? Are you 16 years old? No offense, I'm just curious. This sounds like a nice daydream, and then reality hits and you realize it's about as dumb as using water balloons and a water gun to deter an angry man who is running right at you. Believe me, a friend of mine and I tried it when we were 16 years old; my friend ended up punched, laid out on the floor.
In your case, what would happen is the perp would break into your car to grab the fake laptop, discover it's a fake laptop, and then he'd notice the black cloth and you would be out the real laptop.:)
Nature needs us. Nature wants to survive, and yet it would end around 600 million - 1200 million years from now (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth), unaided.
Humans are capable of extending life on Earth. Also, we are capable of space flight. So, that is two ways humans could help nature survive longer:)
It looks like you are talking about Easter Island. It doesn't look like they went extinct, just had serious population loss. Your point is very well taken though, the same can and likely will happen to the Earth:)
Yeah, I've been thinking that "we're screwed" as well. I keep hanging on to some hope that the Earth will deal with it a little better than feared, and that Fossil fuels will become scarcer much faster, but I think it may be a false hope.
Still, no matter how bad it gets, I still am hopeful that the carrying capacity of Earth won't drop to 0. In other words, I have high hopes that the human race will survive. I don't guess we'll see, since we'll almost certainly be dead by 100 years old, but I guess you just gotta ride the wave as long as you can:)
Great post. I particularly enjoyed your point that speculators provide feedback and, in other words, early warning signs. When you take away the incentive for speculators, then you lose this benefit. Let the markets be! Regulate pollution and other problems, but not the markets...
The Tobin tax as it was originally conceived is a knee-jerk reaction to the problem of speculation. It will harm all market participants, both speculators and non-speculators, because both will take actions to avoid the tax. The transactions cost incurred for avoiding the tax, coupled with the tax itself, are harmful to the market.
The problem is speculation, and I don't claim to have a full-on solution, but see the * below for a solution idea that may be a bit of a tangent.
Even so, I do aplaud Bill Gates and other leaders for discussing things. There may be some good to come out of all of this discussion, but I don't think the Tobin tax or any similar tax is one of them.
*Permit currency creation: For instance, permit corporations and persons to create their own "currencies", backed by whatever they see fit (oil, gold, silver, other commodities, a basket of Government currencies, their own bartered labor, etc.). I don't have the entire solution here, the idea would need to be refined, but it could bring a significant net gain to the currency problem. I mean, we all know and expect the dollar will "die" some day - in the end it is only a piece of paper or a bank balance - and so this could replace it...
I have a feeling it wouldn't have gotten towed too many times, if any, before the tow company/police wizened up and stopped towing his car. He may have been an asshole, but he was a famous, rich, highly gifted one.
Well put, the part about "if you're interested in increasing the liberty of individuals." I've come to some of the same conclusions myself; that I'm largely against big Government and Government processes because they take away man's freedoms, yet Government is necessary in order to ensure man's freedoms.
At my house of 3 (7 year old plus Mom and Dad), we love Netflix. I do have some ideas to make it better, but I'll get to those in a minute. Here is what we love:
- The ability to pause or stop a movie/show, and then restart hours, days or even weeks later from the same spot. With Hulu through my Blu-Ray Player, we don't have this, and it is sorely missed. - Instant Queue concept (Again, not nearly as intuitive on the Blu-Ray with Hulu) - The ability to choose what we want to watch, on demand. - The selection of older shows and movies is decent, passable. - No advertisements
Here is what we don't like: - Having to use Hulu. Just give me the Hulu shows on Netflix with advertisements. I like Netflix better, i.e. the ability to pause and restart. - Having to use Redbox. Again, just give me the movies on Netflix. It's OK if we have to pay per movie for this!
It is ironic that a profitable market is a failed market.
