If it was up to the current junta one should not read anything but the Bible and should not watch anything but romantic comedies and action films where the all-around good American hero beats/shoots/blows the shit out of all enemies of freedom and democracy or possibly where friendship and courage paves the way to a better future and/or eliminates all vampires, evil aliens and those who do not vote the right (pun intended) way.
Don't forget that this is a country which took Fatcat, a children's programme featuring a big cat off screen on the basis that the cat had no clothes and thus indecently exposed him/herself (hard to know with a cat costume, really) to innocent children. On the other hand, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Power Rangers were perfectly OK. This is a country where on a BBC science show about the human reproduction pixelised the placenta (held by the reporter, no woman or baby in sight) for its explicite sexual nature...
There is already a terror censorship on books, now there will be one on DVDs. Business as usual.
How to support authors? By selling convenience. I like books. I mean paper books, printed and bound and all. I'm willing to pay for them. Even if I could download books in PDF form, I'd rather buy the real thing. It's less hassle and as I mentioned, I do actually like the book as an object. So that's one possibility.
Then the works which have high cultural value but (sadly) very unlikely to be read by a significant amount of the population, well there's always the possibility of government support. Yes, I know, it's a very commie idea but it is actually not completely a pipedream. There are countries in Europe that spend public money an arts and they seem to survive. What's more, they have been producing A&C for many hundreds of years.
I also like to go to concerts and I like to see performing arts live. Pay the author for live performance of the work. Make live performance be worth going to see it. The latest run-off-the-mill vampire movie rolling off from the Hollywood assembly line might be just as good to watch (or to avoid) at home as in a movie theatre, but say a ballet performance is not the same on the tube as it is in a real theatre. Considering that theatrical performances run at full house, it is possible that there are enough theatre-going deviants in the population to support a live-performance model of such products.
Maybe authors will suffer a bit. You can't just write a hit and then lean back knowing that the money is going to tick in for 5-7 generations without you moving a finger. Shock and horror, you might even have to continuously work if you want to have a continuous income. You might even ought to have a motivation along the lines of wanting to express something or educate people or share thoughts instead of "making heaps of money".
Possibly we'd end up with less produce but also possibly with more value.
> Since he was reelected though, it's like he misplaced his... humanity or something. He doesn't stand for what he did the first term, he doesn't stand for freedom or justice
Do you mean that in his first term Bush actually stood for freedom and justice? I thought the Iraq aggression was done in his first term, together with Guantanamo? You know, the war which was finished in 1st of May, 2003 as Mr. Bush pointed it out on that ship. It's a pity that apparently very few people in Iraq watched TV on that day and they still think that their country is occupied by an increasing number of US soldiers who are engaged in something which to a casual observer looks quite similar to war.
I thought that it was his first term when most of your civil rights have been taken from you, in the name of freedom? As per justice, wasn't it in his first term when he said that whomever the US captures are neither solders nor civilians, so neither civil nor military law applies and thus they have no rights whatsoever? I know, his humanity still shone through, for those people could not be tortured, since by definition waterboarding, electric shocks, sleep deprivation, being subjected to hyper/hypothermia and alike are not torture, they are merely pursuations to help the subject to willfully cooperate in the spreading of freedom, democracy and justice.
I don't think he changed after being re-elected. I think people expected him to change if he got re-elected, as it was pretty clear even then that the previous 4 years had not been the way to go forward. Lot of people, rather naively, though that he would change in order to have some "nice legacy". Apparently, they were wrong. Leaving a legacy is easily trumped by making loads of money and have ever increasing control over your populace (which, in turn, means making even more money).
Um, from PARC's website http://www.parc.xerox.com (note the URL)
"Founded in 1970 as part of Xerox Research, then incorporated in 2002 as an independent research business, PARC is celebrated for such innovations as laser printing, distributed computing and Ethernet, the graphical user interface (GUI), object-oriented programming, and ubiquitous computing. PARC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox Corporation."
So no, they did not disown it, just made it a separate business entity. It is still a Xerox company.
