I'm all in favor of that, as long as we simplify the tax code by eliminating all the loopholes/tax breaks.
Although the nominal corporate tax rate is not that low, the actual (average) taxes paid by corporations is quite low compared to other developed countries because of the convoluted tax breaks written into the law. This distorts the market by creating winners and losers based on how much a tax lawyer can game the system for the corporation.
Besides, IMHO...corporate tax is useless, it is just a hidden tax on the consumer, since a corporation just passes this off onto the consumer as part of their cost of a product.
B.S. As other replies have said, corporate tax is only on the profits, and cannot be simply passed on to the consumers in a competitive environment.
TFA is terribly confused. Although it was ostensibly about the obvious fact that software engineering is not the same thing as computer science, it instead spent a lot of time talking about whether or not software engineering is really an engineering discipline. Then it asks questions with false premises, like:
Why can't software engineering have more rigorous results, like the other parts of computer science?
(hint, engineering!=science, if you can't see the obvious, read your own article headline)
When it says things like:
No concept is precisely defined. . . . We believed that structured programming was the answer. Then we put faith in fourth-generation languages, then object-oriented methods, then extreme programming, and now maybe open source.
then you know it is even more confused, using debates about improvements in languages, language paradigms, work/management methods, and licensing types to try to show that software engineering is not rigorous science. That is like comparing varieties of apples, oranges, bananas, and pears in order to make the point that plants are not safety-tested automobiles.
Voice mail and speech recognition are reducing the need for humans to answer and direct phone calls.
Word processing and good templates means it is usually easier to type things oneself rather than give a handwritten markup to a typist.
But secretaries do far more than those things, and are not going away anytime soon.
Sanger's stand on eugenics, from the Wikipedia article you linked in a way that implies that she favored killing of undesirables:
'Nor do we believe,' wrote Sanger in Pivot of Civilization, 'that the community could or should send to the lethal chamber the defective progeny resulting from irresponsible and unintelligent breeding.'
All the news from Germany is sad & horrible, and to me more dangerous than any other war going on any where because it has so many good people who applaud the atrocities & claim its right.
"We maintain that a woman possessing an adequate knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge of the time and conditions under which her child should be brought into the world. We further maintain that it is her right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she shall bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if she chooses to become a mother... Only upon a free, self-determining motherhood can rest any unshakable structure of racial betterment"
This is a very narrow brief about a very narrow petition and response.
The brief basically says that there're no important issues, so SCOTUS does not need to get involved. So even if SCOTUS takes the DOJ's view they will merely put off making a ruling about these issues, and no national precedent will be set (though there will be a little precedent set in the particular appeals circuit.)
In my useless opinion, this is no different than timeshifting on a VCR, just using a remote rented DVR instead of an local owned VCR. The **IAs may even be better off by putting this off, as it doesn't seem they'd win this one, anyway.
But of course going to Switzerland, comparing notes would have BEEN TOO EASY...
From TFA:
But Dr Braden and his supervisor Professor Murray Campbell, were approached by a Swiss-based music conservatoire specialising in early music, the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, to help them recreate the Lituus - even though no one alive today has heard, played or even seen a picture of this forgotten instrument.
I do use AutoCAD software, and the "improvements" (since 2000) are split about 50/50 between things that enhance my productivity and things that hinder it. Yet the recent versions are a pain to run on equipment that is even 2 years old. Older versions fly on even 4-year old computers, and are therefore actually more productive; unfortunately, you lose compatibility with new file versions. Since AutoCAD has a habit of not letting you save more than a couple of versions back, that incompatibility is a deal breaker.
Would have been nice to see the papers actually cover the run up to the Iraq war, or all the insane voter suppression tactics from 2004,
That, I think is the real reason why papers are in a big hole. They had a job to do and they didn't do it, so why would people continue to pay for substandard work?
As much as I'd have liked them to do better reporting, that is not at all what is causing their financial problems. The papers have never gotten much of their money from consumer purchases of the paper, they rely on ad revenues. They can't compete with other forms of advertising, especially their former bread-and-butter - classifieds, which have been completely taken over by Craig's List, e-bay, Monster, etc.
Although I'm sure they would have found another excuse, it was in fact a bug in OpenOffice that they turned into the reason they had to be incompatible (OpenOffice does something really stupid when a string is used in an expression, it turns it into zero, rather than either producing an error or seeing if the contents of the string look like a number [Excel and every other ODF program do the second one]). They used this as a reason that Excel had "different" formulas, or that the formulas were "undefined" (they are in fact defined by "do what is obvious, if not obvious then copy Excel").
