Now, the Great and Powerful Wikipedia is telling me that the PPP GDP/capita is $48K for the US and $35K for France. (PPP vs. Nominal is an important distinction, one I wasn't really thinking about, so good catch there)
My chart shows Nominal PPP -- Production Per Person, not Purchasing Power Parity. Confusing, which is perhaps why some use PPC to mean GDP per capita instead of PPP. Now that you bring it up, perhaps I will start doing that.
I am not a fan of the purchasing power parity metric. From the world economic perspective, measuring a country's production is about how much they produce at the nominal exchange rate. It's not like ten pounds of steel from Switzerland is worth more than ten pounds of identical US steel because Switzerland has lower purchasing power internally.
Purchasing power parity needs lots of context numbers to give it any solid meaning, and it is so often stated without those numbers. In a society with lots of social services (eg: transit, police, trash removal), the citizens could have low purchasing power but still have lots of stuff because they aren't spending as much of their paychecks on transportation, security, and waste management. If those details aren't accounted, I don't think purchasing power parity is very substantive.
If correct, that's 37%, not 10%.
When I made the chart I used 2006 numbers, IIRC. US nominal PPC was about $41k, France was about $37k. France is 10% below the US using those numbers. Using your numbers, the US is 37% above France.
there's little incentive for Wall Street to offer those economy-distorting salaries, and less incentive for workers to take them
Yes, absolutely! I've been pondering the same thing. One of the people I have discussed that angle with is a former investment banker, now private investor. He agreed, and asked if I thought my kind, software engineers, were becoming subject to the same forces and would suffer the same fall from grace. Having spent half a dozen years in Internet advertising, and now working for one of the beasts, I could do no more than wince my assent.
I suspect that is the most significant reason that progressive taxation is correlated with higher long-term GDP growth and flatter taxes are correlated with a stronger boom/bust cycle. The analogy also works in other industries at organizational levels above the individual. Patents have become a collosal distorting incentive causing corporations to engage in GDP-harmful behavior.
I believe that 96% of people are fundamentally good (4% are sociopaths, if I remember that stat right). Getting the 96% to do antisocial things requires incentives. Sex is the oldest one, money is a relative newcomer. Some have a lower barrier than others, or can more easily trick themselves that they are not doing harm. So you get a sliding scale -- the higher the reward differential, the more people defect.
But the other side is also true -- money is a motive to do productive work. So it's not about seeking flat income distribution, and it's not about seeking extreme concentration -- it's about finding the right balance. There are many measures of what is the right balance. To me, fair is making sure everyone winds up with the maximum amount of resources with which to do as they please. That can only be achieved in the long run by maximizing the GDP growth rate.
It is true that a society which has too much income concentration will suffer the ills lamented in The Spirit Level -- and those ills can be measured in a reduced GDP growth rate in the long run. Crime costs GDP. Poor health care costs GDP. Disenfranchisement costs GDP. So you don't have to measure disenfranchisement, crime, and untreated illness. You don't have to try to assign a price to those problems. You don't have to judge whether the woman who doesn't have health care is more satisfied than the man who got mugged, or which one has done more for his fellow citizens to have earned more satisfaction. Much as the silent hand of the free market assigns re
First the CEO of Exxon admits AGW is happening, now one of the first software patent trolls admits software patents are causing harm. If we can get Karl Rove to admit that manipulating public perception is anathema to representative democracy, we'll have hit the "it's obvious to everyone but you" trifecta.
By most any metric, European nations have much lower income inequality, and they also score better on many quality of life metrics.
They also score quite well on GDP per capita.:)
Link to a chart I made. (note: PPP = GDP Per Capita, Gini is a measure of income concentration)
Roughly speaking, GDP per capita is inversely related to Gini down to about Gini 0.30. We are about 0.42, and a pretty extreme outlier in the first world. Below 0.30 there isn't enough data to say if/where the inflection point is. To me, that means we should be running some tests down there (at a flatter income distribution level, maybe Gini 0.20 - 0.25). Not because I believe flatter income distribution is right for some personal moral belief, but because the data shows that it is more productive -- that it would benefit everyone, rich and poor alike.
France has a much lower GDP per capita than we do.
