One of the issues in shifting gears to these new high tech capital intensive industries is the shift away from low-capital, labor intensive industries.
In developed countries this is counterbalanced by the suddenly unemployed workers going back to school or entering a new job that should overall pay better and produce more overall as the unemployed fall into appropriate jobs(effient allocation). Capital intensive jobs need education on how to utilize that capital(machinery, computers, development software, etc.).
However, in a country as huge and diverse as China you have sections of highly developed and wealthy people, and sections of abject poverty.
A good example is the Three Gorges Dam which displaced millions of people when they flooded the river valley and towns and villages that lived off it(Remember how Bush got slammed for how he handled Hurricane Katrina? This flood was actually man-made and much bigger!). The rationale of this huge dam was that the electricity would help catapult modern china into competition with the other first-world countries, i.e a propaganda move. Essentially, poor Chinese were pushed aside to help develop the modern areas.
In the USA, if you get kicked out of your job, you try to get another one. You've probably got a highschool diploma or GED. You can read a training manual, or maybe even take out a loan to go back to school and accumulate some knowledge capital so that you can sell yourself and your education to get a better job than the one you lost. If you're a poor fisherman who can barely read, when you lose the river your family has lived off of for generations...you're pretty screwed. You don't have the education infrastructure to enable you to fall into another line of work as easily.
It may be prudent for China to invest more heavily in its infrastructure before trying to chase after other countries which are much more thoroughly developed.
The dominant culture has not been around so long that creativity could have been bred out of the population, and despite attempts to force out foreign influence, they cannot claim the level of success necessary to have eliminated creativity from all individuals. Further, this is assuming that the culture itself is capable of repressing innovation in an individual.
China is big, really @#%^ing big. Among that immense population you can find a chinese person to fit virtually any description. There is too much diversity to make such a specific claim about them. Americans aren't all packing a gun in one pocket and a bible in the other.
I think one of the biggest problems they will face is not a lack of creative talent, but the "braindrain" drawing these individuals to the west instead of staying and developing their ventures in China.
But in practice the "-ism" is just flamebait for pedants.
In practice when the average joe sees "Darwinism" they see "Darwin" and think "evolution" or "survival of the fittest".
In a society where "lolrlywtf txt me bak" is understood, they aren't going to get hung up on the "ism" of Darwinism to relate it to a faith. Nobody's up in arms over plagiarism, syllogism, mechanism, etc. Most people just look at a word and relate it to the meaning, rather than obsess over linguistic syntax. The "-ism" means very little to the general populace in relation to the rest of the word.
While I don't doubt that there are fundamental crazies out there spitting fire and vitriol at the slightest hint of heresy, but I seriously doubt that they make up the majority of the christian demographic. I don't expect every brown-skinned person to suddenly explode either.
The fear-mongering surrounding ID on slashdot is reminiscent of Fox News and their view of terrorists and pedophiles. The actual threat is far more minor than the visibility it receives on this venue. Perhaps I'm just lucky enough to live in an area where ID proponents, terrorists, and pedophile are few and far between. I could be wrong, maybe it's much more prevalent in the states around the biblebelt?
The purpose of the package is an injection of funds to create an immediate stimulation in the economy to keep from sliding further and hopefully spur it back towards recovery. By immediate, it would have to be things that can start within a few months so that it can start affecting today's economy.
Also, they need to consider the long-term effect of this money. A new school is nice, but it needs to go where the population needs it to be, then zoned and blueprinted, and then only after these are complete, they can start to contract and get that funding into the economy. However, after the school is built, they need to worry about budgeting. Now that it's started up, who pays for the staff and upkeep? It may very well be worth the additional future cost, but that needs to be carefully weighed in practical terms, and not pushed through the door en masse.
Things like road repair don't increase future costs because the road will definitely need repair sooner or later, so while the money is here, they can get stated right now so that it won't need to be repaired later. It's an immediate place where money can be spent without increasing future cost.
