The libraries pay a lot more for a DVD than it wopuld cost you and me, because they also buy the right to loan it to people. Even if they repurchase a broken DVD, which I think is nuts. They already bought the right to loan the DVD to people, they just don't have the DVD, why can't they buy the DVD for the normal price and then transfer the right to let people loan it? But that is the old dichtomy between selling a physical object and selling a licens, and, as usual, the content providers gets the best of both worlds...
I think economists should learn more about human behaviour. A large number of people don't act rationally; the idea of the rational self-interested individual who makes rational purchase decisions based on the information available to them is a myth. It's seductive because most economists are geeks (like us) and that's how most geeks behave and it also makes modelling behaviour much simpler but people out there in the real world do all sorts of crazy things for utterly ludicrous reasons.
Actually, economists are learning that, and are trying to make models of it. A lot of the people who think they know economy don't know that, though.
Wait, are you being sarcastic? If it generates more jobs, it will cost more, as you need to pay more people to be able to run it, a factor he did not include in his calculations. So you claim it to be better because it costs more to run it? I don't quite follow...
How does that work for authors who are not US citizens? If they need to send it to the Library of Congress, why can't every other national library demand the same? If you have to take it to the national library of your own country, a full search of all national libraries are needed to determin the orphan-staus of a work. Of course, they could make a collaboration to make the search easier, but if you can't get them all to have the same terms, it is going to be a mess.
I'm sorry. Where do we have a right to copy others' work?
Why do the author have a right to stop me from typing certain things? It doesn't directly harm him, he still have the book.
If I had spent 2-3 years creating a novel, I certainly don't want somebody taking my labor without pay... it can go into the public domain after I'm dead, but not before.
I have a lot of plants, I would like people to pay me for the oxygen they make when they breath it, after it is out of my appartment. Well, tough luck, I shouldn't have let it out of my appartment in the first place, then.
You could make the same argument about IP, if you don't want people to copy it, don't give them a copy in the first place.
Now, it might be in everyones best interest if we made a deal, we, the society, agrees to not copy your work for some time, and you, the author, will make more books, as you can make more money on them now. But copyright is just that, a deal, and not an inherent right of the author.
Because the actual research was more complicated than that, and did actually go some of the way to rule out that causation? I don't remember the details, but they did more than just the correlation.
But then, why actually check the facts and read the actual research (or read more about it then the one line in the resume), when you can just assume the you are smarter than the researchers and yell "CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION"?
Evolution, at least in the Darwinian sense, does not account for the creation of life. It only accounts for the progression of life already in existence.
Ahh, and this is a weakness in the same sense that it is a weakness for the law of gravitation that it does not explain the behavior of light. A scientific theory is not supposed to explain everything, only that which it covers, and the theory of evolution does not cover the origin of life, only what happens once it has come to exist.
Darwin never intended, and indeed strongly affirmed that he never intended, for his theories to indicate that human kind (or any other variety of higher life) was evolved from, say, single-celled organisms or some kind of primordial ooze.
Darwin was also known for having expressed that his theory showed that (and how) blacks were genetically and naturally inferior to whites.
What Darwin thought about the theory of evolution is not really relevant, what is relevant is how the theory is formulated today and what data there is supporting it.
Ahh, but what caused the universe? Perhaps that was caused by someting, that was caused by...
Hmm, I have a feeling that that hit upon another possible solution, if time started with our universe, whatever caused our universe couldn't be said to happen before anything, as the concept has no meaning without time. But I don't know enough of physics to say whether that is an out.
There is also a problem with A4, who says there is anything meaningfully described as "the first event"? There could be an infinite series of events, each being caused by the one before that.
[...] but we will need all sorts of rare minerals just like we do now, only with limitless energy we will develop all sorts of new exotic manufacturing processes.
Most of those rare minerals (well, all the elements, anyway)you can extract from sea water, it just take too much energy for it to be cost effective at present(googles results). that more or less leaves us with human creativity as the only scarce resource. I have a hard time imagining a war over human creativity, but I'm sure humans are creative enough to find a way to accomplish that...
A car analogy to how I read that sentence:
You have a car. It has a speedometer using some unit for speed. There are no speed signs. After a while, you have discovered how fast you can go (according to the speedometer) on different streets and not get a speeding ticket. You get a new, more accurate speedometer, but it uses a different unit. Now, do you throw the old speedometer away at once, and start calibrating the new one (getting lots of speeding tickets), or do you keep both of them, until you know how the readings relate to each other?
How the old speedometer, the new speedometer and the speed limit relates to SSM/I, the AMSR-E and the arctic ice extent is left as a exercise for the reader.
Hey, an old TV I had used that kind of systen as a fuse. One of the solders to one of the resistors in the sound curcuit were of a low-melting alloy. The resistor were forced down into it, so when the solder melted due to excess load, the resistor would spring up, breaking the curcuit, and removing the sound. You had to get out your soldering iron to get the sound back. And turn it down a bit, if you wanted to watch the rest of the show with sound...
