Was thinking more "home entertainment" (which they're already trying, but mostly failing at), console gaming and portable gaming. Basically come out with something to compete with Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo and/or something to compete with Sony/Nintendo in the mobile space. Alternately they could try to beef up iLife to the point where more folks wouldn't feel the need to buy Office. Or they could do what Google did with Chrome and hire a crack team of academics to juice Safari performance to the point of absurdity. Given it's already pretty decent that doesn't figure to offer compelling ROI, but hey- if you've got money to burn, why not gin up some good P.R. by stealing the "fastest browser" crown back from Google?
I know they get criticized for it, but until there's a shareholder revolt and/or people stop buying the stock (fat chance), I don't see the "need" to pay out a dividend. Apple could instead do one or more of the following:
1. Lower its profit margins and steal even more market share from its competitors. Tons of people already buy Apple products; imagine if they were that much cheaper.
2. Hire an even more talented workforce by offering "way above market" pay. Establish a threshold like 10%. Fire the lowest performing 10% of Apple employees. Technical, design, sales, the whole nine yards. Then give everybody who's left a 25% raise. Then fill the vacant positions with "superstar" caliber replacements. (Note: it shouldn't do this unless it's confident it can accurately gauge employee performance.)
3. Get into a market it doesn't yet play in and dominate it. This with the understanding it will incur a short-term financial loss. Prior to the iPhone's release, who would have ever thought the most popular phone in 2012 would be from Apple? Not me.
As someone else pointed out: was the telegraph really the first email? How closely does a system need to resemble what we currently know as "email" in order for it to really be "email"? If we were to identify the inventor of "modern" email, would that be Postel in 1982 with the RFC for SMTP (proposed in 1980), or someone earlier?
Actually I think it's very unlike doing jack squat after you've built a fortune. Since I'm paying the researcher to sit around and do nothing. Consider that most tenure programs already allow for termination in cases of gross violation of policy. If a laureate is documented to have engineered a "sex for grades" scheme, he gets sacked regardless of how great his research is. "Sitting around doing nothing" seems like a pretty obvious violation of the terms of one's employment.
Which is why I said a hard quota seems like a terrible idea. Come up with some pseudo-objective way to evaluate your staff's research output and take action on the ones that aren't producing with respect to that metric. Are you arguing for ignoring productivity altogether and basically letting them do whatever they want? Even if, for a few, that ends up being "pretty much nothing at all"?
Good? If you're not teaching full-time then you'd better be publishing. If you're not teaching or publishing, what the hell are you doing? A hard quota on papers-per-time-period seems like a terrible idea, but sacking guys who legitimately aren't producing (or moving them to full-time teaching) seems like a no-brainer. Unless, of course, you have some Nobel laureate on staff and want to keep him around just to beef up your department's "cred".
Most anti-global warming folks I know don't deny the existence of warming. They oppose the consensus in some subset of the following ways:
1. Warming is happening, but rather than it being caused entirely by human activity it's at least partly the result of natural processes.
2. Projections of future temperatures are much less reliable than currently thought.
3. Projections of the negative effects of potential future temperature increases are exaggerated.
4. Efforts currently being discussed to curb the activities alleged to contribute to warming would be spectacularly expensive.
5. Efforts currently being discussed to curb the activities alleged to contribute to warming would be only minimally effective at achieving that goal.
6. Warming is happening and is caused at least in part by human activity but given #3-5 above it would actually cause more human suffering to curb the activities alleged to contribute to warming than it would to continue with the status quo.
Besides: is it really much worse to deny the existence of a thing than to insist on the existence of something which, in fact, does not exist?
EtoS = Earth to Space. Basically destroy an enemy's space-based surveillance, communication and guidance technology as a precursor to actual terrestrial warfare. Imagine if you could knock out the US's military positioning, surveillance and communication satellites. It'd be a juiced version of Pearl Harbor but without the human casualties.
If they could get away with it, seems like 1920x1080 would be ideal. That's a lot longer/skinner (or shorter/wider) than 2048x1536, but still an incremental improvement over the iPad2 resolution.
Type one: bandwidth sensitive. OS files, application files, cached application data, etc.
Type two: bandwidth insensitive, e.g. streamed. E.g. Video, audio.
Store type one on a SSD. Store type two on a higher-capacity magnetic drive. How likely is type one data expected to grow? Perhaps not that fast. My home machine is an ~8 year old Dell laptop with a 60G disk. It's not even half full. That includes an OS, browser, Office suite, and a few other applications.
