I mean it was designed by the same people. The biggest differance is that you stand in one [which is hard for wheelbound people] and in one you sit. I guess one could strap somebody in a standing posistion but I would think that would be harder.
iBot is a cool technology, but I understand it is dying a slow death because the extra value really does not offset the extra costs [expensive, limited range. And when a electric wheelchair runs out of juice somebody can still push it. With an iBot...]
In it the lead of OK Go! says they are leaving their major labor record for thier own. Basicly the reasons you mentioned.
On the other hand, he is not sure if they could have started out as you suggested. He thinks it takes 250k to lauch a low cost, no thrills alt-indie band like his. More if you want to go mainstream. He talks about the months that it took to write, produce and polish their first albume. Quiting their part time jobs to work full time on the album. Thier first tour, upfront costs, etc.
He could not get a bank loan to lauch this because 19 out of 20 bands fail comericially. So they needed the upfront loan to lauch.
He think the internet is getting to the point where a start up band could by-pass the major labors and their label is going to try it. So, yeah, in theory you don't. In practice, for today....
Side Note: Why do Rock Bands make more money then Rap Acts? It not because of the white/black divided. It because Rock Bands then to have a uncle who is a accountant who tell them if the thier agent gets 50% and the managment company gets 50% it is not a good deal.
Let us note the differance between a good / bad idea and a good / bad execution of that idea.
My wife is a veterinarian and they routinely do white cell counts, look for parasites in the stool, etc, I can't imagine that the human world is too far off.
First, you are looking at the wrong angle. Biofules is just solar power using a different angle. Thre is more then enough carbon to make biofules work.
Second, the real question is knock on effects. Farming the fuel stock could increase CO2 in the area. Farmed land tends to relase greanhouse gasses that was stored in the land. . Fertilizer tends to use a lot of hydrocarbons in production. Most biofules need to be cooked with heat - which tends to come from hydrocarbons. I think biofules are viable and can lead to reduced CO2 but there is a lot of work that needs to be done.
In a Co-op it is the customers/members that own the company. And it is the customers/members that have voting rights [which in my mind, is the key question when it comes to ownership.]
It is not a Partnership because the shares don't have voting rights - I think. From the article: "A 'small committee' of 33 union members are elected by other shareholders employed by Huawei to make decisions." I am not sure but it sounds like Huawei selects key people to vote. It sounds like management has captured the voting process.
While this can happen in western style corporations there is always the outside chance of a external shareholder / hostile take over to force management. [See Barbarians At the Gate] I am not seeing this here.
Limited Partnership: General Partners control the partnership and the limited partners are along for the economic ride - with only limited voting rights.
You don't buy futures to insure against bad weather. You buy crop insurance for that.
You use futures for
1. Price discorcory discovery [e.g. should I plant Corn at $3.80 per bush or Soybeans at $9.80]
2. Insure against price movements. Spends gobs on money in the spring, lock in prices for the fall. Once you have done that you can focus on being a farmer instead of spending your time trying to guess where the market will be in 6 months.
Add the fact that methane, as a green house gas, is 20x more powerful then CO2, you can see that burning methane and converting it into CO2 is a net gain in terms of green house gases.
“Under capitalism, science is often bent to the needs of the patron/employer/investor.”
So What? Is this good, bad or indifferent? Let me tell you why.
Basic Research [i.e. Science done at Research Universities, Bell Labs, etc.] has the following qualities.
High Variance [Lots of missies, but the hits tend to be home runs]
Commercial applications tend to be 10+ years. I tend to disagree with people who say that companies are driven by quarterly profits – however business plans tend to fall apart if longer then 10 years – just too many variables and assumptions.
Value of the research tends to land outside of the company. It is hard to put the genie back in the bottle. It took years of tinkering to make computer chips, lasers, biotech, LCD, etc. from an interesting niche product to something mainstream. The companies that blazed the trail in research have a no better chance of producing a main stream product as a Johnny come lately.
Basic Research generates great value – only some of which lands with the company – most lands with the public.
I tend towards the liberation side, but unless we have draconian IP laws on the books the profit motive tends to underfund basic research.
I have great doubts about the this City – but this is because I tend to think of grand scale from scratch projects are mostly doomed vanity projects.
I would disagree with you.
