You can throw someone in prison for consuming an addictive narcotic, which is clearly bad for them. When you try to reduce oil consumption, it's an affront to the American way of life! An attack on freedom!
I have not owned a car in nearly 3 years. I now take transit and trains everywhere I go, both of which are powered by electricity.
I'm not suggesting that I am "better" than anyone by doing those things, I just personally prefer to not deal with the stress of being in a car. My point is that there are alternatives to just consuming more of a resource which is clearly becoming more difficult, costly and downright dangerous to extract (the mess from this spill is going to make the Athabasca oil sands seem like a Greenpeace-approved project)
I think it is mostly due to laziness on the part of American businesses and the administrative headache of dealing with different country-level regulations.
There are two markets for the American MBA: America, and not-America. When your average PHB looks at the potential money to be made in Canada selling products/services, he looks at it as going through a whole lot of effort to gain an (English-speaking) market a bit bigger than Texas (Quebec brings Canada's population up to 34m, but adding another language to the mix makes it even less desirable)
Once a business has saturated the US market and is looking to expand abroad, that's when we seem to get the goods, although I'm increasingly seeing US businesses bypass Canada and head for the UK market first.
This often works in reverse though -- many European businesses look at Canada as pseudo-European (or America-lite, depending on your viewpoint) and will test out products here first. For example, the Smart car was available in Canada long before it was available down in the US.
You are right, my rant did go astray and I realize that debt and equity are not the same thing. I am, however, trying to explain things from the perspective of a small business owner, you know, the little guy that the financial industry is walking all over.
If we reverted to a very old fashioned banking system, 3% on deposits, 6% loans, bankers on the golf course at 3pm, i would be better off. With all the "innovation" and technology giving us "liquidity" in the debt and equity markets, what do i see? My deposits at 0.1% and loans up at 10 or higher. I wouldn't dream of putting good money into what is clearly a rigged equity market. How can I support anything that continues to push in that direction when my most basic financial needs are being neglected?
Give me capital at a decent price, (i.e. stop looting it into bonus pools) and you'll have my support to "innovate" all you want.
And regarding being well-capitalised, I have money and cash-flow, but I wanted to get a credit line so that I could have a life line while taking on some riskier jobs. Of course, at 8-9%, I consider it unacceptably expensive to do so, and so I operate much more conservatively than I otherwise would.
Parent characterises the complete detachment from reality that characterises the modern "innovative" financial industry.
I operate a small business. I don't give a fsck about your claims that we need "liquidity" when I can't get a simple business loan for less than 8-9%, despite being well-capitalised, while my personal savings attract all of r pct, where 0.01 < r < 0.1. Quite the scam there. As a result, I use only retained earnings to pay for anything, which while a prudent thing to do given my situation, is hardly a recipe for large-scale economic growth. The financial industry does not fulfil its most basic imperative of funnelling capital to productive use, why should I care about whether some institutions can hold a stock for 1ms or 1 day?
I suppose things could be worse. Maybe in addition to being completely starved for capital, I may be subject to "protection" payments in the near future just to be able to stay in business at all! Financial innovation, 'Ndrangheta style! Wouldn't that be a boon for Wall Street and the City of London.
Both parent and grandparent have failed to understand the significance of the experiment. The task was specifically chosen as a right-brain type of activity. With a large monetary award, left-brain thinking creeps into the process and reduces performance.
With a smaller reward and less pressure, right-brained activity can flourish and the solution found much faster. If the task had been, say, hammer these 20 nails into this wall, I would expect a correlation between total time to complete the task, and compensation (that is, unless you had right-brained MacGyver create a nailgun out of a paperclip and an elastic...)
The results of the experiment are not very interesting or controversial in themselves; the important part is whether you believe that right-brained activity is so important to functioning of the 21st century economy.
Just based on this post, it is clear that the US is lucky to have you as an immigrant. Immigration policy should encourage you and make your life as easy as possible, since you are the "right" type of immigrant, but that does not seem to be the result of the current policies.
I believe that most Americans would agree with this, regardless of their stance on the H1-B program.
Right on the money. The result is that the H1-B is only desirable for people who have it "bad" back in their home countries. As a Canadian working in the US for a few years on the comparatively free (but temporary) TN-1 visa, I quite rightly told my employer thanks but no thanks to the second-class status of an H1-B. I've since left, and the US has lost an immigrant who was fluent in the language and assimilated into the culture.