They are only about 10% below us, higher than England, and well into the "first world" class. Our edge over France is small enough that it can easily be explained by greater natural resources per capita (same reason Australia is running so high right now). France has also been chasing us on income tax distribution policy (see Piketty/Saez 2007), so their income distribution is not as flat as most of the highest PPP countries.
If they started working themselves to exhaustion the way we Americans do, it would close the GDP per capita gap significantly.
I do not immediately find that statement credible, but if you have evidence to support the claim I would like to see it. Based on the limited data on the topic that I have seen, I think overwork leads to inefficient production and hence reduced PPP.
The purpose of maximizing PPP is to give all citizens as much resources as possible with which to do as they please. Giving them the freedom to use their resources as they please is what gives them quality of life. I do fairly well, for example, and choose to spend less hours working for a paycheck and more hours working on my own projects (and posting on Slashdot, haha).
Quality of life metrics, however, must inherently reflect what the person setting up the metric feels is "quality of life". My Dad is in his seventies, has more money than he knows what to do with, and still works sixty hour weeks because he loves his work and believes it is important (he's a corrosion engineer). To him that is quality of life. Who am I to judge?
I think you may have assumed that I am a right winger because I believe in maximizing PPP. That is not the case. I believe in maximizing PPP because it helps everyone in the long run. I am a hard-core everyone-winger. Right now, as it happens, that means we should decrease Gini (and I have a lot more data to back that statement up than just that one chart) -- but that doesn't mean I'm left wing either. If we go too far someday, and the data shows that we should increase Gini to benefit everyone, I'd be on the other side of the argument.
A well-run country maximizes incentive to provide sustained employment for as many of its citizens as is possible.
Hmmm, or: A well-run country maximizes incentive to produce goods and services for as many of its corporations as is possible.
Or maybe: A well-run country maximizes incentive to purchase goods and services from as many of its citizens and corporations as is possible.
But really: A well-run country maximizes the productivity per capita in the long run.
Maximizing GDP per capita depends on the entire economy; capital investment, productive work, and efficient consumption. Each feeds on the next. Claiming one of them is "the important one" displays a lack of comprehension of the circularity of the free market. Maximizing GDP per capita maximizes all three in the long run.
Maximizing one of the components at the expense of the others in the short run reduces all three in the long run. It is not just theft from the other two, it is theft from the future self. It is the purest form of sociopathy; stealing from your own identical future twin.
And is willing as an entrepreneur to take the risks associated with that swim.
An externality is a cost or risk which is not internalized in the transaction. In this case, the risk of an ecosystem failure is not fully incorporated in the cost of seeding the area with iron. That is to say, the entrepreneur in this case has not taken all of the risks associated with his work. Externalities reduce GDP in the long run and are the enemy of the free market. You can read more here.
>> There is a difference between insulting a religion and discriminating against or inciting violence against the followers.
> That's the big difference... Nothing about "Innocence of Muslims" encouraged anyone to go murdering Muslims...
I am a hard-core believer in free speech. I believe that Thomas Paine was entirely justified in advocating terrorism against his lawful government. I do not think Innocence of Muslims should be censored any more than should Rush Limbaugh be.
But the latter was involved in the long and broad US public media hate speech that helped create support for our doctrine of preemptive defense. A doctrine that resulted in tens of thousands of Muslims being killed. The sitting President at the time said that God had told him to do it, and many of our congresspeople said that they prayed for guidance on the matter. Our active troops were asked by their command structure to pray for President Bush.
> Do you see thousands of Jews protesting Sacha Baron Cohen's works or those of Mel Brooks because they can be considered insulting to Judaism? No. A few complain, but no massive outpourings of rage and no one was murdered.
"The Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting." - 1999 Likud Charter
Our leaders may use the religion angle differently, in a fashion more tightly coupled with politicial nationalism, and ultimately employing our flag troops. We may use secular cultural differences as often or more often than we use religious doctrine to garner support for the use of force. We may even be more justified in our actions. But it is disingenuous to deny that religious and cultural intolerance is a significant component of popular support for our use of deadly force.
tens of thousands of car owners may be driving vehicles with counterfeit air bags, which fail to inflate properly or don't inflate at all.... Dai Zhensong, a Chinese citizen, had the counterfeit air bags manufactured
Given how hard we've been trying to extradite Kim Dotcom for facilitating copyright infringement, I assume we will be getting at least as heavy handed with China over this guy's tens of thousands of cases of attempted fraudulent homicide (or whatever it is called).
