can put, what, 25 to 50 bodies in space at any given time at the moment? It would bankrupt the world to get sufficient craft capacity to get a million into space at anything like the current rates) will die out pretty quickly after the connection to earth is severed. Heck, no nations on earth are self-sustainable anymore, and we don't have the constraint of living in an environment which is lethal to us by default. What happens to the colony's power supply needs after their connection with Earth goes down? What are they using, nukes? Great plan -- do we know if there is any uranium on Mars? Nope? Oh, well, that could be a slight problem then if the yearly uranium shipment gets interrupted. Maybe there is uranium, great, all we need to do is dig it up. And process it. That just requires a huge mass of heavy machinery and some chemists, no problem, just 1900s technology after all. Ah, but those heavy machinery needed to be created in factories, which require big inputs of metals, plastics, and fossil fuels. Oh, no fossil fuels on Mars... shootskie. Well, we'll make them out of Unobtanium that the UN can research if we only fund their Mars colony basic research. OK, so we've got Unobtanium steamshovels and are trying to mine pitchblende. Now we've got to get it back from the mine to wherever we've got our processing center. Oh, problem, Mars isn't crisscrossed with ocean shipping lines, highways, and airports. Well, no problem, we'll build trucks out of Unobtanium and power them with fossil fuels... aww, shoot. OK, ethanol Unobtanium trucks. Aww, shoot, there is no Kansas on Mars. No Kansas means no freaking fields of corn husks which we can afford to turn into ethanol to fatten influential Congresscritters pockets and fill up our Unobtanium trucks. OK, we'll use hydrogen powered Unobtanium trucks -- I'm sure the UN can figure out how to lick the hydrogen problem despite the fact that its been 10 years away for the last 30 here on earth. So we've got our hydrogen powered Unobtanium trucks, which we can fill up by just combining some of that power we've got with cheap, abundant, liquid water. Oh wait, liquid water is neither cheap or abundant on Mars. Heh, my mistake. Well, they've got polar ice. So all we need to do is to have an ice mining center at the polar ice caps, to melt the ice, to use it to power our unobtanium trucks, to transport the uranium, mined using unobtanium steam shovels, to power the colony. That only involves a couple hundred thousand workers employed in an intricately complex dance of related industries to provide power. Now, the next problem: what are our workers going to do to prevent tooth decay? Brush and floss regularly, no problem. Well, small problem: there are no tooth brushes on Mars. But hey, how hard can it be to make a toothbrush... (For further ruminations of this nature, see "I, Pencil", which is a pro-capitalism attack on command economies. The thesis is that even the simplest of tasks, like producing a common pencil, requires too many inputs for one person to comprehend much less command. You can find a copy here: http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/760868/post s )
... and you've got something going. I know exactly where my most effective PPC ads (Google/MSN) are for my small business: my Perfect Customer is
* late 20s/early 30s
* female
* elementary school teacher
* teaches English/ESL
* looking for an activity for teaching sight words
* needs it for this Friday
* searching during either her lunch hour, a prep period, or from home after she puts the kids to bed
I sell Bingo Card Creator (http://www.bingocardcreator.com), which conveniently has sight words bingo built into it. There are perhaps 100 people in the country who fit my Perfect Customer profile in any given week and I sell to about 3-4 of them.
Not that I'd do it, because its creepy, but if there were some way I could send a message to every one of my Perfect Customers on Tuesday saying "Are you too busy this week? I've got your Friday lesson done already. $24.95 and you'll be done in 3 minutes.", oh boy, the things I could do with that.
(P.S. What a wonderful age we live in where a small businessman like me can get hyper-targetted advertising for less than $100 a month, and KNOW it to be effective at driving sales.)
>>Why would anyone ship burnt disks rather than making them in the destination country?>>
Simple. You can have an industrial scale DVD burning operation in China operating in broad daylight, stamp enough DVDs to fill a cargo container (thats, ahem, "A lot"), and then move them to America to sell via the gray market. Marginal cost per DVD is far less than it would be trying to make them in America, because in the US you'd be using small setups, like some shareware writers have for servicing their customers, rather than commercial stamping services (which would say "Awwww hellllllllllll no" if you asked them to make a zillion pirated Pirates of the Carribean DVDs because they don't want the feds knocking on their door).
