When was the last time someone flew some planes into a few of the tallest buildings in your country in the middle of your most densely populated city? I'm as opposed to the TSA as the next guy but it's important to put what Americans "put up with" in context. I think it's pretty well understood by most people who take the time to consider such things that it's largely security theater.
Google has destroyed the market for GPS devices for everyone in my circle of friends and family. There's a couple of hiking/fishing style GPS devices, but none of the "driving" directions style. I dunno what it costs them to run that "map" charity, but I can tell you that it goes along way for marketing/mindshare every time I use the Navigation app to get somewhere.
I disagree. If you're serious about using maps you will probably go with Bing because they have superior APIs. It's one of the few things Microsoft has gotten (relatively) right.
This is a pet peeve of mine. These days I'd fire any programmer who coded their own sorting algorithm. These days most languages have collections libraries with very efficient sorting algorithms that should meet 99.999% of business needs. Your business may be a unique snowflake so this wasn't necessarily targeted at you, but developers trying to write basic standard library stuff over again really irks me.
I didn't miss it. A person starting any of those businesses might have a few hundred or perhaps a couple thousand dollars wrapped up in it. Yes there's risk but people talk about it as if it's a life or death scenario for a person and it just isn't.
The number of businesses starting up these days which are capital intense are pretty small. Most small businesses are things like: accountant, pressure washer, plumber, antique dealer, used auto dealer, etc. Yes there's capital involved but you wouldn't, for example, go from zero to professional antique dealer with a huge store of inventory over night... you'd start probably on e-bay or local auctions, maybe get a flea market booth, then graduate up as you increased revenue and learned the business. Similarly if you're starting a business as a plumber you've accumulated most of the tools working as a plumber for someone else.. a professional grade pressure washer is less than $2k, etc. etc. There's exceptions like high tech manufacturing but those types of things are usually paid for with seed money from people for which the investment amount is a small portion of their wealth and are also relatively uncommon.
As a business owner myself I disagree that starting a business is some big lofty risk. What's the real risk? If the business fails you can just get a job like everyone else. Incorporation means that my personal wealth (not that I have any) is not at risk at any time.
First, I admitted my ignorance wrt what meaningful technology they had so I find your accusation of malice towards me silly.
Secondly, Solyndra does have fishy things going on with its loan. The original loan was fine and was structured in such a way that if the company failed the government got paid first. Then they came back and re-financed with a structure that meant the government got paid last, after the private investors. If the people responsible for that refinance (government people) knew that the company was on the brink of failing and they restructured the loan to favor the private investors at the expense of the government then there's something illegal going on there. I doubt very seriously that it goes on up to Obama, but it is worth looking into. And no, it's not the scope of scandal that the conservative media is trying to make it out to be, but it's something that should be looked into.
Seriously, switch to decaf.. most of what I wrote i the GP post was in line with what you're saying. I have to believe you went on auto-pilot in the first sentence and failed to read my post to completion.
I don't buy the cronyism argument because cronyism is not unique to government work. There's just as good of a chance of someone stretching the definitions of their work to be included in the tax break where they really shouldn't qualify in the spirit of the goal.
The government isn't any different than the company in this regard: X dollars in subsidy has the same exact affect on the books as an X dollar tax break. Tax breaks are easier to market, but there's no difference on the bottom line between the two.
Solyndra was 5% of the project in question.. dunno what % the other one ways but I think the 90% is a fair number. The scandal is about some hokiness with the loan itself, nobody has mentioned whether or not Solyndra did meaningful research or was granted valuable new patents.. my understanding is that they bet big based on the commodities markets and it flopped. It's not as if Solyndra never made any serious attempts at making valuable solar technologies.. so "scandal-laden" is (potentially) just political nonsense. If someone did something illegal wrt the loan then they should be punished, but that has little to do with whether or not the Solyndra investment was worthwhile to us as a society.
This. At the peak of their research time lines the Manhattan project and the Apollo projects reach 0.4% of our GDP spent JUST on those individual projects. I would submit that this kind of commitment is what it will take to get solar/wind/whatever to "the next level." Either way the technology is going to improve and we'll eventually get "there." The question is how long we want to wait and what kinds of resources are we willing to commit to it?
