Watch out for that homeopathic strength chocolate. I think yukk might have kept the cure for himself, because you can't taste any difference between homeopathic strength chocolate and no chocolate at all.
Tell one group they're getting the homeopathic "medicine" and give that to them. Tell the other group that's what they're getting and give them a placebo. Compare the results. That's how accurate results are obtained about the effectiveness of an actual drug against the placebo effect.
No, no, no, no, no!
Secretly assign subjects to be in one of two groups. Each subject gets a substance. It might be the medicine under test, it might be a placebo. Neither the patient nor the person administering the medicine/evaluating the results should know which group the patient was in, i.e. whether the patient got the medicine or the placebo.
Basic science, here. Only Change One Variable At A Time. My fourth-grade daughter learned that in science class. Patient knowing what they're receiving: variable. Administrator knowing what they're giving the patient: variable. Medicine the patient got: variable. Decide what you want to test, and change only that.
Another driver of energy efficiency is how much work has to be done to keep the vehicle on course and speed. For an airplane, this is drag. For a train or car, this is rolling resistance and air drag. CSX is running ads that say they can move a ton of cargo 400 miles on one gallon of fuel (presumably diesel). I don't know if the facts support that number. Steel wheels on steel rails have very low rolling resistance; much lower than pneumatic rubber tires on asphalt or macadam.
And the third driver of energy efficiency is braking losses. How often does the vehicle have to slow down and come to a stop (or slow down going down a grade). Cars and trucks have to stop for traffic. Airplanes and trains, less so.
There are some fundamental limits to what models can predict. If a model demonstrates extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, then any deviation between actual and measured initial conditions will cause the output of the model to deviate from actual at an exponential rate.
Without VisiCalc driving Apple ][ sales, there would have been no IBM PC. So it was a product with world-changing impact.
Talking about "killer products" without talking about VisiCalc is like talking about automobile manufacturing milestones without mentioning Henry Ford's Model T and Assembly Line.
Drill Press and Lathe from 1938. I've replaced the belts, but the rest of the parts (motors, bearings) are all original, and still work (except for the return spring on the drill press). I turned a bowl on that lathe earlier this year.
Apple//e with 4-digit serial number, purchased February 1983, still in my attic. I haven't fired it up in years, and I might, this weekend. Mac Plus from 1986.
Free Markets break down in numerous ways. Externalities, Free-Riders, Monopolies. And no, our current economic slump and the great depression were not caused by meddling in market forces by government agencies, and they were alleviated by "continued meddling".
The trouble is, if he cures all disease, solves world hunger, solves pollution issues thanks to miniaturized cold fusion power, then he moves the entire world very rapidly towards a Utopian Star Trek setting.
If you solve all disease, you reduce the death rate. So your population increases exponentially.
It only takes 250 doublings to go from a single nucleon (i.e. proton or neutron) to the whole of the visible universe. Exponential growth in anything material cannot continue forever.
Capitalism is about the right for individuals to own property, and Free Market is the idea that individuals can make the most responsive efficient rational choices regarding their labor and resources, which of course quickly ties back to the idea of Capitalism.
You are ignoring Market Failures: times when the free market does not produce an efficient solution. Free Markets have several problems:
uncaptured externalities, when an exchange does not capture all of the value or harm. Pollution is a significant uncaptured externality; companies could escape the costs of polluting others' environment.
free rider, when people cannot be prevented from benefiting from a good when they choose not to pay for it. National defense is an example of this. There is no way to enable the army to only protect those who choose to pay for it, and leave those choose not to pay vulnerable.
natural monopolies, when the nature of the good (continually declining marginal costs, or high sunk costs) enables the dominant supplier to undercut all other competitors, and eventually become the sole supplier and rake in monopoly profits.
Middle ground? There is no middle ground. What DOES exist is different questions, but not middle ground. If one tends towards a better society, than a mix of both is certain to be a failure.
Why? Because you say so? Because Ayn Rand wrote it down?
Continuing on from the ellipsis: delivering electricity and natural gas, telephone and cable television services are also natural monopolies. Economics 101 instructs that a free market in any of these services will quickly devolve into a monopoly, and that unregulated monopolies unduly enrich the monopoly owners and impoverish the public.
All three articles suggested that Apple was going to design their own chips for iPods and iPhones. They won't use this in desktop or laptop systems. There's no way to cover the design costs off the miniscule number of chips compared to Intel and AMD.
Recall the history. High-end workstation vendors Sun, Apollo, Silicon Graphics all used Motorola chips. All designed their own RISC processors. All of the RISC processors lost out to Intel/AMD on the low end workstation market, and have almost been obliterated at the high end server market as well.
On the other hand, Apple's investment in ARM payed off quite handsomely. But ARM isn't a desktop processor that competes with Intel/AMD, is it?
Do it with Google in a reliable way, decide whether it would try and answer the question within 0.500000 seconds, and then parse the results into a sentence, prepend "who/what is/are" within ten seconds, and have the answer make sense?
