Some knowledgeable sources close to the discovery process say that there is a secret clause buried in these contracts. Apparently all these companies agreed not to rouse 2000 employees in the middle of the night and herd them back to work for a cup of tea and some biscuits. But Apple found a loop hole, that this clause applies only to USA and not China. That kind of gotcha tactic upset the other players who were overheard saying, "tut, tut, it is not cricket, it is not done" in the Olde Duquesne Country Club. And one of them go so upset he drank a little too much and spilled it all to some friendly guy tending to him as he was throwing up in the men's room. That is how the whole thing came out in the open.
OK, OK, you get the same thing being taught to Stanford students. Big deal. You can get the same quality teaching material in any of the top 50 univs. What sets them apart is a degree from Stanford, nothing else. Stanford degree is just a filtering criterion. The quality of teaching has only a very minor part in it.
Looks like they have done some serious photoshopping. I could not see any of the lines showing the state borders. May be they erased it for security reasons. Also I did not see the pink tear drop like thingie with A, B etc written on it. Simply put, it does not look anything like the satellite images I have seen in maps.google.com.
Government undertaking grandiose projects, be it man on moon, be it universal healthcare, be it war on poverty, are all typically Democratic thinking. The Republicans usually slant towards free markets, low deficits, small government etc. In moderation both sides have good ideas. When ideas from either party are taken to the extremes, it becomes grotesque. Suddenly because Floridians think they will benefit by the revival of government spending on space research, he is pandering to them. Such pandering is the bane of democracy.
I did not move any goal posts brother. I said this part of the original post:
Such business practices are actually the most logical and rational thing to do in a free market. They will argue if they do not do that, their competitor would do it and undercut them. It is a tangible ship wrecked off a beautiful island this time. But in countless instances it is pollution created by mining or industrial chemicals are as stranded as this wreck. But somehow the public falls for extreme arguments like, "Eliminate EPA".
As in all things the absolute extremes are uninhabitable; Moderation is key.
I agree with you, but pl do realize you will be denounced as a redistributionphilic socialist by the Republicans and the Tea party. Anything less than unfettered capitalism is socialism in their book. Crony capitalism, trusts, cartels, monopolies are all A-OK for them while even minimal disclosure requirements like truth-in-lending, truth-in-advertisement are labeled onerous burden and over regulation by the government.
If you are a free market believing Republican please rescue it from its captors who have kidnapped it and holding it for ransom.
Come on guys, I have seen clouds shapped like a lion, like a baby etc. The ancient astronomers have seen a hunter, a scorpion, a bull, a big bear, a small bear, a girl, a lion etc etc for a long time in the skys with nothing more than a few pin pricks of light. When you have the imagination, you can see anything.
Hey, hey, hey, you don't have unfettered capitalism. We in America are proud to have unfettered capitalism. All our corporations, which are really people, are unfettered. America has the best freedom and liberty money can buy. What? You don't have the money to buy your freedom? mmm. we have heard that kind of talk before. Tough luck buddy. BTW, what happens when people who are at the receiving end of these corporations decide to find, mm, eh, second amendment remedies against the corporations?
There is no money to be made by early detection and early treatment. Medical industry loves chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension that require a steady stream of patented drugs to be continuously consumed with a steady monetized revenue stream. Tricorder, early detection, bah! humbug. Free markets and unfettered capitalism will take you there. Solution is not socialism but fettered capitalism and fostering competition. But don't hold your breath waiting for it, because the fox is guarding the henhouse.
There seems little new in this approach; would it be able to compete with good ol' corn based ethanol? There's so much built infrastructure for that already, and massive corporations throwing their weight behind it. >
But any damn thing can beat corn based ethanol. It takes more than a gallon of gasoline to make a gallon equivalent of corn based ethanol. I think it is a matter of time before the genetic code of the bacteria used to digest cellulose in the guts of termites is cracked. Then lignin would not be an issue at all. There are bacteria that break down cellulose in the mud and the guts of termites. They manage to produce surplus energy to live after spending whatever energy it takes to break it down. So it has a positive energy output, unlike you corn based ethanol. Will the process be fast enough? Will the surplus energy be enough to scale it to industrial proportions? I am not sure.
