when you're cooking for one or two people, it's easier and cheaper to eat out, particularly when you factor in time of preparation.
I can cook something more quickly than I could get to a restaurant, so preparation time isn't an issue, and I certainly think the cost comparison can't be true -- the meal I made on Saturday would have come to maybe 3 quid for 2 big servings. I wouldn't weant to eat in a restaurant which charged less than that. Took about 5 minutes preparation (human time, rather more elapsed of course).
I recently hunted down a sudden spike in bandwidth use on one of our servers to a picture of my nephew. I had stupidly left the full-resoultion image beside a web friendly one and people from all over the world had decided to have a look. It really doesn't take many to be noticable when the file is 500MB.
My best guess is that the fact that my nephew's name, which was in the filename, is a simple one-letter typo away from that of a saint whose feast day was close to the start of the rise in bandwidth was the cause. Bloody google.
And we "socialist" fit #1 fairly well if I do say so myself.
Well, given that socialist ideas go back centuries, they are as established, traditional and orthodox as you might wish.
But it is always a bad idea to rely on a dictionary in debate, ridiculous when you propose to use it to prove that a word has the same meaning everywere and pointless when you are looking at technical vocabulary, as in this case for the description of political philosophies.
Liberal pretty much means the same thing here in the US too. It's an english word after all.
``Two nations divided by a common language''.
By observation from outside, `liberal' as a political label in the US has been completely subverted by a bizzare cooperative move from left (who wanted to co-opt the label) and right (for whom the ideas traditionally associated with the label, free markets, personal responsibility etc, were dangerous).
As an indication of the change, consider the fact that The Economist, being British and liberal, but with a large US readership, regularly feels the need to remind readers what it means by the word.
BTW, contrary to the impliction in the story summary, the 2008 Free Choice organisation is not liberal per-se but pro-democracy. Perhaps all the big members are liberals, I don't know, but the aim of the organisation is to try and get Russia moving back towards democracy.
In your eagerness to discredit and malign Bush[...]
I haven't written anything bad about Bush. That he is anti-science is, if anything, a good thing - he was elected to be anti-science. That there is a large anti-science constituency in the US is the worying thing.
you imply that anyone who believes in the feasibility and value of attempts to go to Mars[...]
And I said nothing at all about people who propose Mars missions.
I just said that Bush is not proposing anything real WRT Mars. That is not a value judgement, it is an observation of the man's concrete behaviour. Whether it is good or bad is a personal judgement.
Personally, I think a programme which was targeted at creating the infrastructure for regular and extended presence on the moon and the, when feasable, Mars would be a very Good Thing. OTOH, an Apolo style `send up some jocks in a tin can to have their photos taken' scheme which leaves nothing behind but a bad feeling about manned space exploration in the public mind would be worse than useless.
Bush want's neither. He wanted a quick JFK moment, so he made a speech. Everything else is just very expensive post-press-conference fodder for the press. Hopefully, some scientists and engineers are diverting some of the resources to something useful, but that is not what Bush intended, he just wanted the pretty TV pictures and the headlines and maybe the odd gullable space-nerd's vote.
All in all it takes about 5 minutes to produce your own COMPLETE high quality audio cd. For free.
Life is too short. Buy the CD and do something fun with the 5 minutes.
Far less work and time than getting in the car and going to a store staffed by mostly clueless people.
I go to the shops regularly anyway. The marginal time to pick up a CD and have it scanned is maybe 10 seconds.
Far far less work than ordering online and hoping it shows up someday unbroken.
I seriously doubt you can point me to a download site where it takes me sigificantly less screen time to request the content of a CD than it does to order it from a decent online shop. After all they are doing the same job (picking from a database of CDs) up until the point where you have to worry about the download, and I just push `send me those'.
If it doesn't show up the next day I'd be pissed off and shop somewhere else. If it was broken I'd get my money back.
And that your account and credit information stay secure.
