In any other business or field, employees get fired for under-performing.
Well, there are some places with unionized employees, but few who consider themselves 'professionals.'
The concept of 'Tenure' has been extended far beyond what the term is meant to mean. Tenure is granted to scholars/professors in research institutions, so that the direction of their research can remain independent.
The starting point for any meaningful education reform in the US is for the 'Teacher's Unions' to be crushed.
Well, it's a good thing from Facebook's point of view. It would render their whole 'like' scheme meaningless.
Me, I think it would be excellent. Anything that pumps more worthless shit into Facebook's database lowers the quality of their mined 'ore.' If it became valueless, they would fucking go out of business.
But you are talking about a coal plant plus an immense distribution network to get that energy out and in use. The comparison to individual combustion engines isn't as good when you factor everything in.
So instead of the public paying indirectly for their oil in the form of subsidies, you feel they should pay a higher price directly.
That would mean their taxes would go down proportionately. No new money would enter or leave the cycle.
Okay, okay, a bunch less would be siphoned off by worthless politicians and bureaucrats. But not enough to make a difference. People pay the same for subsidized oil as they would for unsubsidized oil.
I want companies to pay for the pollution they've caused, and continue to cause.
Businesses don't have a 'money room' where they keep all the gold. When you say 'companies to pay' you mean: customers of those companies, in the form of higher prices. In other words, we all pay more. Which is a fine sentiment. Convince everybody. But don't pretend the money will just show up because evil C.E.O. Moneybags was hiding it in a vault somewhere.
The whole population can't scrap the entire housing infrastructure and rebuild their entire lives out of totally new-design housing. Tighter insulation means less air circulation. That means an unhealthy habitat.
You're burning wood and calling it a green energy source? Really????
Duh, that's why you use the existing grid for backup.
I thought the existing grid was supposed to fade away and not be there anymore. So you're saying it will be needed? With this big cheap-solar implementation being proposed, I don't see the cost of maintaining 'the grid' and those ugly old energy sources going down.
That sounds like the episode of The Simpsons where Mister Burns builds the big apparatus that blocks out the sun from the people of Springfield.
The more efficient your scheme is, the less sun that will reach the ground in populated areas. I guess that's okay, we can live without plants or animals or other living things....
You mean the silicon they're made from? Ever heard of sand? Nothing rare about it.
You go build yourself a massive photovoltaic cell array using completely pure silicon from sand. Make it huge, use ultra pure silicon. Don't put any dopant into any of it.
We'll watch. This is gonna be rich, when he figures it out.
their competitors in the oil industries also get giant subsidies from the Federal Government
Said 'giant subsidies' come from somewhere. Government money comes from taxpayers. Taxpayers who burn all that oil. So it's being funded by the oil consumers. There's no 'magic money' being inserted into the transaction to artificially lower the price of oil. Not in any real sense.
You just described the 'peace benefit' of a bunch of Military Spending. What it has to do with space isn't clear.
The primary payload of ICBMs has never been satellites. Intercontinental (the I in ICBM) means it goes up from one continent and delivers a warhead payload to another.
Integrated circuits were developed for--- surprise again, control systems for warhead delivery systems.
The space program was the 'gee whiz' the government pointed at to explain all the development and research money being spent. NASA was a PR stunt.
For many of the examples you give, it wouldn't have been libertarians raising the hue and cry. It would have been hand-wringing soft liberals.
Whether it was gifting free land to railroads
For trans-continental railroads to traverse the west, the tracks needed to remain intact. We couldn't have massive herds of buffalo grinding the tracks into nothing on a regular basis. So the solution was: exterminate the buffalo herds. Subjugate subsistence Indian peoples as a side benefit.
building canals in Central America
The species damage from crossing Pacific and Atlantic life forms caused by the Panama Canal was immense. When species from two separate ecosystems suddenly find themselves in direct competition, mass extinction occurs. Unfortunately we weren't studying life forms enough to pay attention to it back then.
creating massive socialist highway building programs to help auto makers
Whoops, there go the railroads. And the highways weren't socialist. The Interstate Freeway System was designed as a Department of Defense project. The road beds were specifically designed for heavy military traffic needs.
