Setting off every nuclear weapon will not destroy "the earth"... if by "the earth" you mean the massive ball of (mostly) iron and rock that rotates and revolves.
Much easier than destroying "the earth" is ending all life on earth.
Even easier than that, is ending the ability for humans to live on the earth. One big enough bang, Yuucutan-style, and we go the way of the large dinosaurs. This much smaller goal is well within our capabilities as a species. Sadly, it may also be within our intelligence.
The catch - and Microsoft's biggest problem - is that when you own a market share that effectively gives you the same influence as a true monopoly, then you are (or should be) legally held to the same constraints and conduct standards.
You are legally held to the same constraints and conduct standards... until you buy off the government.
Had all the votes in Florida actually been counted in 2000, MS would have gotten some pain from the Gore administration.
You're right. I misread your original post, and the Microsoft Anti-Trust trial was a few years ago. I forgot that Microsoft's past conduct, the per-processor licensing agreement and the cliff pricing agreement, got entered into evidence to show a pattern of behavior.
And you're right again about MS finding a way to benefit from a loss, too.
Absurd: In a free market, no abusive monopoly would stay that way -- competitors, smelling profits, would start supplying effective alternatives.
Apparently, you dropped out of your Econ 101 course before they covered market failures. Or techniques a monopoly can use to prevent competitors from having much success.
Wrong court action. The "Per processor" tying was never the subject of a trial, only an action by the FTC that Microsoft settled by agreeing not to do it any more. Of course, what Microsoft did was to institute "Cliff Pricing" which had the exact same effect.
It is illegal for a company to tie the purchase of a monopoly product to the purchase of a competitive product. I.e. they may not say "you must purchase our product I, instead of competitor's product N, in order to get our monopoly product W." Such ties are likely to result in the monopoly provider taking over a formerly competitive market, even though their competitive product is inferior to the competition.
So Microsoft cannot "give away" product "I" by "including it free" with product "W". That is an illegal tieing.
It used to be 17 years from the granting of the patent.
Lemuelson gamed the system, filing early, vague patents, and then amending them as other people developed technologies. He got patents on things he didn't invent, and abused those patents to became tremendously wealthy.
Patents do not give the inventor a period of time to make an attempt to deliver to consumers a complex manufactured product incorporating a new idea.
Patents give the patent holder grounds on which to sue alleged violators of the patent. The patent holder may succeed with the lawsuit, or may fail. The legal battle will be expensive, and the lawyers will make out well.
Just because one person fails to fly, doesn't mean flight is impossible
But if person after person after person fails to fly, and calculations of lift show that it is not possible to generate enough lift to fly, then it is very likely that it is impossible to fly.
The patent office will no longer consider patents for perpetual motion machines. Is this unfair discrimination against alternate energy sources? Or a practical decision to avoid wasting time on schemes by fraudsters and kooks?
In 1983, AT&T and the government agreed to divide into eight pieces, the "new AT&T" and the seven "Baby Bells", because the long distance business was subsidizing the local business, and the local business was locking out competitors to the long distance business.
Of the seven "Baby Bells", Bell Atlantic gobbled up NYNEX and then merged with GTE to form Cingular. Southwestern Bell renamed itself SBC and gobbled up Pacific Telesys and then Ameritech, U S WEST got bought by QWEST, and now SBC has gobbled up the husk of AT&T and is making a play for BellSouth.
And the cell phone revolution happened.
AT&T, after divestiture, bought NCR, got indigestion, and then spun back out the New NCR and Lucent.
I have a sony XBR TV set from 1988. Still going strong. It did need repairs a few years back (thermal stresses caused a connection to work loose), and the first shop didn't fix it right. The second did.
A lightning strike on the house across the street killed a lot of electronics in the house, including a $500 Pioneer receiver from circa 1990, and the modem on the TiVo. But the TV came through fine.
I'll look at High-Def when this set conks out. Blu-Ray vs. HDDVD should be settled by then.
I bought a craftsman lawn mower in 1995. It's still going storong. Paint is coming off the bottom of the deck, so it's going to rust out in four or five more years.
It's an electric, and I haven't run over the cord yet. My ex-wife, and the neighbor boy who mowed the lawn for a while have each cut one. That's why I mow the lawn now.
Re:Meaning, for those who are curious.
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Beginning Ubuntu Linux
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Or as one talk in some other book noted (I think it was "the 3 pillars of zen"), everything we see is just the mental representation of visual input. We don't see a chair, our eyes detect the patterns of light bouncing off the chair, and what we experience is a mental composite of that image and our thoughts and ideas about chairs. In essense, what we experience isn't the chair, but our own mental image of a chair. Fundamentally every experience is not external but internal, the chair that we see is actually as much a part of us as our arm or our leg or our thoughts.