Wrong. If they occupy space in a rental or apartment the owner pays property tax and rolls that into their rent. If none of them had ever immigrated then the overall population would be lower, less apartment complexes would have been built, meaning less property tax would be collected.
They do pay sales tax, if they buy locally. However, in most states, the main money is from income taxes, not property taxes.
This may not be true for those states with the largest illegal immigrant populations. Texas, for instance, derives almost all its revenue from sales and property taxes. There's also the question of how much income the state would actually collect from illegal immigrants if they filed, given the prevalence of low incomes among that population. The biggest "hit" would be that they'd have to pay federal payroll taxes. However, since they can't take advantage of SS or Medicare anyway...
In addition, by having illegals work here, they lower the salaries/wages, which lowers the taxes paid.
And by lowering wages they increase the profit margins of their employers and lower the price of goods to consumers.
Finally, look at alabama.
Driving out the illegals may also put many Alabama farmers out of business. You point out that unemployment is down and revenue is up. That's the case everywhere. The national unemployment rate is down as well, and most of the illegals who left Alabama are still living in the U.S. Another thing to consider is that the effectiveness of Alabama's new policy is enhanced by the fact that none of its neighbors have a similar policy. Illegals are leaving Alabama because there are better options nearby. If such a policy were enacted at the federal level, and enforced, then it would probably result in fewer illegals in the country, but the steady-state level would not be as low as it currently is in Alabama.
Here are a couple articles that allege the new law has had less than beneficial effects:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec11/alimmigration_10-13.html (See Jerry Spencer's comments)
One would think the detractors of theism might view it as slightly less ridiculous given the wealth of intelligent and otherwise skeptical minds who've been believers. That's not to say it's true, per se; just that "completely ridiculous" might not be the most apt way to describe it. Or, if you insist, it means perfectly reasonable and intelligent people can somehow accommodate holding "completely ridiculous" beliefs while deriving emotional/psychological benefit from them.
Illegal aliens can't take advantage of welfare, if by welfare you mean TANF. They pay property taxes, sales tax and the federal gas tax. Existing outside the federal income tax system they're also unable to take advantage of the EITC, which many would qualify for if they were filing federal returns.
I also like how you simultaneously complain about a lack of federal education spending and rail against the socialist nanny state. What do you think free, compulsory public education is?
So you want to go to Mars as part of a big national dick-waving contest. Because if someone got there first it would be a "slap in the face" to U.S. exceptionalism.
I'd like to see a chart of the revenue growth of "brick and mortar" Apple stores over the last 10 years. Fry's also seems to be doing alright, and like Best Buy they also have questionable customer service.
I'm of the opinion that school quality (i.e. irrespective of the demographics of students) is important, but demographics count for a lot too. Kids tend to do better when surrounded by smart/motivated peers. They tend to do worse when surrounded by less gifted / less motivated peers. This is true irrespective of teacher / school quality. So if a school's student body is "high scoring" purely due to demographics (and not anything having to do with the school per se) then that's still attractive to me, because those are the students my kid will be surrounded by.
What I tend to do is compare schools based on test scores, but account for ethnicity. So I might compare the scores of *only white kids* at school A vs. *only white kids* at school B. (This assumes a situation where white kids are the majority. If the majority were something else then I'd use that ethnicity instead.)
One interesting fact: the "quality" (at least judging by test scores) of the "top" public schools tends to decline as you move upwards in grade level. The "best" public elementary school where I live has something like 95% of students at an "acceptable" level and something like 50% at a "superior" level. The "best" junior high might only have 25% at a superior level. The "best" high school might have only 15% at that level. This makes sense since elementary schools serve a smaller geographic area, so are more likely to have their entire student body coming from a demographic predisposed to have high test scores. Also I think some parents send their kids to public school for elementary then switch to private school for junior high & high school. I don't have data to back that up though.
Doesn't it cost money? There's also the captioning thing. I'd really, really need that to work, or my wife would prefer to just keep doing what we're doing.
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Do you not get CD-quality sound when you download a song in Apple Lossless format?
