I suspect Google has simply taken out insurance policies against all their employees for between 5x and say 10x their annual salary. Given the likelyhood that few "googlers" will die in a given year, the cost is probably pretty minimal to Google.
Am I criticising them for doing this, heavens no, but this is something the average person could probably set up themselves using life insurance.
Ten years of half pay equals something less than 5x annual pay, given the time value of money - maybe about 3x base salary in death benefits?
What is the real cost of 3x base salary for most employees? Not that much - but how many have such coverage? Not that many I suspect.
The "news" is that Google is doing what a good financial planner would suggest YOU do.
The recent miniITX motherboards with an AMD E350 CPU on them retail in the $75-100 range, and require all the same bits the RaspberryPi and similar boards do (monitor, keyboard, mouse, power supply, case, network infrastructure) and provide much greater processing power capacity than these SBCs which some arcade mic have calculated will meet the needs of school age children.
An E350-based system can be put together for under $200 (plus monitor) and it would have 8 gigs of RAM ($35), chassis/PS ($25), keyboard/mouse ($20), and attach to a wired network running a full version of Linux or Windows 7 (with appropriate license fees paid annually).
Or, for $50 less you can run a system with a fraction of the CPU, 1/16th the memory, and no possibility of running a mainstream OS like most children use at home. That $50 savings may sound significant, but the cost in lost flexibility far exceeds any real savings.
The RaspberryPI board suits a small number of applications, none of which will be the K-12 education market.
Precious few teachers would opt for the RaspberryPI in their classroom over an Apple Mac or a Windows PC - no matter the age:
A) The system is incomplete (no display, keyboard, mouse, power supply), and completing it quickly triples or quadruples the price per system.
B) The operating system and applications are lacking curricullum support, it is non-trivial for the average non-computer science teacher to simply integrate this computer into their class plans beyond as a simple web browser activity.
C) Many parents will oblect to a perceived 'sub-standard' computer is being foisted on their kids - teaching children to use an operating system (Linux) embraced by less than 1% of the worlds users will not be seen as preparing them for high tech careers.
I agree, to me this points out the trivial nature of their 'research' - can I safely assume that a slavish insistence that all the words in your tweets be spelled properly is the hallmark of a feeble mind, and that truly intelligent users have mastered so-called TXT-speak?
As noted in the brief blurb, NBC bought-out Microsoft back in 2005, the branding has changed, but little else will, and the complete seperation of the two will not be completed until 2014, nearly ten years after the buyout.
I seriously doubt the issue was political spin, ratings, etc. since this divorce started back in 2005 - it simply took Microsoft a long time to decide to actually do something with a cable channel on their own.
When the plane got stuck on the Tarmac was it because of the slightly higher than normal ambient temperatures OR was it the several jet engines that were running for several hours in the one spot?
My money's on the jet engines not the 10-20 degree higher ambient temperature.
The Obama Administration talks about hiring more teachers, firemen and police men every summer since they took office, they also try and ram through some "emergency funding" paid for with 10 years of tax increases... They've done it every year like clockwork.
Oh, and the Democrats decided to have their national convention in a Right-to-Work state - that sorta hurt their relations with the unions a bit...
He should think about a career in politics - I heard about this one guy from Chicago (well, he wasn't born there - he was born in Hawaii, but that's another story) and he just bounced all the way to the top of his field without any major accomplishment after Law School.
Those are the evil task-masters that are controlling the world energy markets?
Let's compare federal government subsidies for solar and wind power to the entire revenue stream of Koch Bros... Which is greater?
How can little-old Koch Bros. control the world oil/energy market? They have near zero influence over the President/Senate...
According to Rolling Stone magazine, the Koch Brothers have poured about $100 MIllion over the past 30 years into supporting organizations, politicians, and think tanks that they agree with - the US Gov't poured $528 Million down the drain at Solyndra in just under two years.
Put another way, over the last thirty years the Koch Brothers have (in your mind) controlled the Repubican Party and hence the controlled the country while Senator Obama spent nearly 8 times as much on his campaign to become President in 2007-2008.
But maybe, if we borrow ever more money from China, we can figure out some way to make simple, labor-intensive products like solar panels as cheaply as China - the first steps will be to lower worker wages and forget about those silly environmental concerns... In order to beat China at their own game we need to become China.
"It also doesn't help that while the government subsidizes solar power companies to an extent; it's a paltry level of support compared to the oil company subsidies."
Seriously?
We subsidise the research into solar panels, we subsidise the production of solar panels, we subsidise the purchase of solar panels, and we subsidise the price utility companies pay for the electricity the panels produce. We also subsidise the training of the workers that install and maintain the solar panels.
What are the massive oil industry subsidies? The same "subsidies" that Nabisco, Intel an dnearly every other company in the US get - they can write-off reasearch investments, depreciate capital investments, and a few other small tax write-offs.