If it's not distorting consumer behaviour, it's not doing anything at all, is it?
Yes, sometimes. Sometimes advertisements make a potential customer aware of a new product that satisfies a want more efficiently, or makes them aware of a new way to use an existing product to satisfy their wants. In such a case the ad is not distorting behavior in the economic sense; the person's lack of informedness prior to seeing the ad was a distortion preventing a mutually beneficial trade from happening.
The ability of lasers to do interesting things is based on the concentration of the beam. Spread a watt or two over a six foot radius and it is not very strong. It is something less than a shop light with twin four foot T8's shining on a white door. Not enough to blind.
it scatters which illuminates the entire cockpit with a rather blinding light.
It may split the beam into a few beams, each of which are powerful enough to blind, assuming the beam has not already spread to a harmless radius, but it cannot "illuminate the entire cockpit with a rather blinding light." You still have to hit the pupil with a healthy percentage of the original beam.
Colorful stories from overzealous policemen aside, the physics simply do not support the claim of filling the cockpit with blinding light. Pointing lasers at airplanes is dangerous and is a crime for good reason, but lasers are not magical death beams.
Like the music industry, the advertising industry is using jobs numbers to imply that they are inherently good. Like the music industry, there is an ideal level of their product -- the level at which it maximizes the long-run GDP growth rate. Beyond that point, increasing employment in their industry harms GDP growth by applying resources (labor in this case) beyond the efficient allocation level.
The music industry has a government granted monopoly in copyright. When that grant becomes too powerful, the industry consumes more resources than is efficient and is a net drag on the economy. Their employment numbers climb while their net contribution to the economy becomes negative.
Advertising, at its worst, distorts consumer behavior and causes unearned cashflow. This unearned cashflow causes corporations to focus their product development on features that advertise well even if they do not result in genuine customer satisfaction, resulting in a net drag on the economy. A portion of the distorted cashflow is channeled back into advertising to keep the distortion running despite negative customer experieneces. As employment in advertising rises past the efficient level, each additional job represents a net cost to the economy.
In any industry, not just those two mentioned, there is a GDP maximizing level of employment. Going beyond that point costs us all in the long run. In traditional industries, that point is defined by the guns versus butter balance. But that is only an upper bound. In industries that have a structural inefficiency, like government granted regulatory monopolies or the potential to distort consumer behavior, the balancing point is reached at a lower level. In those industries, using employement as a measure of societal benefit is particularly perilous.
RedHat > Mandrake > Debian > Ubuntu > Linux Mint > Debian
Lots of other experiments along the way, of course, but those are the ones that have spent more than a month on my main workstation. Debian has had the lions share by far -- probably 70 - 80%.
If what you are implying was true, I wouldn't have a Linux Mint machine right next to me (though, admittedly, this one is stripped-down Debian testing with XFCE). I have my hard-core machines, my user-friendly machines, and I even have two MacBook Pros. I even ran Ubuntu on one of my primary laptops for more than a year -- get this -- because it was user-friendly.
Ummm, Are you getting paid? Would you still get the money if you removed the Amazon component from the OS? OK, let's see if you can follow this: When you get paid for a commercial placement, that is paid placement. The fact that the individual items displayed are not paid placements does not change the fact that the entire component is a paid placement.
This is just his nature. He is a sleazeball. That's why so many of us were so hesitant to use Ubuntu way back when it started rising. Do we really want to get an OS from this glorified PHB? What slimy crap is he going to pull next? On the upside, he also has some really stupid ideas about the direction of the UI, so it doesn't hurt to just walk away. Just walk away.
If I logged into Facebook and changed my location would that work?
In theory, it should. They could use IP geolocation, but that would be pretty noisy and probably would not satisfy the regulators. If you are a Dubliner on a business trip overseas or using a VPN through another continent, do you lose your legal protections?
Regardless, though, suppose a few hundred thousand people log in and do this over the next few days. Even if it doesn't foil this lens of the panopticon directly, it does send a pretty strong (and rather amusing) message.
Are such users violating the spirit of what Wikipedia is about? Or should we trust that the wisdom of crowds will offset obvious shilling?