Energy-effiency may even reduce future costs, great place to spend the money. I do see that 7 billion was cut to 3.5 billion for energy efficient federal buildings. However, does it take 7 billion to enact the effiency improvement plans for federal buildings? Perhaps after further review they determined that 7 billion might be more than necessary, and that they can be reasonably certain that 3.5 can be immediately used. If more is needed, then perhaps that is a bridge to cross at a later time.
NASA research has kickstarted new industries into life that had an obvious positive effect on the economy. However, when will these funds create this result in today's economy? They probably eliminated it these funds because they're not part of the package's purpose: immediate funding. I would assume that increased NASA funding would definitely be worth it, but I guess they'll have to discuss this in the budget plan instead of the stimulus.
Readers can probably go right down the line and examine each item from such perspectives, and then actual decision making would rely on actual reports on the status of these projects. I can certainly imagine the rationale behind such cuts. I don't necessarily agree with all of them, but it's not too hard to imagine where they got their decision from.
It would require careful consideration of where the "fuzziness" can be accepted. Obviously things that are critically significant can't be fudged, like player control in a game, or immediate surroundings. But even in today's games, LOD (level of detail) is applied so that that scenery nearby is shown at full detail, while distant scenery only displays the bare essentials and improves in quality as you approach. How the player tosses a rock is critical because it's closely monitered by the user, he presumably is throwing it for a reason, and expecting a specific result. But how a landslide tumbles can be fudged since you're only looking at the general landslide, rather than looking for a pebble to fall with pinpoint accuracy after bouncing down a mountain.
But this is just an example, I really don't think this will pop up in games because the extra work involved probably won't be justified by the gain in speed, and the market probably won't feel compelled to include this new chip into their computers (Ageia PhysX for example).
In Star Trek: Voyager, in the episode "Tuvix", 2 main characters are fused in a transporter accident to create a new life form who named itself Tuvix and lived with the crew for almost a month. During this month Tuvix developed his own personality and made friends and new relationships.
Then at the end of the episode, they find a way to seperate Tuvix back into the 2 original people, but by this time Tuvix had started a new life for himself and refused to be destroyed.
The captain is forced to either leave the 2 crew members dead, and allow Tuvix to live, or to kill an innocent man to bring them back.
In the end, the Captain chose to kill Tuvix.
The last scene was the captain leaving the room to pause in the hallway and silently dwell on what she had just done, before a fade to black.
Evolution will happen anyway based on who ends up living and who ends up dying.
If a sickly individual survives to procreate due to the medical technology of his culture, while a healthy one dies because his culture didn't have the medical technology to help him recover from a minor accident. Then the sickly individual's culture survives and grows while the healthy individual's culture has shrunk.
The determining factor of who lives and who dies in this case wasn't the health of the individual, but the culture's ability to provide medical support. If this trend continues, then cultures that can successfully provide medical support will thrive while those that can't, will dissolve. If medical support grows into a burden that drags down the society, then selection based on health may come back into play.
Potential for intelligence and social cooperation leading to technological advances is a trait which yields the benefit of medical technology. Being healthy enough not to get sick is a different way to get around the problem. Natural selection will still guide evolution in this case.
You could even see the medical technology as an evolved immune system for the cultural entity.
The person you're replying to, was replying to someone stating that they enjoyed working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week and liking it (videogame programmer).
I'd just like to point out that overwork isn't necessarily a race for money for the employee.
They go into a job interview and get a general picture of what will be done. As they shoulder the workload, it may be more than the employer had let on, or the employee's responsibilities end up growing over time.
And once they are given a responsibility they take it upon themselves to make sure it's done, regardless what time it is, how long ago everyone else has left the office, or the fact that they're not being paid. It's important because leaving a responsibility unfulfilled is damaging to their personal pride and morale. Money doesn't necessarily factor into their decision.
Just explaining the mindset of the overworked employee.
I was friends with a homeschooled girl back in college, she wasn't bad at socializing, she was extremely friendly and extremely talkative.
But you could definitely tell she was homeschooled because she was sweet to the core and so ready to love a stranger. It was disarming to see so much naivetè. There are a number of "walls" that everyone puts up around new people and she didn't have them. I didn't even recognize these walls existed until I met her.