But we do experience things that are external to our mental image of things. If I sneak up behind you and clonk you on the head, you have no preparatory mental experience of me, but you would experience cuts, bruises, and (possibly) broken bones. Fundamentally that experience is external, as you had no internal experience or expectation to which it could corresponded.
Pathogenic Disease is another area where you have no internal states at the outbreak of symptoms, but there is an external agent causing your experiences.
I find the whole internal/external debate to be useless and sterile. There is an external world out there, and it will affect you, whether you want it to or not, and no philosophers can change that.
To an American audience, reading Adams in the original English English, "Ford Prefect" doesn't really stand out. Translating it into American English would be "Ford Pinto" in the 1970s, or maybe "Ford Escort" in the 1990s. A common name, one that wouldn't really stand out.
Re:Oh yeah, I've seen predictions like this before
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No More Next Big Thing?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I thought the Michelson quote had another sentence: "now, if we can only figure out why these salts fog our photographic plates..." Or was that an ad-lib by my Physics Professor? (Dr. Thomas Eck, CWRU)
The thinking was that to the room of physics knowledge in 1896, the radioactivity door led only to a small closet of additional knowledge, rather than opening out into the wide, wide world.
In 1896, noone knew what made the sun shine. Now we do.
IMHO, precision chemistry (e.g. nanotechnology) will lead to some amazing things, but not at all the ones that people expect. K. Erich Drexler's universal manipulator will not happen, and a space elevator is a lot more likely. Precision fibers and laminates will do surprising things. MEMS and biotechnology will shake things up.
As fossil fuels dwindle and become more expensive, energy conservation will become more important, as will turning plant material into liquid fuels. There will be much innovation in how to do things using less energy, or less fuel. The accelleration in processor power will slow down, as thermal and quantum effects become more and more important and harder to overcome. But storage technologies, hard disk and flash will continue improving.
All of the changing ratios of relative costs will keep innovators busy finding better solutions to the changing problems.
The development of the still with cooled collector -- necessary for the efficient distillation of spirits without freezing -- was an invention of Arab and Persian alchemists in the 8th or 9th centuries.
Not so much the invention, but the act of making the process efficient.
Unfortunately, the nations with the most muslims are not places where arabic is spoken. India is number one, Indonesia is number two, and Pakistan is number three.
Scientists, doing science, make predictions about the future based on observations of past behavior. Since radical changes in the behavior of the physical world have never been observed before, it is unlikely that they will occur.
On the other hand, believers in an omnipotent deity have to deal with the possibility that their deity will stop the sun in its trek across the sky, and other such radical violations of the laws of physics or astronomy.
Empires come and empires go. Europe was really quite backward in 1450, compared to the great empires of the age. A few centuries of unending warfare, though, gave Europe the weapons (and other technologies) that enabled them to defeat other empires that had stagnated and turned inward.
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Setting off every nuclear weapon will not destroy "the earth"... if by "the earth" you mean the massive ball of (mostly) iron and rock that rotates and revolves.
Much easier than destroying "the earth" is ending all life on earth.
Even easier than that, is ending the ability for humans to live on the earth. One big enough bang, Yuucutan-style, and we go the way of the large dinosaurs. This much smaller goal is well within our capabilities as a species. Sadly, it may also be within our intelligence.
Had all the votes in Florida actually been counted in 2000, MS would have gotten some pain from the Gore administration.
You're right. I misread your original post, and the Microsoft Anti-Trust trial was a few years ago. I forgot that Microsoft's past conduct, the per-processor licensing agreement and the cliff pricing agreement, got entered into evidence to show a pattern of behavior.
And you're right again about MS finding a way to benefit from a loss, too.
Wrong court action. The "Per processor" tying was never the subject of a trial, only an action by the FTC that Microsoft settled by agreeing not to do it any more. Of course, what Microsoft did was to institute "Cliff Pricing" which had the exact same effect.
It is illegal for a company to tie the purchase of a monopoly product to the purchase of a competitive product. I.e. they may not say "you must purchase our product I, instead of competitor's product N, in order to get our monopoly product W." Such ties are likely to result in the monopoly provider taking over a formerly competitive market, even though their competitive product is inferior to the competition.
So Microsoft cannot "give away" product "I" by "including it free" with product "W". That is an illegal tieing.
And Microsoft was convicted of abusing their monopoly.
They didn't learn their lesson, and they're at it again.
TiVo is the first to let you watch the beginning of a show while still recording the end of the show.
It used to be 17 years from the granting of the patent.
Lemuelson gamed the system, filing early, vague patents, and then amending them as other people developed technologies. He got patents on things he didn't invent, and abused those patents to became tremendously wealthy.