This Monday, I might suggest that you contemplate where we would be if a Reverend had insisted that "Separate but Equal" was not. Saying that all people are equal came from a profoundly religious place.
Political questions are rarely strictly technical question. Values and morality often come into play. To say that religion has no comment on politics would leave religion a shallow thing - just rites that one performs on the holy days. Politics would be equally improvised as well, having no moral compass.
Freedom of Religion. Not Freedom from Religion. Love and Respect. Do not hate and condemn.
Stepping off my soap box now.
If you look at the past 20 years, economic slow downs have not slowed down technology purchases. Computers were perceived as improving productivity. Fire people, hire computers, become more efficient in a downturn was the mantra.
Only now that everybody has a computer is the world of technology synching up with the rest of the economy. It is important news.
Bill Clinton ordered the wireless wiretaps. He also order forced renditions of terrorist to 3rd party countries to be "questioned".
George may have done it on a grander scale, but Bill got there first.
Well, I am an internal resource tackling internal problems. So, yes, completion is limited.
The point that I wanted to get across is that if you have read what Paul Graham has been writing over the years, his advice has been simple. Start small, lean and hungry. Get something - anything - out fast. Experiment. Get feedback from your clients. Improve. Mistakes are o.k. Better to make dozen of mistakes, get honest feedback, and improve. If you have something worthwhile, the early adopters who need it will stick with you if you have a truly innovated idea. In this case, black swans, rare events, are good. The more black swans you have the better. Most will blow up. One will be a home run that pays for the rest.
This does not always work. My "Customer" is the IRS - which requires a single complex report once a year. It needs to be perfect. It needs to tie out multiple different ways. The IRS does not care about innovation. You can extend this to a host of other industries where failure is not allowed. Banking [my industry], Aircraft, Medical, etc. Here, black swans must be killed.
Now, that being said, we have outsourced a lot of our software. We don't compete on having the best software, we compete on having the best products. software is a utility for us.
So, do you write perfect code, which takes too long and is too expensive?
Or do you write quick and dirty code, and let it blow up in somebody else's face a few years down the road?
Or do you write it just right?
Working in a highly regulated complex industry, the rare blow up is very very bad. We work hard to avoid them. On the other hand, there are a few quick and dirty things that I write because I know that I will be able to toss them soon.
I think the question that you need to ask the end user first - what do you need.
Having read the author for quite some time, I expect he would disagree. I think he would go quick and dirty. But then again, he thinks like a start up. They are smaller. And when things blow up it is less important, affecting only a few people and a few bucks.
IANAL, but my understanding is that if you can not produce the evidence [because you destroyed it, your dog ate it, etc.] the judge can instruct the jury to draw a negative conclusion on why the evidence can not be produced. Saying your dog ate your homework just does not cut it.
The "Long Tail" is a retail concept. Normally, business make 80% of their profit/sales off 20% of the items that they sell. Which is why "Big" retails are well stocked with the latest Hollywood film, but not that obscure DVD with British humor. The Internet is supposed to change this. Because adding an additional piece to inventor does not take up an additional retail "space" a store can offer unlimited holdings. So one would expect that fewer sales of the "Big" hits and more sales of the more odd titles.
It's is a nice theory, but it not true. 80% of Amazon's sales come from just 20% of their inventory. I mean, sure, they have a much larger inventory then most stores, but they don't expect the long tail. The numbers are bigger but the ratio stays the same.
I have always wondered if Apple's Itunes has escaped into the long tail.
Might I suggest that the next one you get is not a knock off counterfeit. I know this is Slashdot, but the quality of lightsabers that you buy out of the back of a trunk is not of the same quality as those bootleg DVDs. I know that the DRM that the Jedi council is hideous, but still, best to go to a legitimate source and pay full retail.
I am surprised nobody has mentioned newspapers and such. I have looked at a Kindle so I can get my subscriptions in a timely fashion without worrying about the weather, travel, and the such. And honestly, I am not that worryied about DRM and lock in issues for yesterday's paper. Doing the math in my head I think my break even point would be something under 18 months.
Also, on top of the purchase, you will have to pay commissions, and a transfer agent fee. It depends on how much your broker will charge on top of what the transfer agent will charge, but expect at least another $60 on top of that.
Or instead of hoping from TV channel to TV Channel, people will hop from a information channel to another channel. I have noticed in the past 20 years a vast increase in the quantity of information that people demand - not in the quality - for late breaking hot news. Only the tempo has picked up.