She assumed everyone would be a great friend and treated them as such, she had a much shorter sense of personal distance, and was much more open to physical contact. I am the polar opposite, everyone who's not my friend isn't worth getting to know, and I don't want to be touched by anyone but my closest circle of relationships. I'm not saying my way is better, or even that it's a rational behavior. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'd be happier if I was as social as her(though I'm pretty happy already). I just hope she won't end up burned somehow by being so open.
I watch Star trek on my ipod and just look up to give my opinion on the various articles of clothing that she brings over to me. She can shop all day if she wants, I'm all set.
Yeah, the whole approach is targeted at one pretty specific type of female.
Women, like men, vary wildly in personality and behavior. Disparaging her, exaggerating your own qualities, or putting on a fake persona might work on some girl...but it could just as easily put her off. How would that make you feel if someone did that you?
Trying that approach will probably get them a girl eventually, but mainly through sheer volume of attempts rather than the success of the method.
It's just an example of how protectionism can grow a country's competitive ability by shielding a domestic industry that is still in its infant stages.
One of the major questions in economic development is why the third world countries that do have lots of natural resources have so much difficulty catching up with modern countries who had industrialized their economies centuries ago. The technology advances since the industrial revolution have crossed all over the globe so why can't they take advantage of it like other nations have?
There are a multitude of significant reasons, but one of the possible reasons is that the first countries to industrialize have crowded the market with their cheaper manufacturing processes. A poor third world country might be able to afford a motorized tractor to farm far more efficiently than a pre-industrial farm, however, the modern countries have high-tech equipment, factories, and even genetically manipulated crops to yield huge crops at far lower costs. Opening up trade does allow that countries to buy food from other countries but that's giving them fish instead of teaching them how to fish, they need to export to get money and investment capital to grow.
The farmer who can't compete will need to find another industry to try to compete in, but the country's infrastucture may not be able to move him into another profession( how easily can he get a loan for a new business? Can he get the education or re-education needed for a new career?).
The reasoning is that there are different levels of efficiency.
But simple example is that if one country can make a component cheaper than another country who is better at making finished product from that component, closing up the trade means that the component company now has to inefficiently spawn an industry to finish it themselves, and the finished goods company has to inefficiently manufacture their own components. In the end, if they both work together and focus on what they're most efficient at, they'll produce more than if they try to do it all themselves.
This is just a very general example. Restricting trade definitely has advantages, for example, a poor country might not be able to produce a corn industry because the USA already sells corn so cheap that the corn farmers can't make any money to invest and compete. So that country may want to forego cheap US corn in order to allow itself to grow its own corn industry and perhaps grow other corn-related industries as well.
Some wireless mice sacrifice performance for energy conservation(since they are running on batteries instead of a plug) so they sample at a slower rate than other mice.
The more recent wireless mice don't sacrifice performance and run at the same speed. G5 = G7. You may need to worry about signal interference, but it performs identically. So with signal interference it's either at 100% performance or 0%.
I have used it, I liked it, I even dominated in games with it.
In the end I went back to mice, not so much because of how the cursor is operated, but because I want all other buttons for desktop use(not so much in games). From my MX revolution mouse, I have left click, right click, middle click, toss window to next monitor, open shortmenu to most frequently accessed folders, media back, media forward, media play/pause, back, forward, open in new window, minimize, and close program.
I'm pretty sure that I would have no problem performing the same actions on a trackball equipped with the same number of buttons, but the problem is that trackball manufactureres disagree and believe that most people can't or won't use that many buttons on a trackball(since it needs more fingers available for control) so they don't make any with that many buttons.
Last I heard, the Xbox360 was no longer selling at a loss due to improved manufacturing processes and multiple die shrinks in production. It also has the highest attach rate of games of the 3 consoles.
The Xbox360 is making quarterly profits, but has not made a lifetime profit because of the multi-billion writeoff they made in their calculations because they needed to extend the warranty because of their defective hardware(otherwise they had a high risk of a much more costly class-action lawsuit). Plus the games division also has to overcome the losses during the lifetime of the original Xbox.
