Which is exactly why you can be reasonably confident that the alarmist tone of both TFA and the summary is unwarranted.
The odds of Microsoft seriously jeapordizing government contracts - especially as they keep losing the occasional city/state/F?A to OSS - are slim to none. I'm no huge MS fan, but it's silly to assume that they just blithely ignore security concerns and potential impacts on major fed.gov contracts that are obvious to the average slashdotter.
The problem with this is it assumes that product Alpha is a substitute good for the original item. Since all of modern marketing is focused specifically on fighting commoditization of products, that is not a safe assumption.
That being said, the ruling isn't worrisome for a completely different reason. The SCOTUS didn't say that "all price floors are legal," it said "it is not the case that all price floors are illegal," which is a very different thing.
That is, it's logically equivalent to changing "all positive integers are prime" to "not all positive integers are prime," not logically equivalent to changing it to "all positive integers are not prime."
So you're right, there's no call for huddling cheetos.
I have a couple phrases that might be of some interest to you:
"Selection bias"
and
"The plural of anecdote is not data"
(The upper bound on failure rate, incidentally, is 17.5% within the first year - that's the break-even point for Microsoft selling one-year extended warranties on the $400 version. Any higher than that, and they're losing money on the warranties, which is incredibly unlikely. Given the profit margins available in warranties, I'd be shocked if the actual failure rate comes anywhere near that number.)
The difference between a board game with six players and an MMO with tens or hundreds of thousands is a a difference in degree so large as to be a difference in kind. If one of six people in a Monopoly game drops a huge wad of cash on buying someone else's properties and Monopoly money, there's a material impact on the remaining four players, since now one person controls a full third of the wealth in the game.
This is a different story when even the biggest spender can only amass a tenth of a percent of all the wealth in the game - and for a game like WoW, I consider that proportion to be absurdly high.
The other difference which is strictly a difference in kind is that a game like Monopoly is, by nature, a zero-sum game. There will be one winner and five losers in our hypothetical six-player game. WoW - and probably all MMOs, though I don't know this for sure - are distinctly not zero-sum games. They aren't even competitive in the same fashion as Monopoly.
The analogy of MMOs to Monopoly is analogous to an alligator on a rollerskate.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you're from somewhere in UK (but not Ireland), due to your use of pounds and pence as monetary units.
This amuses me, see, because I was just in England and Scotland for a couple weeks on my honeymoon. As your typical ignorant, unwashed, barbaric American, I was fairly worried about driving on the left* and operating in metric. Imagine my surprise when I got to England, and discovered that speed limits are posted in MPH, distances are measured in miles, and clearances are measured in feet and inches.
*Driving on the left, it turns out, isn't difficult. Driving a cute little Artos with the turn signal lever on the right side of the steering column is troublesome. Driving on roads that purport to be bidirectional and yet are only 1.5 car widths across (partially due to cars parked half on the sidewalk) is somewhat stressful. Driving on roads such that you can't tell if a given lane is going in your direction or the opposite direction (because there are three lanes divided by identical dashed white lines, the two sides have traffic moving in opposite directions and there's no one in the center lane - I'm looking at you, A37 through Bristol) is downright obnoxious.
Don't worry, it's a problem in IE6, too. The page is completely unreadable. Pieces of interface pop in and out as I scroll up and down the page, I only know about the controls on the left-hand side by rumor; I can't actually see anything helpful over there, comments overlap each other (by which I mean text is actually laid atop other text such that neither block is readable), and it takes comparatively longer to load.
I'm hoping there's an option similar to the old "light" mode for those of us often stuck using IE. I can understand if the nifty bells and whistles don't get made IE-compatible in favor of actual standards, but if I can't read slashdot at all when I'm forced to use IE (like at work, for example), I'm going to be a sad panda.
Normally, this is due to friend and friend-of-a-friend status. I'm not sure, but I think the default behavior is to give anyone you've identified as friend a transparent +1 on top of pre-existing karma/subscriber bonuses.