In the southern India in the state of Tamil Nadu atheistic parties gained lots of ground in the 1960s. ( Even now all the dominant parties there eulogize a noted atheist, but the parties themselves have become more tolerant towards theism). One of the fanatical members of this atheistic party named his son "God Does not Exist" (kadavul-illai in the local language). Name was found to be too long for the liking of his teachers and classmates. So they shortened it to "God" (kadavul). So, yes, I could have spoken to God, if I had gone to that school. God flunked eighth grade and dropped out of school, if I remember it right.
Wasn't the sweet crude petroleum formed millions of years ago by decaying seaweed and soft bodied marine creatures? So in a way this enigneered microbe is just accelerating the natural process by about 100 million years.
they could easily require insurance or even a bond to be posted for any cruise (cargo, sailing, etc.) ship which enters their territory to cover such costs.
Yes, they could. But the industry lobby group will rail against the "onerous" regulation and the burdens that are killing the jobs. Lunatic libertarians would claim everyone has the right to ply the waters and requiring the bond is a penalty imposed before committing any crime. They argue if they damage the reef you could sue them but not before. Eventually, there will be no regulation.
It is interesting you talked about the cruise ship and notably silent about the stranded costs of cleaning up after the mining operations, chemical spills, pension obligations, liability due to bad products etc. Technically the government could require sellers to post a bond/insurance to take care of the cost of disposal of all hazardous consumer products from lead-acid batteries to mercury file CFLs to toxic substance filled electronic goods. Would you agree theoretically that is correct? Or would you join the crowd asking for the dismantling of EPA?
I was wondering where these free market no regulation fanatics are hiding now. In every discussion about government and taxes they ooze out of the wood work, screaming, "Govt is the problem not the solution", "Free markets will solve all problems efficiently".
Here we have a problem, a foundered ship. If the owner declares bankruptcy and walks away then who is responsible for clearing this wreck? Corporations create new corporations to do their business operations. The child corporations constantly send profits up to the parents, while carefully retaining all liabilities. They maintain just enough assets to keep the credit lines open. The moment something goes wrong, the child corporation sends any remaining assets back to the parent. It does not declare bankruptcy promptly. It waits for the claw back period to elapse, and allow enough time for the parent corporations to shuffle money further afar so that it can't be clawed back from the parent corp or even the grandparent corp either.
Such business practices are actually the most logical and rational thing to do in a free market. They will argue if they do not do that, their competitor would do it and undercut them. It is a tangible ship wrecked off a beautiful island this time. But in countless instances it is pollution created by mining or industrial chemicals are as stranded as this wreck. But somehow the public falls for extreme arguments like, "Eliminate EPA".
It wont work. The soap and detergents are molecules that are hydrophilic on one end and oleophilic in the other. They are likely to bond with the hydrophobic nano coating and strip them off. When they say "waterproof" they dont mean soap/detergent proof. Definitely wont work in showers.
BTW don't berate me if I got that nugget of info wrong. I got it by reading "The Case of the Drowning Duck by Erle Stanely Gardener, a Perry Mason mystery. Not from any Chemistry text book.
Ridiculous, useless, redundant comments reduce the signal to noise ratio. I would term "This function calculates the area of a triangle" or "this function changes the state of widget" to this category. Just pick some very sensible function/class names and be done with it.
What must be documented are the complex procedures and why it is doing it. Or if a previous simpler approach has been tried and then removed for a different non obvious procedure, that fact must be documented. Example:
"This class maintains a multi map of triangle pointers, sorted by area, to solid body faces. The sort key is a double, the truncation errors differ between Linux and Windows, so the order of visitation is not the same. When we used a simple std::multimap(Triangle *, FaceList, double),[*], the tables had different orders in different platforms. To provide repeatability we use a tolerance and tie breakers to make sure in both platforms the table will have the same order. It is called by render class, in a not very deeply nested loop. So CPU performance is NOT critical. Code is written for ease of maintenance and development, not optimized for CPU or memory."
Such comments are useful, if maintained and kept up to date.
But most of the time it is not done. You see beautifully formatted comments created by macros in the editor, that occupies so much of screen real estate, I am not able to see both the code and the comment. Example:
[*] Syntax nazis: Slashdot formatter would not let me use angle brackets there. So I used () for illustration./***Function Foo**/
/**Author Iman I Diot**/
/**Date 1993 Aug 21**/
/**Returns bool**/
/**Input int**/
it so stupid, I feel like screaming. If that coder is still working for me, I can scream at him or her. But mostly it is people who have left the company ages ago dumping that legacy POS on my lap.