I haven't read it myself, but the reviews when it came out were not too good, to the point off pointing out massive amounts off factual errors and logical fallacies (the only one I remember was stating that Friedman visited Chile shortly after the coup, which is correct, and using that to conclude that he supported the coup, which isn't. Oh, sorry, stating that it was necessary to implement his economic polities). Some fact-checking might be in order before relying too much on "the shock doctrine".
Hmm, interesting. And in the link you gave it says that reactor-grade means excactly what I said couldn't be used. I wonder what tricks are required to make that work.
Plutonium generated from normal reactors have too high a content of Pu-240 to ever be weapons-grade. It gets bombarded with neutrons for too long, Pu-239 + n -> Pu-240. The containment shell makes it quite cumbersome (to the point of shutting down the reactor for weeks, I believe), so you can't just remove it earlier. So, If you have a containment shell around your reactor, you can't really use it to make weapons grade plutonium.
If the store knows it can sell excess items at a discount later, the price of ordering too many lowers, and it is more likely to order more in the first place, so the stores expectation of having bargain customers do support the company making the game.
The second hand market is somewhat the same, if you know you can sell it second hand when you are done with it, you should be willing to pay that much more for the product, or should be a little more willing to buy the product, leading to increased sales.
Well, if people were rational, it would be that way. Whether that is a reasonable assumption is another discussion.
And you can't use plutonium in a gun-type-bomb, the inevitable Pu-240 in it emits so many neutrons that you need a much faster assembly of the critical pile, as in the implosion-type bombs. But they are much harder to make. So, either you need to separate isotopes with a mass difference of 1% or you need to make a good explosive lens.
No, it is not the pupil, it contracts just as much in red light as in blue light, but the red light doesn't effect the rods, which therefor isn't desinsitized, so the nightvision returns in the time it takes the pupil to relax, which is a couple of seconds, in stead of the time it takes for the rods to resensitize, which is in the order of a quarter of an hour.
Well, the scientific project would have to be long-running and/or non-local if it shouldn't be easier to just define a local time for it. But, as someone already pointed out, this is very important in air traffic control.
Hah, you're the lucky one. In Denmark, we had commercials before the movies featuring film stars in shops, that, when they heard that the employees "made a copy of a film, to their friends" took 3-5 of the items they had just bought, "just a copy, for their friends".
Man, I nearly walked out of the cinema. Luckily they stopped them soon after.
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The libraries pay a lot more for a DVD than it wopuld cost you and me, because they also buy the right to loan it to people. Even if they repurchase a broken DVD, which I think is nuts. They already bought the right to loan the DVD to people, they just don't have the DVD, why can't they buy the DVD for the normal price and then transfer the right to let people loan it?
But that is the old dichtomy between selling a physical object and selling a licens, and, as usual, the content providers gets the best of both worlds...
I think economists should learn more about human behaviour. A large number of people don't act rationally; the idea of the rational self-interested individual who makes rational purchase decisions based on the information available to them is a myth. It's seductive because most economists are geeks (like us) and that's how most geeks behave and it also makes modelling behaviour much simpler but people out there in the real world do all sorts of crazy things for utterly ludicrous reasons.
Actually, economists are learning that, and are trying to make models of it. A lot of the people who think they know economy don't know that, though.
Wait, are you being sarcastic? If it generates more jobs, it will cost more, as you need to pay more people to be able to run it, a factor he did not include in his calculations. So you claim it to be better because it costs more to run it? I don't quite follow...
How does that work for authors who are not US citizens? If they need to send it to the Library of Congress, why can't every other national library demand the same? If you have to take it to the national library of your own country, a full search of all national libraries are needed to determin the orphan-staus of a work. Of course, they could make a collaboration to make the search easier, but if you can't get them all to have the same terms, it is going to be a mess.
I'm sorry. Where do we have a right to copy others' work?
Why do the author have a right to stop me from typing certain things? It doesn't directly harm him, he still have the book.
If I had spent 2-3 years creating a novel, I certainly don't want somebody taking my labor without pay... it can go into the public domain after I'm dead, but not before.
I have a lot of plants, I would like people to pay me for the oxygen they make when they breath it, after it is out of my appartment. Well, tough luck, I shouldn't have let it out of my appartment in the first place, then.
You could make the same argument about IP, if you don't want people to copy it, don't give them a copy in the first place.
Now, it might be in everyones best interest if we made a deal, we, the society, agrees to not copy your work for some time, and you, the author, will make more books, as you can make more money on them now. But copyright is just that, a deal, and not an inherent right of the author.
Because the actual research was more complicated than that, and did actually go some of the way to rule out that causation? I don't remember the details, but they did more than just the correlation.
But then, why actually check the facts and read the actual research (or read more about it then the one line in the resume), when you can just assume the you are smarter than the researchers and yell "CORRELATION DOES NOT EQUAL CAUSATION"?
Evolution, at least in the Darwinian sense, does not account for the creation of life. It only accounts for the progression of life already in existence.
Ahh, and this is a weakness in the same sense that it is a weakness for the law of gravitation that it does not explain the behavior of light. A scientific theory is not supposed to explain everything, only that which it covers, and the theory of evolution does not cover the origin of life, only what happens once it has come to exist.
