Facing a budget crisis, California’s Silicon Valley school district has resorted to cutting salaries of teachers and other employees by 5 percent.
This is one of the problems that can arise when districts become too dependent on rising property taxes (Silicon Valley has a number of empty office buildings, due to the dot com crash).
More than one-third of the cost of GM’s automobiles now involves software and electronic components, and the amount of software loaded into a typical automobile is skyrocketing, Scott said. Cars had approximately 1 million lines of software code in 1990, but this number will jump to 100 million by 2010, he predicted.
The emergence of the automobile as a platform for software developers will mean that a much broader range of software will be used in tomorrow’s cars. Remote diagnostics software, media players, even database software all will run on automobiles at some point, he said. “I can’t think of software ? that isn’t going to run on the vehicle.”
I think we’re already north of 100 million lines of code. BMW and others have baked Windows CE into their cars. This ill advised move has introduced a legion of bugs and challenges to our once reliable cars. I believe the automakers are better off creating very simple, purpose built software, rather than extending Windows….
In the middle of a scene, the TV turned off.
For 10 seconds, Li kept looking, waiting, not blinking through his glasses. At last, he left his stool, trashed his plate and emerged into the cool autumn night.
Leaving, he passed 48-year-old Mitch Altman, who was twiddling a matte-black plastic fob on his key chain. Altman’s blue and purple hair reflected the pizza shop’s neon, and he was smiling excitedly.
“We just saved him several minutes of his life,” he said.
Li agreed. He said he didn’t care that the TV was gone, even though he had been watching the show.
Altman’s key-chain fob was a TV-B-Gone, a new universal remote that turns off almost any television. The device, which looks like an automobile remote, has just one button. When activated, it spends over a minute flashing out 209 different codes to turn off televisions, the most popular brands first.
I think this is great. I’ve never understood the need to put TV’s absolutely everywhere….. Ken Lonnquist comes to the rescue with an appropriate
mp3 – Time Vacuum!
An intresting yin to the professor’s yang on the Bush Tax Cuts:
Russ Wiles:
Prescott, speaking from Minnesota, where he advises the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, described Kerry’s plan to roll back tax cuts for top wage-earners as counterproductive.
“The idea that you can increase taxes and stimulate the economy is pretty damn stupid,” he said.
Bush’s campaign on Monday released a letter signed by Prescott and five other Nobel laureates critical of Kerry’s proposal to roll back tax reductions for families earning $200,000 or more.
In The Republic interview, he said such a policy would discourage people from working.
“It’s easy to get over $200,000 in income with two wage earners in a household,” Prescott said. “We want those highly educated, talented people to work.”
Prescott also gave Bush the nod on another controversial campaign issue, dismissing Kerry’s claims that outsourcing of jobs is damaging the economy. . . . Prescott also backed the idea, espoused by Bush, to reform Social Security by allowing some workers to place a portion of their payroll taxes into private savings accounts.
Personally, I’d rather see a more straightforward approach to taxes, than the ongoing deals with special interest groups that Senators Russ Feingold and Herb Kohl supported recently. via instapundit
As always, the rest of us get to pay. Evidently our senators, Russ Feingold (Yes) and Herb Kohl (“Present”) support these very narrow non populist measures. Edmund Andrews:
Under the bill, Navy shipbuilders would be allowed to once again defer paying most federal income taxes on a project until the contract was completed. Because it takes about five years to build an aircraft carrier and three years to build a destroyer, the shipyards would be able to delay their tax bills for years, allowing more opportunity to offset taxes against future losses.
….
“This provision takes dramatic steps to remedy the inequity of how naval shipbuilders pay their taxes,” Ms. Snowe said in a statement last week, just after House and Senate negotiators agreed to include the provision in a broader bill that would shower $140 billion in tax cuts across almost every segment of industry.
But critics said the provision would not create jobs, the stated intention of the tax bill, because employment at naval shipyards is determined almost entirely by federal spending on ships and submarines rather than by tax incentives.
“We’re not going to buy any more war boats if we give them a tax incentive,” said Robert S. McIntyre, director of Citizens for Tax Justice, a liberal research group here that has long scrutinized corporate tax practices. “We’re going to buy more boats if the government decides we need more boats.”
Disney’s being sued by a kids’ hospital that has the rights to the Peter Pan novels. The hospital says that the 1998 Sonny Bono term-extension (a law that Disney bought in order to ensure that its earliest cartoons didn’t enter the public domain) covers the Peter Pan stories and so Disney owes it royalties on a sequel that a publishing subsidiary put out. Disney says that the law doesn’t cover the Pan books — and that it should know, since it paid for that law! — and now they’re going to court.
At 28, Manjul Bhargava has already won a coveted full professorship at Princeton University. An expert in number theory, the study of the properties and relationships of numbers, Bhargava is also a master of the tabla, a small Indian hand drum used to create music with rhythmic, precise patterns.
Number theory is the type of math that describes the swirl in the head of a sunflower and the curve of a chambered nautilus. Bhargava says it’s also hidden in the rhythms of classical Indian music, which is both mathematical and improvisational. He sees close links between his two loves — both create beauty and elegance by weaving together seemingly unconnected ideas.
Rhonda Abrams takes a look at small business issues and the upcoming Presidential election.
Wisconsin Telco Monopoly SBC launches an inexpensive, bundled WiFi option for their DSL subscribers:
SBC officially announces $1.99 per month unlimited hot spot services: If you subscribe to SBC’s DSL service at a rate as low as $26.95 per month for their cheapest service, you are entitled to unlimited Wi-Fi hot spot service for $1.99 a month with a one-year commitment — after receiving free service until April 2005.
This gives SBC a giant sledgehammer to wield against the cable vendors trying to encourage people to sign up for ever-slower cable service. I’ll confess that I’m biased against cable because of the pooled bandwidth/pooled network approach. Cable modem providers initially had no protection against entire neighborhoods seeing each other’s networks. Then they restricted upload speeds to 128 Kbps on most links to defeat “servers.” Because bandwidth is pooled, it means that each neighborhood on a cable head end has a finite amount of bandwidth–the more subscribers, the more frustration.
WiFi News
Keep in mind that US broadband service significantly lags systems in Asia in terms of speed and price/performance. Korea and Japan citizens have access to broadband at speeds up to 20X faster than services we can purchase.
An Open Letter to the President
These folks raise some useful points. The problem is not only with Bush. Interestingly, last week, Russ Feingold voted FOR one of the biggest tax giveaways…. (Kohl voted present).
The tax system is a complete mess and ripe for reform. Thinking of a solution, go read Mitch Kapor’s recent piece on our current political situation.