It's funny because you think that a company sees a difference between a tax break for $1 Million and a check for $1 Million. Your tax break is my government program. Either subsidize it or not, but worrying about whether it's tax breaks or a check is just being pedantic.
What you just stated is patently false. There's constant delivery date and cost over-runs in private business. Not as dramatic as in government, but it's there nonetheless. And it doesn't usually result in lawsuits or even a loss of business.
The whole military industrial complex works this way. Those lobbyists are so powerful they get things made that the Pentagon as firmly stated they don't even want.
Re:Is the past is viewable in one direction or all
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Ask The Bad Astronomer
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· Score: 1
Everything we see is in the past. The light emitted from your monitor took a very small amount of time to get to your eyes, but in that sense it is still "historical" data. You can still see your monitor even if you're slowly backing away from it. Same principle applies here.
Re:jupiter's orbital"responsible" for sunspot-ryth
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Ask The Bad Astronomer
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· Score: 1
I would assume that the gp is referring to when the planets' elliptical orbits have them close to the Sun.. if Jupiter is the main culprit I would expect this event to happen twice per "Jupiter year." How fast the Sun rotates should be unrelated.
This is my favorite part of thinking about this stuff.. it's interesting brain candy (to me) to consider things like the fact that matter didn't even exist in the forms we think of it until hundreds of thousands of years after the big bang.. Thinking about the first moments measured in plank times, the fact that there's no language to describe what would have been "outside" the original singularity, etc.
At some point in its history there was a hypernova at the center of our galaxy (which may not have been a galaxy until the resulting super black hole started sucking stuff towards it). It's swirly because everything's getting sucked towards the center. It's flat because of the angular momentum stuff others noted.
Slashdot Mirror
When was the last time someone flew some planes into a few of the tallest buildings in your country in the middle of your most densely populated city? I'm as opposed to the TSA as the next guy but it's important to put what Americans "put up with" in context. I think it's pretty well understood by most people who take the time to consider such things that it's largely security theater.
Google is absolutely HORRIBLE at making APIs. Microsoft is better at making APIs than Google and Microsoft isn't good at anything. Bing has a superior map API than Google.. When Google+ came out? One API. Ebay/Paypal has better APIs than Google (http://developer.ebay.com/common/api/ https://cms.paypal.com/us/cgi-bin/?cmd=_render-content&content_ID=developer/howto_api_reference) Go take a look at https://developers.google.com/ it's really depressing.
Google has destroyed the market for GPS devices for everyone in my circle of friends and family. There's a couple of hiking/fishing style GPS devices, but none of the "driving" directions style. I dunno what it costs them to run that "map" charity, but I can tell you that it goes along way for marketing/mindshare every time I use the Navigation app to get somewhere.
I disagree. If you're serious about using maps you will probably go with Bing because they have superior APIs. It's one of the few things Microsoft has gotten (relatively) right.
This is a pet peeve of mine. These days I'd fire any programmer who coded their own sorting algorithm. These days most languages have collections libraries with very efficient sorting algorithms that should meet 99.999% of business needs. Your business may be a unique snowflake so this wasn't necessarily targeted at you, but developers trying to write basic standard library stuff over again really irks me.
I didn't miss it. A person starting any of those businesses might have a few hundred or perhaps a couple thousand dollars wrapped up in it. Yes there's risk but people talk about it as if it's a life or death scenario for a person and it just isn't.
The number of businesses starting up these days which are capital intense are pretty small. Most small businesses are things like: accountant, pressure washer, plumber, antique dealer, used auto dealer, etc. Yes there's capital involved but you wouldn't, for example, go from zero to professional antique dealer with a huge store of inventory over night... you'd start probably on e-bay or local auctions, maybe get a flea market booth, then graduate up as you increased revenue and learned the business. Similarly if you're starting a business as a plumber you've accumulated most of the tools working as a plumber for someone else.. a professional grade pressure washer is less than $2k, etc. etc. There's exceptions like high tech manufacturing but those types of things are usually paid for with seed money from people for which the investment amount is a small portion of their wealth and are also relatively uncommon.
