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"The Chicago School say that Gov't Won't Help"

Please also make the distinction between the editorial and the reporting parts of the WSJ - they're entirely separate operations and sometimes disagree fundamentally, e.g. on climate change.

Dreams appear to be based on the 'noise' coming in, but a lot of interpretation is applied (and without imposed constraints of consistency or logic). A common game/prank involves people asking yes/no questions about an alleged dream, but the answers they get are based on some simple scheme like "yes if the last word in the question they ask ends in a consonant". Surprisingly detailed 'stories' get constructed... by the person asking the questions. (Here's what appears to be an online version.) Actual dreams seem to be built in an analogous way, with the subconscious 'asking questions' of the senses (which are just feeding in 'static') and weaving an experience out of them.

I'd guess that 'eavesdropping' on dreams via this means would only get the kind of swirling colors and such you 'see' when you close your eyes.

Did I mention that depends upon a perfect world?

For starters, municipal wi-fi is not a rural subsidy. Rural broadband is, but that would seem to be built into the existing Universal Service Fund. An interesting question is exactly what the big Telcos did with the money that was supposed to get broadband out to the boondocks. Some small phone companies seem to have gotten the money and used it to roll out broadband. Why do Waitsfield Telecom customers in Hinesburg, Vermont have DSL whereas Verizon customers in Westford about the same distance out in the other direction don't? I suspect that the answer to that question -- were it to be sought out -- might lead to some prosecutions.

As for why you should subsidize anybody else. I can only suggest that you compare and contrast the philosophies of Thomas Hobbes and Ayn Rand. There's a good summary of Hobbes philosophy here. You probably won't like it at first, but think about it for a few years. Is Hobbes wrong about the life of man in the natural state being "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short"? Do you really want to stand up against General Motors, ADM, General Dynamics, or any of the world's dozens of nutcase leaders (our own not excepted) without laws and society to back you up? The price you pay for belonging to society is paying for things for others when you might prefer not to.

But note that subsidizing municipal Wi-fi may not be a good idea. It is obviously good public policy to use subsidies only where they will do substantial good at comparatively modest costs. It's unclear --to me at least -- that the benefits of municipal wi-fi justify any non-trivial investment.

In the Cours, his main economic contributions was his exposition of "Pareto's Law" of income distribution. He argued that in all countries and times, the distribution of income and wealth follows a regular logarithmic pattern that can be captured by the formula:

log N = log A + m log x

where where N is the number of income earners who receive incomes higher than x, and A and m are constants. Over the years, Pareto's Law has proved remarkably resilient in empirical studies.

It's always funny to me when people defend "capitalism" without even realising that the term was invented as a perjorative by its greatest enemy. (Surely this is the definition of being a reactionary...)

Marx distinguishes capitalism from straight commerce by pointing out that, in capitalism, workers neither own the means of production, nor do they own the fruits of their labour. Thus, companies that have stakeholding and share-vesting programs are less "capitalist" than those in which workers receive a direct wage.

It's certainly true that Google treats its employees better, but I don't know if it's less capitalist than MS. Depends if they dole out shares, I suppose. As for the idea that companies have to crush the competition, no this isn't really capitalism, though I would imagine it's a fairly natural consequence of the Milton Friedman/Chicago school of free market competition.

It's not porn it's called Sexuality in Film

Sexual Personae: Representations of Female Sexuality in Film and Video (3914) Michelle Handelman and M.M. Serra; Mondays 6:00-9:30.
This course examines the cultural construction of female sexuality by comparing and contrasting works created within the sex industry, promoted by mass media, and produced by women artists using sexually explicit material. We will develop a discourse on gender politics by examining the culturally constructed relationship of male/female desire; the female perspective of sexual arousal; the commodification of sexuality and the queer reconstruction of sexual identity. Works to be screened range from classic pornography, Behind the Green Door and Deep Throat, to exploitation films by Doris Wishman and Russ Meyer, to experimental works by Barbara Rubin, Barbara Hammer, and Annie Sprinkle and a wide range of contemporary, cutting-edge films. Readings will include classic literature such as Story of the Eye, contemporary theories by Robert Stoller, Linda Williams, Pat Califia, and Judith Butler, and legal documents on censorship, such as the Meese Commission Report.