Both. Wikipedia is not a paid content service, paid content is a clear violation. The wisdom of the crowds is now, has always been, and will always be a critical line of defense against disinformation. The conflict between well-informed citizens and those who would distort information has been going on for millennia. There's a whole lot of fancy new weapons in the game, but it's the same game.
Here's one of the most fundamental rules of dynamically unstable systems with lots of new weapons: Arm yourself or be subjugated. If you believe in truth, justice, and The American Way(*), detecting and outing shills is a fine way to serve your fellow man. Say what you will of human nature -- maybe we're all for sale, but the bad guys can't afford to buy us all. The not-paid-off people massively outnumber the shills. And if they do find a way to buy us all off, we can totally throw a rager with the money.
* in the starry-eyed Superman sense, not necessarily the current observed sense
Google is doing all of the following: 1) Lobbying against the existing software patent regime, 2) Working very hard (e.g., via amicus filings in cases to which it is not a party) to get the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to stop blatantly ignoring Supreme Court decisions (particularly, Bilski) limiting patentability under the existing patent laws, so that patents that are invalid -- under the standards set by the Supreme Court interpreting existing law -- don't keep getting upheld by the Federal Circuit, and 3)...
Items 1 and 2 are very good news. You mention Bilski, which is a good reference (here's a link for others who are interested). Do you have any other citations of Google's efforts? I want to believe.
So what's ok for Google is not ok for Apple. Because Apple shot first.
That is correct.
if it's bullshit one direction, it's bullshit the other direction.
That may be true in your prefered solution to the iterated prisoner's dilemma, but it is not the best solution for society. Society benefits most when all members apply some evolved form of tit-for-tat with forgiveness. Once Apple defected, the most prosocial response within the game is for Google to defect. This acts as a social corrective force against unprovoked defectors to inhibit defection for light or transient reasons. See more at: The Prisoner's Dilemma
Outside the game the most prosocial response is to work toward making the system more efficient; in this case, to see patent reform happen and reduce the profit of defection. Both sides should be heavily and publicly engaged in this part in appreciation for all that our society and its economic system does for them.
Find out if there's a hackerspace near you. The one I go to (not nearly often enough) has worked with schools before -- you might be able to get some community involvement going on. Ask if they'd be interested in hosting a class field trip, or developing extracurricular activities or class projects. Think Stirling engines, robots, 3D printers, arduino gadgets, laser cutters, all kinds of cool hands-on stuff. Obviously YMMV pretty significantly from one space to the next, and they're not all charities, but it could be really cool if there's a good one near you.
You can look for a hackerspace near you at hackerspaces.org or just use your favorite search engine with your region and "hackerspace". If not, maybe look for other local clubs that are into hands-on activities; rocketry, halloween, stagecraft, burners, whatever.
Geez -- I better clarify, eh? OK: Run the script on boot assuming it's a laptop. So you take your laptop to the lab, plug it in to whatever port is available, fire it up, it resets its MAC, and away you go. Each time you reboot, you get a new MAC. That's a fresh MAC daily, at least, with no intent to defraud. (remember -- the intent comes later)
On a network that has a moderate degree of security, thats sufficient to trigger IDS and block your network access. Its not exactly difficult for networking gear to notice that one port is cycling through MACs, and cut you off.
Oh, come on, now, you can think of a solution to that. I bet you can think of half a dozen ways to satisfy the spirit of what I was saying without triggering that problem.
It is if you're doing it to gain access to a computer that otherwise doesn't want you accessing it.
So the takeaway seems to be this: Set up a script to regularly randomize your MAC for the hell of it. Make it a standard practice on all your computers. If it's against the rules to do it with intent to defraud, do it now, before you have the intent.
Slashdot Mirror
Now, the Great and Powerful Wikipedia is telling me that the PPP GDP/capita is $48K for the US and $35K for France. (PPP vs. Nominal is an important distinction, one I wasn't really thinking about, so good catch there)
My chart shows Nominal PPP -- Production Per Person, not Purchasing Power Parity. Confusing, which is perhaps why some use PPC to mean GDP per capita instead of PPP. Now that you bring it up, perhaps I will start doing that.