While I agree that showing an error may be the best in that situation, I think that automagically changing a string into a number is a far worse error than assigning no value to the cell. (I believe that a cell in OOo has text and number value attirbutes; if you type text into the cell, the default 0.0 value is not changed)
In reality, the issue was that ODF 1.1 did not specify formulas and ODF 2.2 is not yet finalized; so rather than making the obvious choice of following the 2.2 spec and allowing for some incompatibilities, MS decided to just ignore the formulas from an.ods file originating from another program and save only the resultant values. (I believe that the display values are stored separately in ODF from the formula) Also, it has been reported that when saving a.xls file in.ods format, MS saves the.xls formula, but in a namespace that no other program yet recognizes.
There is no versioning standard.
Ubuntu uses year.month.
Linux doesn't seem to ever change the major or minor version, using 2.6.x, seemingly for values of.x up to infinity
KDE/KOffice apparently uses:
x.0 for alpha
x.1 for beta
x.2 for release candidate
x.3 for useable
x.4 for deprecated, only working on y.0 now
Actually, it's not uncommon to use an aluminum-colored paint on flat roofs in the hottest areas. For work I've had to walk around on one in Phoenix in the summer on a day when it got up to 114F. I literally thought I was going to die, what with one hot sun heating me from above, and its' reflection heating me from below.
But the color of the roof has a bigger impact on summer cooling loads than winter heating loads (in most temperate climates) for at least two reasons:
- The temperature difference between indoor and outdoors is greater in the winter, so the same amount of solar heating has a greater proportion of the load in summer.
- There is less sunlight in the winter, especially on a flat horizontal roof.
Having said that though, if you have a well insulated roof (R30 or so) the impact of the roof load is not that great for most buildings compared to the total heat gain/loss from windows, walls, infiltration/ventilation, lighting, people, computers, etc,
How much more fucked does it get when you loan a company money (via buying secured bonds) and the government arbitrarily changes the laws that says you are no longer required to be paid back (and the preferred creditors do not want control of the company)?
Not that I think it was entirely fair, but no laws were changed.
It was a bankruptcy negotiation where the representatives of the largest creditor/investor (the US government) swung their weight around and "forced" a compromise that might keep the business in operation to some extent.
f only someone had thought to run a duct to the outside to use natures AC, they could have
saved a lot of money and headache.
Or, they could have, you know, put some A/C on the emergency back-up power.
Backing up power to the servers without backing up power to the A/C really just allows for an orderly shutdown.
At the pressures generated by fans in a typical data center A/C unit (around 2" water column or so, i.e. less than 0.1 psi) engineers can model air as incompressible for the purposes of designing the fans, ducting, etc. with more than sufficient accuracy.
Here's an example. Remember station wagons? . . . You don't see those around any more. Why? Because they raised the fuel standards and there was no way that station wagons could reach that.
My recollection is different: station wagons disappeared because minivans were introduced, and judged by the buying public to be superior to station wagons.
The linked article is BS, because the average fuel efficiency has gone down for most of the period mentioned, not up. So the increase in driving is in spite of higher fuel usage not because of lower fuel usage.
Also, the article does not take into account other factors in increasing amount of driving, such as moving farther from work for reasons totally unrelated to fuel efficiency; low and falling fuel prices for most of the period discussed (more related to producer decisions to maintain revenue, rather than fuel efficiency); and increasing wealth leading to more cars per household and more driving per car smoewhat independent of costs.
It's obviously true that reduced prices commonly result in increased consumption, but that assumes an elastic supply/demand where you have a choice of how much to consume, and base those decisions on price. Most people do not have much of a choice about how much they commute to work - they have to travel to where they can get a job, and they are inclined to live in the best neighborhood they can reasonably afford, with commuting distance less important than many other considerations.
The 25 watt CFL you are discussing actually uses 50 watts total power. 25 watts at the bulb, and another 25 at the power company as they try to balance the reactive load.
You are conflating Watts and Volt-Amps.
There are some increased costs in sizing wires and equipment for the harmonics and poor power factors of cheap CFLs, but it even if those issues double the transmission losses from 10% to 20% (which would be an exaggeration), that would only mean something like a 60 watt equivalent uses 17 watts instead of 14 watts, and it ignores the transmission losses of the 60 watt incandescent.
You are ignoring the possibility of positive feedback: Rise in temperature (among other things) causes a rise in CO2. Rise in CO2 causes a rise in temperature.
Lather
Rinse
Repeat
Considering that even Protestants recite a creed declaring their belief in "one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church", "Papist" or "Roman Catholic" are better labels than "Catholic", anyway.
Still, you have to be purposefully ignorant to not consider Roman Catholicism as a form of Christianity, even if you don't agree with it.
It couldn't possibly be that it makes perfect sense to not spend tremendous time and effort porting and maintaining a desktop application for an OS that holds at best 1% of the desktop market.