It is like setting up a 2D space, one being the weight and the other the age. Then if person X hangs around the doughnut shop all day, we can assume that (s)he is fat, if (s)he spends the rest of the time at movies watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Spiderman and alike then we can also assume that (s)he is young, so we can assign a vector pointing somewhere in the (fat,young) quadrant. Wow. If the pattern is food, food, movie, food, food, food, movie then we can assume that (s)he is rather fat. Wait, it will get even better! Now, if we don't know how to guess who's fat and who's young, we can get a handful of test subjects of whom we know how fat/skinny/young/old they are and watch where they go. So we then can have a reference to the preferences of various kinds of people and we can base our decisions about further subjects on that. Wow ^ 2. What's more, we can implement this using any method, included but not limited to, a computer which may have a processor, disk, memory and any other peripheral units but maybe it doesn't; or a mobile phone or application specific hardware or any other device which can be used to add numbers together and store them, such as abacuses, pieces of corn or beans, superhumans, humans, subhumans and in general everything and anything under the Sun. This is *so* original that the mind just boggles. What'll they think of next?!
It's sad to see Xerox PARC to fade away, they used to be so cool.
> but in a lot of places in Europe they absolutely believe that we would fry this joker for a non-violent crime
Why, you kidnapped and tortured that Canadian guy for no apparent reason, kidnapped (and probably tortured) quite a handful of other guys in Europe, some of whom did not do anything unlawful, you run a "the law does not apply here" concentration camp on soil that you rent from your arch enemy communist country from which you can not otherwise import even cigars, bombed the crap out of and pretty well destroyed a country which did nothing to draw your mighty anger, you fight a war in an other against a regimee that you put into power, funded and armed to the teeth, declared that your soldiers can not be held responsible for whatever warcrimes they commit and last but not least, as a matter of fact, you (alone in the developed world) do actually off quite a lot of your people.
So, there's some reason behind that sentiment in Europe; even if it is stereotyping, like many stereotypes, it is not entirely baseless.
The New Scientist article is talking about comms, but the Nature abstract actually doesn't have a single word in it with that regards. It only talks about completely different uses. From the abstract:
"Resonantly enhanced light transmission through periodic subwavelength aperture arrays perforated in metallic films has generated significant interest because of potential applications in near-field microscopy, photolithography, displays, and thermal emission."
> Price and price alone. If you can get your widget for $0.01 cheaper online from Omni Mega Corp, you will.
No, I won't. I go back to the same retailer even if it is a little bit more expensive. Now if Omni Mega Corp offers it significantly cheaper, that's different. Most people do not buy stuff based on price alone, for if they did noone would buy brandname products - the no-name shop product is quite often contains exactly the same stuff as the brandname, just in cheaper and less flashy packaging (think about washing powder, sugar, everyday stuff). There is a brand loyalty, which is worth a lot. There are also all sorts of other features of products that are important. If the price would be the only factor, you could never sell eggs from free-range chichen at ~AU $4-$5 a dozen when you can get the cage egg for maybe $3.50 from the exact same shelf.
As per child labour, you have no idea if any object you buy had child labour in it or not. You can claim that you guarantee that your shoes are made with no child labour. Fine, I believe you. How about your supplier of the shoelace? Does he guaratee that too? Does he guarantee that the cotton plantation where the cotton was picked from which somewhere they made the string that yet somewhere else has been turned into a shoelace is all ethical wages, proper working conditions, fair wages and all that? No. "Child labour free" is not an ethical statement but an advertising / marketing pitch that makes the product's value higher to a certain segment of the customer base.
Convenience, service and quality are all things that you can express in financial terms. Covenience is a simple decision: I can buy X in the supermarket for $1 but it takes me 10 minutes to drive there, park, buy the thing, come home. Alternatively, I can walk to the corner store in 2 minutes but I have to pay $1.20. Is it worth it to go to the supermarket? I.e. is $0.20 worth 8 minutes of my time, plus the petrol and tear&wear of my car? Obviously $0.20 is not. On the other hand, $20 is, that's why shopping for the week is done in the supermarket and not in the corner store.
Service is an other thing that you can measure in terms of $-s. Is it worth to me $X to be smiled at and being helped instead of getting a grumpy look and one-sillable answers if I ask something? There is always a value of X for which the answer is yes. You can also put financial value on the personal contact, the fact that the shopkeeper knows you (if you are a regular) and sometimes gives you things cheaper, finds you hard-to-get items and so on.
Quality is yet an other purely financial thing: you take into account the cost of repair, replacement and time wasted with a low quality but cheap product. If I can buy a shoe which last 3 years of constant usage for $150 but can buy the 'made in china' brand one for $30 that last maybe 8 months, then it's $150 versus $30 * 36/8 = $135. If I go with the Chinese, then I have a new (and maybe different looking) shoe in every 8 months and not an old one plus I save $15. On the other hand, with the expensive shoe I'm done with shoe shopping for 3 years, with the chinese I'll have to come quite a few times. These should also be factored in.