You just assume the bosses are under the mistaken impression that they can code better than their underlings and they can be persuaded to change this easily.
Most bosses who can't hack code, or whose development environment has become obsolete, know they can't really cut it. They would talk as though they are better hackers, just for the effect. If you really try to give them code, they won't take it. Or implement a version that works on one particular use case using hardwired codes and logic, throw it back at you and say, "do the rest and handle other use cases". And they will open every meeting with, "I have already implemented a prototype X days/weeks/months ago. My resources are working on tying the loose ends".
The correct analogy is selling all you can eat meal plans and then complain that a few of them eat too much. If you insist on Cadillac and car analogies, it is like selling unlimited free fuel and then complain people actually drive up and fill up lots of fuel.
I'm all for some corrective action too prevent too much wealth concentration, provided that the people with the wealth are not already spreading it around. But taking it too far is not a good thing either. You don't want to increase the taxes to the point where those people are no longer rich. Not only is it distasteful from a philosophical standpoint, it has the effect of encouraging tax evasion and discouraging ethical people from even trying to get ahead in life.
When you find ways to encourage the ultra-wealthy to give away large amounts of their money, you have a good regulatory system for a Free Market. When you just take the money from them in taxes, and Government spreads it around, you have Socialism.
The current tax rates are nowhere near the onerous levels that would sap people of their ambition. In 1950s we had top marginal tax rates higher than 60%. No damping of enthu whatever. Even the Regan tax rates were higher. What you say would be true in a philosophical sense as long as you don't look at the numbers. But when you save going from 33% to 36.3% is going to make all these fat cat hedge fund managers stop hedge fund managing, you are stretching it too much.
As for encouraging people to give it away voluntarily, think of what happened to Warren Buffet. Second richest man gave away most of his fortune. The moment he deviated from the ultra loony bin batshit crazy right wing orthodoxy, he was pilloried by the very same people you are supporting. So why would the next rich guy give away anything?
My argument for high tax rates for the rich people are based on the simple logic of long term self interest of the same rich people. Mere existence of the government helps the wealth and the earning potential of people. Even if we assume opportunities are equally available to all, even if we assume every last rich man made it big completely on his own using ethical means and hard work, they have to pay more in taxes. Why? Because the poor have nothing to lose. They would not care to keep the existing system of government going. May be the ocean of milk is so vast, every last one can drink to his fil. A few do and many dont/cant. Those who don't/can't will happily piss on it spoil it for all. So merely to protect the wealth, and the earning potential, the rich has to pay as much as it takes to keep the faith in the government intact, to keep the roiling masses rested, well fed and preoccupied with the latest Hollywood scandal. You might think it is unfair. But frankly, people who own the 90% of the country, the top 10% should do everything it takes to keep the other 90% mollified. Else there will be a revolution. The gun owners will do well for themselves. But most of the wealth in the country will evaporate. GDP will fall to what we had in 18th century.
So there is going to be brutal price war in the PC market. And Apothecary wanted HP to get out of that business and was excoriated for it. Now what? Fate of HP (and other manufacturers who threw in their lot with Microsoft) is doomed. Not that I shed any tears for them. Not that any of the PC maker big execs showed any kind of leadership or foresight.
They agreed to every non disclosure clause from Microsoft, accepted tainted money to keep Microsoft's competitors out, missed every opportunity to set themselves apart from their competition by something other than price. Did any of these geniuses think, "What is the major complaint about the PCs? Lack of security. Let me pitch a line of PCs with Firefox front and center, with NoScript pre loaded. Throw in some OpenOffice free too" when it would have mattered, may be five years ago? Nah, they obediently kow-towed every line drawn by Microsoft and reduced themselves to mere purveyors of commodity boxes. When there is no difference between the brands qualitatively what happens? Price war, gimmicky sales tactics, pre-loading of crapware and nagware. Good riddance. Go die in a price war somewhere clueless idiots.