I am not a fan of the purchasing power parity metric. From the world economic perspective, measuring a country's production is about how much they produce at the nominal exchange rate. It's not like ten pounds of steel from Switzerland is worth more than ten pounds of identical US steel because Switzerland has lower purchasing power internally.
Purchasing power parity needs lots of context numbers to give it any solid meaning, and it is so often stated without those numbers. In a society with lots of social services (eg: transit, police, trash removal), the citizens could have low purchasing power but still have lots of stuff because they aren't spending as much of their paychecks on transportation, security, and waste management. If those details aren't accounted, I don't think purchasing power parity is very substantive.
If correct, that's 37%, not 10%.
When I made the chart I used 2006 numbers, IIRC. US nominal PPC was about $41k, France was about $37k. France is 10% below the US using those numbers. Using your numbers, the US is 37% above France.
there's little incentive for Wall Street to offer those economy-distorting salaries, and less incentive for workers to take them
Yes, absolutely! I've been pondering the same thing. One of the people I have discussed that angle with is a former investment banker, now private investor. He agreed, and asked if I thought my kind, software engineers, were becoming subject to the same forces and would suffer the same fall from grace. Having spent half a dozen years in Internet advertising, and now working for one of the beasts, I could do no more than wince my assent.
I suspect that is the most significant reason that progressive taxation is correlated with higher long-term GDP growth and flatter taxes are correlated with a stronger boom/bust cycle. The analogy also works in other industries at organizational levels above the individual. Patents have become a collosal distorting incentive causing corporations to engage in GDP-harmful behavior.
I believe that 96% of people are fundamentally good (4% are sociopaths, if I remember that stat right). Getting the 96% to do antisocial things requires incentives. Sex is the oldest one, money is a relative newcomer. Some have a lower barrier than others, or can more easily trick themselves that they are not doing harm. So you get a sliding scale -- the higher the reward differential, the more people defect.
But the other side is also true -- money is a motive to do productive work. So it's not about seeking flat income distribution, and it's not about seeking extreme concentration -- it's about finding the right balance. There are many measures of what is the right balance. To me, fair is making sure everyone winds up with the maximum amount of resources with which to do as they please. That can only be achieved in the long run by maximizing the GDP growth rate.
It is true that a society which has too much income concentration will suffer the ills lamented in The Spirit Level -- and those ills can be measured in a reduced GDP growth rate in the long run. Crime costs GDP. Poor health care costs GDP. Disenfranchisement costs GDP. So you don't have to measure disenfranchisement, crime, and untreated illness. You don't have to try to assign a price to those problems. You don't have to judge whether the woman who doesn't have health care is more satisfied than the man who got mugged, or which one has done more for his fellow citizens to have earned more satisfaction. Much as the silent hand of the free market assigns re
First the CEO of Exxon admits AGW is happening, now one of the first software patent trolls admits software patents are causing harm. If we can get Karl Rove to admit that manipulating public perception is anathema to representative democracy, we'll have hit the "it's obvious to everyone but you" trifecta.
By most any metric, European nations have much lower income inequality, and they also score better on many quality of life metrics.
They also score quite well on GDP per capita. :)
Link to a chart I made. (note: PPP = GDP Per Capita, Gini is a measure of income concentration)
Roughly speaking, GDP per capita is inversely related to Gini down to about Gini 0.30. We are about 0.42, and a pretty extreme outlier in the first world. Below 0.30 there isn't enough data to say if/where the inflection point is. To me, that means we should be running some tests down there (at a flatter income distribution level, maybe Gini 0.20 - 0.25). Not because I believe flatter income distribution is right for some personal moral belief, but because the data shows that it is more productive -- that it would benefit everyone, rich and poor alike.
France has a much lower GDP per capita than we do.
They are only about 10% below us, higher than England, and well into the "first world" class. Our edge over France is small enough that it can easily be explained by greater natural resources per capita (same reason Australia is running so high right now). France has also been chasing us on income tax distribution policy (see Piketty/Saez 2007), so their income distribution is not as flat as most of the highest PPP countries.
If they started working themselves to exhaustion the way we Americans do, it would close the GDP per capita gap significantly.
I do not immediately find that statement credible, but if you have evidence to support the claim I would like to see it. Based on the limited data on the topic that I have seen, I think overwork leads to inefficient production and hence reduced PPP.