As a business owner myself I disagree that starting a business is some big lofty risk. What's the real risk? If the business fails you can just get a job like everyone else. Incorporation means that my personal wealth (not that I have any) is not at risk at any time.
It would be funny to outsource the manual work of putting the puzzle pieces together out to China for $10k, collect the difference.
Some enterprising youngster will ramp up a few hundred Amazon EC2 virtual servers and crunch through it in a few minutes.
No, it should be looked into by the Justice Department, the same way that the military contractors and bankers should be looked into.
I hear this method is also effective for nuclear winter. Don't forget to duct tape your windows.
First, I admitted my ignorance wrt what meaningful technology they had so I find your accusation of malice towards me silly.
Secondly, Solyndra does have fishy things going on with its loan. The original loan was fine and was structured in such a way that if the company failed the government got paid first. Then they came back and re-financed with a structure that meant the government got paid last, after the private investors. If the people responsible for that refinance (government people) knew that the company was on the brink of failing and they restructured the loan to favor the private investors at the expense of the government then there's something illegal going on there. I doubt very seriously that it goes on up to Obama, but it is worth looking into. And no, it's not the scope of scandal that the conservative media is trying to make it out to be, but it's something that should be looked into.
Seriously, switch to decaf.. most of what I wrote i the GP post was in line with what you're saying. I have to believe you went on auto-pilot in the first sentence and failed to read my post to completion.
I don't buy the cronyism argument because cronyism is not unique to government work. There's just as good of a chance of someone stretching the definitions of their work to be included in the tax break where they really shouldn't qualify in the spirit of the goal.
The government isn't any different than the company in this regard: X dollars in subsidy has the same exact affect on the books as an X dollar tax break. Tax breaks are easier to market, but there's no difference on the bottom line between the two.
Solyndra was 5% of the project in question.. dunno what % the other one ways but I think the 90% is a fair number. The scandal is about some hokiness with the loan itself, nobody has mentioned whether or not Solyndra did meaningful research or was granted valuable new patents.. my understanding is that they bet big based on the commodities markets and it flopped. It's not as if Solyndra never made any serious attempts at making valuable solar technologies.. so "scandal-laden" is (potentially) just political nonsense. If someone did something illegal wrt the loan then they should be punished, but that has little to do with whether or not the Solyndra investment was worthwhile to us as a society.
This. At the peak of their research time lines the Manhattan project and the Apollo projects reach 0.4% of our GDP spent JUST on those individual projects. I would submit that this kind of commitment is what it will take to get solar/wind/whatever to "the next level." Either way the technology is going to improve and we'll eventually get "there." The question is how long we want to wait and what kinds of resources are we willing to commit to it?
It's funny because you think that a company sees a difference between a tax break for $1 Million and a check for $1 Million. Your tax break is my government program. Either subsidize it or not, but worrying about whether it's tax breaks or a check is just being pedantic.
What you just stated is patently false. There's constant delivery date and cost over-runs in private business. Not as dramatic as in government, but it's there nonetheless. And it doesn't usually result in lawsuits or even a loss of business.
The whole military industrial complex works this way. Those lobbyists are so powerful they get things made that the Pentagon as firmly stated they don't even want.
Everything we see is in the past. The light emitted from your monitor took a very small amount of time to get to your eyes, but in that sense it is still "historical" data. You can still see your monitor even if you're slowly backing away from it. Same principle applies here.
I would assume that the gp is referring to when the planets' elliptical orbits have them close to the Sun.. if Jupiter is the main culprit I would expect this event to happen twice per "Jupiter year." How fast the Sun rotates should be unrelated.
This is my favorite part of thinking about this stuff.. it's interesting brain candy (to me) to consider things like the fact that matter didn't even exist in the forms we think of it until hundreds of thousands of years after the big bang.. Thinking about the first moments measured in plank times, the fact that there's no language to describe what would have been "outside" the original singularity, etc.
Oh, and here's a reference: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCADH3x56eE
At some point in its history there was a hypernova at the center of our galaxy (which may not have been a galaxy until the resulting super black hole started sucking stuff towards it). It's swirly because everything's getting sucked towards the center. It's flat because of the angular momentum stuff others noted.