I have one of the capacitive styluses that works with the iPad. It has a big soft squishy round end on it. It's basically a digital crayon. I wouldn't try to do anything precise with it. It's just for poking at things, which is the interface for iPod. A 'poke at things' interface. Which doesn't lend itself to creative use. MultiTouch makes for the perfect couch-potato machine though. I love playing games on my iPod Touch.
Not only is it a proprietary cable at the iPod end, they also actively and intentionally break 'non-approved' third-party video out adapters. I have one that worked fine when I first got my iPod but which was 'killed' in a subsequent firmware 'update.'
The connector doesn't 'HAVE' to support video out. A second connector could have been added for that. The USB connector could be one of the tiny standard connectors. But then... oh my, there would be an identifiable video out port on my iPod that they would have disabled with a firmware upgrade. It's always better to push all the connections into their own proprietary fog-zone so they can do with it as they wish.
Proprietary is as proprietary does, and if Steve Jobs will be remembered for anything, outside his circle of worshiping zealots, it will be for always putting that shiny proprietary 'twist' in anything apple produced.
'Open Standards' at Apple are seen as avenues to pull in resources from outside the company. Then they put what they deem the proper proprietary twist on it to keep it theirs. They've been doing that for decades. No amount of fanboy spin will change this.
My theory is that he needed a place of refuge after Larry's barbarians took over his company. For someone of Gosling's standing, a short term job at Google could be used as a lateral move. So he took the time to figure out what he really wanted to do and has now found it.
Google gains from the prestige of having hired him, and now he's free to do what he really wanted.
how will they have anything to build on if we don't start now.
They will have whatever they can get by starting later. Starting later isn't the same as starting never. And anyway, the whole Space Program was really just a way of quietly funding a lot of Cold War rocket technology research. Didn't anybody else figure this out?
For long term survival we need technologies that allows us to survive i otherwise hostile environments. Human colonization of space is a great way to research and prove such technologies.
Actually, you're wrong there. Blasting stuff off into space tremendously accelerates the degradation of the only environment we can live in. Look at the greenhouse-gas emissions from a shuttle launch sometime, let alone the environmental impact of the space program as a whole.
We'd be far better off working on 'research on survival in hostile environments' in domes at the bottom of the ocean, underground, etc.
It's not dramatic, though, and space cowboys can't fly around in their dreams when their pod is down at the bottom of the ocean in a hole in the ground.
That's an interesting recollected story, but I find it hard to believe. I was into electronics at that same time, and almost none of us had a frequency counter. Furthermore, someone as smart at the Woz would have made one oscillator, and tuned it to record it at 700 and 900 Hz.
Maybe, though, the 'Steves house' being referred to was Wozniak's house. I can see him conceivably having a frequency counter.
It sounds like a fancified memory, not the real truth.
The frequencies were listed in an early 1960's issue of the Bell System Journal, which is probably where they got it from, not 'a book.' That's where the frequencies were established, of course, so maybe they were repeated in some book at Stanford. The Blue Boxers who I knew all had photocopies of the Bell Systems article to work off of, though.
Google however does not sell people; you cannot buy information on any specific person from Google.
And hence, they should have no need to tag and track anything about any specific person. Except, they do, and they do need to. Because they sell data about trends within communities of people. So they're in the business of mining subcultures. They want to know 'what is cool' quick enough to be able to rip it off and commercialize it as soon as possible.
In otherwords, they are activiely in the business of making whatever is cool totally uncool as quickly as possible, making the most money they can in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
...Even if that were true, why would someone's bigotry or intolerance...
I would argue that you're not a bigot, just someone who parrots out the narrow spectrum of 'current event' opinions he is exposed to.
Please grow up. We're adults here, not comedians on television.
In any other business or field, employees get fired for under-performing.
Well, there are some places with unionized employees, but few who consider themselves 'professionals.'
The concept of 'Tenure' has been extended far beyond what the term is meant to mean. Tenure is granted to scholars/professors in research institutions, so that the direction of their research can remain independent.