But then again, in a perfectly efficient market, with no profits, is it a bad thing that there aren't any profits? For in the perfectly efficient market, what good are profits? Profits = more money than others = more goods and services than another person. Money is used to decide which people get to have the finite number of goods and services available in the marketplace. But in a perfectly efficient market, wouldn't there be enough goods and services to satisfy everyone's needs? Would you have shortages of those goods and services? I'm thinking that you wouldn't. Therefore, the need for mass amounts of money would go away. You would work to get your wage, and then your wage would buy you everything you needed. The only problem with my explanation is "want" versus "need"... Also, I don't think human beings can fit into the perfectly efficient market, because we and our world isn't perfectly efficient. Could we really reach a point in civilization where anyone can travel to the moon for a nominal wage? I suppose we could, but we're a long ways from a perfectly efficient market for moon trips. And for lots of other stuff, too. I know, I digress. Sorry that my post isn't the quality of a Google Knol. It's just me thinking out loud.
Codebuster - I'm glad to see you fighting for free markets. I also have p.s. to you at the end of this message.
I enjoyed the discussion.
Bombula - I agree on the points about regulation, I'm all for it, and I'm a staunch free marketer. Monopolies and Fraud are the reasons we need regulation, in my book. Even so, I think your assertion that "regulation is antiethical to truly free markets and antithetical to the ideals held by proponents of globalization and unbridled free trade" is off the mark. For instance, take a look at this wonderful wikipedia article on Economic Freedom. You'll see that the central theme to achieving economic freedom, in the article, is regulation to prevent theft, fraud, ensure property rights and uphold contracts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_freedom Maybe I'm missing some reason why this doesn't apply to the ideals held by propnents of unbridled free trade, but to me it does. I feel those people would want contracts upheld, property rights upheld, and that requires regulation.
I'm short on time at this point, and maybe I'll never have time to come back to this discussion, but basically I see two interesting assertions that it would be fun to try to disprove, or at the very least explain. In fact, this reminds me of when I learned about Einstien's theory of relativity, and I REALLY wanted to disprove it. I still want to, to this day, but I haven't been able to yet.
1. Your statement, paraphrased, that "The textbook definition of a free market says that profits go to zero. Therefore, wouldn't that be a profitless, "subsistent" marketplace?"
I want to say that I hashed this out with myself once, 8 or 9 years ago in college. However, I'm not sure. At any rate, it is a fundamental question that must be asked of the textbook definition. I have several answers, but I'd like to flesh them out. The cop-out answer is that real markets will never bee 100% efficient, so profits will always be possible. But I want to do it more justice than that. Also, see the point below about long-run versus short-run. It applies to this.
2. This statement: "So if you're a proponent of free markets as they are defined by the academic and political right, you must accept the fact that any profitable market is - by definition - also a failed market: i.e. one whose efficiency is so poor that, via coercion, it facilitates exploitation of consumers"
I mean, this one is just asking to be rebuffed. Maybe you don't really believe what you said. I mean, it sounds cool. "so poor that, via coercion, it faciliates exploitation of consumers" has a nice ring to it. But I would go back to this concept: Long-run versus short run. What I remember from my economics classes in college is that academics define profits -> 0 (going to 0) over the long run. Not the short run. My econ profersor used that phrase hundreds of times. And then, add in what Codebuster said about conditions changing - you yourself acknowledged that conditions change. We add new features to products. We are always doing new things. Therefore, profits continue to exist in a free market. It's just that products that have been around for a long time see their profits going to zero, but new products have profits. I'm thinking out loud here. I'd like to spend more time thinking about this. You did bring up an interesting point, but I think the long-run vs. short-run can explain it....
Phos
P.S. to Codebuster - The only thing I would add to your vegetables example is to point out that labor is part of the selling price, so the farmer can assign some value to his labor - i.e. the amount of money he needs to buy goods and services for his household, or to put it another way, the average amount of money needed to buy goods and services for a household in the market, for the amount of vegetables he is selling - so he wouldn't just be selling it for his costs. Of course, I'm sure you already know this and may have included this in the "costs", but it wasn't clear in your example so I thought I would bring it up.
I've seen this phenomenon you speak of, IT vs. MIS, in another way: The creation of software.
In my previous job, I was a software developer for a Nuclear Power Company, and I fell under the "IT" umbrella. Management decided that engineers should not be writing software, only software developers should be writing software.
I think two main reasons for this was the adherance to software standards, and the future maintenance of the application.
Software standards - The company created tons of Software standards, which drove most good programmers away from them (including myself - Note that I am no longer there).