I usually bring up the case of Dan Bricklin and VisiCalc -- a harrowing story of the man who single-handedly invented business computing as we know it -- but Opera is a good, closer case study.

It's so simple. Opera comes up with the conceptual innovations (say, mouse gestures or tabbed browsing), and then someone can hack up an extension in XUL to duplicate the functionality. Why would someone cough up the bucks to support Opera's R&D? I know I don't.

Granted, futile software patents are granted everyday, sp. when there is significant prior art already, but incentives are really being distorted here. Why would a company even invest in R&D? They can always just begin a company with no significant investment.

This is a schumpeterian collapse scenario, and it's dangerous for the future of technology as a whole.

It's pretty scary. Tell me, what open-source app has come up with a really new concept, if as minor as mouse gestures?

Remember, Bush and his supporters are ideological conservatives, and as such they are ideologically opposed to "wasteful" social programs, because they believe that giving things that aren't earned to people is immoral (fostering dependency).

While I don't claim that everyone in favor of Bush's plan uses this argument, I'd like to treat you to a little historical tidbit about it:

Thomas Carlyle used the same argument in support of slavery in the 1800s. His argument: blacks should be forced to work for nothing, since doing otherwise would merely feed their inherent laziness and in turn corrupt their souls. Although the source of Carlyle's proposed "dependency" was different - he believed that the slaves would simply eat wild melons instead of working.

In case you couldn't tell, I find these arguments to be very silly at best.

"When the 21-year old John Nash wrote his 27-page dissertation outlining his "Nash Equilibrium" for strategic non-cooperative games, the impact was enormous. On the formal side, his existence proof was one of the first applications of Kakutani's fixed-point theorem later employed with so much gusto by Neo-Walrasians everywhere; on the conceptual side, he spawned much of the literature on non-cooperative game theory which has since grown at a prodigious rate - threatening, some claim, to overwhelm much of economics itself." here and

"The concept we need is called the Nash Equilibrium, after Nobel Laureate (in economics) and mathematician John Nash. Nash, a student of Tucker's, contributed several key concepts to game theory around 1950. The Nash Equilibrium conception was one of these, and is probably the most widely used "solution concept" in game theory." here

People knew sex, and its intricacies, but were discrete about it. It wasn't something they depicted on television, or explicitly in leisure books.

There's nothing surprising about this, unfortunately. The phenomenon was described at least as early as 1833 by William Forster Lloyd. Any common, limited resource that is not regulated will be destroyed by misuse.

What's sad, to me, is just how self destructive it all is. With all our intelect our behavior is no better than a parasite that dies when it kills it's host.

Cheers.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon said that.

Actually, a frequent quotation from the 19th-century drama, Axel, by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam (who had five first names, at last count). I was going to be a little snide about this, but I started looking for a weblink, found nothing yet at Project Gutenberg, then found a site from somebody who would like to make the play into a movie. The site includes a link to a bit from Arthur Symons about Villiers de l'Isle-Adam .

The 2nd section discusses the play, and its descriptions of the hero's disdain for capital-L Life and capital-N Nature seemed mighty appropriate for a discussion of robots and those who employ them.

Thanks for a connection I wouldn't have made!

(Hmm.. I'm a long time lurker, second time poster, and my first attempt failed.)

"'Candy' Keynes"? Do you know anything of the history of economics?

>Quoting John "Candy" Keynes. Sheesh.anything of the history of economics?

[This is primarily directed at those who claim to be libertarians and then bitch about H1B's or offshore IT work.]

Quit your whining. This is a good thing people and it's an example of what makes capitalism great.

