The main source of famine is not a lack of food. Indeed, famine is primarily caused by conflict and economic policy. Unfortunately, food aid often has adverse affects, as giving away free food destroys the local market for farmers.
Beyond that, we use a lot of land for luxury food stuffs, and food production could rise rapidly if needed. A field of saffron produces little nutritional value, but the same field can be used to grow crops that do produce a significant nutritional value.
Finally, it is in everyones long term benefit to allow developing economies to use agriculture to grow. Eventually food prices will rise, but if everyones is rich(er), this will be little to worry about. Wealthy countries seem to view other country's wealth as bad, but it is good for everyone. Labor markets will become more stable, real wages will grow, and markets will turn to natural advantages instead of chasing cheap labor. In the meantime, things will be fairly chaotic, but we have been dealing with that for decades.
Is that enough optimism to overcome your pessimism ? Corn is in flux now because of a sudden change in economic policy. However, if farmers can earn decent wages growing corn, fewer will grow "less desirable" crops like (ahem) poppies. The only real downside is a possible loss of biodiversity, but all farming has that effect to some degree.
As much as I want to believe aliens are among us, it just doesn't make sense that a civilization advanced enough to cross interstellar space would crash in New Mexico.
An FTP session running over a 100Mbit LAN should see about 10MB/sec real data transfer, maxing out the line and accounting for overhead. They're claiming that their gadgets could move a file between each other at 150 megabytes per second over the same cable?
As the saying goes, this requires some very extraordinary evidence. Or there are a lot of missing qualifiers like "over a specific worst-case line that TCP doesn't come close to theoretical maximum performance on".
Note the last line of the story for the real reason :
The Aria 2000, which is due in July, supports 1G-bps links. Existing Aria appliances support 10M-bps links, 50M-bps links and 200M-bps links.
Their previous products supported a max link speeds from 50Mbsp to 200Mbps, but the new one supports 1000Mbps. 20 * 50 = 1000. If you upgraded from their lowest end product, to their new one, you may well achieve a 20x improvement. It seems this is just a product upgrade with over-eager marketing claims. Imagine that.
Honestly, where as it could be argued that there was little of redeeming value in the 1980s, guitar work was not one of them. Randy Rhodes, Van Halen, Yngwie Malmsteen, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Slash, Hammitt, Dimebag, and so forth.
Excellent choices, but don't forget the Eric Johnson, Mark Knopfler, Eric Bloom, Adrian Smith / Dave Murray, or Vernon Reed.
What the hell kind of shit track listing is Harmonix trying to pull?
Instead of Love in an Elevator, we get music from the elevator.
Dacelo
Re:Piracy is marker of immature market
on
Piracy Economics
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
PS: This even applies to labor markets. In that case we call the piracy 'slavery', and the low end versions 'volunteers'.
For once, I'm glad to be lower than a slave, courtesy of the American Red Cross.
If Dell isn't going to be supplying support for proprietary media codecs (regardless of how easy it is to add them yourself), then this suggests to me Dell wasn't prepared to pay licensing costs to make this happen. I hope they provide instructions, or perhaps a script that runs the first time you boot into your Linux box that can auto-install these codecs, otherwise this will piss off a lot of people.
Yes, but mostly just the support reps.
However, it may make quite a few people happy. Imaging an overworked IT person at a small business. They can order a Dell PC without a bunch of crapware installed. Sure, no media codecs, but for some businesses, that may be a bonus. If it isn't on there, they don't have to support it. If people want to play MP3's at work, they can bring their iPod.
Why does the title read "Hubble Space Telescope Detects Ring of Dark Matter" when - as the first line of the summary states -, the HST actually only " may have finally found dark matter".
How long until Mr Davidson gets prosecuted by some lawyer working for McCain...
If McCain is dumb enough to give someone subpoena power over him and his website while trying to run a presidential campaign, then perhaps any day now...But for some reason, I just don't see it happening.
"These people are successfully making a lot of money through this activity."
Are you sure about that ? The article says some students have accepted the offer, but it doesn't say how many, if any, have actually paid. Consider that the students are probably the ones who cannot afford a lawyer, and then ask yourself this :
Given a student who may or may not have a job, and may not have a job for several more years, and apparently doesn't have enough money to pay for a lawyer, what kind of a credit risk would you assign to such a student ? Would you be willing to give such a student $1000 worth of merchandise today for a promise to pay $3000 later ? Do you think such a business would make or lose money ? The RIAA has to be spending something on their legal fees, and they may be losing money even on the settlements when all is said and done.
Therefore I must disagree with your assessment. Even if they are making money off of this, it certainly isn't a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
The main source of famine is not a lack of food. Indeed, famine is primarily caused by conflict and economic policy. Unfortunately, food aid often has adverse affects, as giving away free food destroys the local market for farmers.
Beyond that, we use a lot of land for luxury food stuffs, and food production could rise rapidly if needed. A field of saffron produces little nutritional value, but the same field can be used to grow crops that do produce a significant nutritional value.
Finally, it is in everyones long term benefit to allow developing economies to use agriculture to grow. Eventually food prices will rise, but if everyones is rich(er), this will be little to worry about. Wealthy countries seem to view other country's wealth as bad, but it is good for everyone. Labor markets will become more stable, real wages will grow, and markets will turn to natural advantages instead of chasing cheap labor. In the meantime, things will be fairly chaotic, but we have been dealing with that for decades.
Is that enough optimism to overcome your pessimism ? Corn is in flux now because of a sudden change in economic policy. However, if farmers can earn decent wages growing corn, fewer will grow "less desirable" crops like (ahem) poppies. The only real downside is a possible loss of biodiversity, but all farming has that effect to some degree.
Dacelo G.
Obviously, they took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.
Dacelo
Note the last line of the story for the real reason :
The Aria 2000, which is due in July, supports 1G-bps links. Existing Aria appliances support 10M-bps links, 50M-bps links and 200M-bps links.
Their previous products supported a max link speeds from 50Mbsp to 200Mbps, but the new one supports 1000Mbps. 20 * 50 = 1000. If you upgraded from their lowest end product, to their new one, you may well achieve a 20x improvement. It seems this is just a product upgrade with over-eager marketing claims. Imagine that.
Dacelo Gigas
Dacelo
For once, I'm glad to be lower than a slave, courtesy of the American Red Cross.
Dacelo Gigas
Yes, but mostly just the support reps.
However, it may make quite a few people happy. Imaging an overworked IT person at a small business. They can order a Dell PC without a bunch of crapware installed. Sure, no media codecs, but for some businesses, that may be a bonus. If it isn't on there, they don't have to support it. If people want to play MP3's at work, they can bring their iPod.
Dacelo Gigas
Please note that you cannot patent stupidity. There's way too much prior art.
Dacelo Gigas
The Slashdot editors are moonlighting at NASA.
Dacelo
Kardashev Scale
Dacelo
If McCain is dumb enough to give someone subpoena power over him and his website while trying to run a presidential campaign, then perhaps any day now...But for some reason, I just don't see it happening.
Dacelo Gigas
Dacelo Gigas
Given a student who may or may not have a job, and may not have a job for several more years, and apparently doesn't have enough money to pay for a lawyer, what kind of a credit risk would you assign to such a student ? Would you be willing to give such a student $1000 worth of merchandise today for a promise to pay $3000 later ? Do you think such a business would make or lose money ? The RIAA has to be spending something on their legal fees, and they may be losing money even on the settlements when all is said and done.
Therefore I must disagree with your assessment. Even if they are making money off of this, it certainly isn't a lot.
Dacelo Gigas
PS3 vs. wii