OK TV the 3D content is sparse and the fare is gimmicky. Fine. What about 3D CAD work stations? Almost all the 3D geometry/model rendering is done in OpenGL or DirectX that has 3D data folded in. It is trivial to create left and right eye view for the given solid model, and project them alternately and synch up shutter glasses. Our company demoed 3D workstation where you visualize electric fields, magnetic fields, solid models, "fly through" an electric motor or near a phased array antenna and see the fields as shimmering things like aurora borealis (northern lights). Some of our developers would just spend hours flying through the Finite Element Mesh of the models. When? Some 10 or 12 years ago.
Result? No takers. The stereoscopic display maker who would accept plain OpenGL input but render in stereoscopic 3D went under and we scrapped the project. Though we did not have much to do. The hardware was compatible with our software without too much of modification on our side.
Slashdot Mirror
Some knowledgeable sources close to the discovery process say that there is a secret clause buried in these contracts. Apparently all these companies agreed not to rouse 2000 employees in the middle of the night and herd them back to work for a cup of tea and some biscuits. But Apple found a loop hole, that this clause applies only to USA and not China. That kind of gotcha tactic upset the other players who were overheard saying, "tut, tut, it is not cricket, it is not done" in the Olde Duquesne Country Club. And one of them go so upset he drank a little too much and spilled it all to some friendly guy tending to him as he was throwing up in the men's room. That is how the whole thing came out in the open.
OK, OK, you get the same thing being taught to Stanford students. Big deal. You can get the same quality teaching material in any of the top 50 univs. What sets them apart is a degree from Stanford, nothing else. Stanford degree is just a filtering criterion. The quality of teaching has only a very minor part in it.
Looks like they have done some serious photoshopping. I could not see any of the lines showing the state borders. May be they erased it for security reasons. Also I did not see the pink tear drop like thingie with A, B etc written on it. Simply put, it does not look anything like the satellite images I have seen in maps.google.com.
Government undertaking grandiose projects, be it man on moon, be it universal healthcare, be it war on poverty, are all typically Democratic thinking. The Republicans usually slant towards free markets, low deficits, small government etc. In moderation both sides have good ideas. When ideas from either party are taken to the extremes, it becomes grotesque. Suddenly because Floridians think they will benefit by the revival of government spending on space research, he is pandering to them. Such pandering is the bane of democracy.
Such business practices are actually the most logical and rational thing to do in a free market. They will argue if they do not do that, their competitor would do it and undercut them. It is a tangible ship wrecked off a beautiful island this time. But in countless instances it is pollution created by mining or industrial chemicals are as stranded as this wreck. But somehow the public falls for extreme arguments like, "Eliminate EPA".
(Emphasis added now)
You chose to ignore it.
As in all things the absolute extremes are uninhabitable; Moderation is key.
I agree with you, but pl do realize you will be denounced as a redistributionphilic socialist by the Republicans and the Tea party. Anything less than unfettered capitalism is socialism in their book. Crony capitalism, trusts, cartels, monopolies are all A-OK for them while even minimal disclosure requirements like truth-in-lending, truth-in-advertisement are labeled onerous burden and over regulation by the government.
If you are a free market believing Republican please rescue it from its captors who have kidnapped it and holding it for ransom.
Come on guys, I have seen clouds shapped like a lion, like a baby etc. The ancient astronomers have seen a hunter, a scorpion, a bull, a big bear, a small bear, a girl, a lion etc etc for a long time in the skys with nothing more than a few pin pricks of light. When you have the imagination, you can see anything.
Hey, hey, hey, you don't have unfettered capitalism. We in America are proud to have unfettered capitalism. All our corporations, which are really people, are unfettered. America has the best freedom and liberty money can buy. What? You don't have the money to buy your freedom? mmm. we have heard that kind of talk before. Tough luck buddy. BTW, what happens when people who are at the receiving end of these corporations decide to find, mm, eh, second amendment remedies against the corporations?
There is no money to be made by early detection and early treatment. Medical industry loves chronic diseases like diabetes and hypertension that require a steady stream of patented drugs to be continuously consumed with a steady monetized revenue stream. Tricorder, early detection, bah! humbug. Free markets and unfettered capitalism will take you there. Solution is not socialism but fettered capitalism and fostering competition. But don't hold your breath waiting for it, because the fox is guarding the henhouse.