So no, people do not go for the cheapest all the time. The ones who only look at the pricetag and nothing else are either poor (when you're scraping the barrel, you can't afford convenience) or they put very little value on these factors, which tells you a lot about their personality (e.g. they don't value courtesy so probably they wouldn't provide any). However, I don't think that most of the people are like that. I don't know about the USA, but I don't think that "price and price alone" would be true for say most of Europe.
Because this is the *same* government that grants the right of the music factory to charge for their product every time they make a copy for about one and a half century even if the actual cost of making that particular copy is practically zero and *anyone* can make that copy if they want. This is the same government which in some countries artificially raises the price of data medium and give a cut to the music factories because the medium is capable of holding music.
In this case they do not do Big Brother things, they do not limit what you can do - it is actually DRM that limits what you can do and the various IP laws (by the government, actually). All they want now is that the music manufacturers can't squeeze you more than what the law grants to them.
Giving away the boxes makes perfect sense especially if you realise that the voucher is actually from the very tax you paid to the government. All they have to do is to twist the tax rules very slightly to increase their revenue by an average $80 per family -> free vouchers for everyone and the image of a generous, caring government. 3. Profit!
Tit for tat is actually a pretty good and stable strategy if it is widespread in the social environment of whatever entity you talk about. There's reasonable literature about it. If you have a population where most entities play the "do no harm" game then the tit for tat keeps the number of cheaters quite low. If you have a population of "cheaters" (i.e. greedy, selfish entities), however, a lonely "good guy" is pretty much screwed (although it might survive).
Yes, it would be interesting. Although, if the object does not absorb EM energy, it can do two things with it: reflect it or let it pass through. If it reflects it, then assuming that it reflects it in random directions, we shall see a faint, hazy, fuzzy cloud. If it just lets it go through we shall see nothing, although if it has mass and thus gravity, it should distort the image of the objects behind it (and we may or may not realise it).
>...large amounts of completely non-reflective dust and asteroids?
The idea of completely non-reflective matter has already been examined with regards to the Olbers-paradox. The basic rebuttal is that if a material is completely non-reflective (i.e. a perfect black-body) then it is constantly absorbing the radiation around it (i.e. energy) and thus it heats up. Then it should start to radiate (black-body radiation) until it reaches a thermal equilibrium when it radiates exactly as much energy as it receives, transforming the unknown spectra of inbound radiation to the black-body radiation spectra of outbound energy.
It can not be dark for long and no matter how massive it is, the many billion years should have been enough for it to go above the about 3K ambient temperature of the background radiation's, so we should be able to see it.
Any known material does that (due to the conservation of energy), except for black holes. Actually, even black holes have a Hawking radiation, but that is an interesting thing because the bigger the black hole the less it radiates, so if you have an enormously huge one it radiates very little.
To get something really dark you need an object that can absorb energy without radiating any. If you can change enery into matter (say create a hydrogen atom out of a handful of photons) and disperse the hydrogen quietly, that might work but as far as I know (I am no physicist at all) we don't know how to turn energy to matter yet (apart from the black hole, which turns incidental radiation to rest mass).
Hm, in Australia the leader of the Christian Democrats, Rev. Fred Nile just suggested to ban muslims to immigrate to Australia. So no, the example is not that stupid. Don't forget that the racial hatred is not the *goal* but the *means*. The goal is total control over an absolutely subservient population.
BSD says: I wrote this code, you can use it for anything, I don't care, as long as you tell people that I wrote it. GPL says: I wrote this code, you can use it for anything but if you add to it, you must let others use your additions as well. You say: I want to use your code and make money out of it without giving you a dime and if you don't let me you're a selfish pig!
> Sometimes I think the US should just leave the rest of the planet alone.
This sentiment is what makes you branded "America hater", "terrorist", "enemy of freedom". You know, if you're not with us, you're against us and all that.
> Just because "they" think one thing, doesn't mean it is the case...
Oh yes it is. As long as they have more weapons than anyone else (and the proven eagerness to use those weapons) anything they think is, by definition, the Ultimate Truth.
I seem to remember that quite a few years back a German physicist group at some university claimed that they made information travel faster than light. Their device was tunneling, what they said was that when an electron tunnels through a barrier, it does it rather instanteniously and after "disappearing" on the one side it does not wait c * thickness of the barrier time before "appearing" on the other. They had some experimental device that they said that you fed information on the one side and it came out on the other earlier than a modulated light beam (in vacuum) would have done.