Not my problem. Credit cards come with protection schemes for that kind of thing. If there is something on the bill that wasn't me I don't pay it, and the CC company can argue with the retailer. If the CC company couldn't explain why the bogus entry is there I'd cancel the card and get another half dozen from the many companmies desperate to issue them.
In fact, after a long history of buying online, I have never had a problem. I have had problems in the `real world' because real world retailers don't worry as much about such things as online shops do.
I never said anything was Bush's fault. I just said that his PR bullshit about mars is not an indication that he has any interest in science.
Bush is actually a quite open and honest guy, as politicians go. He has, so far as I can see from over here, done more or less exactly what he was elected to do. That he has, for instance, been running the US economy like an 8 year old who has lifted his mother's credit card is the fault of those who voted him in saying he would do exactly that.
In the current context, he has made no secret of his anti-science stance. Science is the evil stuff which denys divinely revealed truth and doesn't recognise single cells as being as important as adult human beings. Went down a storm in enough of America to make it official US policy. That science also sometimes points out facts uncomfortable to the oil industry is, of course, just a coincidence:-).
If we don't get self-sufficient colonies off of this rock, humanity itself could be extinguished when the next big disaster strikes.
But Bush's silly grandstanding has no relationship to any long term goals such as collonisation. It's just PR blather. There is no political gain fron making a speech about how you are putting N billion over 20 years into development of, say, closed life support systems. Artists impressions of boxes of pipes just don't look good behind the speaker in the way that pictures of people doing nothing interesting on mars do.
To me, the big difference is that anyone can develop a chemical dependency, a psychological dependency implies some pre-existing defect.
Surely, the suceptability to become addicted to alcohol is a pre-existing defect.
Perhaps a better distinction is between things which pervert and undermine the functioning of the brain, and unwelcome consequences of the brain's normal operation. For instance, opiates mimic natural brain chemicals and so can cause operational problems. OTOH, sex is just pleasent, that causes a normal and healthy response that `hey I want more of this', and the problem comes if people's priorities get screwed up.
There is a borderline class around activities which release floods of endorphines. These can cause people to do unpleasent things (such as cutting themselves or gambling, which without the rush is just stress). Extreme cases here are just another way to get opiate like chemicals into the brain without having to find a needle. But most talk of `gambling addiction' is really just about people who like to gamble and won't take advice to stop.
An addiction can, in one sense, be defined as a behaviour which the user is unable to successfully resist
If you redefine words you can get anywhere. For instance, you have just extended `addiction' to cover everything from reflexes to `oh what the hell I may as well have another biscuit'.
If calling it an addiction gets them the help they need to stop hurting themselves, then the world is a better place.
If it diverts resources from people who actually have real addiction problems to people who are voluntarilly surfing the Web, I think that is to everyone's disadvantage.
Alcohol addiction is far more serious than internet addiction.
This is because there is no such thing as internet addiction.
Alcohol. niccotine, heroin, caffine and perhaps chocolate are (potentially) addictive. Internet use, gambling, sex and food are merely things some people enjoy so much that they can't bring themselevs to give them up.
Social scientists and journalists who use `addiction' to mean `habit' are just snake oil salesmen. You can get big bucks researching and reporting on addiction, but rather less for investigating self-indulgence.
What is it that makes Firefox better than Mozilla?
Smaller, faster, more stable. Firefox might tempt me away from Opera, Mozilla never would have.
To be fair, Mozilla is rather better now than it was when firefox was young - stays up for hours at a time, and the area where Mz stinks most for me is only marginally (and I suspect accidentally) better in Firefox, 'cos it's something no one at mozilla.org cares about (Java support, just the thing which M$ handed to them on a plate...)
[The administration has been anti-science since the beginning and shows no signs of letting up.]
That's why Bush was pushing for a Mars mission, right?
Yep. Bush will go for silly not-gonna-happen-and-no-point-if-it-did stuff rather than science any day.