I don't think anyone writing immigration policy in Washington, or the string-pullers in Silicon Valley, Seattle, etc. are shedding a tear, however -- a person integrated into American society with choices and relative freedom of movement is not the type of person they want.
This would be interesting if it were true. IBM consultants are quite happy to sell Oracle-based solutions and do so quite often -- the linkages between IBM software, consulting and hardware are really quite loose.
Definitely. Supporting a studio like S2 that independently publishers, and one that develops for linux, is like a double win -- I know that my dollars are going mostly towards the developers, designers and artists, not a bloated layer of marketers, sales, bizdev, etc. etc. that only drive up the cost of most games.
It's amazing that TFA doesn't mention a thing about whether Perelman will actually accept the prize. What will happen to the prize money if he does not accept? The million dollars disappears into Lichtenstein numbered bank accounts 2718-282 and 3141-519?
It's not quite that simple. Proving that a product as complex as a consumer-level GUI operating system is bug-free and secure is in general an undecideable problem.
We can't even prove that our critical, lower-level embedded software (aerospace, health-related, etc) is bug-free, and this is why there is substantially more effort put into ensuring that such software is of high quality. For example there are extensive regulations on how exhaustively testing must be done on various components of an aviation-related piece of software, depending on its criticality
Try enforcing something like this on Windows, and even monopolistic Microsoft's fabled profit margins would disappear -- it would be the push that crowd-sourced OSS software would need to acheive a real foothold in the desktop market.
This is a great story and an example of the principle of things we know, things we don't know, and things we don't know that we don't know. I struggled for years with asthma and only really got better once I stopped taking all the drugs. I haven't used an inhaler for nearly 10 years. I take virtually everything I am told to do by the "latest studies" with a huge grain of salt (pardon the pun)
My personal belief is that all people, simply by virtue of their genes having made it this far evolutionarily, are pretty damn resilient and most of our internal processes return to a kind of equilibrium state, given a diet and activity level which is somewhat "natural" relative to what was the norm for our ancestors.
Of course this is a general rule that often is not relevant -- if you've been diagnosed with cancer due to long-term exposure to radioactivity, well our process of evolution for resilience to radioactivity is only just beginning.
The problem with this is that it invalidates much of the expected role of the medical professional, who writes us some prescription, gives us test results, waves a magic wand, etc. What would we do with all the excess antibiotic-producing capacity if doctors just told clearly virus-infected patients to go home and rest?
Great to see that someone gets it. Of course the ad buyer's perspective is not considered in these whines from publishers because the money that pays for those ads just comes from "somewhere" , and these ad blockers are disrupting my flow of $$$ from that "somewhere"!
If you think about it a bit, you'll realize that it is fundamentally not any different than the current 3rd party ad-server architecture; the only thing that changes is where the money comes from -- direct from readers, and not from advertisers. To the publisher, all they really care about is making money and they will sign on to such a network the second it becomes available, because there is little risk on their end.
Eventually, someone will build a network like this that will revolutionize the way money is made by publishers, and do a whole lot of good for the internet as a whole in the process, but it will be an uphill struggle to unseat a lot of players that have a strong vested interested in things remaining as backwards as they are.
These micropayments are not micro in any way; if a site expects you to pay 5 cents for an article, they are asking the equivalent of a fortune ($50 effective revenue per thousand). What we need is a real micropayment infrastructure that can be shared across sites and do away with the obtrusive ads once and for all.
While it varies from site to site, the effective revenue that most sites get for every thousand views is not usually more than a couple of dollars, and for small sites far less. This translates to fractions of a penny of revenue per page viewed.
So doing the math again on your year-end total would be in the range of $10-20, not $550
I don't think I could have said it better, but I'll go a step further. The argument of TFA is fallacious
I'm waiting for the internet financing model to shift away from employing vast numbers of people in an entirely useless pursuit of harassing me into buying things I don't want or need, and towards building a comparatively simple micropayment infrastructure, where as I view sites that I enjoy and value, i can drop small (less than 1 cent) tips that contribute to the revenue of the site.
Compared to the typical effective value per thousand page views most sites get for ads, it would result in maybe $0.10 - $2 worth of tips you leave for every thousand pages you load (depending on the site)
Until that infrastructure is in place, my adblocker is still on, because im' not going to buy any useless crap based on a flash animation, so I only dilute the value of the advertising, and the extra cpu cycles my computer spends to render the ads is actually a net cost to me in power consumption.