Was thinking more "home entertainment" (which they're already trying, but mostly failing at), console gaming and portable gaming. Basically come out with something to compete with Sony/Microsoft/Nintendo and/or something to compete with Sony/Nintendo in the mobile space. Alternately they could try to beef up iLife to the point where more folks wouldn't feel the need to buy Office. Or they could do what Google did with Chrome and hire a crack team of academics to juice Safari performance to the point of absurdity. Given it's already pretty decent that doesn't figure to offer compelling ROI, but hey- if you've got money to burn, why not gin up some good P.R. by stealing the "fastest browser" crown back from Google?
I know they get criticized for it, but until there's a shareholder revolt and/or people stop buying the stock (fat chance), I don't see the "need" to pay out a dividend. Apple could instead do one or more of the following:
1. Lower its profit margins and steal even more market share from its competitors. Tons of people already buy Apple products; imagine if they were that much cheaper.
2. Hire an even more talented workforce by offering "way above market" pay. Establish a threshold like 10%. Fire the lowest performing 10% of Apple employees. Technical, design, sales, the whole nine yards. Then give everybody who's left a 25% raise. Then fill the vacant positions with "superstar" caliber replacements. (Note: it shouldn't do this unless it's confident it can accurately gauge employee performance.)
3. Get into a market it doesn't yet play in and dominate it. This with the understanding it will incur a short-term financial loss. Prior to the iPhone's release, who would have ever thought the most popular phone in 2012 would be from Apple? Not me.
As someone else pointed out: was the telegraph really the first email? How closely does a system need to resemble what we currently know as "email" in order for it to really be "email"? If we were to identify the inventor of "modern" email, would that be Postel in 1982 with the RFC for SMTP (proposed in 1980), or someone earlier?
Actually I think it's very unlike doing jack squat after you've built a fortune. Since I'm paying the researcher to sit around and do nothing. Consider that most tenure programs already allow for termination in cases of gross violation of policy. If a laureate is documented to have engineered a "sex for grades" scheme, he gets sacked regardless of how great his research is. "Sitting around doing nothing" seems like a pretty obvious violation of the terms of one's employment.
Guess I'm against tenure then. At least, a tenure system that allows one to sit around doing jack squat after rendering one's self un-fire-able.
Which is why I said a hard quota seems like a terrible idea. Come up with some pseudo-objective way to evaluate your staff's research output and take action on the ones that aren't producing with respect to that metric. Are you arguing for ignoring productivity altogether and basically letting them do whatever they want? Even if, for a few, that ends up being "pretty much nothing at all"?
Good? If you're not teaching full-time then you'd better be publishing. If you're not teaching or publishing, what the hell are you doing? A hard quota on papers-per-time-period seems like a terrible idea, but sacking guys who legitimately aren't producing (or moving them to full-time teaching) seems like a no-brainer. Unless, of course, you have some Nobel laureate on staff and want to keep him around just to beef up your department's "cred".
Most anti-global warming folks I know don't deny the existence of warming. They oppose the consensus in some subset of the following ways:
1. Warming is happening, but rather than it being caused entirely by human activity it's at least partly the result of natural processes.
2. Projections of future temperatures are much less reliable than currently thought.
3. Projections of the negative effects of potential future temperature increases are exaggerated.
4. Efforts currently being discussed to curb the activities alleged to contribute to warming would be spectacularly expensive.
5. Efforts currently being discussed to curb the activities alleged to contribute to warming would be only minimally effective at achieving that goal.
6. Warming is happening and is caused at least in part by human activity but given #3-5 above it would actually cause more human suffering to curb the activities alleged to contribute to warming than it would to continue with the status quo.
Besides: is it really much worse to deny the existence of a thing than to insist on the existence of something which, in fact, does not exist?
To be fair, the granola types (which is to say "not Republicans") are generally the ones opposing GM crops and arguing that WiFi causes cancer.
EtoS = Earth to Space. Basically destroy an enemy's space-based surveillance, communication and guidance technology as a precursor to actual terrestrial warfare. Imagine if you could knock out the US's military positioning, surveillance and communication satellites. It'd be a juiced version of Pearl Harbor but without the human casualties.
If they could get away with it, seems like 1920x1080 would be ideal. That's a lot longer/skinner (or shorter/wider) than 2048x1536, but still an incremental improvement over the iPad2 resolution.
Type one: bandwidth sensitive. OS files, application files, cached application data, etc.
Type two: bandwidth insensitive, e.g. streamed. E.g. Video, audio.
Store type one on a SSD. Store type two on a higher-capacity magnetic drive. How likely is type one data expected to grow? Perhaps not that fast. My home machine is an ~8 year old Dell laptop with a 60G disk. It's not even half full. That includes an OS, browser, Office suite, and a few other applications.