Don't know what was the end of their story, though.
Panel member Mike Bebel, CEO of Ruckus music service, said: "Look, I don't think anybody is necessarily down on Apple. The problem is the proprietary implementation of technology...and it's causing everybody else who is participating in the marketplace--the other service providers, the labels, the users--a lot of pain. If they could simply open it up, everybody would love them."
Listen carefully to what he says: "The problem is the PRORIETARY IMPLEMENTATION of technology"
Not the technology, but the implementation. The industry doesn't want to get rid of DRM. They want Apple's DRM to be the standard. Probably by the simple logic that most digital services with various DRM-s do not work as expected (i.e. do not generate enough money) while iTunes seems to be flourishing. In the very limited mindset of the music execs that translates to "*** DRM no good, Apple DRM good". It does not mean "DRM bad" at all.
Also, the fact that CD sales are down and digital is up in a music exec mind easily turns to "CD = no DRM = down, digital = DRM = up ==> DRM GOOD!"
As per how come that CD sales down 25% and digital up by 130% and still there are losses: simple, there were a helluva lot more CD sales to start with. I don't know, but possibly the CD down is caused more by crap being pressed and digital up is by downloading *oldie* stuff and not the latest and greatest. Or people download the latest and greatest but wouldn't care to get it on a CD because the 2 songs on the album (from which the other 8 are indistinguishable) they want to listen to does not warrant the price tag on the CD. (Here in Australia a top-10 CD is running around the AUD 35 mark, which is roughly US $27 or about 21 Euros. The only good point in not being young any more is that I can get most of my retro stuff from the "below (AU) $15" bin).
If you were serving coffee to your neighbour that contained a mild poison which had a 5% chance of killing him and you new that and you did that because it saved you 20c on the cost of the coffee, I think you would be in serious trouble. If he dies, you don't get fined, you go to jail. Maybe not because of mureder, but definitely along the lines of manslaghter due to negligence.
If you sell a car that you know that has an X% chance of rupturing the fuel tank when participating in a *mild* collision but you do not fix the car, that's the same case. You might remember that famous equation:
which *was* applied, as it turned out when one of the victims who survived the fire went to court to fight instead of settling for the money.
Corporations are punished by fines and fines that are usually peanuts compared to their profit and most definitely nothing compared to their revenue. I can't imagine that the penalty for a living person for manslaghter due to negligence would ever be say a $50 fine (which might be 0.1% of the annual revenue of a living person - translating to a fine of 200 million for General Motors). If a corporation blows up a 20-person apartment block by breaking the gas main in the cellar, they have to pay compensation to the victim's families, say $200M each. You blow up the same block - no way that you'd go away with a $1000 payout, you'd be in a cell for a long, long time.
As per the risk versus benefits, there is a very significant difference between the following scenarios:
1) A flight company tells me that there is an X% chance of a plane crashing for unforeseen reasons *but* they do everything they can to minimise the risk and they can cut a 1-month jurney to 1 day - I can make an informed decision whether it is worth it to take the risk.
2) A car company knows that there's a risk of me burning to death in my car in a trivial small accident but they don't tell it to anyone (and especially not to me) and do nothing to decrease that risk because they figured out that it'd be cheaper to let some random people die than mitigate the problem.
There is a risk in horseriding and no sane man would keep the riding school responsible if you were clumsy or the horse bucked because it saw something and you fell from the horse. That is a risk associtaed with riding a horse, no matter what. On the other hand, if they use not yet broken-in horses because they were much cheaper, then it is definitely negligence and not an unavoidable risk.
Umm, I wouldn't exactly call the Clockwork Orange crock of shit or garbage... I mean you may not *like* it but it has both literary value (the original novel from Burgess) as well as some cinematographic merit (Kubrick wasn't that bad of a director).
Not necessary, it is just a question with whom he was talking. Big company reps and the politicians in their pockets will want to follow a system that has been evolved for 200 years to specifically serve the abovementioned subset of people.
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If it was up to the current junta one should not read anything but the Bible and should not watch anything but romantic comedies and action films where the all-around good American hero beats/shoots/blows the shit out of all enemies of freedom and democracy or possibly where friendship and courage paves the way to a better future and/or eliminates all vampires, evil aliens and those who do not vote the right (pun intended) way.