Future maintenance of the application - the company did not want to be reliant on a single engineer, so they felt that by having the Software group write the software following company standards, that it would be well documented and maintained by that group, instead of being maintained by one engineer.
So, my job consisted of meeting with the engineers, gathering their requirements, and implementing their programs. It was a pretty fulfilling job to see satisfied engineers, but I always felt like such a position would, someday, become obsolete. I mean, the engineers are necessary because they know the business. But why is the software developer truly necessary? He isn't! Technology should advance enough so that the engineers could develop their own programs, without the problems that the company is trying to avoid. In fact, you could say that we are already there, it just may take a few decades before everyone realizes that this is the best practice!
You, nametaken, said it. I have been looking for an alternative to paypal for about 5 years, and while it's not up and running yet, this is very promising. Go Google. Down with Paypal:)
Jason
My experience was somewhat positive
on
Advocating Dvorak
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· Score: 1
I have been using DVORAK for 6 years.
I currently type about 80WPM in both DVORAK and QWERTY. I use QWERTY at home, because the wife and I share a computer, and I use DVORAK at work. Switching back and forth is no problem, except for curly braces {}. I can't type a damn curly brace in QWERTY without looking...
Also, as others have pointed out, it is a slight nuisance whenever other people want to use your computer; you have to alt+shift+2 to change to QWERTY, and then alt+shift+1 to change back.
I did not see any speed boosts when switching from QWERTY to DVORAK, but I do feel like my wrists have improved. I was feeling some carpel tunnel pain when I made the switch, and the pain went away within a few weeks!
However, I also started using a wrist rest at the same time, so maybe that was the key factor......
Anyways, I don't plan to ever give it up, because I figure it can't hurt to be proficient in both layouts! Plus, my good friend - FireWrought - uses it, and I want to be able to use his computer:)
This is a really good point, running a gnutella network within a college. I'll look into it. Of course, what happens if people leak the info to outsiders? Is it possible to use limewire to restrict access? I suppose that, if not, it is a feature that could be easily added to a gnutella client.
Thanks for the idea,
Jason
Re:A crash is possible, but for different reasons
on
Gaming Crash up Ahead
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· Score: 1
>I think the author is off base about what would cause another video game crash.
You have a very good insight here. The cost of video games is going up, and horrible games are getting published because a company wants to re-coup some of their investment.
But how off-base is the author? If a lot of horrible video games are ported from pc to the x-box, as he suggests, and the average consumer ends up buying several melons, it may discourage a good portion of the market from the systems.... Then again, maybe everyone is investigating before buying.
Two comments: We don't all stand it, and it was more like 15 minutes.
1. I, for one, watch very little T.V. Perhaps 2 hours a week. There is so many better ways to spend time than glued to a Television, and commercials underline this point.
2. I didn't time the lengths of segments/commercial breaks, but I did pay a little bit of attention during the second night, and I was estimating it at about 15 minutes/4 minutes.
Phos
Right now we are paying a monthly payment per desktop of 20 dollars. This payment licenses one copy of Microsoft's Office suite, NT 4.0, and norton utilities.
I am not sure how much money is given to Microsoft, because the money is also used to fund some number of employees (10-20?), whose job it is to represent our interests with Microsoft, research new versions of Office/NT, write-up common problems/solutions for our 'knowledge base', implement migrations to a newer version, and help our in-house technicians/developers who have Microsoft-specific questions.
Re:Basic error in first algorithm?
on
Does P = NP?
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· Score: 1
Its not a big deal at all. No error will occurr, because the array is not accessed after the else condition.
Holy mother of geniousness. I need to hire one of these lead programmer dudes as a consultant. Maybe they can answer a few other questions I've been mulling over, such as the meaning of life, the universe, and everything after...
I'm surprised that it took this long for Squeak to be mentioned... I just jumped in to Squeak about a week ago (For a class at school). If you use Squeak to teach your kids programming, and I recommend it, you also get to (have to) spend some time helping them out. They could probably figure out some of it on their own, but no matter how "intuitive for kids" it is supposed to be, they are going to need some pointers. Good luck, and check out http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak for a good Squeak source. Phos
Slashdot Mirror
? Are you 16 years old? No offense, I'm just curious. This sounds like a nice daydream, and then reality hits and you realize it's about as dumb as using water balloons and a water gun to deter an angry man who is running right at you. Believe me, a friend of mine and I tried it when we were 16 years old; my friend ended up punched, laid out on the floor.