NASA's internal beauracracy
Just as a data point, NASA is asking for $77 million next year just to fund changes to their financial reporting systems. Ie the noise in the flapping around the edges of the work of the people who couldn't find $4mil for Voyager would fund it for nearly 10 years.
Well, unless you are assuming perfect information[...]and that no company has market power
No, that's the point, market power costs money to excercise (eg Intel has to pay people not to buy AMD, or keep it's prices below reasonable cost plu margin or whatever), so given a perfectly stable open market etc. etc. eventually the little guys who keep nipping at the monopolist's ankles will bring it down.
Unfortunatly, in the real world, there are barriers to entry, especially international ones and the world changes under us. And, of course, economic theories tend to assume agents in the market behave rationally, which we know is bollocks.
If there is only one grocer in your town selling adulterated flour, while all the rest are selling quality stuff, he has a monopoly on adulterated flour. Is that a bad thing? Would your life be improved if some of the others moved into the adulteration business?
Obviously if a company is buying more of a competitor's products then they're buying less of yours, so your own are more expensive to them because they are buying in lower quantities.
But, if you read the article, that is not what was happening.
Rather, the scheme was that if I was buying 1,000,000 intel chips, and you were buying 1,000,000 intel chips plus 500,000 AMD chips, my intel chips would be cheaper. Ie it is not an issue of bulk discounts, but rather of bribes not to buy anything from AMD.
Now, pure free market theory would say this is fine, evenetually Intel will run out of money and the 10th firm to be built on the ashes of AMD will win out. However, that could take 50 years or perhaps longer than the integrated circuit industry will exist for. Anti-monopoly laws exist on the theory that a small distortion of the free market to speed up that attrition process and maintain some competition now is a general win.
Not necesarily - they might not have understood the licence.
A BSD style licence's are remarkably simple. Anyone who could fail to understand is not someone likely to be able to produce software anyone else would want to use:-).
Now, the GPL is a different matter. The amount of bandwidth on Usenet and other places which has been eaten trying to explain the ramifications of the GPL is an indication that it is fundamentally too complex to be sane.
Slashdot Mirror
I can cook something more quickly than I could get to a restaurant, so preparation time isn't an issue, and I certainly think the cost comparison can't be true -- the meal I made on Saturday would have come to maybe 3 quid for 2 big servings. I wouldn't weant to eat in a restaurant which charged less than that. Took about 5 minutes preparation (human time, rather more elapsed of course).
I recently hunted down a sudden spike in bandwidth use on one of our servers to a picture of my nephew. I had stupidly left the full-resoultion image beside a web friendly one and people from all over the world had decided to have a look. It really doesn't take many to be noticable when the file is 500MB.
My best guess is that the fact that my nephew's name, which was in the filename, is a simple one-letter typo away from that of a saint whose feast day was close to the start of the rise in bandwidth was the cause. Bloody google.
This might make some sense if the words "the pursuit of happiness" were actually in the bill of rights.
As it is I have to suspect you have been persuing happiness a little too much today:-).
Just leaves more rampant studmuffin for us real men, eh?
<Cough!><Choke!><Splutter!>
Blair liberal? The man who is as we write attempting to eliminate habeas corpus from the UK legal system?
On what planet is that considered liberal?
Well, given that socialist ideas go back centuries, they are as established, traditional and orthodox as you might wish.
But it is always a bad idea to rely on a dictionary in debate, ridiculous when you propose to use it to prove that a word has the same meaning everywere and pointless when you are looking at technical vocabulary, as in this case for the description of political philosophies.
``Two nations divided by a common language''.
By observation from outside, `liberal' as a political label in the US has been completely subverted by a bizzare cooperative move from left (who wanted to co-opt the label) and right (for whom the ideas traditionally associated with the label, free markets, personal responsibility etc, were dangerous).
As an indication of the change, consider the fact that The Economist, being British and liberal, but with a large US readership, regularly feels the need to remind readers what it means by the word.