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/mars_ice-age _031208.html
Its always fun saying "Mars has global warming" to a room full of people who consider themselves "educated enough to know that global warming denial is an unscientific crock". You first get a bit of laughter, and then about 15 seconds later the implication dawns on them, and they'll say the satellites were busted, the protocols unscientific, and that whatever boring astronomer produced the result must be a stooge for Big Carbon.
My mother things BlueRay is a "new brand of DVD player, right?" I'd hate to be Amazon's customer service department explaining to people that they need to read carefully because the new Bond requires a new gadget to be able to play. Maybe if you beat somebody in a high-stakes poker game you'll be able to afford a BlueRay player... or at least the cable for one, which is a start.
As we all learned in college, words have meanings and deconstructing those meanings is the only worthwhile human pursuit. The UN excels at this. Take the situation in Darfur, for example. A simplistic person such as an American might look at 250,000 civilian deaths and conclude that its a "genocide". Silly American with your black and white views of the world! Learn to see shades of grey! While it is an easy mistake to make to call Darfur a genocide, everyone knows that only white people commit "genocide". When brown people kill black people its grey! Quoting from the UN report:
"In particular, the commission found that government forces and militias conducted indiscriminate attacks, including killing of civilians, torture, enforced disappearances, destruction of villages, rape and other forms of sexual violence, pillaging and forced displacement, throughout Darfur... These acts were conducted on a widespread and systematic basis, and therefore may amount to crimes against humanity... [But] The crucial element of genocidal intent appears to be missing..."
Phew, we dodged a bullet there! See, if there had been genocidal intent in those 250,000 murders, then we would have had to do something about it! But since there's no intent, there is no genocide, and we can just tut-tut about it a little and then get back to important things, like textual deconstruction! After all, the US firms practice of saying Last Mile instead of First Mile clearly has negative connotations for people living on it, and we wouldn't want to discourage people in places like Darfur by implying that their discursive status is to be dismissed as cavalierly as their lives! Then we can concentrate our efforts into the political and ideological reasons why people don't have Internet technology, and ignore those silly American corporations who persist on trying to find technical and financial solutions to the problem. (See the excellent breakdown in parent's article for the UN.) I mean, who expects something prosaic like *broadcasting* and *cheap, mass-produced hardware* to work at reaching the rural population? Its not like that worked for radio and television! No, we got radio and television deployed essentially everywhere by deconstructing the root political and ideological reasons for absence of television!
Seriously for a moment: you want Last Mile connectivity? Stop arguing about what its called, get the "development" eggheads out of the way, and tell American industry that there is money in it. Bam, they WILL find a path to the cheese. You don't even have to tell them there is money in it because they already know -- everyone is looking at bypassing the guys who own the physical networks and if you surmount the Last Mile problem then networks cease to become really impressive because you can't own the customers attached to them. The fact that surmounting that problem will also make for vastly cheaper infrastructure expenses for the portion of the world that isn't wired yet (which, if you're talking about broadband, includes most of the States!) is one of those happy accidents of progress. Capitalism: It Works.
Again? *yawn* Well, I guess third time's the charm.
(Mild sacrilege coming up: Jesus died to save the world from its sins and arose from the dead on the 3rd day. Jack Bauer died to save the world and was back on his feet in 20 minutes. And he's done it twice.)
They're custom-made from Lockheed Martin, spent 8 years in development each at a cost of $650 million, use military-grade titanium frames and have wheels made up of 65,000 tiny sheets of vulcanized rubber which are handmade and then painstakingly knit together to best resist wear-and-tear with the road. They're only used for serious scientific business, like carrying a mouse in the basket to see what the physiological changes are to a mouse riding a bicycle. It was determined that the changes are rather similar to what a mouse experiences in low-gravity: not much, and if you give him cheese he really couldn't care less.
Plans to retest using a hamster and sunflower seeds were scrapped after the bike was totaled in a training accident. (A NASA bicycle rider on loan from the Air Force attempted to take the bicycle over a 3 inch curb, which should have been within the 5 inch tolerance level of the suspension. Unfortunately, one of NASA's subcontractors designed for 5 cm tolerance level instead, and after the suspension exceeded tolerance it folded like only a $600 million can can.)
NASA is now submitting a proposal for a better, more expensive bicycle to continue their important scientific mission. $1 billion is slated for testing the suspension under a variety of stressful conditions, and as much as $2.50 is slated for experimental apparati for measuring the responses of the hamster.