The purpose of maximizing PPP is to give all citizens as much resources as possible with which to do as they please. Giving them the freedom to use their resources as they please is what gives them quality of life. I do fairly well, for example, and choose to spend less hours working for a paycheck and more hours working on my own projects (and posting on Slashdot, haha).
Quality of life metrics, however, must inherently reflect what the person setting up the metric feels is "quality of life". My Dad is in his seventies, has more money than he knows what to do with, and still works sixty hour weeks because he loves his work and believes it is important (he's a corrosion engineer). To him that is quality of life. Who am I to judge?
I think you may have assumed that I am a right winger because I believe in maximizing PPP. That is not the case. I believe in maximizing PPP because it helps everyone in the long run. I am a hard-core everyone-winger. Right now, as it happens, that means we should decrease Gini (and I have a lot more data to back that statement up than just that one chart) -- but that doesn't mean I'm left wing either. If we go too far someday, and the data shows that we should increase Gini to benefit everyone, I'd be on the other side of the argument.
A well-run country maximizes incentive to provide sustained employment for as many of its citizens as is possible.
Hmmm, or: A well-run country maximizes incentive to produce goods and services for as many of its corporations as is possible.
Or maybe: A well-run country maximizes incentive to purchase goods and services from as many of its citizens and corporations as is possible.
But really: A well-run country maximizes the productivity per capita in the long run.
Maximizing GDP per capita depends on the entire economy; capital investment, productive work, and efficient consumption. Each feeds on the next. Claiming one of them is "the important one" displays a lack of comprehension of the circularity of the free market. Maximizing GDP per capita maximizes all three in the long run.
Maximizing one of the components at the expense of the others in the short run reduces all three in the long run. It is not just theft from the other two, it is theft from the future self. It is the purest form of sociopathy; stealing from your own identical future twin.
And is willing as an entrepreneur to take the risks associated with that swim.
An externality is a cost or risk which is not internalized in the transaction. In this case, the risk of an ecosystem failure is not fully incorporated in the cost of seeding the area with iron. That is to say, the entrepreneur in this case has not taken all of the risks associated with his work. Externalities reduce GDP in the long run and are the enemy of the free market. You can read more here.
Jimmy now has an alibi
Interesting angle. Thanks.
>> There is a difference between insulting a religion and discriminating against or inciting violence against the followers.
> That's the big difference... Nothing about "Innocence of Muslims" encouraged anyone to go murdering Muslims...
I am a hard-core believer in free speech. I believe that Thomas Paine was entirely justified in advocating terrorism against his lawful government. I do not think Innocence of Muslims should be censored any more than should Rush Limbaugh be.
But the latter was involved in the long and broad US public media hate speech that helped create support for our doctrine of preemptive defense. A doctrine that resulted in tens of thousands of Muslims being killed. The sitting President at the time said that God had told him to do it, and many of our congresspeople said that they prayed for guidance on the matter. Our active troops were asked by their command structure to pray for President Bush.
> Do you see thousands of Jews protesting Sacha Baron Cohen's works or those of Mel Brooks because they can be considered insulting to Judaism? No. A few complain, but no massive outpourings of rage and no one was murdered.
"The Jewish communities in Judea, Samaria and Gaza are the realization of Zionist values. Settlement of the land is a clear expression of the unassailable right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel and constitutes an important asset in the defense of the vital interests of the State of Israel. The Likud will continue to strengthen and develop these communities and will prevent their uprooting." - 1999 Likud Charter
Our leaders may use the religion angle differently, in a fashion more tightly coupled with politicial nationalism, and ultimately employing our flag troops. We may use secular cultural differences as often or more often than we use religious doctrine to garner support for the use of force. We may even be more justified in our actions. But it is disingenuous to deny that religious and cultural intolerance is a significant component of popular support for our use of deadly force.
tens of thousands of car owners may be driving vehicles with counterfeit air bags, which fail to inflate properly or don't inflate at all. ... Dai Zhensong, a Chinese citizen, had the counterfeit air bags manufactured
Given how hard we've been trying to extradite Kim Dotcom for facilitating copyright infringement, I assume we will be getting at least as heavy handed with China over this guy's tens of thousands of cases of attempted fraudulent homicide (or whatever it is called).