The oil industry could survive without the subsidies, it would just raise fuel prices and make research into cleaner/alternative energies that much more expensive - creating a disincentive when I suspect you actually want an incentive...
"How come all the oil and gas companies keep expanding like this and all the solar companies keep going bankrupt?"
Because solar panels are not cost-effective, not yet anyway, and the massive government subsidies are being poured into "production facilities" not basic research.
It reminds me of the bee in "The Bee Movie" that kept slamming into the glass because he didn't understand the concept of glass "Maybe this time," "Maybe this time," "this time," this time..."
Solyndra was the quintesential example of this stupidity - in an effort to wrestle the solar panel industry from the grips of the Chinese Government, we (the US of A) invested in a company that used a more expensive process, baked on to more fragile panels that were made in a factory in the country with one of the highest labor costs in the world in a plant built on some of the most expensive land in the country (Silicon Valley). Surprisingly, one the production rate for solar cells at Solyndra was known, and the discount off the cost of manufacturing each solar panel sold for, it was a trivial exercise to calculate how long the money would last - so trivial even the government analysts were able to do it.
And to add insult to injury, the money used to finance the production facility was borrowed, most likley from the Chinese.
There is one use case where solar panels are very cost-effective - on space ships...
Aside fom creating the realization that people would buy netbooks, it really hasn't lived up to the hype.
I saw teachers in classrooms with laptops for each student say 'I wish we could get OLPC laptops' - teachers want the new hint toy, they ignore the fact they never used what they lready have.
Price the annual rental cost of an eTextbook and then tell me about the money districts will save by re-buying all their current textbooks and ereaders...
Raspberrypi? Seriously? That is a solution most third-world countries would reject, let almond first-world countries.
It's a $20 circuit board that needs a case, ps, keyboard, mouse to be useful. To make it ready for a student to use it approaches the cost of a netbook ($200-300) once you factor in the cost of a monitor, chassis, ps, keyboard, mouse...
Slashdot Mirror
I suspect Google has simply taken out insurance policies against all their employees for between 5x and say 10x their annual salary. Given the likelyhood that few "googlers" will die in a given year, the cost is probably pretty minimal to Google.
Am I criticising them for doing this, heavens no, but this is something the average person could probably set up themselves using life insurance.
Ten years of half pay equals something less than 5x annual pay, given the time value of money - maybe about 3x base salary in death benefits?
What is the real cost of 3x base salary for most employees? Not that much - but how many have such coverage? Not that many I suspect.
The "news" is that Google is doing what a good financial planner would suggest YOU do.
How would we build a 20 year old plant? Won't it be a new plant once we build it?
Three Mile Island "melted down" - I think you are confusing it with the nuclear plant in the movie that came out at the same time.
Wikipedia refers to it as a "partial meltdown."
The recent miniITX motherboards with an AMD E350 CPU on them retail in the $75-100 range, and require all the same bits the RaspberryPi and similar boards do (monitor, keyboard, mouse, power supply, case, network infrastructure) and provide much greater processing power capacity than these SBCs which some arcade mic have calculated will meet the needs of school age children.
An E350-based system can be put together for under $200 (plus monitor) and it would have 8 gigs of RAM ($35), chassis/PS ($25), keyboard/mouse ($20), and attach to a wired network running a full version of Linux or Windows 7 (with appropriate license fees paid annually).
Or, for $50 less you can run a system with a fraction of the CPU, 1/16th the memory, and no possibility of running a mainstream OS like most children use at home. That $50 savings may sound significant, but the cost in lost flexibility far exceeds any real savings.
The RaspberryPI board suits a small number of applications, none of which will be the K-12 education market.
Precious few teachers would opt for the RaspberryPI in their classroom over an Apple Mac or a Windows PC - no matter the age:
A) The system is incomplete (no display, keyboard, mouse, power supply), and completing it quickly triples or quadruples the price per system.
B) The operating system and applications are lacking curricullum support, it is non-trivial for the average non-computer science teacher to simply integrate this computer into their class plans beyond as a simple web browser activity.
C) Many parents will oblect to a perceived 'sub-standard' computer is being foisted on their kids - teaching children to use an operating system (Linux) embraced by less than 1% of the worlds users will not be seen as preparing them for high tech careers.
I agree, to me this points out the trivial nature of their 'research' - can I safely assume that a slavish insistence that all the words in your tweets be spelled properly is the hallmark of a feeble mind, and that truly intelligent users have mastered so-called TXT-speak?
We appear to be averaging about 100 suicides per day in the USA, or double your reported deaths by gun violence rate...
Reportedly he bought a ticket, went into the theater, and propped open a door then laeft and returned...
Why not leave the lights on in the theater?