In addition to the former Yugoslavia. The individual republics were encouraged to develop complementary industries to foster a sense of co-dependence . This did not come close to stopping a violent breakup once the Soviet Union fell and Western powers desired direct influence in what was previously a neutral buffer state (that they previously helped support to deny Soviet access to the Mediterranean)
I saw an idea somewhere that politicians these days should require NASCAR/Formula-1 style sponsor patches to be worn on their suits at all times, to indicate which corporations are funding their campaigns.
Then when someone says there is no evidence of IE being less secure, we can Look for the logo
In the same vein, Apple products equivalent to the recently-gentrified area in any major city where artists and "bohemians" used to live, but have now been pushed out and replaced with "edgy" chain stores and condo developments like the (vomit) Bohemian Embassy in Toronto's formerly-cool (West)+ Queen West neighbourhood.
Anyone with a creative impulse has long since abandoned such areas, yet there is still quite a bit of profit to be extracted from the former reputation of edginess and creativity.
It seems like the regions of the world where electricity-hungry aluminum production has centered would do well with data centers. Quebec is also endowed with plentiful hydroelectric electricity, ample cooling capacity, local expertise, and most importantly, proximity to large markets. I almost wonder why i don't hear more about data center hosting in Quebec, given the natural advantages
I believe we are seeing a large-scale, mental health version of the tragedy of the commons that has gone completely unregulated and will likely end even worse than the unregulated financial mess we're dealing with now. An ever-escalating war for the ever-decreasing attention span our mush-like minds still have left.
Media and advertising companies have incentives to continue to use ever more intrusive tactics to get access to our minds, and now the analytical tools to optimize those tactics. When I lived in LA, i was amazed that in some areas around hollywood I found it actually dangerous to drive, because every now and then BOOM, there's a 100ft tall poster of basically a naked woman advertising some brand of jeans or whatever. Equally potent for men and women -- the jeans you need to wear if you want the guys to want you, ladies, and to the men, a mental cue: this is what you should want.
Of course, I didn't mean to suggest that Oracle could be successful with such a strategy. The best they can hope for is to sabotage or try to slow the adoption and development of pgsql, but as long as there are companies like NTT that are willing to put resources into its development, it will be a losing battle.
Slashdot Mirror
You can throw someone in prison for consuming an addictive narcotic, which is clearly bad for them. When you try to reduce oil consumption, it's an affront to the American way of life! An attack on freedom!
I have not owned a car in nearly 3 years. I now take transit and trains everywhere I go, both of which are powered by electricity.
I'm not suggesting that I am "better" than anyone by doing those things, I just personally prefer to not deal with the stress of being in a car. My point is that there are alternatives to just consuming more of a resource which is clearly becoming more difficult, costly and downright dangerous to extract (the mess from this spill is going to make the Athabasca oil sands seem like a Greenpeace-approved project)
I think it is mostly due to laziness on the part of American businesses and the administrative headache of dealing with different country-level regulations.
There are two markets for the American MBA: America, and not-America. When your average PHB looks at the potential money to be made in Canada selling products/services, he looks at it as going through a whole lot of effort to gain an (English-speaking) market a bit bigger than Texas (Quebec brings Canada's population up to 34m, but adding another language to the mix makes it even less desirable)
Once a business has saturated the US market and is looking to expand abroad, that's when we seem to get the goods, although I'm increasingly seeing US businesses bypass Canada and head for the UK market first.
This often works in reverse though -- many European businesses look at Canada as pseudo-European (or America-lite, depending on your viewpoint) and will test out products here first. For example, the Smart car was available in Canada long before it was available down in the US.
Thank you -- now please go back home and tell your friends, so that I don't have to see stale "eh?" jokes every time Canada is mentioned...
You are right, my rant did go astray and I realize that debt and equity are not the same thing. I am, however, trying to explain things from the perspective of a small business owner, you know, the little guy that the financial industry is walking all over.
If we reverted to a very old fashioned banking system, 3% on deposits, 6% loans, bankers on the golf course at 3pm, i would be better off. With all the "innovation" and technology giving us "liquidity" in the debt and equity markets, what do i see? My deposits at 0.1% and loans up at 10 or higher. I wouldn't dream of putting good money into what is clearly a rigged equity market. How can I support anything that continues to push in that direction when my most basic financial needs are being neglected?
Give me capital at a decent price, (i.e. stop looting it into bonus pools) and you'll have my support to "innovate" all you want.
And regarding being well-capitalised, I have money and cash-flow, but I wanted to get a credit line so that I could have a life line while taking on some riskier jobs. Of course, at 8-9%, I consider it unacceptably expensive to do so, and so I operate much more conservatively than I otherwise would.