Don't forget that this is a country which took Fatcat, a children's programme featuring a big cat off screen on the basis that the cat had no clothes and thus indecently exposed him/herself (hard to know with a cat costume, really) to innocent children. On the other hand, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Power Rangers were perfectly OK. This is a country where on a BBC science show about the human reproduction pixelised the placenta (held by the reporter, no woman or baby in sight) for its explicite sexual nature...
There is already a terror censorship on books, now there will be one on DVDs. Business as usual.
How to support authors? By selling convenience. I like books. I mean paper books, printed and bound and all. I'm willing to pay for them. Even if I could download books in PDF form, I'd rather buy the real thing. It's less hassle and as I mentioned, I do actually like the book as an object. So that's one possibility.
Then the works which have high cultural value but (sadly) very unlikely to be read by a significant amount of the population, well there's always the possibility of government support. Yes, I know, it's a very commie idea but it is actually not completely a pipedream. There are countries in Europe that spend public money an arts and they seem to survive. What's more, they have been producing A&C for many hundreds of years.
I also like to go to concerts and I like to see performing arts live. Pay the author for live performance of the work. Make live performance be worth going to see it. The latest run-off-the-mill vampire movie rolling off from the Hollywood assembly line might be just as good to watch (or to avoid) at home as in a movie theatre, but say a ballet performance is not the same on the tube as it is in a real theatre. Considering that theatrical performances run at full house, it is possible that there are enough theatre-going deviants in the population to support a live-performance model of such products.
Maybe authors will suffer a bit. You can't just write a hit and then lean back knowing that the money is going to tick in for 5-7 generations without you moving a finger. Shock and horror, you might even have to continuously work if you want to have a continuous income. You might even ought to have a motivation along the lines of wanting to express something or educate people or share thoughts instead of "making heaps of money".
Possibly we'd end up with less produce but also possibly with more value.
> Since he was reelected though, it's like he misplaced his... humanity or something. He doesn't stand for what he did the first term, he doesn't stand for freedom or justice
Do you mean that in his first term Bush actually stood for freedom and justice? I thought the Iraq aggression was done in his first term, together with Guantanamo? You know, the war which was finished in 1st of May, 2003 as Mr. Bush pointed it out on that ship. It's a pity that apparently very few people in Iraq watched TV on that day and they still think that their country is occupied by an increasing number of US soldiers who are engaged in something which to a casual observer looks quite similar to war.
I thought that it was his first term when most of your civil rights have been taken from you, in the name of freedom? As per justice, wasn't it in his first term when he said that whomever the US captures are neither solders nor civilians, so neither civil nor military law applies and thus they have no rights whatsoever? I know, his humanity still shone through, for those people could not be tortured, since by definition waterboarding, electric shocks, sleep deprivation, being subjected to hyper/hypothermia and alike are not torture, they are merely pursuations to help the subject to willfully cooperate in the spreading of freedom, democracy and justice.
I don't think he changed after being re-elected. I think people expected him to change if he got re-elected, as it was pretty clear even then that the previous 4 years had not been the way to go forward. Lot of people, rather naively, though that he would change in order to have some "nice legacy". Apparently, they were wrong. Leaving a legacy is easily trumped by making loads of money and have ever increasing control over your populace (which, in turn, means making even more money).
Um, from PARC's website http://www.parc.xerox.com (note the URL)
"Founded in 1970 as part of Xerox Research, then incorporated in 2002 as an independent research business, PARC is celebrated for such innovations as laser printing, distributed computing and Ethernet, the graphical user interface (GUI), object-oriented programming, and ubiquitous computing. PARC is a wholly owned subsidiary of Xerox Corporation."
So no, they did not disown it, just made it a separate business entity. It is still a Xerox company.
Patent in zanza form:
It is like setting up a 2D space, one being the weight and the other the age. Then if person X hangs around the doughnut shop all day, we can assume that (s)he is fat, if (s)he spends the rest of the time at movies watching Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Spiderman and alike then we can also assume that (s)he is young, so we can assign a vector pointing somewhere in the (fat,young) quadrant. Wow. If the pattern is food, food, movie, food, food, food, movie then we can assume that (s)he is rather fat. Wait, it will get even better!