If it's not distorting consumer behaviour, it's not doing anything at all, is it?
Yes, sometimes. Sometimes advertisements make a potential customer aware of a new product that satisfies a want more efficiently, or makes them aware of a new way to use an existing product to satisfy their wants. In such a case the ad is not distorting behavior in the economic sense; the person's lack of informedness prior to seeing the ad was a distortion preventing a mutually beneficial trade from happening.
the light will have spread to a six foot radius.
The ability of lasers to do interesting things is based on the concentration of the beam. Spread a watt or two over a six foot radius and it is not very strong. It is something less than a shop light with twin four foot T8's shining on a white door. Not enough to blind.
it scatters which illuminates the entire cockpit with a rather blinding light.
It may split the beam into a few beams, each of which are powerful enough to blind, assuming the beam has not already spread to a harmless radius, but it cannot "illuminate the entire cockpit with a rather blinding light." You still have to hit the pupil with a healthy percentage of the original beam.
Colorful stories from overzealous policemen aside, the physics simply do not support the claim of filling the cockpit with blinding light. Pointing lasers at airplanes is dangerous and is a crime for good reason, but lasers are not magical death beams.
Like the music industry, the advertising industry is using jobs numbers to imply that they are inherently good. Like the music industry, there is an ideal level of their product -- the level at which it maximizes the long-run GDP growth rate. Beyond that point, increasing employment in their industry harms GDP growth by applying resources (labor in this case) beyond the efficient allocation level.
The music industry has a government granted monopoly in copyright. When that grant becomes too powerful, the industry consumes more resources than is efficient and is a net drag on the economy. Their employment numbers climb while their net contribution to the economy becomes negative.
Advertising, at its worst, distorts consumer behavior and causes unearned cashflow. This unearned cashflow causes corporations to focus their product development on features that advertise well even if they do not result in genuine customer satisfaction, resulting in a net drag on the economy. A portion of the distorted cashflow is channeled back into advertising to keep the distortion running despite negative customer experieneces. As employment in advertising rises past the efficient level, each additional job represents a net cost to the economy.
In any industry, not just those two mentioned, there is a GDP maximizing level of employment. Going beyond that point costs us all in the long run. In traditional industries, that point is defined by the guns versus butter balance. But that is only an upper bound. In industries that have a structural inefficiency, like government granted regulatory monopolies or the potential to distort consumer behavior, the balancing point is reached at a lower level. In those industries, using employement as a measure of societal benefit is particularly perilous.
RedHat > Mandrake > Debian > Ubuntu > Linux Mint > Debian
Lots of other experiments along the way, of course, but those are the ones that have spent more than a month on my main workstation. Debian has had the lions share by far -- probably 70 - 80%.
If what you are implying was true, I wouldn't have a Linux Mint machine right next to me (though, admittedly, this one is stripped-down Debian testing with XFCE). I have my hard-core machines, my user-friendly machines, and I even have two MacBook Pros. I even ran Ubuntu on one of my primary laptops for more than a year -- get this -- because it was user-friendly.
Go peddle your prejudice elsewhere.
'are not paid placement'
Ummm, Are you getting paid? Would you still get the money if you removed the Amazon component from the OS? OK, let's see if you can follow this: When you get paid for a commercial placement, that is paid placement. The fact that the individual items displayed are not paid placements does not change the fact that the entire component is a paid placement.
This is just his nature. He is a sleazeball. That's why so many of us were so hesitant to use Ubuntu way back when it started rising. Do we really want to get an OS from this glorified PHB? What slimy crap is he going to pull next? On the upside, he also has some really stupid ideas about the direction of the UI, so it doesn't hurt to just walk away. Just walk away.
If I logged into Facebook and changed my location would that work?
In theory, it should. They could use IP geolocation, but that would be pretty noisy and probably would not satisfy the regulators. If you are a Dubliner on a business trip overseas or using a VPN through another continent, do you lose your legal protections?
Regardless, though, suppose a few hundred thousand people log in and do this over the next few days. Even if it doesn't foil this lens of the panopticon directly, it does send a pretty strong (and rather amusing) message.
I just logged in to Facebook and changed my home to Dublin, Ireland.
the textbook for 'Global Visual and Material Culture: Prehistory to 1800' features placeholders with a link to an online image.