I think the Xbox360 is finally a success at this point, it's carved its own niche in a tough market. It locked into the "hardcore" gamer market, and became the console multiplayer platform. It got lucky in that both competitors chose to target different markets in this generation, the Wii expanded into a casual/new gamer market, and the PS3 tried to sell a high-end home media product instead of just a game console.
Strategically it seems that all 3 got what they wanted. MS got a solid foothold in the console games market, leveraged by its weight in the PC market, and creating a new online marketplace in the home. Nintendo's success is obvious, no need to elaborate. Sony could have made a much cheaper and more competitive PS3 if they ditched Blu-ray. But they didn't, because the success of Blu-ray over HD-DVD was worth it to them, and they won the format war at the loss of some gaming marketshare.
I keep a "close" button on my mouse. This is really just Alt+F4 but in Firefox to close a tab it's CTRL+W. (I can address this in program-specific options though)
I keep a "toss window" button on my mouse to "toss" a window from one screen to the other, but I can't use it on a tab.
I've got a button to tile all the windows via Switchr (kinda like what they've got on a mac), but it doesn't help with tabs.
In firefox I don't have a forward or back button. I use a Shift button and a Minimize button instead. Shift+Mousewheel up is Forward, and Shift+Mousewheeldown is Back, and Shift+Leftclick is Open new window. I could also work around this by finding a way to change Shift+Leftclick to opening a new tab instead.
I can find a way to compromise my usage in order to use tabs, but windows already fill the role better. So it is possible to use firefox without using tabs.
(However, at work, I do use tabs because I have far less screen real estate and just a basic mouse. )
Something that is often forgotten is that the free market is NOT a natural phenomenon. When left to their own devices, the businesses will try to fuck the consumer, and the consumer who has virtually no individual power, will seek consumer rights via collective bargaining, eventually forming large concerted organizations that will act against the interests of the business. In other words, there are checks and balances in play, and the government's part in regulating the economy was created as a check against businesses seeking to overpower the public.
There are few if any free markets in the world for a good reason. They don't work. If you want to find a free market, you can look towards Somalia, no government interference there.
"The other thing would be latency. My guess is wireless mice are more likely to have higher latency than wired mice since they have to encode/modulate stuff to RF/IR and then decode/demodulate.
A few milliseconds here and there and it could add up to something significant. "
Actually this isn't what's happening. You've actually witnessed the problem yourself earlier in your post.
"I've noticed that for some optical mice, if you move them very fast, their sampling or something is not fast enough so the mouse makes a blind guess on the direction and magnitude of the move. "
The old wireless mice faced a power consumption vs. performance problem. If they sampled fast enough to keep up, then the batteries are bled dry very quickly. Thus, they turned down the sample rate on those older wireless mice so they were incredibly unresponsive and inaccurate since they did not sample fast enough to keep up with hand movements even at basic desktop-use speeds (I've had one of these trashy wireless mice myself)
However, newer mice like the MX Revolution or the G7 mentioned by the other poster use the other approach, higher performance and lower battery life. These mice now have rechargeable lithium batteries and dock stations so it remains a viable product despite fast battery drain. The G7 is for very high performance, and actually comes with 2 batteries for swapping since it drains the power so quickly. The end result however is that both function at the same speed as wired mice, the wireless G7 is identical to the wired G5.
It should be noted that wireless mice must still combat interference while wired mice do not. So a wireless mouse will perform just as well, but there is the potential for the occasional hiccup from interference in an otherwise smooth experience. This can be costly for gamers and is why it's still better to seek out a wired mouse for games.
Slashdot Mirror
One of the issues in shifting gears to these new high tech capital intensive industries is the shift away from low-capital, labor intensive industries.
In developed countries this is counterbalanced by the suddenly unemployed workers going back to school or entering a new job that should overall pay better and produce more overall as the unemployed fall into appropriate jobs(effient allocation). Capital intensive jobs need education on how to utilize that capital(machinery, computers, development software, etc.).