Now, if we don't know how to guess who's fat and who's young, we can get a handful of test subjects of whom we know how fat/skinny/young/old they are and watch where they go. So we then can have a reference to the preferences of various kinds of people and we can base our decisions about further subjects on that. Wow ^ 2. What's more, we can implement this using any method, included but not limited to, a computer which may have a processor, disk, memory and any other peripheral units but maybe it doesn't; or a mobile phone or application specific hardware or any other device which can be used to add numbers together and store them, such as abacuses, pieces of corn or beans, superhumans, humans, subhumans and in general everything and anything under the Sun. This is *so* original that the mind just boggles. What'll they think of next?!
It's sad to see Xerox PARC to fade away, they used to be so cool.
> but in a lot of places in Europe they absolutely believe that we would fry this joker for a non-violent crime
Why, you kidnapped and tortured that Canadian guy for no apparent reason, kidnapped (and probably tortured) quite a handful of other guys in Europe, some of whom did not do anything unlawful, you run a "the law does not apply here" concentration camp on soil that you rent from your arch enemy communist country from which you can not otherwise import even cigars, bombed the crap out of and pretty well destroyed a country which did nothing to draw your mighty anger, you fight a war in an other against a regimee that you put into power, funded and armed to the teeth, declared that your soldiers can not be held responsible for whatever warcrimes they commit and last but not least, as a matter of fact, you (alone in the developed world) do actually off quite a lot of your people.
So, there's some reason behind that sentiment in Europe; even if it is stereotyping, like many stereotypes, it is not entirely baseless.
The New Scientist article is talking about comms, but the Nature abstract actually doesn't have a single word in it with that regards. It only talks about completely different uses. From the abstract:
"Resonantly enhanced light transmission through periodic subwavelength aperture arrays perforated in metallic films has generated significant interest because of potential applications in near-field microscopy, photolithography, displays, and thermal emission."
No comms there at all.
> Price and price alone. If you can get your widget for $0.01 cheaper online from Omni Mega Corp, you will.
No, I won't. I go back to the same retailer even if it is a little bit more expensive. Now if Omni Mega Corp offers it significantly cheaper, that's different. Most people do not buy stuff based on price alone, for if they did noone would buy brandname products - the no-name shop product is quite often contains exactly the same stuff as the brandname, just in cheaper and less flashy packaging (think about washing powder, sugar, everyday stuff). There is a brand loyalty, which is worth a lot. There are also all sorts of other features of products that are important. If the price would be the only factor, you could never sell eggs from free-range chichen at ~AU $4-$5 a dozen when you can get the cage egg for maybe $3.50 from the exact same shelf.
As per child labour, you have no idea if any object you buy had child labour in it or not. You can claim that you guarantee that your shoes are made with no child labour. Fine, I believe you. How about your supplier of the shoelace? Does he guaratee that too? Does he guarantee that the cotton plantation where the cotton was picked from which somewhere they made the string that yet somewhere else has been turned into a shoelace is all ethical wages, proper working conditions, fair wages and all that? No. "Child labour free" is not an ethical statement but an advertising / marketing pitch that makes the product's value higher to a certain segment of the customer base.
Convenience, service and quality are all things that you can express in financial terms.
Covenience is a simple decision: I can buy X in the supermarket for $1 but it takes me 10 minutes to drive there, park, buy the thing, come home. Alternatively, I can walk to the corner store in 2 minutes but I have to pay $1.20. Is it worth it to go to the supermarket? I.e. is $0.20 worth 8 minutes of my time, plus the petrol and tear&wear of my car? Obviously $0.20 is not. On the other hand, $20 is, that's why shopping for the week is done in the supermarket and not in the corner store.
Service is an other thing that you can measure in terms of $-s. Is it worth to me $X to be smiled at and being helped instead of getting a grumpy look and one-sillable answers if I ask something? There is always a value of X for which the answer is yes. You can also put financial value on the personal contact, the fact that the shopkeeper knows you (if you are a regular) and sometimes gives you things cheaper, finds you hard-to-get items and so on.
Quality is yet an other purely financial thing: you take into account the cost of repair, replacement and time wasted with a low quality but cheap product. If I can buy a shoe which last 3 years of constant usage for $150 but can buy the 'made in china' brand one for $30 that last maybe 8 months, then it's $150 versus $30 * 36/8 = $135. If I go with the Chinese, then I have a new (and maybe different looking) shoe in every 8 months and not an old one plus I save $15. On the other hand, with the expensive shoe I'm done with shoe shopping for 3 years, with the chinese I'll have to come quite a few times. These should also be factored in.