Postulate for a moment a limitless supply of raw materials, and a limitless space to put waste materials in. In that environment, what, exactly, is wrong with a "consume all" mentality?
The space elevator - or rather, a technology which gives efficient, low-cost access to space - has the potential to make that scenario a reality. We've got near-earth asteroids, the moon, and the entire asteroid belt full of metals. We've got moons and an Oort Cloud full of CHON - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen: the building blocks of all our food. And we've got all of space to discard waste products into. The resources exist in this solar system to keep us in consumables for a long, long time if we can just get out hands on them.
An important - not, of course, the only, or even the hardest, but an important - step towards this is a cheap, high-volume way of ferrying material out of and into Earth's gravity well.
OK, this is neat, and a Lunar lander is something we definitely need if we're to go back to the moon. Granted.
But personally, I would be far more excited by advancements in getting things cheaply into orbit. Followed by getting things cheaply out to Lunar orbit. Then followed by getting things down to the lunar surface and back up into Lunar orbit.
So far, we've had success with the X Prize for getting something up into space. Which is a major accomplishment, to be sure, but it's about 7kps in angular velocity away from just being in Terran orbit, and even further away from being in Lunar orbit.
Figuring out both ends is cool, but the middle bit is sort of important, too.
Doesn't matter. Just to keep up with current birth/death rates, you have to send 192,000+ people off-planet per day. Which is roughly equivalent to taking every passenger coming into or out of O'Hare International and sending them into space.
First: you're right. Reality is generally more humdrum than certain alarmists (or idealists) would have you believe.
However, one could make an argument that, in part, what keeps reality more humdrum are the extremists banging out anti-whomever rants about the evils of whatever.
...while simultaneously being involved in a low-grade war against another superpower who has threatened and has the means to wipe you out if you spend too much time not keeping an eye on them.
But we all know the robot brains will only operate at very low temperatures (hence the giant radiators aimed between stars to chill liquid helium for coolant). So won't you be shocked when it turns out that hyperspace is pervasively warm - looks like there's a use for all those meatbag menials, after all!
(Mad phat props to anyone who picks up that reference)
If that is the case, Eta C. should already have gone supernova. We just can't see it yet.
Which is an interesting statement, really, since it presupposes some sort of universal timeline on which it has "already" gone supernova. When in fact, there is no universal synchronicity.
For the energy to be enough to kill us at 7500 light years, and the inverse square law to be in effect
That's kind of the point: the inverse square law isn't in effect, because the energy isn't radiated in all directions. This star is of a type that, when it goes nova, tends to emit its energy in a couple of highly directional beams.
such as by getting off this rock before the big one hits
You're kidding, right? At current birth/death rates, you need to move 192,000+ people off the planet every day just to break even. That's pretty close to converting every flight into or out of O'Hare into a flight into space.
Barring truly magical technologies (like the ability to equip entire cities with comprehensive life support, anti-gravity, and propulsion systems...or interstellar teleportation systems), reducing the population of the planet by emigrating into space is completely unworkable.
Colonizing space to get our genes spread across more than one rock is a good idea, I agree - but it's not going to address population growth.
This is becoming increasingly untrue. The last two places I've worked - DBA both times - have mandated direct deposit only. I can't be completely certain, I suppose, that I wouldn't have been hired had I not filled out the direct deposit form...but since it was with the paperwork that included my citizenship and tax withholding forms, along with the official application, I suspect I would have lost the jobs.
Shh, I prefer never to really think about what physical assest is behind our currency... because its just belief/faith that has been backing it for decades. This is an interesting subject to look into, but it's really scary if you actually "think about it."
It isn't, actually. The only thing that makes gold valuable (as a medium of exchange) is the belief/faith that it will remain valuable as a medium of exchange. Anything beyond a strict barter system of goods intended to be consumed for goods intended to be consumed depends on the belief/faith that the medium of exchange will still be valuable as a medium of exchange in the future.