In your case, what would happen is the perp would break into your car to grab the fake laptop, discover it's a fake laptop, and then he'd notice the black cloth and you would be out the real laptop. :)
Jason
Nature needs us. Nature wants to survive, and yet it would end around 600 million - 1200 million years from now (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_of_the_Earth), unaided.
Humans are capable of extending life on Earth. Also, we are capable of space flight. So, that is two ways humans could help nature survive longer :)
Phos
It looks like you are talking about Easter Island. It doesn't look like they went extinct, just had serious population loss. Your point is very well taken though, the same can and likely will happen to the Earth :)
Phos
Yeah, I've been thinking that "we're screwed" as well. I keep hanging on to some hope that the Earth will deal with it a little better than feared, and that Fossil fuels will become scarcer much faster, but I think it may be a false hope.
Still, no matter how bad it gets, I still am hopeful that the carrying capacity of Earth won't drop to 0. In other words, I have high hopes that the human race will survive. I don't guess we'll see, since we'll almost certainly be dead by 100 years old, but I guess you just gotta ride the wave as long as you can :)
Great post. I particularly enjoyed your point that speculators provide feedback and, in other words, early warning signs. When you take away the incentive for speculators, then you lose this benefit. Let the markets be! Regulate pollution and other problems, but not the markets...
The Tobin tax as it was originally conceived is a knee-jerk reaction to the problem of speculation. It will harm all market participants, both speculators and non-speculators, because both will take actions to avoid the tax. The transactions cost incurred for avoiding the tax, coupled with the tax itself, are harmful to the market.
The problem is speculation, and I don't claim to have a full-on solution, but see the * below for a solution idea that may be a bit of a tangent.
Even so, I do aplaud Bill Gates and other leaders for discussing things. There may be some good to come out of all of this discussion, but I don't think the Tobin tax or any similar tax is one of them.
*Permit currency creation: For instance, permit corporations and persons to create their own "currencies", backed by whatever they see fit (oil, gold, silver, other commodities, a basket of Government currencies, their own bartered labor, etc.). I don't have the entire solution here, the idea would need to be refined, but it could bring a significant net gain to the currency problem. I mean, we all know and expect the dollar will "die" some day - in the end it is only a piece of paper or a bank balance - and so this could replace it...
Spot on sir!
I have a feeling it wouldn't have gotten towed too many times, if any, before the tow company/police wizened up and stopped towing his car. He may have been an asshole, but he was a famous, rich, highly gifted one.
Well put, the part about "if you're interested in increasing the liberty of individuals." I've come to some of the same conclusions myself; that I'm largely against big Government and Government processes because they take away man's freedoms, yet Government is necessary in order to ensure man's freedoms.
Well, the guy has a point that the chatbot blows. I tried it out too, and after about 6 or 7 messages it threw me the dilemma thing too.
And you have a point that AI is definitely improving :) Btw, when are we getting together again, we should do at least once a month no?
Phos
At my house of 3 (7 year old plus Mom and Dad), we love Netflix. I do have some ideas to make it better, but I'll get to those in a minute. Here is what we love:
- The ability to pause or stop a movie/show, and then restart hours, days or even weeks later from the same spot. With Hulu through my Blu-Ray Player, we don't have this, and it is sorely missed.
- Instant Queue concept (Again, not nearly as intuitive on the Blu-Ray with Hulu)
- The ability to choose what we want to watch, on demand.
- The selection of older shows and movies is decent, passable.
- No advertisements
Here is what we don't like:
- Having to use Hulu. Just give me the Hulu shows on Netflix with advertisements. I like Netflix better, i.e. the ability to pause and restart.
- Having to use Redbox. Again, just give me the movies on Netflix. It's OK if we have to pay per movie for this!
Cheers,
Jason
It is ironic that a profitable market is a failed market.