And how do you think that it got to that point? It largely was because of MS' manipulation of the markets. Wordperfect, for example, was popular in part because it ran well on so many platforms, but MS sabotaged it on Windows and also forced OEMs to bundle MS Word, drastically cutting into Wordperfect's market share to the point that it went from the defacto standard of document exchange to a niche product.
What entitles you to other people's work on terms of your choosing?
The doctrine of first sale.
(note, GP said nothing about being entitled to other people's work, just that if MS were split up, the parts would have incentives to support their software across a variety of platforms, allowing him to buy something that better fits his choices.)
Slashdot Mirror
why don't we cut corportate taxes severely.
I'm all in favor of that, as long as we simplify the tax code by eliminating all the loopholes/tax breaks.
Although the nominal corporate tax rate is not that low, the actual (average) taxes paid by corporations is quite low compared to other developed countries because of the convoluted tax breaks written into the law. This distorts the market by creating winners and losers based on how much a tax lawyer can game the system for the corporation.
Besides, IMHO...corporate tax is useless, it is just a hidden tax on the consumer, since a corporation just passes this off onto the consumer as part of their cost of a product.
B.S. As other replies have said, corporate tax is only on the profits, and cannot be simply passed on to the consumers in a competitive environment.
Why can't software engineering have more rigorous results, like the other parts of computer science?
(hint, engineering!=science, if you can't see the obvious, read your own article headline)
When it says things like:
No concept is precisely defined. . . . We believed that structured programming was the answer. Then we put faith in fourth-generation languages, then object-oriented methods, then extreme programming, and now maybe open source.
then you know it is even more confused, using debates about improvements in languages, language paradigms, work/management methods, and licensing types to try to show that software engineering is not rigorous science. That is like comparing varieties of apples, oranges, bananas, and pears in order to make the point that plants are not safety-tested automobiles.
Voice mail and speech recognition are reducing the need for humans to answer and direct phone calls.
Word processing and good templates means it is usually easier to type things oneself rather than give a handwritten markup to a typist.
But secretaries do far more than those things, and are not going away anytime soon.
No, this is a "Chicago mob-style" politician.
Obama is a "Hyde Park independent" style politician.
'Nor do we believe,' wrote Sanger in Pivot of Civilization, 'that the community could or should send to the lethal chamber the defective progeny resulting from irresponsible and unintelligent breeding.'
All the news from Germany is sad & horrible, and to me more dangerous than any other war going on any where because it has so many good people who applaud the atrocities & claim its right.
"We maintain that a woman possessing an adequate knowledge of her reproductive functions is the best judge of the time and conditions under which her child should be brought into the world. We further maintain that it is her right, regardless of all other considerations, to determine whether she shall bear children or not, and how many children she shall bear if she chooses to become a mother... Only upon a free, self-determining motherhood can rest any unshakable structure of racial betterment"
. . . why use three syllables when one will do!
Often because the three syllables have a meaning somewhat different from the one syllable.
This is a very narrow brief about a very narrow petition and response.
The brief basically says that there're no important issues, so SCOTUS does not need to get involved. So even if SCOTUS takes the DOJ's view they will merely put off making a ruling about these issues, and no national precedent will be set (though there will be a little precedent set in the particular appeals circuit.)
In my useless opinion, this is no different than timeshifting on a VCR, just using a remote rented DVR instead of an local owned VCR. The **IAs may even be better off by putting this off, as it doesn't seem they'd win this one, anyway.
But of course going to Switzerland, comparing notes would have BEEN TOO EASY...
From TFA:
But Dr Braden and his supervisor Professor Murray Campbell, were approached by a Swiss-based music conservatoire specialising in early music , the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, to help them recreate the Lituus - even though no one alive today has heard, played or even seen a picture of this forgotten instrument.
I do use AutoCAD software, and the "improvements" (since 2000) are split about 50/50 between things that enhance my productivity and things that hinder it. Yet the recent versions are a pain to run on equipment that is even 2 years old. Older versions fly on even 4-year old computers, and are therefore actually more productive; unfortunately, you lose compatibility with new file versions. Since AutoCAD has a habit of not letting you save more than a couple of versions back, that incompatibility is a deal breaker.
Would have been nice to see the papers actually cover the run up to the Iraq war, or all the insane voter suppression tactics from 2004,
That, I think is the real reason why papers are in a big hole. They had a job to do and they didn't do it, so why would people continue to pay for substandard work?
As much as I'd have liked them to do better reporting, that is not at all what is causing their financial problems. The papers have never gotten much of their money from consumer purchases of the paper, they rely on ad revenues. They can't compete with other forms of advertising, especially their former bread-and-butter - classifieds, which have been completely taken over by Craig's List, e-bay, Monster, etc.