Sure. Your car is a very special car. It is called a Taxi.
Your have a partner [or perhaps an ex-wife] that gets 10% of your post tax Taxi income.
You go to the bank, use the car as collateral, pay your parnter lump sum to go away. The Partner will do it because they like the lump sum and it is tax advantage. The Bank will do it becasue you have a pile of cash and a great debt rating.
You car has not changed. Your taxi income has not changed. [Well, it has. The debit is a nice tax sheild]. What you have done is gained more risk. After all, if you made a lot of losses your partner could not repo you car - The bank can.
On the other hand, you don't have to share any of the up-side with your parnter - it's all yours.
This has nothing to do with Microsoft's investments or anything like that. All that they are doing is shfiting the ownership structure.
Microsoft may be underpriced [Balmer thinks so]. On the other hand, intrest rates are low, and there are few AAA companies issuing debt out there. I am betting the CFO saw a good time to move.
So I have this to say - Nothing to see. Move along. Just some fancy people shuffling paper. Nothing to do with computers.
Tell that to the Japanese, where skyscrapers have fallen in value by a good 50%. When your mortage is worth more than the building this is not an asset.
Scripophily [collecting stock certificates] is an odd hobby.
Most brokers will charge you a fee to convert your certficate. Let us say $50 - not exaclty pulling the number out of thin air. I have no idea on how many AMD shares you will get.
Is the stock certtificate pretty? I know a lot of people who either have Disney or Playboy [back when the cert had the Feb 72 playmate on them. Alas no longer]
Not true.
A zero [or near zero] just means that the people who hold the equity have nothing left at stake.
The company can have assets [liablities are normally higher at this point], employees, IP, product, etc.
At this point the shareholders are pushed out and the bondholders take over. Take a look at K-Mart [now Sears] as an example. K-Mart went bust, bondholders took over [and became equity holders] and then they bought Sears.
Slashdot Mirror
But is there anyplace that amalgamate book numbers together? I don't know of any. I think we are stuck with partial number sets.
But the Segway is a modifed iBot.....
I mean it was designed by the same people. The biggest differance is that you stand in one [which is hard for wheelbound people] and in one you sit. I guess one could strap somebody in a standing posistion but I would think that would be harder.
iBot is a cool technology, but I understand it is dying a slow death because the extra value really does not offset the extra costs [expensive, limited range. And when a electric wheelchair runs out of juice somebody can still push it. With an iBot...]
I don't think it is as easy as you make it out. Theory vs. Practice. Take a look at from NPR who interviewed OK Go!
http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2010/04/the_tuesday_podcast.html
In it the lead of OK Go! says they are leaving their major labor record for thier own. Basicly the reasons you mentioned.
On the other hand, he is not sure if they could have started out as you suggested. He thinks it takes 250k to lauch a low cost, no thrills alt-indie band like his. More if you want to go mainstream. He talks about the months that it took to write, produce and polish their first albume. Quiting their part time jobs to work full time on the album. Thier first tour, upfront costs, etc.
He could not get a bank loan to lauch this because 19 out of 20 bands fail comericially. So they needed the upfront loan to lauch.
He think the internet is getting to the point where a start up band could by-pass the major labors and their label is going to try it. So, yeah, in theory you don't. In practice, for today....
Side Note: Why do Rock Bands make more money then Rap Acts? It not because of the white/black divided. It because Rock Bands then to have a uncle who is a accountant who tell them if the thier agent gets 50% and the managment company gets 50% it is not a good deal.
Let us note the differance between a good / bad idea and a good / bad execution of that idea.
I don't know how much this counts but....
My wife is a veterinarian and they routinely do white cell counts, look for parasites in the stool, etc, I can't imagine that the human world is too far off.
Two Points:
First, you are looking at the wrong angle. Biofules is just solar power using a different angle. Thre is more then enough carbon to make biofules work.
Second, the real question is knock on effects. Farming the fuel stock could increase CO2 in the area. Farmed land tends to relase greanhouse gasses that was stored in the land. . Fertilizer tends to use a lot of hydrocarbons in production. Most biofules need to be cooked with heat - which tends to come from hydrocarbons. I think biofules are viable and can lead to reduced CO2 but there is a lot of work that needs to be done.
More like a Limited Partnership.