As no one has actually seen a Dragonball Z fight conclude, we have no way of knowing how long a typical fight seen would go on for. Personally my bet is that after a few trillion episodes the vibration from the copious yelling of the same three words over and over causes the scene to collapse in on itself like a Moebius strip. This suggests the unpleasant possibility that the typical Dragonball Z fight scene is infinite in length. The truth of this conjecture is a hotly debated unsolved problem in mathematics, and unraveling it has already cost seventeen grad students their lives, and burned out the department's DVD player. The DVD player was deeply mourned.
* You're in a much better position to evaluate my worth to the company than I am. (I *love* this one.)
* I am sure we can come to something mutually satisfactory. What would you suggest?
* I will entertain any offer commesurate with my skills and experience. (I don't like this one -- concentrate on them, not you.)
Ways to counteroffer:
* That figure could be workable with a few minor modifications to the contract. Lets table it for a moment and discuss...
* I have a comparable offer in hand from another firm but would much rather work for $YOU. Does $YOU have any money in the budget to increase that offer so we can make this happen? (Note the phrasing: HR Man has an ego just like you do, and doesn't want to say "Oh no, we're poor" to justify paying you less. He works for a big, strong company for which an extra $X,000 is a drop in the bucket! Hah, take that, applicant who doubted our financial health!)
* I could quite possibly be pleased with that number, depending on the other specifics of the offer. Where does this fit into the big picture?
* I notice you have offered me a $PERK. That is not that important to me. Could we perhaps eliminate $PERK in favor of increasing my base compensation?
* I notice that you have not offered me $PERK. I am rather more interested in it than I am in my base compensation number. What level of $PERK do you think would be appropriate? (listen) That is almost what I had in mind, but keeping in mind that I am accepting a lower base compensation in return for $PERK, perhaps we could do a little better. I know $PERK is cheaper for you than increasing my base compensation because $PERK doesn't cause my total cost of employment, for example taxes, future raises, and overhead, to increase linearly like base compensation does (listen). Sounds great.
These assume that the initial offer was roughly in line with your expectations. I once got offered $30,000 and poor benefits when I was expecting a package in the neighborhood of $55,000. That calls for a firm handshake and a "Thank you for your time, we'll be in touch."
Come on, you're stretching credibility a wee bit when you insinuate that Rummy managed to squirrel away 100 Microsofts worth of cash without anyone noticing there was an economic black hole eating up the equivalent of 1/2 of the American GDP or about 10% of the value of all goods and services produced on EARTH in any given year. Then again, your source is also stretching credibility a wee bit when they claim that the airplanes which hit the WTC were actually being remotely operated at the time by, who else, the Jooooooooooooooooooos. (Hey mods? Anyone actually READ the contents of those links? Typing in A HREF doesn't make it true, ya dolts!)
Dang, I wish I paid for the cheap, discounted space agency you apparently contract out to for great desktop backgrounds! The Cassini project actually will cost about 3.2 billion dollars. (Portions paid in Euros, because our friends in Europe decided that they, too, had too much taxpayer money on hand). See: http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/faq/mission.cfm
(Incidentally, 3.2 billion is also how much karma I have lost for pasting that link on Cassini stories. Let no one say that I'm unwilling to sacrifice for science.)
They included a bit of bloatware with your OS called the System Idle Process. If you think Digg is thirsty for resources, wait until you see that bastard. On my 3 GHz development machine it regularly is chewing up 99% of the CPU, and I can't figure out how to disable it! ...
SERIOUSLY. The marginal cost of the time you have spent worrying about this is already more than the marginal cost of extra eye candy, which is zero because your computer *will* burn those cycles or consume that RAM whether you want it to or not. (I can't understand why folks get upset about RAM usage. Oh no, IE/Firefox chews up 40MB as soon as you turn it on... out of the 1GB on my machine! Thats too much, I want to keep my memory free so I can look at the process monitor and be happy while waiting an age and a half for the stuff to load from disk.) Unless you routinely have your computer pegged at 100% utilization of some limiting resource, and if you are using a modern machine I can almost guarantee that you don't, saving a few hundred KB by not displaying the technological marvel that is a rotating GIF will not cause your machine to suddenly suffer a massive decrease in performance.
I was wondering how to spin this so that it would possibly be anti-Microsoft. Thank you, Slashdot.
This professor doesn't need AI, he needs a time server. Now.
Its important to note that that bug was present *in simulation only*. My unit tests catch all sorts of nasty edge cases, including some which cause the system to drop huge chunks of the database -- that is what testing is for!