However, in a country as huge and diverse as China you have sections of highly developed and wealthy people, and sections of abject poverty.
A good example is the Three Gorges Dam which displaced millions of people when they flooded the river valley and towns and villages that lived off it(Remember how Bush got slammed for how he handled Hurricane Katrina? This flood was actually man-made and much bigger!). The rationale of this huge dam was that the electricity would help catapult modern china into competition with the other first-world countries, i.e a propaganda move. Essentially, poor Chinese were pushed aside to help develop the modern areas.
In the USA, if you get kicked out of your job, you try to get another one. You've probably got a highschool diploma or GED. You can read a training manual, or maybe even take out a loan to go back to school and accumulate some knowledge capital so that you can sell yourself and your education to get a better job than the one you lost. If you're a poor fisherman who can barely read, when you lose the river your family has lived off of for generations...you're pretty screwed. You don't have the education infrastructure to enable you to fall into another line of work as easily.
It may be prudent for China to invest more heavily in its infrastructure before trying to chase after other countries which are much more thoroughly developed.
The dominant culture has not been around so long that creativity could have been bred out of the population, and despite attempts to force out foreign influence, they cannot claim the level of success necessary to have eliminated creativity from all individuals. Further, this is assuming that the culture itself is capable of repressing innovation in an individual.
China is big, really @#%^ing big. Among that immense population you can find a chinese person to fit virtually any description. There is too much diversity to make such a specific claim about them. Americans aren't all packing a gun in one pocket and a bible in the other.
I think one of the biggest problems they will face is not a lack of creative talent, but the "braindrain" drawing these individuals to the west instead of staying and developing their ventures in China.
But in practice the "-ism" is just flamebait for pedants.
In practice when the average joe sees "Darwinism" they see "Darwin" and think "evolution" or "survival of the fittest".
In a society where "lolrlywtf txt me bak" is understood, they aren't going to get hung up on the "ism" of Darwinism to relate it to a faith. Nobody's up in arms over plagiarism, syllogism, mechanism, etc. Most people just look at a word and relate it to the meaning, rather than obsess over linguistic syntax. The "-ism" means very little to the general populace in relation to the rest of the word.
While I don't doubt that there are fundamental crazies out there spitting fire and vitriol at the slightest hint of heresy, but I seriously doubt that they make up the majority of the christian demographic. I don't expect every brown-skinned person to suddenly explode either.
The fear-mongering surrounding ID on slashdot is reminiscent of Fox News and their view of terrorists and pedophiles. The actual threat is far more minor than the visibility it receives on this venue. Perhaps I'm just lucky enough to live in an area where ID proponents, terrorists, and pedophile are few and far between. I could be wrong, maybe it's much more prevalent in the states around the biblebelt?
The purpose of the package is an injection of funds to create an immediate stimulation in the economy to keep from sliding further and hopefully spur it back towards recovery. By immediate, it would have to be things that can start within a few months so that it can start affecting today's economy.
Also, they need to consider the long-term effect of this money. A new school is nice, but it needs to go where the population needs it to be, then zoned and blueprinted, and then only after these are complete, they can start to contract and get that funding into the economy. However, after the school is built, they need to worry about budgeting. Now that it's started up, who pays for the staff and upkeep? It may very well be worth the additional future cost, but that needs to be carefully weighed in practical terms, and not pushed through the door en masse.
Things like road repair don't increase future costs because the road will definitely need repair sooner or later, so while the money is here, they can get stated right now so that it won't need to be repaired later. It's an immediate place where money can be spent without increasing future cost.
Energy-effiency may even reduce future costs, great place to spend the money. I do see that 7 billion was cut to 3.5 billion for energy efficient federal buildings. However, does it take 7 billion to enact the effiency improvement plans for federal buildings? Perhaps after further review they determined that 7 billion might be more than necessary, and that they can be reasonably certain that 3.5 can be immediately used. If more is needed, then perhaps that is a bridge to cross at a later time.