In a Co-op it is the customers/members that own the company. And it is the customers/members that have voting rights [which in my mind, is the key question when it comes to ownership.]
It is not a Partnership because the shares don't have voting rights - I think. From the article: "A 'small committee' of 33 union members are elected by other shareholders employed by Huawei to make decisions." I am not sure but it sounds like Huawei selects key people to vote. It sounds like management has captured the voting process.
While this can happen in western style corporations there is always the outside chance of a external shareholder / hostile take over to force management. [See Barbarians At the Gate] I am not seeing this here.
Limited Partnership: General Partners control the partnership and the limited partners are along for the economic ride - with only limited voting rights.
You don't buy futures to insure against bad weather. You buy crop insurance for that.
You use futures for
1. Price discorcory discovery [e.g. should I plant Corn at $3.80 per bush or Soybeans at $9.80]
2. Insure against price movements. Spends gobs on money in the spring, lock in prices for the fall. Once you have done that you can focus on being a farmer instead of spending your time trying to guess where the market will be in 6 months.
Add the fact that methane, as a green house gas, is 20x more powerful then CO2, you can see that burning methane and converting it into CO2 is a net gain in terms of green house gases.
It is all about the Externalities
“Under capitalism, science is often bent to the needs of the patron/employer/investor.”
So What? Is this good, bad or indifferent? Let me tell you why.
Basic Research [i.e. Science done at Research Universities, Bell Labs, etc.] has the following qualities.
High Variance [Lots of missies, but the hits tend to be home runs]
Commercial applications tend to be 10+ years. I tend to disagree with people who say that companies are driven by quarterly profits – however business plans tend to fall apart if longer then 10 years – just too many variables and assumptions.
Value of the research tends to land outside of the company. It is hard to put the genie back in the bottle. It took years of tinkering to make computer chips, lasers, biotech, LCD, etc. from an interesting niche product to something mainstream. The companies that blazed the trail in research have a no better chance of producing a main stream product as a Johnny come lately.
Basic Research generates great value – only some of which lands with the company – most lands with the public.
I tend towards the liberation side, but unless we have draconian IP laws on the books the profit motive tends to underfund basic research.
I have great doubts about the this City – but this is because I tend to think of grand scale from scratch projects are mostly doomed vanity projects.
I would disagree with you. This Monday, I might suggest that you contemplate where we would be if a Reverend had insisted that "Separate but Equal" was not. Saying that all people are equal came from a profoundly religious place. Political questions are rarely strictly technical question. Values and morality often come into play. To say that religion has no comment on politics would leave religion a shallow thing - just rites that one performs on the holy days. Politics would be equally improvised as well, having no moral compass. Freedom of Religion. Not Freedom from Religion. Love and Respect. Do not hate and condemn. Stepping off my soap box now.
"Yes"
If you look at the past 20 years, economic slow downs have not slowed down technology purchases. Computers were perceived as improving productivity. Fire people, hire computers, become more efficient in a downturn was the mantra.
Only now that everybody has a computer is the world of technology synching up with the rest of the economy. It is important news.
Bill Clinton ordered the wireless wiretaps. He also order forced renditions of terrorist to 3rd party countries to be "questioned". George may have done it on a grander scale, but Bill got there first.
Well, I am an internal resource tackling internal problems. So, yes, completion is limited. The point that I wanted to get across is that if you have read what Paul Graham has been writing over the years, his advice has been simple. Start small, lean and hungry. Get something - anything - out fast. Experiment. Get feedback from your clients. Improve. Mistakes are o.k. Better to make dozen of mistakes, get honest feedback, and improve. If you have something worthwhile, the early adopters who need it will stick with you if you have a truly innovated idea. In this case, black swans, rare events, are good. The more black swans you have the better. Most will blow up. One will be a home run that pays for the rest. This does not always work. My "Customer" is the IRS - which requires a single complex report once a year. It needs to be perfect. It needs to tie out multiple different ways. The IRS does not care about innovation. You can extend this to a host of other industries where failure is not allowed. Banking [my industry], Aircraft, Medical, etc. Here, black swans must be killed. Now, that being said, we have outsourced a lot of our software. We don't compete on having the best software, we compete on having the best products. software is a utility for us.