The starting point for any meaningful education reform in the US is for the 'Teacher's Unions' to be crushed.
Well, it's a good thing from Facebook's point of view. It would render their whole 'like' scheme meaningless.
Me, I think it would be excellent. Anything that pumps more worthless shit into Facebook's database lowers the quality of their mined 'ore.' If it became valueless, they would fucking go out of business.
But you are talking about a coal plant plus an immense distribution network to get that energy out and in use. The comparison to individual combustion engines isn't as good when you factor everything in.
So instead of the public paying indirectly for their oil in the form of subsidies, you feel they should pay a higher price directly.
That would mean their taxes would go down proportionately. No new money would enter or leave the cycle.
Okay, okay, a bunch less would be siphoned off by worthless politicians and bureaucrats. But not enough to make a difference. People pay the same for subsidized oil as they would for unsubsidized oil.
I want companies to pay for the pollution they've caused, and continue to cause.
Businesses don't have a 'money room' where they keep all the gold. When you say 'companies to pay' you mean: customers of those companies, in the form of higher prices. In other words, we all pay more. Which is a fine sentiment. Convince everybody. But don't pretend the money will just show up because evil C.E.O. Moneybags was hiding it in a vault somewhere.
Some of us live in climates that require neither heating in the winter nor cooling in the summer, and we can power our computers easily from solar.
We can't all live there. And I bet you'd get spittin' mad if even as few as ten times as many people as presently live there moved into your area.
The whole population can't scrap the entire housing infrastructure and rebuild their entire lives out of totally new-design housing. Tighter insulation means less air circulation. That means an unhealthy habitat.
You're burning wood and calling it a green energy source? Really????
Duh, that's why you use the existing grid for backup.
I thought the existing grid was supposed to fade away and not be there anymore. So you're saying it will be needed? With this big cheap-solar implementation being proposed, I don't see the cost of maintaining 'the grid' and those ugly old energy sources going down.
That sounds like the episode of The Simpsons where Mister Burns builds the big apparatus that blocks out the sun from the people of Springfield.
The more efficient your scheme is, the less sun that will reach the ground in populated areas. I guess that's okay, we can live without plants or animals or other living things....
You mean the silicon they're made from? Ever heard of sand? Nothing rare about it.
You go build yourself a massive photovoltaic cell array using completely pure silicon from sand. Make it huge, use ultra pure silicon. Don't put any dopant into any of it.
We'll watch. This is gonna be rich, when he figures it out.
their competitors in the oil industries also get giant subsidies from the Federal Government
Said 'giant subsidies' come from somewhere. Government money comes from taxpayers. Taxpayers who burn all that oil. So it's being funded by the oil consumers. There's no 'magic money' being inserted into the transaction to artificially lower the price of oil. Not in any real sense.
You just described the 'peace benefit' of a bunch of Military Spending. What it has to do with space isn't clear.
The primary payload of ICBMs has never been satellites. Intercontinental (the I in ICBM) means it goes up from one continent and delivers a warhead payload to another.
Integrated circuits were developed for--- surprise again, control systems for warhead delivery systems.
The space program was the 'gee whiz' the government pointed at to explain all the development and research money being spent. NASA was a PR stunt.
Kumbaya.
One connector good. Two connectors bad.
Bleat bleat.
For many of the examples you give, it wouldn't have been libertarians raising the hue and cry. It would have been hand-wringing soft liberals.
Whether it was gifting free land to railroads
For trans-continental railroads to traverse the west, the tracks needed to remain intact. We couldn't have massive herds of buffalo grinding the tracks into nothing on a regular basis. So the solution was: exterminate the buffalo herds. Subjugate subsistence Indian peoples as a side benefit.
building canals in Central America
The species damage from crossing Pacific and Atlantic life forms caused by the Panama Canal was immense. When species from two separate ecosystems suddenly find themselves in direct competition, mass extinction occurs. Unfortunately we weren't studying life forms enough to pay attention to it back then.
creating massive socialist highway building programs to help auto makers
Whoops, there go the railroads. And the highways weren't socialist. The Interstate Freeway System was designed as a Department of Defense project. The road beds were specifically designed for heavy military traffic needs.