Consider gold, which many people consider the gold standard (ha ha...sorry, couldn't resist) of "real" currency. If we were to have a real, worldwide breakdown of civilization (Lucifer's Hammer style), what value would gold have? People need food, potable water, clothing, shelter, firearms, etc. Gold wouldn't be of any particular value; it really might as well be greenbacks at that point. Your carton of cigarettes would be worth more than its weight in gold.
The only advantage gold has over fiat money is it has real, rather than artificial, scarcity. This protects gold against a government devaluing it, and has a very anti-inflationary effect. Which, on the whole, is an advantage for creditors and a disadvantage for debtors. The fact that it's protected from government meddling is a major advantage, true - but it has nothing to do with the fact that it's belief/faith that makes it valuable.
Insure car rental agencies against you damaging the car you rented Verify you can be trusted to rent high-end audio equipment Cover damages to hotel rooms you may incur Screen you from acquiring government security clearances Complete transactions wherein transferring cash is impractical (eg purchasing online)
A few of those can be avoided with cash deposits in varyingly usurious amounts, one of those can be gotten around with credit-card-like debit cards (though not if you don't even have a bank account, of course), and the one of those that you just can't get around isn't one that has an impact on most people's careers.
But the point is that credit is used for more than just incurring more debt. Can you do without it? Certainly. But it's a financially terrible decision, since it means you'll be renting your residence for your entire life (unless, of course, you have the self-discipline to spend fifteen years saving a few hundred grand in cash - and then assuming that your non-interest-bearing cash savings ever catch up to the price of a home given inflation).
Slashdot Mirror
Which is exactly why you can be reasonably confident that the alarmist tone of both TFA and the summary is unwarranted.
The odds of Microsoft seriously jeapordizing government contracts - especially as they keep losing the occasional city/state/F?A to OSS - are slim to none. I'm no huge MS fan, but it's silly to assume that they just blithely ignore security concerns and potential impacts on major fed.gov contracts that are obvious to the average slashdotter.
The problem with this is it assumes that product Alpha is a substitute good for the original item. Since all of modern marketing is focused specifically on fighting commoditization of products, that is not a safe assumption.
That being said, the ruling isn't worrisome for a completely different reason. The SCOTUS didn't say that "all price floors are legal," it said "it is not the case that all price floors are illegal," which is a very different thing.
That is, it's logically equivalent to changing "all positive integers are prime" to "not all positive integers are prime," not logically equivalent to changing it to "all positive integers are not prime."
So you're right, there's no call for huddling cheetos.
I have a couple phrases that might be of some interest to you:
"Selection bias"
and
"The plural of anecdote is not data"
(The upper bound on failure rate, incidentally, is 17.5% within the first year - that's the break-even point for Microsoft selling one-year extended warranties on the $400 version. Any higher than that, and they're losing money on the warranties, which is incredibly unlikely. Given the profit margins available in warranties, I'd be shocked if the actual failure rate comes anywhere near that number.)
The difference between a board game with six players and an MMO with tens or hundreds of thousands is a a difference in degree so large as to be a difference in kind. If one of six people in a Monopoly game drops a huge wad of cash on buying someone else's properties and Monopoly money, there's a material impact on the remaining four players, since now one person controls a full third of the wealth in the game.
This is a different story when even the biggest spender can only amass a tenth of a percent of all the wealth in the game - and for a game like WoW, I consider that proportion to be absurdly high.
The other difference which is strictly a difference in kind is that a game like Monopoly is, by nature, a zero-sum game. There will be one winner and five losers in our hypothetical six-player game. WoW - and probably all MMOs, though I don't know this for sure - are distinctly not zero-sum games. They aren't even competitive in the same fashion as Monopoly.
The analogy of MMOs to Monopoly is analogous to an alligator on a rollerskate.
Yeah, it's terrifying. Just like iLO boards and RDP, which is why no one uses them.
Oh, wait.
I'm going to go out on a limb and assume that you're from somewhere in UK (but not Ireland), due to your use of pounds and pence as monetary units.