NASA research has kickstarted new industries into life that had an obvious positive effect on the economy. However, when will these funds create this result in today's economy? They probably eliminated it these funds because they're not part of the package's purpose: immediate funding. I would assume that increased NASA funding would definitely be worth it, but I guess they'll have to discuss this in the budget plan instead of the stimulus.
Readers can probably go right down the line and examine each item from such perspectives, and then actual decision making would rely on actual reports on the status of these projects. I can certainly imagine the rationale behind such cuts. I don't necessarily agree with all of them, but it's not too hard to imagine where they got their decision from.
It would require careful consideration of where the "fuzziness" can be accepted. Obviously things that are critically significant can't be fudged, like player control in a game, or immediate surroundings. But even in today's games, LOD (level of detail) is applied so that that scenery nearby is shown at full detail, while distant scenery only displays the bare essentials and improves in quality as you approach. How the player tosses a rock is critical because it's closely monitered by the user, he presumably is throwing it for a reason, and expecting a specific result. But how a landslide tumbles can be fudged since you're only looking at the general landslide, rather than looking for a pebble to fall with pinpoint accuracy after bouncing down a mountain.
But this is just an example, I really don't think this will pop up in games because the extra work involved probably won't be justified by the gain in speed, and the market probably won't feel compelled to include this new chip into their computers (Ageia PhysX for example).
In Star Trek: Voyager, in the episode "Tuvix", 2 main characters are fused in a transporter accident to create a new life form who named itself Tuvix and lived with the crew for almost a month. During this month Tuvix developed his own personality and made friends and new relationships.
Then at the end of the episode, they find a way to seperate Tuvix back into the 2 original people, but by this time Tuvix had started a new life for himself and refused to be destroyed.
The captain is forced to either leave the 2 crew members dead, and allow Tuvix to live, or to kill an innocent man to bring them back.
In the end, the Captain chose to kill Tuvix.
The last scene was the captain leaving the room to pause in the hallway and silently dwell on what she had just done, before a fade to black.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuvix
Evolution will happen anyway based on who ends up living and who ends up dying.
If a sickly individual survives to procreate due to the medical technology of his culture, while a healthy one dies because his culture didn't have the medical technology to help him recover from a minor accident. Then the sickly individual's culture survives and grows while the healthy individual's culture has shrunk.
The determining factor of who lives and who dies in this case wasn't the health of the individual, but the culture's ability to provide medical support. If this trend continues, then cultures that can successfully provide medical support will thrive while those that can't, will dissolve. If medical support grows into a burden that drags down the society, then selection based on health may come back into play.
Potential for intelligence and social cooperation leading to technological advances is a trait which yields the benefit of medical technology. Being healthy enough not to get sick is a different way to get around the problem. Natural selection will still guide evolution in this case.
You could even see the medical technology as an evolved immune system for the cultural entity.
I get /way/ more done in the last hours of the 12 hour days because everybody else has gone home and they stop @#%^ing bugging me.
The person you're replying to, was replying to someone stating that they enjoyed working 16 hours a day, 7 days a week and liking it (videogame programmer).
I'd just like to point out that overwork isn't necessarily a race for money for the employee.
They go into a job interview and get a general picture of what will be done. As they shoulder the workload, it may be more than the employer had let on, or the employee's responsibilities end up growing over time.
And once they are given a responsibility they take it upon themselves to make sure it's done, regardless what time it is, how long ago everyone else has left the office, or the fact that they're not being paid. It's important because leaving a responsibility unfulfilled is damaging to their personal pride and morale. Money doesn't necessarily factor into their decision.
Just explaining the mindset of the overworked employee.
The article reminds me of Gagh...
http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Gagh
The Klingon bowl o' worms always sounded like a pretty interesting meal to me.
I was friends with a homeschooled girl back in college, she wasn't bad at socializing, she was extremely friendly and extremely talkative.
But you could definitely tell she was homeschooled because she was sweet to the core and so ready to love a stranger. It was disarming to see so much naivetè. There are a number of "walls" that everyone puts up around new people and she didn't have them. I didn't even recognize these walls existed until I met her.