Darwin never intended, and indeed strongly affirmed that he never intended, for his theories to indicate that human kind (or any other variety of higher life) was evolved from, say, single-celled organisms or some kind of primordial ooze.
Darwin was also known for having expressed that his theory showed that (and how) blacks were genetically and naturally inferior to whites.
What Darwin thought about the theory of evolution is not really relevant, what is relevant is how the theory is formulated today and what data there is supporting it.
Ahh, but what caused the universe? Perhaps that was caused by someting, that was caused by... Hmm, I have a feeling that that hit upon another possible solution, if time started with our universe, whatever caused our universe couldn't be said to happen before anything, as the concept has no meaning without time. But I don't know enough of physics to say whether that is an out.
There is also a problem with A4, who says there is anything meaningfully described as "the first event"? There could be an infinite series of events, each being caused by the one before that.
[...] but we will need all sorts of rare minerals just like we do now, only with limitless energy we will develop all sorts of new exotic manufacturing processes.
Most of those rare minerals (well, all the elements, anyway)you can extract from sea water, it just take too much energy for it to be cost effective at present(googles results). that more or less leaves us with human creativity as the only scarce resource. I have a hard time imagining a war over human creativity, but I'm sure humans are creative enough to find a way to accomplish that...
Brian Dunning from Skeptoid says no... He is usually well researched. And funny.
Or perhaps tehy metn something else?
A car analogy to how I read that sentence: You have a car. It has a speedometer using some unit for speed. There are no speed signs. After a while, you have discovered how fast you can go (according to the speedometer) on different streets and not get a speeding ticket.
You get a new, more accurate speedometer, but it uses a different unit. Now, do you throw the old speedometer away at once, and start calibrating the new one (getting lots of speeding tickets), or do you keep both of them, until you know how the readings relate to each other?
How the old speedometer, the new speedometer and the speed limit relates to SSM/I, the AMSR-E and the arctic ice extent is left as a exercise for the reader.
Actually, that would be Axl Rose, or the anagram wouldn't work.
Hey, an old TV I had used that kind of systen as a fuse. One of the solders to one of the resistors in the sound curcuit were of a low-melting alloy. The resistor were forced down into it, so when the solder melted due to excess load, the resistor would spring up, breaking the curcuit, and removing the sound. You had to get out your soldering iron to get the sound back. And turn it down a bit, if you wanted to watch the rest of the show with sound...
I haven't read it myself, but the reviews when it came out were not too good, to the point off pointing out massive amounts off factual errors and logical fallacies (the only one I remember was stating that Friedman visited Chile shortly after the coup, which is correct, and using that to conclude that he supported the coup, which isn't. Oh, sorry, stating that it was necessary to implement his economic polities). Some fact-checking might be in order before relying too much on "the shock doctrine".
Hmm, interesting. And in the link you gave it says that reactor-grade means excactly what I said couldn't be used. I wonder what tricks are required to make that work.
Plutonium generated from normal reactors have too high a content of Pu-240 to ever be weapons-grade. It gets bombarded with neutrons for too long, Pu-239 + n -> Pu-240. The containment shell makes it quite cumbersome (to the point of shutting down the reactor for weeks, I believe), so you can't just remove it earlier. So, If you have a containment shell around your reactor, you can't really use it to make weapons grade plutonium.
If the store knows it can sell excess items at a discount later, the price of ordering too many lowers, and it is more likely to order more in the first place, so the stores expectation of having bargain customers do support the company making the game.
The second hand market is somewhat the same, if you know you can sell it second hand when you are done with it, you should be willing to pay that much more for the product, or should be a little more willing to buy the product, leading to increased sales.
Well, if people were rational, it would be that way. Whether that is a reasonable assumption is another discussion.
I think you should be thinking in binary to get the joke...
And you can't use plutonium in a gun-type-bomb, the inevitable Pu-240 in it emits so many neutrons that you need a much faster assembly of the critical pile, as in the implosion-type bombs. But they are much harder to make. So, either you need to separate isotopes with a mass difference of 1% or you need to make a good explosive lens.
Well, the change happened after he got laid... It's known to have that effect on some men
No, it is not the pupil, it contracts just as much in red light as in blue light, but the red light doesn't effect the rods, which therefor isn't desinsitized, so the nightvision returns in the time it takes the pupil to relax, which is a couple of seconds, in stead of the time it takes for the rods to resensitize, which is in the order of a quarter of an hour.
Well, the scientific project would have to be long-running and/or non-local if it shouldn't be easier to just define a local time for it. But, as someone already pointed out, this is very important in air traffic control.
Hah, you're the lucky one. In Denmark, we had commercials before the movies featuring film stars in shops, that, when they heard that the employees "made a copy of a film, to their friends" took 3-5 of the items they had just bought, "just a copy, for their friends".
Man, I nearly walked out of the cinema. Luckily they stopped them soon after.
No, no, that's the italian communists, according to their prime minister.
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/berlusconis-communist-claims/2006/03/27/1143330959861.html
And you think your politicians are bad...