BTW, contrary to the impliction in the story summary, the 2008 Free Choice organisation is not liberal per-se but pro-democracy. Perhaps all the big members are liberals, I don't know, but the aim of the organisation is to try and get Russia moving back towards democracy.
The USA does have a bill of rights, and the government can do as it pleases.
He's targetting 10 year olds rather than 6 year olds.
I haven't written anything bad about Bush. That he is anti-science is, if anything, a good thing - he was elected to be anti-science. That there is a large anti-science constituency in the US is the worying thing.
you imply that anyone who believes in the feasibility and value of attempts to go to Mars[...]
And I said nothing at all about people who propose Mars missions.
I just said that Bush is not proposing anything real WRT Mars. That is not a value judgement, it is an observation of the man's concrete behaviour. Whether it is good or bad is a personal judgement.
Personally, I think a programme which was targeted at creating the infrastructure for regular and extended presence on the moon and the, when feasable, Mars would be a very Good Thing. OTOH, an Apolo style `send up some jocks in a tin can to have their photos taken' scheme which leaves nothing behind but a bad feeling about manned space exploration in the public mind would be worse than useless.
Bush want's neither. He wanted a quick JFK moment, so he made a speech. Everything else is just very expensive post-press-conference fodder for the press. Hopefully, some scientists and engineers are diverting some of the resources to something useful, but that is not what Bush intended, he just wanted the pretty TV pictures and the headlines and maybe the odd gullable space-nerd's vote.
Life is too short. Buy the CD and do something fun with the 5 minutes.
Far less work and time than getting in the car and going to a store staffed by mostly clueless people.
I go to the shops regularly anyway. The marginal time to pick up a CD and have it scanned is maybe 10 seconds.
Far far less work than ordering online and hoping it shows up someday unbroken.
I seriously doubt you can point me to a download site where it takes me sigificantly less screen time to request the content of a CD than it does to order it from a decent online shop. After all they are doing the same job (picking from a database of CDs) up until the point where you have to worry about the download, and I just push `send me those'.
If it doesn't show up the next day I'd be pissed off and shop somewhere else. If it was broken I'd get my money back.
And that your account and credit information stay secure.
Not my problem. Credit cards come with protection schemes for that kind of thing. If there is something on the bill that wasn't me I don't pay it, and the CC company can argue with the retailer. If the CC company couldn't explain why the bogus entry is there I'd cancel the card and get another half dozen from the many companmies desperate to issue them.
In fact, after a long history of buying online, I have never had a problem. I have had problems in the `real world' because real world retailers don't worry as much about such things as online shops do.
I never said anything was Bush's fault. I just said that his PR bullshit about mars is not an indication that he has any interest in science.
Bush is actually a quite open and honest guy, as politicians go. He has, so far as I can see from over here, done more or less exactly what he was elected to do. That he has, for instance, been running the US economy like an 8 year old who has lifted his mother's credit card is the fault of those who voted him in saying he would do exactly that.
In the current context, he has made no secret of his anti-science stance. Science is the evil stuff which denys divinely revealed truth and doesn't recognise single cells as being as important as adult human beings. Went down a storm in enough of America to make it official US policy. That science also sometimes points out facts uncomfortable to the oil industry is, of course, just a coincidence:-).
Note, that is not the cost of their accounting, it is the one-yesr cost of some changes to their accounting which are taking many years.
No, he's shooting for some short term headlines.
If we don't get self-sufficient colonies off of this rock, humanity itself could be extinguished when the next big disaster strikes.
But Bush's silly grandstanding has no relationship to any long term goals such as collonisation. It's just PR blather. There is no political gain fron making a speech about how you are putting N billion over 20 years into development of, say, closed life support systems. Artists impressions of boxes of pipes just don't look good behind the speaker in the way that pictures of people doing nothing interesting on mars do.
Surely, the suceptability to become addicted to alcohol is a pre-existing defect.