The one area where the machine has the human players beat is in reaction time. It can measure and respond to the "half second after Alex stops speaking" rule with much more precision than any human player could manage. It could even notice when it didn't successfully buzz in, and adjust it's reaction time to the timekeepers.
Yeah, but Silverlight and ASP.NET bind you tightly to the Microsoft server platform.
Server-side Java code can run on free stacks all the way down to the operating system, as well as on proprietary stacks. Silverlight/ASP.NET, not so much.
It's worse than that. Time Warner was one of the incumbent cable operators. They were making enough money in the market, so they chose not to increase their investment to improve their services. So the citizens banded together, took a vote, and built improved infrastructure using new technology, fiber vs. coax. Now Time Warner isn't making as much as they used to, and they're crying (via lobbyists) to the government that the municipality isn't being fair.
As an investor, I can demand all I want. Demanding doesn't keep stock prices from falling. I can demand 10% interest. I won't get it in a realistic investment when the Fed is loaning money at near zero.
Remember, Greenlight was going to compete with Time Warner. Time Warner didn't like the idea of having competition, so they're trying to kill the competition, not with a better product at the same price or a comparable product at a lower price, but with lobbying another government to shut down their competition. That's not a free-market economy; that's oppressive government.
But I wonder how many people who are criticizing Time Warner over this really understand what they're arguing in favor of. They're arguing in favor of an economic system that is designed to be anti-competitive and to provide services for less than a private company ever could.
Are you mad? Or a shill for Time-Warner?
The current system is absolutely, totally anti-competitive. I have one choice for cable: Time Warner. They just raised my rates $6/month. I can't "go to the competition" because there isn't any. Time Warner has a monopoly, and they like it like that, because they can keep on raising my rates and I don't have another provider to turn to.
Is there something wrong with getting my water from the village at a dollar for hundreds of cubic feet rather than in bottles (put there by a private company) from the privately-owned grocery store? I'm getting charged far less than a private company ever would.
Surveys show that prices are lower and services are better when the consumer has a choice of two competing cable services rather than one. Since noone is forcing the cable companies into those competitive markets, one has to conclude that they're making money in them. And making lots more money in the non-competitive markets, because they can charge higher prices. Because there is no competition. And you have the nerve to suggest that a city-owned utility, competing with those private monopolists, is anti-competitive?
My car is almost 13 years old, with over 205,000 miles on it. I need to do something about some tiny rust spots on the hood.
About 3 years ago, the transmission started failing. I took it to my mechanic. He put in a rebuilt transmission, for $2,200.
The price for a replacement battery pack for a Prius is around $2,000, and falling according to third-hand reports. The warranty on hybrid components is 8 years/100,000 miles, and the battery warranty could be longer under the emissions warranty.
So the battery replacement costs are not terribly out of line with other major component repairs. They may come a little sooner than engine or transmission work, or maybe later, depending on your driving habits and luck.
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Watch out for that homeopathic strength chocolate. I think yukk might have kept the cure for himself, because you can't taste any difference between homeopathic strength chocolate and no chocolate at all.
No, no, no, no, no!
Secretly assign subjects to be in one of two groups. Each subject gets a substance. It might be the medicine under test, it might be a placebo. Neither the patient nor the person administering the medicine/evaluating the results should know which group the patient was in, i.e. whether the patient got the medicine or the placebo.
Basic science, here. Only Change One Variable At A Time. My fourth-grade daughter learned that in science class. Patient knowing what they're receiving: variable. Administrator knowing what they're giving the patient: variable. Medicine the patient got: variable. Decide what you want to test, and change only that.
Another driver of energy efficiency is how much work has to be done to keep the vehicle on course and speed. For an airplane, this is drag. For a train or car, this is rolling resistance and air drag. CSX is running ads that say they can move a ton of cargo 400 miles on one gallon of fuel (presumably diesel). I don't know if the facts support that number. Steel wheels on steel rails have very low rolling resistance; much lower than pneumatic rubber tires on asphalt or macadam.
And the third driver of energy efficiency is braking losses. How often does the vehicle have to slow down and come to a stop (or slow down going down a grade). Cars and trucks have to stop for traffic. Airplanes and trains, less so.
In the USA, as of around 10 years ago, gifts to family members of $10,000 or less did not have to be reported and were not taxable income.
There are some fundamental limits to what models can predict. If a model demonstrates extreme sensitivity to initial conditions, then any deviation between actual and measured initial conditions will cause the output of the model to deviate from actual at an exponential rate.
Without VisiCalc driving Apple ][ sales, there would have been no IBM PC. So it was a product with world-changing impact.
Talking about "killer products" without talking about VisiCalc is like talking about automobile manufacturing milestones without mentioning Henry Ford's Model T and Assembly Line.
Lame.
They marketed the hell out of the product (dunkle?) But before that, they designed a significantly more usable interface to the product.
No. Concrete = cement + gravel + sand.
Drill Press and Lathe from 1938. I've replaced the belts, but the rest of the parts (motors, bearings) are all original, and still work (except for the return spring on the drill press). I turned a bowl on that lathe earlier this year.