Read up on Joseph Schumpeter, arguably the most brilliant economist to come out of Austria. One's inability to see that the move of IT labor offshore is a good thing is largely due to a failure of most people to understand Schumpeter.

Schumpeter's primary focus was on capitalism as a dynamic system. It continually evolves through creative destruction. There are countless examples of this phenomenon.

A 120 years ago, most Americans were living on farms. With little mechanization, hard manual labor was the order of the day. As mechanization began to become more prevalent, thousands upon thousands of farm workers were surplus to requirements. Doom and gloom predictions that the move from an agricultural economy to a non-agricultural economy would lead to the collapse of America were common. Politicians ran on platforms aiming to keep the family farms solvent and prevent greater mechanization (for instance by taxing production of goods that could be used for farm mechanization).

However, mechanization and consolidation took place in the agricultural business. Today, less than 3% of Americans are farmers, and there are far fewer farmers today than there were then. If static economic analysis, from the perspective of the past, was used to look at the economy today (or during the boom years of the late 1990's), the only conclusion would be that the US was in a total depression, because the vast majority of the old farm jobs were gone.

So why wasn't it the case that the US went on to enjoy even better economic times than in the late-19th century? Why isn't there 90% unemployment (since from the 19th century perspective, 90% of the jobs that existed then are gone today)?

What no one saw was that freeing up the most important capital, human labor, from inefficient application to the task of growing food for other purposes. What those who looked at the farms failing and saw disaster were missing was that now the farmer was able to go to the city and be basically as well off working in a factory, and that the farmer's children would go on to become doctors or lawyers or engineers or skilled laborers. Indeed, the industrialization could not have happened without the farm failures.

For a more recent example, look at the state of heavy industry over the last 30 years. In the 1950's, 50% of Americans worked in industrial occupations, creating physical products. Nowadays, it's less than 20% (IIRC). You would expect there to be massive (>30%) unemployment, wouldn't you?

But there's not 30% unemployment. The children of factory workers went to college and became clerks or salesmen or scientists. Think about what your grandparents did for a living. With few exceptions (I'm one of them; my grandmother was one of the early programmers of ENIAC-type machines), they weren't computer scientists, sysadmins, or electrical engineers. They were probably factory workers, or day laborers, or housewives, or maybe a clerk at some large industrial concern.

By freeing up human capital from making cars and clothing and other labor intensive tasks, financial services, creative services, IT itself could be spawned.

IT arose out of the collapse of an old economic model; it will collapse as a major player. It is inevitable. In 20 years, the jobs held by the readers of this site will have demand levels at a fraction of what they were before. In a century, we'll be looked at as the farmers; while there will still be demand for the tasks we perform, it will be nowhere near what it is today (and nowhere near what it was a few years ago).

The core of what I'm saying is that we don't know what will come next (though it is most likely happening below our noses). T

This is a big whig lawyer.

Somebody who wears one of these is a big wig lawyer.

My left hand and my right hand are totally dofferent entities in a way, but shouldn't they do whats best for the whole? I work a contract company for a major automotive manufacturer, and they try to do the same thing. They always try to protect there own division and not the company as a whole. What they end up doing half the time, at least from an IT perspective, is beating themselves into the ground. Hell, even from the IT perspective, my company bids against itself for the same contract. Like I said before it just seems odd. Maybe its that I agree with the Neo-Walrasian General Equilibrium School and John F. Nash, Jr.

I trust a review if the reviewer seems knowledgeable and insightful. I buy a lot of opera on DVD and it's pretty easy to figure out who knows what he's talking about and who doesn't. With cookbooks, I look for people's description of what actually cooking the dishes was like. With technical books, I skip the "I loved it, you should buy it too" reviews and head for the long ones that discuss in depth the strengths and weaknesses of the author's presentation of the material. With other topics, YMMV, but this has worked for me and I have generally felt that I understood pretty much what I was buying.