Perhaps a better distinction is between things which pervert and undermine the functioning of the brain, and unwelcome consequences of the brain's normal operation. For instance, opiates mimic natural brain chemicals and so can cause operational problems. OTOH, sex is just pleasent, that causes a normal and healthy response that `hey I want more of this', and the problem comes if people's priorities get screwed up.
There is a borderline class around activities which release floods of endorphines. These can cause people to do unpleasent things (such as cutting themselves or gambling, which without the rush is just stress). Extreme cases here are just another way to get opiate like chemicals into the brain without having to find a needle. But most talk of `gambling addiction' is really just about people who like to gamble and won't take advice to stop.
If you redefine words you can get anywhere. For instance, you have just extended `addiction' to cover everything from reflexes to `oh what the hell I may as well have another biscuit'.
If calling it an addiction gets them the help they need to stop hurting themselves, then the world is a better place.
If it diverts resources from people who actually have real addiction problems to people who are voluntarilly surfing the Web, I think that is to everyone's disadvantage.
Everything you experience brings about chemical changes in the brain.
This is because there is no such thing as internet addiction.
Alcohol. niccotine, heroin, caffine and perhaps chocolate are (potentially) addictive. Internet use, gambling, sex and food are merely things some people enjoy so much that they can't bring themselevs to give them up.
Social scientists and journalists who use `addiction' to mean `habit' are just snake oil salesmen. You can get big bucks researching and reporting on addiction, but rather less for investigating self-indulgence.
Toilets outlets are always shaped that way to keep the stink down.
Smaller, faster, more stable. Firefox might tempt me away from Opera, Mozilla never would have.
To be fair, Mozilla is rather better now than it was when firefox was young - stays up for hours at a time, and the area where Mz stinks most for me is only marginally (and I suspect accidentally) better in Firefox, 'cos it's something no one at mozilla.org cares about (Java support, just the thing which M$ handed to them on a plate...)
That's why Bush was pushing for a Mars mission, right?
Yep. Bush will go for silly not-gonna-happen-and-no-point-if-it-did stuff rather than science any day.
NASA's internal beauracracy
Just as a data point, NASA is asking for $77 million next year just to fund changes to their financial reporting systems. Ie the noise in the flapping around the edges of the work of the people who couldn't find $4mil for Voyager would fund it for nearly 10 years.
No, that's the point, market power costs money to excercise (eg Intel has to pay people not to buy AMD, or keep it's prices below reasonable cost plu margin or whatever), so given a perfectly stable open market etc. etc. eventually the little guys who keep nipping at the monopolist's ankles will bring it down.
Unfortunatly, in the real world, there are barriers to entry, especially international ones and the world changes under us. And, of course, economic theories tend to assume agents in the market behave rationally, which we know is bollocks.
If there is only one grocer in your town selling adulterated flour, while all the rest are selling quality stuff, he has a monopoly on adulterated flour. Is that a bad thing? Would your life be improved if some of the others moved into the adulteration business?
But, if you read the article, that is not what was happening.
Rather, the scheme was that if I was buying 1,000,000 intel chips, and you were buying 1,000,000 intel chips plus 500,000 AMD chips, my intel chips would be cheaper. Ie it is not an issue of bulk discounts, but rather of bribes not to buy anything from AMD.
Now, pure free market theory would say this is fine, evenetually Intel will run out of money and the 10th firm to be built on the ashes of AMD will win out. However, that could take 50 years or perhaps longer than the integrated circuit industry will exist for. Anti-monopoly laws exist on the theory that a small distortion of the free market to speed up that attrition process and maintain some competition now is a general win.
A BSD style licence's are remarkably simple. Anyone who could fail to understand is not someone likely to be able to produce software anyone else would want to use:-).
Now, the GPL is a different matter. The amount of bandwidth on Usenet and other places which has been eaten trying to explain the ramifications of the GPL is an indication that it is fundamentally too complex to be sane.