Although I'm sure they would have found another excuse, it was in fact a bug in OpenOffice that they turned into the reason they had to be incompatible (OpenOffice does something really stupid when a string is used in an expression, it turns it into zero, rather than either producing an error or seeing if the contents of the string look like a number [Excel and every other ODF program do the second one]). They used this as a reason that Excel had "different" formulas, or that the formulas were "undefined" (they are in fact defined by "do what is obvious, if not obvious then copy Excel").
While I agree that showing an error may be the best in that situation, I think that automagically changing a string into a number is a far worse error than assigning no value to the cell. (I believe that a cell in OOo has text and number value attirbutes; if you type text into the cell, the default 0.0 value is not changed)
In reality, the issue was that ODF 1.1 did not specify formulas and ODF 2.2 is not yet finalized; so rather than making the obvious choice of following the 2.2 spec and allowing for some incompatibilities, MS decided to just ignore the formulas from an .ods file originating from another program and save only the resultant values. (I believe that the display values are stored separately in ODF from the formula) Also, it has been reported that when saving a .xls file in .ods format, MS saves the .xls formula, but in a namespace that no other program yet recognizes.
There is no versioning standard. .x up to infinity
Ubuntu uses year.month.
Linux doesn't seem to ever change the major or minor version, using 2.6.x, seemingly for values of
KDE/KOffice apparently uses:
x.0 for alpha
x.1 for beta
x.2 for release candidate
x.3 for useable
x.4 for deprecated, only working on y.0 now
Actually, it's not uncommon to use an aluminum-colored paint on flat roofs in the hottest areas. For work I've had to walk around on one in Phoenix in the summer on a day when it got up to 114F. I literally thought I was going to die, what with one hot sun heating me from above, and its' reflection heating me from below.
- The temperature difference between indoor and outdoors is greater in the winter, so the same amount of solar heating has a greater proportion of the load in summer.
- There is less sunlight in the winter, especially on a flat horizontal roof.
Having said that though, if you have a well insulated roof (R30 or so) the impact of the roof load is not that great for most buildings compared to the total heat gain/loss from windows, walls, infiltration/ventilation, lighting, people, computers, etc,
Not that I think it was entirely fair, but no laws were changed.
It was a bankruptcy negotiation where the representatives of the largest creditor/investor (the US government) swung their weight around and "forced" a compromise that might keep the business in operation to some extent.
I blame blowjobs
Or, they could have, you know, put some A/C on the emergency back-up power.
Backing up power to the servers without backing up power to the A/C really just allows for an orderly shutdown.
At the pressures generated by fans in a typical data center A/C unit (around 2" water column or so, i.e. less than 0.1 psi) engineers can model air as incompressible for the purposes of designing the fans, ducting, etc. with more than sufficient accuracy.
My recollection is different: station wagons disappeared because minivans were introduced, and judged by the buying public to be superior to station wagons.
The linked article is BS, because the average fuel efficiency has gone down for most of the period mentioned, not up. So the increase in driving is in spite of higher fuel usage not because of lower fuel usage.
Also, the article does not take into account other factors in increasing amount of driving, such as moving farther from work for reasons totally unrelated to fuel efficiency; low and falling fuel prices for most of the period discussed (more related to producer decisions to maintain revenue, rather than fuel efficiency); and increasing wealth leading to more cars per household and more driving per car smoewhat independent of costs.
It's obviously true that reduced prices commonly result in increased consumption, but that assumes an elastic supply/demand where you have a choice of how much to consume, and base those decisions on price. Most people do not have much of a choice about how much they commute to work - they have to travel to where they can get a job, and they are inclined to live in the best neighborhood they can reasonably afford, with commuting distance less important than many other considerations.
You are conflating Watts and Volt-Amps.
There are some increased costs in sizing wires and equipment for the harmonics and poor power factors of cheap CFLs, but it even if those issues double the transmission losses from 10% to 20% (which would be an exaggeration), that would only mean something like a 60 watt equivalent uses 17 watts instead of 14 watts, and it ignores the transmission losses of the 60 watt incandescent.
You are ignoring the possibility of positive feedback:
Rise in temperature (among other things) causes a rise in CO2.
Rise in CO2 causes a rise in temperature.
Lather
Rinse
Repeat
Considering that even Protestants recite a creed declaring their belief in "one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church", "Papist" or "Roman Catholic" are better labels than "Catholic", anyway.
Still, you have to be purposefully ignorant to not consider Roman Catholicism as a form of Christianity, even if you don't agree with it.
And how do you think that it got to that point? It largely was because of MS' manipulation of the markets. Wordperfect, for example, was popular in part because it ran well on so many platforms, but MS sabotaged it on Windows and also forced OEMs to bundle MS Word, drastically cutting into Wordperfect's market share to the point that it went from the defacto standard of document exchange to a niche product.
The doctrine of first sale.
(note, GP said nothing about being entitled to other people's work, just that if MS were split up, the parts would have incentives to support their software across a variety of platforms, allowing him to buy something that better fits his choices.)