There seems little new in this approach; would it be able to compete with good ol' corn based ethanol? There's so much built infrastructure for that already, and massive corporations throwing their weight behind it. >
But any damn thing can beat corn based ethanol. It takes more than a gallon of gasoline to make a gallon equivalent of corn based ethanol. I think it is a matter of time before the genetic code of the bacteria used to digest cellulose in the guts of termites is cracked. Then lignin would not be an issue at all. There are bacteria that break down cellulose in the mud and the guts of termites. They manage to produce surplus energy to live after spending whatever energy it takes to break it down. So it has a positive energy output, unlike you corn based ethanol. Will the process be fast enough? Will the surplus energy be enough to scale it to industrial proportions? I am not sure.
In the southern India in the state of Tamil Nadu atheistic parties gained lots of ground in the 1960s. ( Even now all the dominant parties there eulogize a noted atheist, but the parties themselves have become more tolerant towards theism). One of the fanatical members of this atheistic party named his son "God Does not Exist" (kadavul-illai in the local language). Name was found to be too long for the liking of his teachers and classmates. So they shortened it to "God" (kadavul). So, yes, I could have spoken to God, if I had gone to that school. God flunked eighth grade and dropped out of school, if I remember it right.
Wasn't the sweet crude petroleum formed millions of years ago by decaying seaweed and soft bodied marine creatures? So in a way this enigneered microbe is just accelerating the natural process by about 100 million years.
they could easily require insurance or even a bond to be posted for any cruise (cargo, sailing, etc.) ship which enters their territory to cover such costs.
Yes, they could. But the industry lobby group will rail against the "onerous" regulation and the burdens that are killing the jobs. Lunatic libertarians would claim everyone has the right to ply the waters and requiring the bond is a penalty imposed before committing any crime. They argue if they damage the reef you could sue them but not before. Eventually, there will be no regulation.
It is interesting you talked about the cruise ship and notably silent about the stranded costs of cleaning up after the mining operations, chemical spills, pension obligations, liability due to bad products etc. Technically the government could require sellers to post a bond/insurance to take care of the cost of disposal of all hazardous consumer products from lead-acid batteries to mercury file CFLs to toxic substance filled electronic goods. Would you agree theoretically that is correct? Or would you join the crowd asking for the dismantling of EPA?
Here we have a problem, a foundered ship. If the owner declares bankruptcy and walks away then who is responsible for clearing this wreck? Corporations create new corporations to do their business operations. The child corporations constantly send profits up to the parents, while carefully retaining all liabilities. They maintain just enough assets to keep the credit lines open. The moment something goes wrong, the child corporation sends any remaining assets back to the parent. It does not declare bankruptcy promptly. It waits for the claw back period to elapse, and allow enough time for the parent corporations to shuffle money further afar so that it can't be clawed back from the parent corp or even the grandparent corp either.
Such business practices are actually the most logical and rational thing to do in a free market. They will argue if they do not do that, their competitor would do it and undercut them. It is a tangible ship wrecked off a beautiful island this time. But in countless instances it is pollution created by mining or industrial chemicals are as stranded as this wreck. But somehow the public falls for extreme arguments like, "Eliminate EPA".
The problem is the most common password for techie site is "horse battery staple correct".
I will never scream at you. Most likely I would not hire you, and you would not accept if I did. My division is not big enough for both our egos.
BTW don't berate me if I got that nugget of info wrong. I got it by reading "The Case of the Drowning Duck by Erle Stanely Gardener, a Perry Mason mystery. Not from any Chemistry text book.
What must be documented are the complex procedures and why it is doing it. Or if a previous simpler approach has been tried and then removed for a different non obvious procedure, that fact must be documented. Example:
"This class maintains a multi map of triangle pointers, sorted by area, to solid body faces. The sort key is a double, the truncation errors differ between Linux and Windows, so the order of visitation is not the same. When we used a simple std::multimap(Triangle *, FaceList, double),[*], the tables had different orders in different platforms. To provide repeatability we use a tolerance and tie breakers to make sure in both platforms the table will have the same order. It is called by render class, in a not very deeply nested loop. So CPU performance is NOT critical. Code is written for ease of maintenance and development, not optimized for CPU or memory." Such comments are useful, if maintained and kept up to date.