I have one of the capacitive styluses that works with the iPad. It has a big soft squishy round end on it. It's basically a digital crayon. I wouldn't try to do anything precise with it. It's just for poking at things, which is the interface for iPod. A 'poke at things' interface. Which doesn't lend itself to creative use. MultiTouch makes for the perfect couch-potato machine though. I love playing games on my iPod Touch.
People have been making money, or getting a reputation, or getting laid, with apocalyptic tomes for as long as we've had writing.
Your reading assignment is: Chicken Little.
Not only is it a proprietary cable at the iPod end, they also actively and intentionally break 'non-approved' third-party video out adapters. I have one that worked fine when I first got my iPod but which was 'killed' in a subsequent firmware 'update.'
The connector doesn't 'HAVE' to support video out. A second connector could have been added for that. The USB connector could be one of the tiny standard connectors. But then... oh my, there would be an identifiable video out port on my iPod that they would have disabled with a firmware upgrade. It's always better to push all the connections into their own proprietary fog-zone so they can do with it as they wish.
Proprietary is as proprietary does, and if Steve Jobs will be remembered for anything, outside his circle of worshiping zealots, it will be for always putting that shiny proprietary 'twist' in anything apple produced.
'Open Standards' at Apple are seen as avenues to pull in resources from outside the company. Then they put what they deem the proper proprietary twist on it to keep it theirs. They've been doing that for decades. No amount of fanboy spin will change this.
Come back with assertions like that when they are published in Fortune, Forbes, or the Wall Street Journal.
Some blog called Gizmag? Why do I scent a whift of fanboy spirit?
My theory is that he needed a place of refuge after Larry's barbarians took over his company. For someone of Gosling's standing, a short term job at Google could be used as a lateral move. So he took the time to figure out what he really wanted to do and has now found it.
Google gains from the prestige of having hired him, and now he's free to do what he really wanted.
how will they have anything to build on if we don't start now.
They will have whatever they can get by starting later. Starting later isn't the same as starting never. And anyway, the whole Space Program was really just a way of quietly funding a lot of Cold War rocket technology research. Didn't anybody else figure this out?
For long term survival we need technologies that allows us to survive i otherwise hostile environments. Human colonization of space is a great way to research and prove such technologies.
Actually, you're wrong there. Blasting stuff off into space tremendously accelerates the degradation of the only environment we can live in. Look at the greenhouse-gas emissions from a shuttle launch sometime, let alone the environmental impact of the space program as a whole.
We'd be far better off working on 'research on survival in hostile environments' in domes at the bottom of the ocean, underground, etc.
It's not dramatic, though, and space cowboys can't fly around in their dreams when their pod is down at the bottom of the ocean in a hole in the ground.
That's an interesting recollected story, but I find it hard to believe. I was into electronics at that same time, and almost none of us had a frequency counter. Furthermore, someone as smart at the Woz would have made one oscillator, and tuned it to record it at 700 and 900 Hz.
Maybe, though, the 'Steves house' being referred to was Wozniak's house. I can see him conceivably having a frequency counter.
It sounds like a fancified memory, not the real truth.
The frequencies were listed in an early 1960's issue of the Bell System Journal, which is probably where they got it from, not 'a book.' That's where the frequencies were established, of course, so maybe they were repeated in some book at Stanford. The Blue Boxers who I knew all had photocopies of the Bell Systems article to work off of, though.
Google however does not sell people; you cannot buy information on any specific person from Google.
And hence, they should have no need to tag and track anything about any specific person. Except, they do, and they do need to. Because they sell data about trends within communities of people. So they're in the business of mining subcultures. They want to know 'what is cool' quick enough to be able to rip it off and commercialize it as soon as possible.
In otherwords, they are activiely in the business of making whatever is cool totally uncool as quickly as possible, making the most money they can in the process.
Wow. What a hip company!