You *can* download from US iTunes. You just need an American address, an email account which is not the same as the one linked to your AussieTunes account, and a US payment method. For the American address, you can use the White House for all I care (or, if this scares you for some reason, use Google maps to pick out a city/state at random and use "1234 Maple Street" with the appropriate zipcode). The email can be whatever the heck you want. The payment method is the only tricky part, and its a lot less tricky thanks to eBay. You see, lots of people who get gift certificates but really wanted cash put them up on eBay and some other sites. Buy some gift certificates from eBay (at a discount to face value), get the codes mailed to you, use them to buy from iTunes. Since you aren't inputting a credit card they won't have the computer verify your address because there is nothing to verify it against.
I keep two iTunes accounts around, one for Japan and one for the US. Thankfully they don't do geotracking or anything, and they'll both happily integrate into the same iPod/iTunes/etc.
(Incidentally, the White House address:
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, DC 20500
)
Yep, its pretty easy to hit 50% *marginal* taxation as a self-employed individual in the US. 13.4% self employment tax, 28% federal rate, throw in a high taxing state like California and you're pretty well there. (Don't think you're getting off easy if you're not self employed though. Your company is paying that as a Medicare/SS contribution on your behalf. You never see it but it depresses the wages they're willing to offer you all the same.) This doesn't mean you'll experience 50% effective taxation, since parts of your wages are getting taxed at much lower rates. There are some countries you could live in though which have well in excess of 50% effective taxation... Sweden is one, for example. 60% and up, up, up.
You'll note I don't sell calculators. D'oh. In my defense, I guesstimate my personal tax burden as a third and wrote 30% to not have to worry about rounding error. *sigh*
Sellers already have to charge sales tax in some circumstances but for small non-corporate sellers compliance is nil. This is an income tax issue, though, not a consumption tax issue. For example, if I make say $50,000 a year and am hypothetically paying a marginal 30% on additional income, if my bosses give me a $5,000 raise I lose the first $1,600 or so to taxes. However, if my eBay business profits $5,000 and I don't declare it I get that $5,000 taxfree. (If I do declare it I actually end up paying MORE than $1,600 due to self-employment tax but thats another matter altogether.) I suppose you COULD raise prices to compensate for this but you can't call it a sales tax surcharge and, indeed, with the amount you'd have to raise prices people would likely go spare if you tried.
Signed,
Guy who actually did pay taxes on his web-based small business this year
>>
If games have a blind spot about race, I'd have to admit that it's the appearance of Indians, Muslims, Sikhs and the other eastern peoples as "terrorists" in most situations.
>>
Darn straight, we need to have more diversity among our terrorists or budding lesbian Latina Shinto suicide bombers will suffer from depressed self-esteem.
(Sidenote: Aladdin, in his zillion incarnations. The entire freaking cast of Prince of Persia. You can play as Tehran Airlines in Aerobiz, and if you manage to get past the fact that your region is in ceaseless war (because in real life that region is in ceaseless war) you can even make a profit at it -- it was my favorite "conquer the world" scenario after I got bored of winning with easy starts like Tokyo, New York, and London. I suppose Japanese RPGs have a distinct lack of Muslims but then again they have a distinct lack of Catholics, Jews, and people with hair which is not neon and spiky.)
Or, more to the point, that your lowball glasses always seemed to NOT be filled with bourbon.
"Only 2/16 engines work reliably, 2/3 of the wheels failed"... and its STILL better than anything Detroit makes. Now they're going to try crashing it into a planet to show NASA that they're not the only space agency capable of... crashing something into a planet. Japan was miffed when the European Space Agency got the drop on them last year and slammed something into the moon.
Mac OS X -- Your computer needs water which is dyed a special shade of plastic white, is only available from one manufacturer, and costs about double what water usually costs. On the plus side, you chuckle every time you see the iFlow ads.
Gentoo -- You spend all of your day running submerge.
Windows 95 -- Your water has frozen. Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to reboot.
Windows 98 -- Your water got some virii in it while you were searching for water sports. I swear, they should put a warning label around the English language some days. You now need to buy some chlorine from one of the numerous providers who specialize in cleaning up Microsoft's messes.
Windows XP SP2 -- Your water suddenly looks a whole lot like plastic Fisher Price toy, but with your newfound determination to never, ever again search for watersports your system is actually pretty secure. Slashdot still makes fun of you, but they're all wet.
Windows Vista -- It looks like you're trying to NAND 0 and 1 together. Do you want to permit this action?