Patents do not give the inventor a period of time to make an attempt to deliver to consumers a complex manufactured product incorporating a new idea.
Patents give the patent holder grounds on which to sue alleged violators of the patent. The patent holder may succeed with the lawsuit, or may fail. The legal battle will be expensive, and the lawyers will make out well.
The patent office will no longer consider patents for perpetual motion machines. Is this unfair discrimination against alternate energy sources? Or a practical decision to avoid wasting time on schemes by fraudsters and kooks?
In 1983, AT&T and the government agreed to divide into eight pieces, the "new AT&T" and the seven "Baby Bells", because the long distance business was subsidizing the local business, and the local business was locking out competitors to the long distance business.
Of the seven "Baby Bells", Bell Atlantic gobbled up NYNEX and then merged with GTE to form Cingular. Southwestern Bell renamed itself SBC and gobbled up Pacific Telesys and then Ameritech, U S WEST got bought by QWEST, and now SBC has gobbled up the husk of AT&T and is making a play for BellSouth.
And the cell phone revolution happened.
AT&T, after divestiture, bought NCR, got indigestion, and then spun back out the New NCR and Lucent.
I have a sony XBR TV set from 1988. Still going strong. It did need repairs a few years back (thermal stresses caused a connection to work loose), and the first shop didn't fix it right. The second did.
A lightning strike on the house across the street killed a lot of electronics in the house, including a $500 Pioneer receiver from circa 1990, and the modem on the TiVo. But the TV came through fine.
I'll look at High-Def when this set conks out. Blu-Ray vs. HDDVD should be settled by then.
I bought a craftsman lawn mower in 1995. It's still going storong. Paint is coming off the bottom of the deck, so it's going to rust out in four or five more years.
It's an electric, and I haven't run over the cord yet. My ex-wife, and the neighbor boy who mowed the lawn for a while have each cut one. That's why I mow the lawn now.
Pathogenic Disease is another area where you have no internal states at the outbreak of symptoms, but there is an external agent causing your experiences.
I find the whole internal/external debate to be useless and sterile. There is an external world out there, and it will affect you, whether you want it to or not, and no philosophers can change that.
The problem with voting is that Florida's Electoral Votes were given to the wrong candidate in 2000. Florida voted for Gore, not Bush.
To an American audience, reading Adams in the original English English, "Ford Prefect" doesn't really stand out. Translating it into American English would be "Ford Pinto" in the 1970s, or maybe "Ford Escort" in the 1990s. A common name, one that wouldn't really stand out.
I thought the Michelson quote had another sentence: "now, if we can only figure out why these salts fog our photographic plates..." Or was that an ad-lib by my Physics Professor? (Dr. Thomas Eck, CWRU)
The thinking was that to the room of physics knowledge in 1896, the radioactivity door led only to a small closet of additional knowledge, rather than opening out into the wide, wide world.
In 1896, noone knew what made the sun shine. Now we do.
IMHO, precision chemistry (e.g. nanotechnology) will lead to some amazing things, but not at all the ones that people expect. K. Erich Drexler's universal manipulator will not happen, and a space elevator is a lot more likely. Precision fibers and laminates will do surprising things. MEMS and biotechnology will shake things up.
As fossil fuels dwindle and become more expensive, energy conservation will become more important, as will turning plant material into liquid fuels. There will be much innovation in how to do things using less energy, or less fuel. The accelleration in processor power will slow down, as thermal and quantum effects become more and more important and harder to overcome. But storage technologies, hard disk and flash will continue improving.
All of the changing ratios of relative costs will keep innovators busy finding better solutions to the changing problems.
I flew transatlantic out of LGA... once to Paris (Air France), once to London (I don't recall the airline). Maybe it was a B767 or a larger Airbus.
Yes, the landings there are dramatic.
Not so much the invention, but the act of making the process efficient.
Your thesis is interesting.
Unfortunately, the nations with the most muslims are not places where arabic is spoken. India is number one, Indonesia is number two, and Pakistan is number three.
Even with your correction, you are wrong.
Scientists, doing science, make predictions about the future based on observations of past behavior. Since radical changes in the behavior of the physical world have never been observed before, it is unlikely that they will occur.
On the other hand, believers in an omnipotent deity have to deal with the possibility that their deity will stop the sun in its trek across the sky, and other such radical violations of the laws of physics or astronomy.
Empires come and empires go. Europe was really quite backward in 1450, compared to the great empires of the age. A few centuries of unending warfare, though, gave Europe the weapons (and other technologies) that enabled them to defeat other empires that had stagnated and turned inward.
Sabra. Shatilla. Srebrenica. Oklahoma city.
"Christian Identity".
Just because you do not remember them does not mean they did not happen.