So no, people do not go for the cheapest all the time. The ones who only look at the pricetag and nothing else are either poor (when you're scraping the barrel, you can't afford convenience) or they put very little value on these factors, which tells you a lot about their personality (e.g. they don't value courtesy so probably they wouldn't provide any). However, I don't think that most of the people are like that. I don't know about the USA, but I don't think that "price and price alone" would be true for say most of Europe.
Mr Rives, your attitude has been noted!
Because this is the *same* government that grants the right of the music factory to charge for their product every time they make a copy for about one and a half century even if the actual cost of making that particular copy is practically zero and *anyone* can make that copy if they want. This is the same government which in some countries artificially raises the price of data medium and give a cut to the music factories because the medium is capable of holding music.
In this case they do not do Big Brother things, they do not limit what you can do - it is actually DRM that limits what you can do and the various IP laws (by the government, actually). All they want now is that the music manufacturers can't squeeze you more than what the law grants to them.
Giving away the boxes makes perfect sense especially if you realise that the voucher is actually from the very tax you paid to the government. All they have to do is to twist the tax rules very slightly to increase their revenue by an average $80 per family -> free vouchers for everyone and the image of a generous, caring government. 3. Profit!
... while listening to the air conditioner humming.
Tit for tat is actually a pretty good and stable strategy if it is widespread in the social environment of whatever entity you talk about. There's reasonable literature about it. If you have a population where most entities play the "do no harm" game then the tit for tat keeps the number of cheaters quite low. If you have a population of "cheaters" (i.e. greedy, selfish entities), however, a lonely "good guy" is pretty much screwed (although it might survive).
Yes, it would be interesting. Although, if the object does not absorb EM energy, it can do two things with it: reflect it or let it pass through. If it reflects it, then assuming that it reflects it in random directions, we shall see a faint, hazy, fuzzy cloud. If it just lets it go through we shall see nothing, although if it has mass and thus gravity, it should distort the image of the objects behind it (and we may or may not realise it).
:-)
Would be cool to get there and take a look
> ...large amounts of completely non-reflective dust and asteroids?
The idea of completely non-reflective matter has already been examined with regards to the Olbers-paradox. The basic rebuttal is that if a material is completely non-reflective (i.e. a perfect black-body) then it is constantly absorbing the radiation around it (i.e. energy) and thus it heats up. Then it should start to radiate (black-body radiation) until it reaches a thermal equilibrium when it radiates exactly as much energy as it receives, transforming the unknown spectra of inbound radiation to the black-body radiation spectra of outbound energy.
It can not be dark for long and no matter how massive it is, the many billion years should have been enough for it to go above the about 3K ambient temperature of the background radiation's, so we should be able to see it.
Any known material does that (due to the conservation of energy), except for black holes. Actually, even black holes have a Hawking radiation, but that is an interesting thing because the bigger the black hole the less it radiates, so if you have an enormously huge one it radiates very little.
To get something really dark you need an object that can absorb energy without radiating any. If you can change enery into matter (say create a hydrogen atom out of a handful of photons) and disperse the hydrogen quietly, that might work but as far as I know (I am no physicist at all) we don't know how to turn energy to matter yet (apart from the black hole, which turns incidental radiation to rest mass).
Hm, in Australia the leader of the Christian Democrats, Rev. Fred Nile just suggested to ban muslims to immigrate to Australia. So no, the example is not that stupid. Don't forget that the racial hatred is not the *goal* but the *means*. The goal is total control over an absolutely subservient population.
BSD says: I wrote this code, you can use it for anything, I don't care, as long as you tell people that I wrote it.
GPL says: I wrote this code, you can use it for anything but if you add to it, you must let others use your additions as well.
You say: I want to use your code and make money out of it without giving you a dime and if you don't let me you're a selfish pig!
Did I get it right?
> Ultimate is $590 in US dollars, the article was in Australian dollars.
Considering that 1 AUD is about 0.78 USD, the US $590 should be AU $756 and not 1,150... Interesting.
> Sometimes I think the US should just leave the rest of the planet alone.
This sentiment is what makes you branded "America hater", "terrorist", "enemy of freedom". You know, if you're not with us, you're against us and all that.
> Just because "they" think one thing, doesn't mean it is the case...
Oh yes it is. As long as they have more weapons than anyone else (and the proven eagerness to use those weapons) anything they think is, by definition, the Ultimate Truth.
I seem to remember that quite a few years back a German physicist group at some university claimed that they made information travel faster than light. Their device was tunneling, what they said was that when an electron tunnels through a barrier, it does it rather instanteniously and after "disappearing" on the one side it does not wait c * thickness of the barrier time before "appearing" on the other. They had some experimental device that they said that you fed information on the one side and it came out on the other earlier than a modulated light beam (in vacuum) would have done.