She assumed everyone would be a great friend and treated them as such, she had a much shorter sense of personal distance, and was much more open to physical contact. I am the polar opposite, everyone who's not my friend isn't worth getting to know, and I don't want to be touched by anyone but my closest circle of relationships. I'm not saying my way is better, or even that it's a rational behavior. In fact, I'm pretty sure I'd be happier if I was as social as her(though I'm pretty happy already). I just hope she won't end up burned somehow by being so open.
I watch Star trek on my ipod and just look up to give my opinion on the various articles of clothing that she brings over to me. She can shop all day if she wants, I'm all set.
Yeah, the whole approach is targeted at one pretty specific type of female.
Women, like men, vary wildly in personality and behavior. Disparaging her, exaggerating your own qualities, or putting on a fake persona might work on some girl...but it could just as easily put her off. How would that make you feel if someone did that you?
Trying that approach will probably get them a girl eventually, but mainly through sheer volume of attempts rather than the success of the method.
It's just an example of how protectionism can grow a country's competitive ability by shielding a domestic industry that is still in its infant stages.
One of the major questions in economic development is why the third world countries that do have lots of natural resources have so much difficulty catching up with modern countries who had industrialized their economies centuries ago. The technology advances since the industrial revolution have crossed all over the globe so why can't they take advantage of it like other nations have?
There are a multitude of significant reasons, but one of the possible reasons is that the first countries to industrialize have crowded the market with their cheaper manufacturing processes. A poor third world country might be able to afford a motorized tractor to farm far more efficiently than a pre-industrial farm, however, the modern countries have high-tech equipment, factories, and even genetically manipulated crops to yield huge crops at far lower costs. Opening up trade does allow that countries to buy food from other countries but that's giving them fish instead of teaching them how to fish, they need to export to get money and investment capital to grow.
The farmer who can't compete will need to find another industry to try to compete in, but the country's infrastucture may not be able to move him into another profession( how easily can he get a loan for a new business? Can he get the education or re-education needed for a new career?).
The phenomenon he is referecing is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage
The reasoning is that there are different levels of efficiency.
But simple example is that if one country can make a component cheaper than another country who is better at making finished product from that component, closing up the trade means that the component company now has to inefficiently spawn an industry to finish it themselves, and the finished goods company has to inefficiently manufacture their own components. In the end, if they both work together and focus on what they're most efficient at, they'll produce more than if they try to do it all themselves.
This is just a very general example. Restricting trade definitely has advantages, for example, a poor country might not be able to produce a corn industry because the USA already sells corn so cheap that the corn farmers can't make any money to invest and compete. So that country may want to forego cheap US corn in order to allow itself to grow its own corn industry and perhaps grow other corn-related industries as well.
You're wrong.
Some wireless mice sacrifice performance for energy conservation(since they are running on batteries instead of a plug) so they sample at a slower rate than other mice.
The more recent wireless mice don't sacrifice performance and run at the same speed. G5 = G7. You may need to worry about signal interference, but it performs identically. So with signal interference it's either at 100% performance or 0%.
I have used it, I liked it, I even dominated in games with it.
In the end I went back to mice, not so much because of how the cursor is operated, but because I want all other buttons for desktop use(not so much in games). From my MX revolution mouse, I have left click, right click, middle click, toss window to next monitor, open shortmenu to most frequently accessed folders, media back, media forward, media play/pause, back, forward, open in new window, minimize, and close program.
I'm pretty sure that I would have no problem performing the same actions on a trackball equipped with the same number of buttons, but the problem is that trackball manufactureres disagree and believe that most people can't or won't use that many buttons on a trackball(since it needs more fingers available for control) so they don't make any with that many buttons.
Last I heard, the Xbox360 was no longer selling at a loss due to improved manufacturing processes and multiple die shrinks in production. It also has the highest attach rate of games of the 3 consoles.