So, do you write perfect code, which takes too long and is too expensive? Or do you write quick and dirty code, and let it blow up in somebody else's face a few years down the road? Or do you write it just right? Working in a highly regulated complex industry, the rare blow up is very very bad. We work hard to avoid them. On the other hand, there are a few quick and dirty things that I write because I know that I will be able to toss them soon. I think the question that you need to ask the end user first - what do you need. Having read the author for quite some time, I expect he would disagree. I think he would go quick and dirty. But then again, he thinks like a start up. They are smaller. And when things blow up it is less important, affecting only a few people and a few bucks.
IANAL, but my understanding is that if you can not produce the evidence [because you destroyed it, your dog ate it, etc.] the judge can instruct the jury to draw a negative conclusion on why the evidence can not be produced. Saying your dog ate your homework just does not cut it.
The "Long Tail" is a retail concept. Normally, business make 80% of their profit/sales off 20% of the items that they sell. Which is why "Big" retails are well stocked with the latest Hollywood film, but not that obscure DVD with British humor. The Internet is supposed to change this. Because adding an additional piece to inventor does not take up an additional retail "space" a store can offer unlimited holdings. So one would expect that fewer sales of the "Big" hits and more sales of the more odd titles. It's is a nice theory, but it not true. 80% of Amazon's sales come from just 20% of their inventory. I mean, sure, they have a much larger inventory then most stores, but they don't expect the long tail. The numbers are bigger but the ratio stays the same. I have always wondered if Apple's Itunes has escaped into the long tail.
Might I suggest that the next one you get is not a knock off counterfeit. I know this is Slashdot, but the quality of lightsabers that you buy out of the back of a trunk is not of the same quality as those bootleg DVDs. I know that the DRM that the Jedi council is hideous, but still, best to go to a legitimate source and pay full retail.
I am surprised nobody has mentioned newspapers and such. I have looked at a Kindle so I can get my subscriptions in a timely fashion without worrying about the weather, travel, and the such. And honestly, I am not that worryied about DRM and lock in issues for yesterday's paper. Doing the math in my head I think my break even point would be something under 18 months.
Also, on top of the purchase, you will have to pay commissions, and a transfer agent fee. It depends on how much your broker will charge on top of what the transfer agent will charge, but expect at least another $60 on top of that.
Or instead of hoping from TV channel to TV Channel, people will hop from a information channel to another channel. I have noticed in the past 20 years a vast increase in the quantity of information that people demand - not in the quality - for late breaking hot news. Only the tempo has picked up.
Sure. Your car is a very special car. It is called a Taxi. Your have a partner [or perhaps an ex-wife] that gets 10% of your post tax Taxi income. You go to the bank, use the car as collateral, pay your parnter lump sum to go away. The Partner will do it because they like the lump sum and it is tax advantage. The Bank will do it becasue you have a pile of cash and a great debt rating. You car has not changed. Your taxi income has not changed. [Well, it has. The debit is a nice tax sheild]. What you have done is gained more risk. After all, if you made a lot of losses your partner could not repo you car - The bank can. On the other hand, you don't have to share any of the up-side with your parnter - it's all yours. This has nothing to do with Microsoft's investments or anything like that. All that they are doing is shfiting the ownership structure. Microsoft may be underpriced [Balmer thinks so]. On the other hand, intrest rates are low, and there are few AAA companies issuing debt out there. I am betting the CFO saw a good time to move. So I have this to say - Nothing to see. Move along. Just some fancy people shuffling paper. Nothing to do with computers.
Tell that to the Japanese, where skyscrapers have fallen in value by a good 50%. When your mortage is worth more than the building this is not an asset.
O.K., so the Blue Ray just won the Hi Def Wars. So now we get into another format war? Sigh.
Scripophily [collecting stock certificates] is an odd hobby. Most brokers will charge you a fee to convert your certficate. Let us say $50 - not exaclty pulling the number out of thin air. I have no idea on how many AMD shares you will get. Is the stock certtificate pretty? I know a lot of people who either have Disney or Playboy [back when the cert had the Feb 72 playmate on them. Alas no longer]
Not true. A zero [or near zero] just means that the people who hold the equity have nothing left at stake. The company can have assets [liablities are normally higher at this point], employees, IP, product, etc. At this point the shareholders are pushed out and the bondholders take over. Take a look at K-Mart [now Sears] as an example. K-Mart went bust, bondholders took over [and became equity holders] and then they bought Sears.