This amuses me, see, because I was just in England and Scotland for a couple weeks on my honeymoon. As your typical ignorant, unwashed, barbaric American, I was fairly worried about driving on the left* and operating in metric. Imagine my surprise when I got to England, and discovered that speed limits are posted in MPH, distances are measured in miles, and clearances are measured in feet and inches.
*Driving on the left, it turns out, isn't difficult. Driving a cute little Artos with the turn signal lever on the right side of the steering column is troublesome. Driving on roads that purport to be bidirectional and yet are only 1.5 car widths across (partially due to cars parked half on the sidewalk) is somewhat stressful. Driving on roads such that you can't tell if a given lane is going in your direction or the opposite direction (because there are three lanes divided by identical dashed white lines, the two sides have traffic moving in opposite directions and there's no one in the center lane - I'm looking at you, A37 through Bristol) is downright obnoxious.
Don't worry, it's a problem in IE6, too. The page is completely unreadable. Pieces of interface pop in and out as I scroll up and down the page, I only know about the controls on the left-hand side by rumor; I can't actually see anything helpful over there, comments overlap each other (by which I mean text is actually laid atop other text such that neither block is readable), and it takes comparatively longer to load.
I'm hoping there's an option similar to the old "light" mode for those of us often stuck using IE. I can understand if the nifty bells and whistles don't get made IE-compatible in favor of actual standards, but if I can't read slashdot at all when I'm forced to use IE (like at work, for example), I'm going to be a sad panda.
Normally, this is due to friend and friend-of-a-friend status. I'm not sure, but I think the default behavior is to give anyone you've identified as friend a transparent +1 on top of pre-existing karma/subscriber bonuses.
Postulate for a moment a limitless supply of raw materials, and a limitless space to put waste materials in. In that environment, what, exactly, is wrong with a "consume all" mentality?
The space elevator - or rather, a technology which gives efficient, low-cost access to space - has the potential to make that scenario a reality. We've got near-earth asteroids, the moon, and the entire asteroid belt full of metals. We've got moons and an Oort Cloud full of CHON - carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen: the building blocks of all our food. And we've got all of space to discard waste products into. The resources exist in this solar system to keep us in consumables for a long, long time if we can just get out hands on them.
An important - not, of course, the only, or even the hardest, but an important - step towards this is a cheap, high-volume way of ferrying material out of and into Earth's gravity well.
If I had mod points, I'd fix the glitch.
You're right: Contact was abominable. That's one of only a few movies I disliked so much I actually want my two hours back.
OK, this is neat, and a Lunar lander is something we definitely need if we're to go back to the moon. Granted.
But personally, I would be far more excited by advancements in getting things cheaply into orbit. Followed by getting things cheaply out to Lunar orbit. Then followed by getting things down to the lunar surface and back up into Lunar orbit.
So far, we've had success with the X Prize for getting something up into space. Which is a major accomplishment, to be sure, but it's about 7kps in angular velocity away from just being in Terran orbit, and even further away from being in Lunar orbit.
Figuring out both ends is cool, but the middle bit is sort of important, too.
Wow...for a minute, there, I thought this was the triumphant return to slashdot of Jon Katz!
It's kinda too bad it's not; the resulting flamewar would have been hilarious.
Doesn't matter. Just to keep up with current birth/death rates, you have to send 192,000+ people off-planet per day. Which is roughly equivalent to taking every passenger coming into or out of O'Hare International and sending them into space.
First: you're right. Reality is generally more humdrum than certain alarmists (or idealists) would have you believe.
However, one could make an argument that, in part, what keeps reality more humdrum are the extremists banging out anti-whomever rants about the evils of whatever.
...while simultaneously being involved in a low-grade war against another superpower who has threatened and has the means to wipe you out if you spend too much time not keeping an eye on them.
You forgot that part of the adage.
But we all know the robot brains will only operate at very low temperatures (hence the giant radiators aimed between stars to chill liquid helium for coolant). So won't you be shocked when it turns out that hyperspace is pervasively warm - looks like there's a use for all those meatbag menials, after all!