The Xbox360 is making quarterly profits, but has not made a lifetime profit because of the multi-billion writeoff they made in their calculations because they needed to extend the warranty because of their defective hardware(otherwise they had a high risk of a much more costly class-action lawsuit). Plus the games division also has to overcome the losses during the lifetime of the original Xbox.
I think the Xbox360 is finally a success at this point, it's carved its own niche in a tough market. It locked into the "hardcore" gamer market, and became the console multiplayer platform. It got lucky in that both competitors chose to target different markets in this generation, the Wii expanded into a casual/new gamer market, and the PS3 tried to sell a high-end home media product instead of just a game console.
Strategically it seems that all 3 got what they wanted. MS got a solid foothold in the console games market, leveraged by its weight in the PC market, and creating a new online marketplace in the home. Nintendo's success is obvious, no need to elaborate. Sony could have made a much cheaper and more competitive PS3 if they ditched Blu-ray. But they didn't, because the success of Blu-ray over HD-DVD was worth it to them, and they won the format war at the loss of some gaming marketshare.
I keep a "close" button on my mouse. This is really just Alt+F4 but in Firefox to close a tab it's CTRL+W. (I can address this in program-specific options though)
I keep a "toss window" button on my mouse to "toss" a window from one screen to the other, but I can't use it on a tab.
I've got a button to tile all the windows via Switchr (kinda like what they've got on a mac), but it doesn't help with tabs.
In firefox I don't have a forward or back button. I use a Shift button and a Minimize button instead. Shift+Mousewheel up is Forward, and Shift+Mousewheeldown is Back, and Shift+Leftclick is Open new window. I could also work around this by finding a way to change Shift+Leftclick to opening a new tab instead.
I can find a way to compromise my usage in order to use tabs, but windows already fill the role better. So it is possible to use firefox without using tabs.
(However, at work, I do use tabs because I have far less screen real estate and just a basic mouse. )
The footpedal is a new one on me, are they putting the mouse on the floor and stepping on it or something?
Something that is often forgotten is that the free market is NOT a natural phenomenon. When left to their own devices, the businesses will try to fuck the consumer, and the consumer who has virtually no individual power, will seek consumer rights via collective bargaining, eventually forming large concerted organizations that will act against the interests of the business. In other words, there are checks and balances in play, and the government's part in regulating the economy was created as a check against businesses seeking to overpower the public.
There are few if any free markets in the world for a good reason. They don't work. If you want to find a free market, you can look towards Somalia, no government interference there.
It's more popular in Asia than the US.
I think a boy from one family and a boy from the other family would get more ratings from the shock value and resulting media frenzy.
If you want really high ratings, use a girl from one family and a girl from the other...
"The other thing would be latency. My guess is wireless mice are more likely to have higher latency than wired mice since they have to encode/modulate stuff to RF/IR and then decode/demodulate.
A few milliseconds here and there and it could add up to something significant.
"
Actually this isn't what's happening. You've actually witnessed the problem yourself earlier in your post.
"I've noticed that for some optical mice, if you move them very fast, their sampling or something is not fast enough so the mouse makes a blind guess on the direction and magnitude of the move.
"
The old wireless mice faced a power consumption vs. performance problem. If they sampled fast enough to keep up, then the batteries are bled dry very quickly. Thus, they turned down the sample rate on those older wireless mice so they were incredibly unresponsive and inaccurate since they did not sample fast enough to keep up with hand movements even at basic desktop-use speeds (I've had one of these trashy wireless mice myself)
However, newer mice like the MX Revolution or the G7 mentioned by the other poster use the other approach, higher performance and lower battery life. These mice now have rechargeable lithium batteries and dock stations so it remains a viable product despite fast battery drain. The G7 is for very high performance, and actually comes with 2 batteries for swapping since it drains the power so quickly. The end result however is that both function at the same speed as wired mice, the wireless G7 is identical to the wired G5.
It should be noted that wireless mice must still combat interference while wired mice do not. So a wireless mouse will perform just as well, but there is the potential for the occasional hiccup from interference in an otherwise smooth experience. This can be costly for gamers and is why it's still better to seek out a wired mouse for games.