But then again, in a perfectly efficient market, with no profits, is it a bad thing that there aren't any profits? For in the perfectly efficient market, what good are profits? Profits = more money than others = more goods and services than another person. Money is used to decide which people get to have the finite number of goods and services available in the marketplace. But in a perfectly efficient market, wouldn't there be enough goods and services to satisfy everyone's needs? Would you have shortages of those goods and services? I'm thinking that you wouldn't. Therefore, the need for mass amounts of money would go away. You would work to get your wage, and then your wage would buy you everything you needed. The only problem with my explanation is "want" versus "need"... Also, I don't think human beings can fit into the perfectly efficient market, because we and our world isn't perfectly efficient. Could we really reach a point in civilization where anyone can travel to the moon for a nominal wage? I suppose we could, but we're a long ways from a perfectly efficient market for moon trips. And for lots of other stuff, too. I know, I digress. Sorry that my post isn't the quality of a Google Knol. It's just me thinking out loud.
Codebuster - I'm glad to see you fighting for free markets. I also have p.s. to you at the end of this message.
I enjoyed the discussion.
Bombula - I agree on the points about regulation, I'm all for it, and I'm a staunch free marketer. Monopolies and Fraud are the reasons we need regulation, in my book. Even so, I think your assertion that "regulation is antiethical to truly free markets and antithetical to the ideals held by proponents of globalization and unbridled free trade" is off the mark. For instance, take a look at this wonderful wikipedia article on Economic Freedom. You'll see that the central theme to achieving economic freedom, in the article, is regulation to prevent theft, fraud, ensure property rights and uphold contracts. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_freedom Maybe I'm missing some reason why this doesn't apply to the ideals held by propnents of unbridled free trade, but to me it does. I feel those people would want contracts upheld, property rights upheld, and that requires regulation.
I'm short on time at this point, and maybe I'll never have time to come back to this discussion, but basically I see two interesting assertions that it would be fun to try to disprove, or at the very least explain. In fact, this reminds me of when I learned about Einstien's theory of relativity, and I REALLY wanted to disprove it. I still want to, to this day, but I haven't been able to yet.
1. Your statement, paraphrased, that "The textbook definition of a free market says that profits go to zero. Therefore, wouldn't that be a profitless, "subsistent" marketplace?"
I want to say that I hashed this out with myself once, 8 or 9 years ago in college. However, I'm not sure. At any rate, it is a fundamental question that must be asked of the textbook definition. I have several answers, but I'd like to flesh them out. The cop-out answer is that real markets will never bee 100% efficient, so profits will always be possible. But I want to do it more justice than that. Also, see the point below about long-run versus short-run. It applies to this.
2. This statement: "So if you're a proponent of free markets as they are defined by the academic and political right, you must accept the fact that any profitable market is - by definition - also a failed market: i.e. one whose efficiency is so poor that, via coercion, it facilitates exploitation of consumers"
I mean, this one is just asking to be rebuffed. Maybe you don't really believe what you said. I mean, it sounds cool. "so poor that, via coercion, it faciliates exploitation of consumers" has a nice ring to it. But I would go back to this concept: Long-run versus short run. What I remember from my economics classes in college is that academics define profits -> 0 (going to 0) over the long run. Not the short run. My econ profersor used that phrase hundreds of times. And then, add in what Codebuster said about conditions changing - you yourself acknowledged that conditions change. We add new features to products. We are always doing new things. Therefore, profits continue to exist in a free market. It's just that products that have been around for a long time see their profits going to zero, but new products have profits. I'm thinking out loud here. I'd like to spend more time thinking about this. You did bring up an interesting point, but I think the long-run vs. short-run can explain it....
Phos
P.S. to Codebuster - The only thing I would add to your vegetables example is to point out that labor is part of the selling price, so the farmer can assign some value to his labor - i.e. the amount of money he needs to buy goods and services for his household, or to put it another way, the average amount of money needed to buy goods and services for a household in the market, for the amount of vegetables he is selling - so he wouldn't just be selling it for his costs. Of course, I'm sure you already know this and may have included this in the "costs", but it wasn't clear in your example so I thought I would bring it up.
I've seen this phenomenon you speak of, IT vs. MIS, in another way: The creation of software.
In my previous job, I was a software developer for a Nuclear Power Company, and I fell under the "IT" umbrella. Management decided that engineers should not be writing software, only software developers should be writing software.
I think two main reasons for this was the adherance to software standards, and the future maintenance of the application.