(Mad phat props to anyone who picks up that reference)
If that is the case, Eta C. should already have gone supernova. We just can't see it yet.
Which is an interesting statement, really, since it presupposes some sort of universal timeline on which it has "already" gone supernova. When in fact, there is no universal synchronicity.
For the energy to be enough to kill us at 7500 light years, and the inverse square law to be in effect
That's kind of the point: the inverse square law isn't in effect, because the energy isn't radiated in all directions. This star is of a type that, when it goes nova, tends to emit its energy in a couple of highly directional beams.
"Why do golf balls have a good chance of going through a tree or hit only one or two branches?"
To quote a frequent golf partner of mine:
Me: Don't worry, trees are 90% air.
Him: So's a screen door.
That should have been: ...current birth/death rates...
such as by getting off this rock before the big one hits
You're kidding, right? At current birth/death rates, you need to move 192,000+ people off the planet every day just to break even. That's pretty close to converting every flight into or out of O'Hare into a flight into space.
Barring truly magical technologies (like the ability to equip entire cities with comprehensive life support, anti-gravity, and propulsion systems...or interstellar teleportation systems), reducing the population of the planet by emigrating into space is completely unworkable.
Colonizing space to get our genes spread across more than one rock is a good idea, I agree - but it's not going to address population growth.
AT&T, the ISP, is not a common carrier, they are an "information service."
AT&T, the phone company, is a common carrier.
I mean, you don't *have* to do direct deposit
This is becoming increasingly untrue. The last two places I've worked - DBA both times - have mandated direct deposit only. I can't be completely certain, I suppose, that I wouldn't have been hired had I not filled out the direct deposit form...but since it was with the paperwork that included my citizenship and tax withholding forms, along with the official application, I suspect I would have lost the jobs.
Shh, I prefer never to really think about what physical assest is behind our currency... because its just belief/faith that has been backing it for decades. This is an interesting subject to look into, but it's really scary if you actually "think about it."
It isn't, actually. The only thing that makes gold valuable (as a medium of exchange) is the belief/faith that it will remain valuable as a medium of exchange. Anything beyond a strict barter system of goods intended to be consumed for goods intended to be consumed depends on the belief/faith that the medium of exchange will still be valuable as a medium of exchange in the future.
Consider gold, which many people consider the gold standard (ha ha...sorry, couldn't resist) of "real" currency. If we were to have a real, worldwide breakdown of civilization (Lucifer's Hammer style), what value would gold have? People need food, potable water, clothing, shelter, firearms, etc. Gold wouldn't be of any particular value; it really might as well be greenbacks at that point. Your carton of cigarettes would be worth more than its weight in gold.
The only advantage gold has over fiat money is it has real, rather than artificial, scarcity. This protects gold against a government devaluing it, and has a very anti-inflationary effect. Which, on the whole, is an advantage for creditors and a disadvantage for debtors. The fact that it's protected from government meddling is a major advantage, true - but it has nothing to do with the fact that it's belief/faith that makes it valuable.
Untrue. Credit is also used to:
Insure car rental agencies against you damaging the car you rented
Verify you can be trusted to rent high-end audio equipment
Cover damages to hotel rooms you may incur
Screen you from acquiring government security clearances
Complete transactions wherein transferring cash is impractical (eg purchasing online)
A few of those can be avoided with cash deposits in varyingly usurious amounts, one of those can be gotten around with credit-card-like debit cards (though not if you don't even have a bank account, of course), and the one of those that you just can't get around isn't one that has an impact on most people's careers.
But the point is that credit is used for more than just incurring more debt. Can you do without it? Certainly. But it's a financially terrible decision, since it means you'll be renting your residence for your entire life (unless, of course, you have the self-discipline to spend fifteen years saving a few hundred grand in cash - and then assuming that your non-interest-bearing cash savings ever catch up to the price of a home given inflation).