Nope. Hence the word "seems". My point, though, was that it's not reasonable to generalize Amoxicillin's lack of efficacy to all antibiotics.
Azithromycin (in the form of a Tri-Pak) sure seems to make a dent in my sinus/bronchial infections.
Wrong. If they occupy space in a rental or apartment the owner pays property tax and rolls that into their rent. If none of them had ever immigrated then the overall population would be lower, less apartment complexes would have been built, meaning less property tax would be collected.
This may not be true for those states with the largest illegal immigrant populations. Texas, for instance, derives almost all its revenue from sales and property taxes. There's also the question of how much income the state would actually collect from illegal immigrants if they filed, given the prevalence of low incomes among that population. The biggest "hit" would be that they'd have to pay federal payroll taxes. However, since they can't take advantage of SS or Medicare anyway...
And by lowering wages they increase the profit margins of their employers and lower the price of goods to consumers.
Driving out the illegals may also put many Alabama farmers out of business. You point out that unemployment is down and revenue is up. That's the case everywhere. The national unemployment rate is down as well, and most of the illegals who left Alabama are still living in the U.S. Another thing to consider is that the effectiveness of Alabama's new policy is enhanced by the fact that none of its neighbors have a similar policy. Illegals are leaving Alabama because there are better options nearby. If such a policy were enacted at the federal level, and enforced, then it would probably result in fewer illegals in the country, but the steady-state level would not be as low as it currently is in Alabama.
Here are a couple articles that allege the new law has had less than beneficial effects:
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/business/july-dec11/alimmigration_10-13.html (See Jerry Spencer's comments)
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-12-15/alabama-s-imperiled-immigration-crackdown-clogs-machinery-of-government.html
Hello Godwin.
One would think the detractors of theism might view it as slightly less ridiculous given the wealth of intelligent and otherwise skeptical minds who've been believers. That's not to say it's true, per se; just that "completely ridiculous" might not be the most apt way to describe it. Or, if you insist, it means perfectly reasonable and intelligent people can somehow accommodate holding "completely ridiculous" beliefs while deriving emotional/psychological benefit from them.
Illegal aliens can't take advantage of welfare, if by welfare you mean TANF. They pay property taxes, sales tax and the federal gas tax. Existing outside the federal income tax system they're also unable to take advantage of the EITC, which many would qualify for if they were filing federal returns.
I also like how you simultaneously complain about a lack of federal education spending and rail against the socialist nanny state. What do you think free, compulsory public education is?
Welcome to the real world.
So you want to go to Mars as part of a big national dick-waving contest. Because if someone got there first it would be a "slap in the face" to U.S. exceptionalism.
V for Vendetta was about opposing a fascist government. Anonymous is about getting free movies and software. There's the difference.
I'd like to see a chart of the revenue growth of "brick and mortar" Apple stores over the last 10 years. Fry's also seems to be doing alright, and like Best Buy they also have questionable customer service.
I'm of the opinion that school quality (i.e. irrespective of the demographics of students) is important, but demographics count for a lot too. Kids tend to do better when surrounded by smart/motivated peers. They tend to do worse when surrounded by less gifted / less motivated peers. This is true irrespective of teacher / school quality. So if a school's student body is "high scoring" purely due to demographics (and not anything having to do with the school per se) then that's still attractive to me, because those are the students my kid will be surrounded by.
What I tend to do is compare schools based on test scores, but account for ethnicity. So I might compare the scores of *only white kids* at school A vs. *only white kids* at school B. (This assumes a situation where white kids are the majority. If the majority were something else then I'd use that ethnicity instead.)
One interesting fact: the "quality" (at least judging by test scores) of the "top" public schools tends to decline as you move upwards in grade level. The "best" public elementary school where I live has something like 95% of students at an "acceptable" level and something like 50% at a "superior" level. The "best" junior high might only have 25% at a superior level. The "best" high school might have only 15% at that level. This makes sense since elementary schools serve a smaller geographic area, so are more likely to have their entire student body coming from a demographic predisposed to have high test scores. Also I think some parents send their kids to public school for elementary then switch to private school for junior high & high school. I don't have data to back that up though.
Doesn't it cost money? There's also the captioning thing. I'd really, really need that to work, or my wife would prefer to just keep doing what we're doing.