Software standards - The company created tons of Software standards, which drove most good programmers away from them (including myself - Note that I am no longer there).
Future maintenance of the application - the company did not want to be reliant on a single engineer, so they felt that by having the Software group write the software following company standards, that it would be well documented and maintained by that group, instead of being maintained by one engineer.
So, my job consisted of meeting with the engineers, gathering their requirements, and implementing their programs. It was a pretty fulfilling job to see satisfied engineers, but I always felt like such a position would, someday, become obsolete. I mean, the engineers are necessary because they know the business. But why is the software developer truly necessary? He isn't! Technology should advance enough so that the engineers could develop their own programs, without the problems that the company is trying to avoid. In fact, you could say that we are already there, it just may take a few decades before everyone realizes that this is the best practice!
You, nametaken, said it. I have been looking for an alternative to paypal for about 5 years, and while it's not up and running yet, this is very promising. Go Google. Down with Paypal :)
Jason
I have been using DVORAK for 6 years.
:)
I currently type about 80WPM in both DVORAK and QWERTY. I use QWERTY at home, because the wife and I share a computer, and I use DVORAK at work. Switching back and forth is no problem, except for curly braces {}. I can't type a damn curly brace in QWERTY without looking...
Also, as others have pointed out, it is a slight nuisance whenever other people want to use your computer; you have to alt+shift+2 to change to QWERTY, and then alt+shift+1 to change back.
I did not see any speed boosts when switching from QWERTY to DVORAK, but I do feel like my wrists have improved. I was feeling some carpel tunnel pain when I made the switch, and the pain went away within a few weeks!
However, I also started using a wrist rest at the same time, so maybe that was the key factor......
Anyways, I don't plan to ever give it up, because I figure it can't hurt to be proficient in both layouts! Plus, my good friend - FireWrought - uses it, and I want to be able to use his computer
Bravo, Bravo. Tell it like it is, ergo98. I applaud your insight into the need for incentives.
Phos
Adam,
This is a really good point, running a gnutella network within a college. I'll look into it. Of course, what happens if people leak the info to outsiders? Is it possible to use limewire to restrict access? I suppose that, if not, it is a feature that could be easily added to a gnutella client.
Thanks for the idea,
Jason
>I think the author is off base about what would cause another video game crash.
You have a very good insight here. The cost of video games is going up, and horrible games are getting published because a company wants to re-coup some of their investment.
But how off-base is the author? If a lot of horrible video games are ported from pc to the x-box, as he suggests, and the average consumer ends up buying several melons, it may discourage a good portion of the market from the systems.... Then again, maybe everyone is investigating before buying.
Phos
Two comments: We don't all stand it, and it was more like 15 minutes. 1. I, for one, watch very little T.V. Perhaps 2 hours a week. There is so many better ways to spend time than glued to a Television, and commercials underline this point. 2. I didn't time the lengths of segments/commercial breaks, but I did pay a little bit of attention during the second night, and I was estimating it at about 15 minutes/4 minutes. Phos
My Company has over 25,000 desktops.
Right now we are paying a monthly payment per desktop of 20 dollars. This payment licenses one copy of Microsoft's Office suite, NT 4.0, and norton utilities.
I am not sure how much money is given to Microsoft, because the money is also used to fund some number of employees (10-20?), whose job it is to represent our interests with Microsoft, research new versions of Office/NT, write-up common problems/solutions for our 'knowledge base', implement migrations to a newer version, and help our in-house technicians/developers who have Microsoft-specific questions.
Its not a big deal at all. No error will occurr, because the array is not accessed after the else condition.
Holy mother of geniousness. I need to hire one of these lead programmer dudes as a consultant. Maybe they can answer a few other questions I've been mulling over, such as the meaning of life, the universe, and everything after...
Phos
I'm surprised that it took this long for Squeak to be mentioned... I just jumped in to Squeak about a week ago (For a class at school). If you use Squeak to teach your kids programming, and I recommend it, you also get to (have to) spend some time helping them out. They could probably figure out some of it on their own, but no matter how "intuitive for kids" it is supposed to be, they are going to need some pointers. Good luck, and check out http://minnow.cc.gatech.edu/squeak for a good Squeak source. Phos