But most of the time it is not done. You see beautifully formatted comments created by macros in the editor, that occupies so much of screen real estate, I am not able to see both the code and the comment. Example:
[*] Syntax nazis: Slashdot formatter would not let me use angle brackets there. So I used () for illustration. /***Function Foo**/
it so stupid, I feel like screaming. If that coder is still working for me, I can scream at him or her. But mostly it is people who have left the company ages ago dumping that legacy POS on my lap.
Most bosses who can't hack code, or whose development environment has become obsolete, know they can't really cut it. They would talk as though they are better hackers, just for the effect. If you really try to give them code, they won't take it. Or implement a version that works on one particular use case using hardwired codes and logic, throw it back at you and say, "do the rest and handle other use cases". And they will open every meeting with, "I have already implemented a prototype X days/weeks/months ago. My resources are working on tying the loose ends".
The correct analogy is selling all you can eat meal plans and then complain that a few of them eat too much. If you insist on Cadillac and car analogies, it is like selling unlimited free fuel and then complain people actually drive up and fill up lots of fuel.
I'm all for some corrective action too prevent too much wealth concentration, provided that the people with the wealth are not already spreading it around. But taking it too far is not a good thing either. You don't want to increase the taxes to the point where those people are no longer rich. Not only is it distasteful from a philosophical standpoint, it has the effect of encouraging tax evasion and discouraging ethical people from even trying to get ahead in life.
When you find ways to encourage the ultra-wealthy to give away large amounts of their money, you have a good regulatory system for a Free Market. When you just take the money from them in taxes, and Government spreads it around, you have Socialism.
The current tax rates are nowhere near the onerous levels that would sap people of their ambition. In 1950s we had top marginal tax rates higher than 60%. No damping of enthu whatever. Even the Regan tax rates were higher. What you say would be true in a philosophical sense as long as you don't look at the numbers. But when you save going from 33% to 36.3% is going to make all these fat cat hedge fund managers stop hedge fund managing, you are stretching it too much.
As for encouraging people to give it away voluntarily, think of what happened to Warren Buffet. Second richest man gave away most of his fortune. The moment he deviated from the ultra loony bin batshit crazy right wing orthodoxy, he was pilloried by the very same people you are supporting. So why would the next rich guy give away anything?
My argument for high tax rates for the rich people are based on the simple logic of long term self interest of the same rich people. Mere existence of the government helps the wealth and the earning potential of people. Even if we assume opportunities are equally available to all, even if we assume every last rich man made it big completely on his own using ethical means and hard work, they have to pay more in taxes. Why? Because the poor have nothing to lose. They would not care to keep the existing system of government going. May be the ocean of milk is so vast, every last one can drink to his fil. A few do and many dont/cant. Those who don't/can't will happily piss on it spoil it for all. So merely to protect the wealth, and the earning potential, the rich has to pay as much as it takes to keep the faith in the government intact, to keep the roiling masses rested, well fed and preoccupied with the latest Hollywood scandal. You might think it is unfair. But frankly, people who own the 90% of the country, the top 10% should do everything it takes to keep the other 90% mollified. Else there will be a revolution. The gun owners will do well for themselves. But most of the wealth in the country will evaporate. GDP will fall to what we had in 18th century.
And also Federal income tax is not the only taxes. They pay a much higher percentage of their income in sales taxes, pay roll taxes, fees and tolls.
They agreed to every non disclosure clause from Microsoft, accepted tainted money to keep Microsoft's competitors out, missed every opportunity to set themselves apart from their competition by something other than price. Did any of these geniuses think, "What is the major complaint about the PCs? Lack of security. Let me pitch a line of PCs with Firefox front and center, with NoScript pre loaded. Throw in some OpenOffice free too" when it would have mattered, may be five years ago? Nah, they obediently kow-towed every line drawn by Microsoft and reduced themselves to mere purveyors of commodity boxes. When there is no difference between the brands qualitatively what happens? Price war, gimmicky sales tactics, pre-loading of crapware and nagware. Good riddance. Go die in a price war somewhere clueless idiots.
Result? No takers. The stereoscopic display maker who would accept plain OpenGL input but render in stereoscopic 3D went under and we scrapped the project. Though we did not have much to do. The hardware was compatible with our software without too much of modification on our side.
B: No.
A: That shows how well they hide
If you knew about these agreements, they would not be secret agreements. Right?