I hope they don't plan to publish in the Netherlands, since linking is infringing there now.
Are such users violating the spirit of what Wikipedia is about? Or should we trust that the wisdom of crowds will offset obvious shilling?
Both. Wikipedia is not a paid content service, paid content is a clear violation. The wisdom of the crowds is now, has always been, and will always be a critical line of defense against disinformation. The conflict between well-informed citizens and those who would distort information has been going on for millennia. There's a whole lot of fancy new weapons in the game, but it's the same game.
Here's one of the most fundamental rules of dynamically unstable systems with lots of new weapons: Arm yourself or be subjugated. If you believe in truth, justice, and The American Way(*), detecting and outing shills is a fine way to serve your fellow man. Say what you will of human nature -- maybe we're all for sale, but the bad guys can't afford to buy us all. The not-paid-off people massively outnumber the shills. And if they do find a way to buy us all off, we can totally throw a rager with the money.
* in the starry-eyed Superman sense, not necessarily the current observed sense
The problem is you think Apple 'defected'/shot first.
Apple thinks Google/Samsung 'defected'/shot first.
So who's actually right?
Google and Samsung. The sequence of the court filings is pretty clear.
Doesn't fit so nicely now, does it?
Your question? No, it doesn't. This thread is about who initiated the regulatory monopoly court proceedings.
Google is doing all of the following: ...
1) Lobbying against the existing software patent regime,
2) Working very hard (e.g., via amicus filings in cases to which it is not a party) to get the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit to stop blatantly ignoring Supreme Court decisions (particularly, Bilski) limiting patentability under the existing patent laws, so that patents that are invalid -- under the standards set by the Supreme Court interpreting existing law -- don't keep getting upheld by the Federal Circuit, and
3)
Items 1 and 2 are very good news. You mention Bilski, which is a good reference (here's a link for others who are interested). Do you have any other citations of Google's efforts? I want to believe.
So what's ok for Google is not ok for Apple. Because Apple shot first.
That is correct.
if it's bullshit one direction, it's bullshit the other direction.
That may be true in your prefered solution to the iterated prisoner's dilemma, but it is not the best solution for society. Society benefits most when all members apply some evolved form of tit-for-tat with forgiveness. Once Apple defected, the most prosocial response within the game is for Google to defect. This acts as a social corrective force against unprovoked defectors to inhibit defection for light or transient reasons. See more at: The Prisoner's Dilemma
Outside the game the most prosocial response is to work toward making the system more efficient; in this case, to see patent reform happen and reduce the profit of defection. Both sides should be heavily and publicly engaged in this part in appreciation for all that our society and its economic system does for them.
Find out if there's a hackerspace near you. The one I go to (not nearly often enough) has worked with schools before -- you might be able to get some community involvement going on. Ask if they'd be interested in hosting a class field trip, or developing extracurricular activities or class projects. Think Stirling engines, robots, 3D printers, arduino gadgets, laser cutters, all kinds of cool hands-on stuff. Obviously YMMV pretty significantly from one space to the next, and they're not all charities, but it could be really cool if there's a good one near you.
You can look for a hackerspace near you at hackerspaces.org or just use your favorite search engine with your region and "hackerspace". If not, maybe look for other local clubs that are into hands-on activities; rocketry, halloween, stagecraft, burners, whatever.
Geez -- I better clarify, eh? OK: Run the script on boot assuming it's a laptop. So you take your laptop to the lab, plug it in to whatever port is available, fire it up, it resets its MAC, and away you go. Each time you reboot, you get a new MAC. That's a fresh MAC daily, at least, with no intent to defraud. (remember -- the intent comes later)
On a network that has a moderate degree of security, thats sufficient to trigger IDS and block your network access. Its not exactly difficult for networking gear to notice that one port is cycling through MACs, and cut you off.
Oh, come on, now, you can think of a solution to that. I bet you can think of half a dozen ways to satisfy the spirit of what I was saying without triggering that problem.
Here, I'll give you one: Run the script on boot.
It is if you're doing it to gain access to a computer that otherwise doesn't want you accessing it.
So the takeaway seems to be this: Set up a script to regularly randomize your MAC for the hell of it. Make it a standard practice on all your computers. If it's against the rules to do it with intent to defraud, do it now, before you have the intent.