Don't know what was the end of their story, though.
> When a federal agency start making bad decisions for corporate lobbyists that will cost real lives, it's time for heads to roll.
Just look at the federal agency called "government". They've been doing just that for decades. Have you seen many heads rolling about it?
If you read the article:
Panel member Mike Bebel, CEO of Ruckus music service, said: "Look, I don't think anybody is necessarily down on Apple. The problem is the proprietary implementation of technology...and it's causing everybody else who is participating in the marketplace--the other service providers, the labels, the users--a lot of pain. If they could simply open it up, everybody would love them."
Listen carefully to what he says: "The problem is the PRORIETARY IMPLEMENTATION of technology"
Not the technology, but the implementation. The industry doesn't want to get rid of DRM. They want Apple's DRM to be the standard. Probably by the simple logic that most digital services with various DRM-s do not work as expected (i.e. do not generate enough money) while iTunes seems to be flourishing. In the very limited mindset of the music execs that translates to "*** DRM no good, Apple DRM good". It does not mean "DRM bad" at all.
Also, the fact that CD sales are down and digital is up in a music exec mind easily turns to "CD = no DRM = down, digital = DRM = up ==> DRM GOOD!"
As per how come that CD sales down 25% and digital up by 130% and still there are losses: simple, there were a helluva lot more CD sales to start with. I don't know, but possibly the CD down is caused more by crap being pressed and digital up is by downloading *oldie* stuff and not the latest and greatest. Or people download the latest and greatest but wouldn't care to get it on a CD because the 2 songs on the album (from which the other 8 are indistinguishable) they want to listen to does not warrant the price tag on the CD. (Here in Australia a top-10 CD is running around the AUD 35 mark, which is roughly US $27 or about 21 Euros. The only good point in not being young any more is that I can get most of my retro stuff from the "below (AU) $15" bin).
If you were serving coffee to your neighbour that contained a mild poison which had a 5% chance of killing him and you new that and you did that because it saved you 20c on the cost of the coffee, I think you would be in serious trouble. If he dies, you don't get fined, you go to jail. Maybe not because of mureder, but definitely along the lines of manslaghter due to negligence.
If you sell a car that you know that has an X% chance of rupturing the fuel tank when participating in a *mild* collision but you do not fix the car, that's the same case. You might remember that famous equation:
( number_of_deaths_per_year * compensation_payout ) / cars_made_per_year cost_of_fix_per_car
which *was* applied, as it turned out when one of the victims who survived the fire went to court to fight instead of settling for the money.
Corporations are punished by fines and fines that are usually peanuts compared to their profit and most definitely nothing compared to their revenue. I can't imagine that the penalty for a living person for manslaghter due to negligence would ever be say a $50 fine (which might be 0.1% of the annual revenue of a living person - translating to a fine of 200 million for General Motors). If a corporation blows up a 20-person apartment block by breaking the gas main in the cellar, they have to pay compensation to the victim's families, say $200M each. You blow up the same block - no way that you'd go away with a $1000 payout, you'd be in a cell for a long, long time.
As per the risk versus benefits, there is a very significant difference between the following scenarios:
1) A flight company tells me that there is an X% chance of a plane crashing for unforeseen reasons *but* they do everything they can to minimise the risk and they can cut a 1-month jurney to 1 day - I can make an informed decision whether it is worth it to take the risk.
2) A car company knows that there's a risk of me burning to death in my car in a trivial small accident but they don't tell it to anyone (and especially not to me) and do nothing to decrease that risk because they figured out that it'd be cheaper to let some random people die than mitigate the problem.
There is a risk in horseriding and no sane man would keep the riding school responsible if you were clumsy or the horse bucked because it saw something and you fell from the horse. That is a risk associtaed with riding a horse, no matter what. On the other hand, if they use not yet broken-in horses because they were much cheaper, then it is definitely negligence and not an unavoidable risk.
Umm, I wouldn't exactly call the Clockwork Orange crock of shit or garbage... I mean you may not *like* it but it has both literary value (the original novel from Burgess) as well as some cinematographic merit (Kubrick wasn't that bad of a director).
Not necessary, it is just a question with whom he was talking. Big company reps and the politicians in their pockets will want to follow a system that has been evolved for 200 years to specifically serve the abovementioned subset of people.