Parent characterises the complete detachment from reality that characterises the modern "innovative" financial industry.
I operate a small business. I don't give a fsck about your claims that we need "liquidity" when I can't get a simple business loan for less than 8-9%, despite being well-capitalised, while my personal savings attract all of r pct, where 0.01 < r < 0.1. Quite the scam there. As a result, I use only retained earnings to pay for anything, which while a prudent thing to do given my situation, is hardly a recipe for large-scale economic growth. The financial industry does not fulfil its most basic imperative of funnelling capital to productive use, why should I care about whether some institutions can hold a stock for 1ms or 1 day?
I suppose things could be worse. Maybe in addition to being completely starved for capital, I may be subject to "protection" payments in the near future just to be able to stay in business at all! Financial innovation, 'Ndrangheta style! Wouldn't that be a boon for Wall Street and the City of London.
Both parent and grandparent have failed to understand the significance of the experiment. The task was specifically chosen as a right-brain type of activity. With a large monetary award, left-brain thinking creeps into the process and reduces performance.
With a smaller reward and less pressure, right-brained activity can flourish and the solution found much faster. If the task had been, say, hammer these 20 nails into this wall, I would expect a correlation between total time to complete the task, and compensation (that is, unless you had right-brained MacGyver create a nailgun out of a paperclip and an elastic...)
The results of the experiment are not very interesting or controversial in themselves; the important part is whether you believe that right-brained activity is so important to functioning of the 21st century economy.
Just based on this post, it is clear that the US is lucky to have you as an immigrant. Immigration policy should encourage you and make your life as easy as possible, since you are the "right" type of immigrant, but that does not seem to be the result of the current policies.
I believe that most Americans would agree with this, regardless of their stance on the H1-B program.
Right on the money. The result is that the H1-B is only desirable for people who have it "bad" back in their home countries. As a Canadian working in the US for a few years on the comparatively free (but temporary) TN-1 visa, I quite rightly told my employer thanks but no thanks to the second-class status of an H1-B. I've since left, and the US has lost an immigrant who was fluent in the language and assimilated into the culture.
I don't think anyone writing immigration policy in Washington, or the string-pullers in Silicon Valley, Seattle, etc. are shedding a tear, however -- a person integrated into American society with choices and relative freedom of movement is not the type of person they want.
This would be interesting if it were true. IBM consultants are quite happy to sell Oracle-based solutions and do so quite often -- the linkages between IBM software, consulting and hardware are really quite loose.
fresh.ide[CTRL+Space][Down]
That was 11 keystrokes. You may want to upgrade from notepad.
apt-get install openjdk-6-jdk
not
apt-get install sun-java6-jdk
Definitely. Supporting a studio like S2 that independently publishers, and one that develops for linux, is like a double win -- I know that my dollars are going mostly towards the developers, designers and artists, not a bloated layer of marketers, sales, bizdev, etc. etc. that only drive up the cost of most games.
It's amazing that TFA doesn't mention a thing about whether Perelman will actually accept the prize. What will happen to the prize money if he does not accept? The million dollars disappears into Lichtenstein numbered bank accounts 2718-282 and 3141-519?
It's not quite that simple. Proving that a product as complex as a consumer-level GUI operating system is bug-free and secure is in general an undecideable problem.
We can't even prove that our critical, lower-level embedded software (aerospace, health-related, etc) is bug-free, and this is why there is substantially more effort put into ensuring that such software is of high quality. For example there are extensive regulations on how exhaustively testing must be done on various components of an aviation-related piece of software, depending on its criticality
Try enforcing something like this on Windows, and even monopolistic Microsoft's fabled profit margins would disappear -- it would be the push that crowd-sourced OSS software would need to acheive a real foothold in the desktop market.
This is a great story and an example of the principle of things we know, things we don't know, and things we don't know that we don't know. I struggled for years with asthma and only really got better once I stopped taking all the drugs. I haven't used an inhaler for nearly 10 years. I take virtually everything I am told to do by the "latest studies" with a huge grain of salt (pardon the pun)
My personal belief is that all people, simply by virtue of their genes having made it this far evolutionarily, are pretty damn resilient and most of our internal processes return to a kind of equilibrium state, given a diet and activity level which is somewhat "natural" relative to what was the norm for our ancestors.
Of course this is a general rule that often is not relevant -- if you've been diagnosed with cancer due to long-term exposure to radioactivity, well our process of evolution for resilience to radioactivity is only just beginning.