Consumer reports it ain't, but most of what I buy at Amazon falls into the category of experience rather than search goods (see G.J. Stigler, "The Economics of Information," J. Pol. Econ., 69, 221 (1961); see also H.R. Varian, "Economics and Search," Plenary address at ACM SIGIR 1999). The question is, of what value is the time it would take you to research the quality of Amazon merchandise via a more trusted source than customer reviews?

This guy thought it was a decent idea.

According to this, The Simpsons are going to be on Inside The Actor's Studio, on Nov. 18. How freaking cool is that?

James Lipton: Homer, what is your favorite curse word?
Homer Simpson: D'oh!

Unfortunately, Nov. 18 is when they tape it, not when they broadcast it...

Game Theory was created by a John Nash

What we have here is a a type of market failure. This does not mean that free markets have failed, but rather that the present market equillibrium is at a situation that is less than optimal for society, a situation that John Maynard Keynes addressed in his General Theory of Economics".

Keep in mind that classical economics assumes perfect information flow for its theories to hold. A situation like this, where academic career concerns and complexity of data interferes with the free flow of information is a clear situation for the government to step in and free up the market, as it is trying to do with the Microsoft monopoly.

Some sort of federally-funded central information clearing-house, where research information could be purchased by the government and put into a freely-accessible database, would be a good first step.

What we have here is a a type of market failure. This does not mean that free markets have failed, but rather that the present market equillibrium is at a situation that is less than optimal for society, a situation that John Maynard Keynes addressed in his General Theory of Economics".

Keep in mind that classical economics assumes perfect information flow for its theories to hold. A situation like this, where academic career concerns and complexity of data interferes with the free flow of information is a clear situation for the government to step in and free up the market, as it is trying to do with the Microsoft monopoly.

Some sort of federally-funded central information clearing-house, where research information could be purchased by the government and put into a freely-accessible database, would be a good first step.

I, for one, consider happenings on the market of interest, and well worthy of slashdot.org's attention. Not only have the Web and tech stocks become the darling of Wall Street, the Web and tek is refashioning the culture and business' image of itself. Thus, if, hypothetically, a fall in stocks is hung, unjustifiably, on the necks of "new business entrepeneurs", that could well affect me, and many of us.

Even now, there are important dissenting opinions as to how good it is for the culture that the Web and computing is Center Stage, with a good dose of worry dashed in that computing may get a bad name. There is, after all, a tradition of this in the computing industry: Expert systems, strong typing, and the DoD's Ada all promised lots more than they could possibly deliver and never recovered from the Public Disappointment.

OTOH, there is a really interesting analysis by Bob Cringely about how ridiculous some of the pricing of the stock market is, and how remarkably inefficient it seems to be, despite the claims of, for instance, the Chicago school and monetarists. (I might add, at risk of introducing extraneous detail and incurring the Wrath of Moderation, that one needs, uh, patience going to the latter two sites.)

I, for one, consider happenings on the market of interest, and well worthy of slashdot.org's attention. Not only have the Web and tech stocks become the darling of Wall Street, the Web and tek is refashioning the culture and business' image of itself. Thus, if, hypothetically, a fall in stocks is hung, unjustifiably, on the necks of "new business entrepeneurs", that could well affect me, and many of us.

Even now, there are important dissenting opinions as to how good it is for the culture that the Web and computing is Center Stage, with a good dose of worry dashed in that computing may get a bad name. There is, after all, a tradition of this in the computing industry: Expert systems, strong typing, and the DoD's Ada all promised lots more than they could possibly deliver and never recovered from the Public Disappointment.

OTOH, there is a really interesting analysis by Bob Cringely about how ridiculous some of the pricing of the stock market is, and how remarkably inefficient it seems to be, despite the claims of, for instance, the Chicago school and monetarists. (I might add, at risk of introducing extraneous detail and incurring the Wrath of Moderation, that one needs, uh, patience going to the latter two sites.)