As noted in the brief blurb, NBC bought-out Microsoft back in 2005, the branding has changed, but little else will, and the complete seperation of the two will not be completed until 2014, nearly ten years after the buyout.
I seriously doubt the issue was political spin, ratings, etc. since this divorce started back in 2005 - it simply took Microsoft a long time to decide to actually do something with a cable channel on their own.
An older house plan will have any possible copyright claim expired - say, for example, a Sears House
Question: How many Georgetown Law School students would this $560M cover?
Answer: At an estimated $3,000/year it would cover about 187,000 Georgetown Law School students.
When the plane got stuck on the Tarmac was it because of the slightly higher than normal ambient temperatures OR was it the several jet engines that were running for several hours in the one spot?
My money's on the jet engines not the 10-20 degree higher ambient temperature.
The Obama Administration talks about hiring more teachers, firemen and police men every summer since they took office, they also try and ram through some "emergency funding" paid for with 10 years of tax increases... They've done it every year like clockwork.
Oh, and the Democrats decided to have their national convention in a Right-to-Work state - that sorta hurt their relations with the unions a bit...
He should think about a career in politics - I heard about this one guy from Chicago (well, he wasn't born there - he was born in Hawaii, but that's another story) and he just bounced all the way to the top of his field without any major accomplishment after Law School.
Koch Bros.?
Those are the evil task-masters that are controlling the world energy markets?
Let's compare federal government subsidies for solar and wind power to the entire revenue stream of Koch Bros... Which is greater?
How can little-old Koch Bros. control the world oil/energy market? They have near zero influence over the President/Senate...
According to Rolling Stone magazine, the Koch Brothers have poured about $100 MIllion over the past 30 years into supporting organizations, politicians, and think tanks that they agree with - the US Gov't poured $528 Million down the drain at Solyndra in just under two years.
Put another way, over the last thirty years the Koch Brothers have (in your mind) controlled the Repubican Party and hence the controlled the country while Senator Obama spent nearly 8 times as much on his campaign to become President in 2007-2008.
But maybe, if we borrow ever more money from China, we can figure out some way to make simple, labor-intensive products like solar panels as cheaply as China - the first steps will be to lower worker wages and forget about those silly environmental concerns... In order to beat China at their own game we need to become China.
Seriously?
We subsidise the research into solar panels, we subsidise the production of solar panels, we subsidise the purchase of solar panels, and we subsidise the price utility companies pay for the electricity the panels produce. We also subsidise the training of the workers that install and maintain the solar panels.
What are the massive oil industry subsidies? The same "subsidies" that Nabisco, Intel an dnearly every other company in the US get - they can write-off reasearch investments, depreciate capital investments, and a few other small tax write-offs.
The oil industry could survive without the subsidies, it would just raise fuel prices and make research into cleaner/alternative energies that much more expensive - creating a disincentive when I suspect you actually want an incentive...
Because solar panels are not cost-effective, not yet anyway, and the massive government subsidies are being poured into "production facilities" not basic research.
It reminds me of the bee in "The Bee Movie" that kept slamming into the glass because he didn't understand the concept of glass "Maybe this time," "Maybe this time," "this time," this time..."
Solyndra was the quintesential example of this stupidity - in an effort to wrestle the solar panel industry from the grips of the Chinese Government, we (the US of A) invested in a company that used a more expensive process, baked on to more fragile panels that were made in a factory in the country with one of the highest labor costs in the world in a plant built on some of the most expensive land in the country (Silicon Valley). Surprisingly, one the production rate for solar cells at Solyndra was known, and the discount off the cost of manufacturing each solar panel sold for, it was a trivial exercise to calculate how long the money would last - so trivial even the government analysts were able to do it.
And to add insult to injury, the money used to finance the production facility was borrowed, most likley from the Chinese.
There is one use case where solar panels are very cost-effective - on space ships...
Why not build an actual pipeline from the middle of the country to the Gulf region, where the refineries are?
Why will the development community abandon C while so many still embrace COBOL or RPG?
Hell, I could improve education by eliminating tenure.
Tenure does nothing for the children in the lass room, but costs school districts untold millions each year...
How is OLPC doing these days?
Aside fom creating the realization that people would buy netbooks, it really hasn't lived up to the hype.
I saw teachers in classrooms with laptops for each student say 'I wish we could get OLPC laptops' - teachers want the new hint toy, they ignore the fact they never used what they lready have.
Price the annual rental cost of an eTextbook and then tell me about the money districts will save by re-buying all their current textbooks and ereaders...
Raspberrypi? Seriously? That is a solution most third-world countries would reject, let almond first-world countries.
It's a $20 circuit board that needs a case, ps, keyboard, mouse to be useful. To make it ready for a student to use it approaches the cost of a netbook ($200-300) once you factor in the cost of a monitor, chassis, ps, keyboard, mouse...
It's the new Apple I, 35 years later.