Apple //e with 4-digit serial number, purchased February 1983, still in my attic. I haven't fired it up in years, and I might, this weekend. Mac Plus from 1986.
Not so.
Free Markets break down in numerous ways. Externalities, Free-Riders, Monopolies. And no, our current economic slump and the great depression were not caused by meddling in market forces by government agencies, and they were alleviated by "continued meddling".
If you solve all disease, you reduce the death rate. So your population increases exponentially.
It only takes 250 doublings to go from a single nucleon (i.e. proton or neutron) to the whole of the visible universe. Exponential growth in anything material cannot continue forever.
You are ignoring Market Failures: times when the free market does not produce an efficient solution. Free Markets have several problems:
Why? Because you say so? Because Ayn Rand wrote it down?
Continuing on from the ellipsis: delivering electricity and natural gas, telephone and cable television services are also natural monopolies. Economics 101 instructs that a free market in any of these services will quickly devolve into a monopoly, and that unregulated monopolies unduly enrich the monopoly owners and impoverish the public.
Boiling hot coffee is having the flavor cooked out of it. Coffee is best when brewed at 180-190 degrees F, and served at 120.
All three articles suggested that Apple was going to design their own chips for iPods and iPhones. They won't use this in desktop or laptop systems. There's no way to cover the design costs off the miniscule number of chips compared to Intel and AMD.
Recall the history. High-end workstation vendors Sun, Apollo, Silicon Graphics all used Motorola chips. All designed their own RISC processors. All of the RISC processors lost out to Intel/AMD on the low end workstation market, and have almost been obliterated at the high end server market as well.
On the other hand, Apple's investment in ARM payed off quite handsomely. But ARM isn't a desktop processor that competes with Intel/AMD, is it?
It would be perfectly fair. If it doesn't come up with the answer, it loses money. Same rule the human players are under.
Do it with Google in a reliable way, decide whether it would try and answer the question within 0.500000 seconds, and then parse the results into a sentence, prepend "who/what is/are" within ten seconds, and have the answer make sense?
The one area where the machine has the human players beat is in reaction time. It can measure and respond to the "half second after Alex stops speaking" rule with much more precision than any human player could manage. It could even notice when it didn't successfully buzz in, and adjust it's reaction time to the timekeepers.
Yeah, but Silverlight and ASP.NET bind you tightly to the Microsoft server platform.
Server-side Java code can run on free stacks all the way down to the operating system, as well as on proprietary stacks. Silverlight/ASP.NET, not so much.
It's worse than that. Time Warner was one of the incumbent cable operators. They were making enough money in the market, so they chose not to increase their investment to improve their services. So the citizens banded together, took a vote, and built improved infrastructure using new technology, fiber vs. coax. Now Time Warner isn't making as much as they used to, and they're crying (via lobbyists) to the government that the municipality isn't being fair.
CPI (Consumer Price Index, a measure of inflation) was -0.4% (that's negative; prices went down) March 2008 to March 2009.
My Time Warner cable bill was +4.8% for Feb 2008 to Feb 2009.
CPI's got nothing to do with it.
As an investor, I can demand all I want. Demanding doesn't keep stock prices from falling. I can demand 10% interest. I won't get it in a realistic investment when the Fed is loaning money at near zero.
Remember, Greenlight was going to compete with Time Warner. Time Warner didn't like the idea of having competition, so they're trying to kill the competition, not with a better product at the same price or a comparable product at a lower price, but with lobbying another government to shut down their competition. That's not a free-market economy; that's oppressive government.
Are you mad? Or a shill for Time-Warner?
The current system is absolutely, totally anti-competitive. I have one choice for cable: Time Warner. They just raised my rates $6/month. I can't "go to the competition" because there isn't any. Time Warner has a monopoly, and they like it like that, because they can keep on raising my rates and I don't have another provider to turn to.
Is there something wrong with getting my water from the village at a dollar for hundreds of cubic feet rather than in bottles (put there by a private company) from the privately-owned grocery store? I'm getting charged far less than a private company ever would.
Surveys show that prices are lower and services are better when the consumer has a choice of two competing cable services rather than one. Since noone is forcing the cable companies into those competitive markets, one has to conclude that they're making money in them. And making lots more money in the non-competitive markets, because they can charge higher prices. Because there is no competition. And you have the nerve to suggest that a city-owned utility, competing with those private monopolists, is anti-competitive?
You seem to be confusing "gross revenue" with "net revenue". There are a few hands in that $180,112,419 pie that are not the movie studio's.
My car is almost 13 years old, with over 205,000 miles on it. I need to do something about some tiny rust spots on the hood.
About 3 years ago, the transmission started failing. I took it to my mechanic. He put in a rebuilt transmission, for $2,200.
The price for a replacement battery pack for a Prius is around $2,000, and falling according to third-hand reports. The warranty on hybrid components is 8 years/100,000 miles, and the battery warranty could be longer under the emissions warranty.
So the battery replacement costs are not terribly out of line with other major component repairs. They may come a little sooner than engine or transmission work, or maybe later, depending on your driving habits and luck.