The problem with this is that it invalidates much of the expected role of the medical professional, who writes us some prescription, gives us test results, waves a magic wand, etc. What would we do with all the excess antibiotic-producing capacity if doctors just told clearly virus-infected patients to go home and rest?
Great to see that someone gets it. Of course the ad buyer's perspective is not considered in these whines from publishers because the money that pays for those ads just comes from "somewhere" , and these ad blockers are disrupting my flow of $$$ from that "somewhere"!
If you think about it a bit, you'll realize that it is fundamentally not any different than the current 3rd party ad-server architecture; the only thing that changes is where the money comes from -- direct from readers, and not from advertisers. To the publisher, all they really care about is making money and they will sign on to such a network the second it becomes available, because there is little risk on their end.
Eventually, someone will build a network like this that will revolutionize the way money is made by publishers, and do a whole lot of good for the internet as a whole in the process, but it will be an uphill struggle to unseat a lot of players that have a strong vested interested in things remaining as backwards as they are.
These micropayments are not micro in any way; if a site expects you to pay 5 cents for an article, they are asking the equivalent of a fortune ($50 effective revenue per thousand). What we need is a real micropayment infrastructure that can be shared across sites and do away with the obtrusive ads once and for all.
While it varies from site to site, the effective revenue that most sites get for every thousand views is not usually more than a couple of dollars, and for small sites far less. This translates to fractions of a penny of revenue per page viewed.
So doing the math again on your year-end total would be in the range of $10-20, not $550
I don't think I could have said it better, but I'll go a step further. The argument of TFA is fallacious
I'm waiting for the internet financing model to shift away from employing vast numbers of people in an entirely useless pursuit of harassing me into buying things I don't want or need, and towards building a comparatively simple micropayment infrastructure, where as I view sites that I enjoy and value, i can drop small (less than 1 cent) tips that contribute to the revenue of the site.
Compared to the typical effective value per thousand page views most sites get for ads, it would result in maybe $0.10 - $2 worth of tips you leave for every thousand pages you load (depending on the site)
Until that infrastructure is in place, my adblocker is still on, because im' not going to buy any useless crap based on a flash animation, so I only dilute the value of the advertising, and the extra cpu cycles my computer spends to render the ads is actually a net cost to me in power consumption.
In addition to the former Yugoslavia. The individual republics were encouraged to develop complementary industries to foster a sense of co-dependence . This did not come close to stopping a violent breakup once the Soviet Union fell and Western powers desired direct influence in what was previously a neutral buffer state (that they previously helped support to deny Soviet access to the Mediterranean)
I saw an idea somewhere that politicians these days should require NASCAR/Formula-1 style sponsor patches to be worn on their suits at all times, to indicate which corporations are funding their campaigns.
Then when someone says there is no evidence of IE being less secure, we can Look for the logo
In the same vein, Apple products equivalent to the recently-gentrified area in any major city where artists and "bohemians" used to live, but have now been pushed out and replaced with "edgy" chain stores and condo developments like the (vomit) Bohemian Embassy in Toronto's formerly-cool (West)+ Queen West neighbourhood.
Anyone with a creative impulse has long since abandoned such areas, yet there is still quite a bit of profit to be extracted from the former reputation of edginess and creativity.
It seems like the regions of the world where electricity-hungry aluminum production has centered would do well with data centers. Quebec is also endowed with plentiful hydroelectric electricity, ample cooling capacity, local expertise, and most importantly, proximity to large markets. I almost wonder why i don't hear more about data center hosting in Quebec, given the natural advantages
If ever there was a post i wish i could mod up...
I believe we are seeing a large-scale, mental health version of the tragedy of the commons that has gone completely unregulated and will likely end even worse than the unregulated financial mess we're dealing with now. An ever-escalating war for the ever-decreasing attention span our mush-like minds still have left.
Media and advertising companies have incentives to continue to use ever more intrusive tactics to get access to our minds, and now the analytical tools to optimize those tactics. When I lived in LA, i was amazed that in some areas around hollywood I found it actually dangerous to drive, because every now and then BOOM, there's a 100ft tall poster of basically a naked woman advertising some brand of jeans or whatever. Equally potent for men and women -- the jeans you need to wear if you want the guys to want you, ladies, and to the men, a mental cue: this is what you should want.
Of course, I didn't mean to suggest that Oracle could be successful with such a strategy. The best they can hope for is to sabotage or try to slow the adoption and development of pgsql, but as long as there are companies like NTT that are willing to put resources into its development, it will be a losing battle.