The Fixed Costs of building the plant, etc. don't apply here, since that plant is already built. Thus Toyota has spent the same money, energy, and resources on the Prius manufacturing plant whether or not you decide to buy one. What we want is the Marginal Cost of building and operating that one Prius that you hypothetically decide to buy.
Don't get me wrong, I do think that Toyota takes a loss on each Prius sold; heck they may even take a loss based on the Marginal Cost per car, not even factoring in the up-front Fixed Costs you pointed out. But that Marginal loss does not add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if they were factoring in the Fixed Costs you mention, then they were wrong to do so.
They probably expect the Prius' batteries to go bad by 100K miles, kind of like the battery in an older iPod. Since the batteries are a major portion of the expense (both in money and in environmental impact) of the vehicle, it makes sense to define the lifespan of the vehicle as the lifespan of the batteries, for the purposes of this analysis.
The Hummer, like most internal combustion engines, can be kept running for much longer with mostly routine maintanence (unless the transmission blows out).
Genetically modified foods still contain the same amino acids in their proteins as all the other foods, so unless you modify their biochemistry to an extent where they'll produce real toxins, they will be digested just the same.(emphasis mine)
If you read the information in the PDF links, you'll see that they did exactly that. RTFA (and not just the fluff piece in the first link).
...between CS and IT. It used to be that IT people did as much new programming work as they did maintanence and configuration of existing tools. Now COTS software solutions are reducing the need for (and desirability of) custom "reinvent the wheel" IT apps, the distinction between the two professions should become clearer.
...sort of. "Robert X. Cringely" (the PBS one, not the InforWorld one) has been squawking about WiFi and WiMax for years. And he predicted that Google's series of new regional data-centers was part of a secret plan to replace/take-over Internet infrastructure.
However, I don't think he put all the pieces together in *quite* this arrangement. His idea for the data-centers was more that they would take over the *backbone* side, or at the very least supplant Akamai in the distributed web content/caching business. Now it sounds like they may be intended as regional hubs for local Google-net broadcast COs?
But this innate sense of morality could be, and very probably is, yet another genetic predisposition, this one with an obvious adaptive benefit.
In short, it provides a "shorthand" for dealing with other humans in your social group. Amoral behavior leads to strife, while fully conscious consideration of the best way to react in a social context is simply too tiring. The basic "moral compass" that most humans share is simply a way of guiding us into behaviors that balance the good of the individual with the good of the tribe, without the need to constantly over-think each and every action.
Of course it's also likely that, like religion itself, the specifics of this moral compass are learned/trained, with just a few basic elements coming directly from the genetic "programming" side.
As the article explains, the form of religous belief is shaped by culture ("nurture") even if the basic predisposition to belief is already there.
And I'll suggest from prior experience that many of your newly-atheist friends will revert to some form of belief in their later years. Not necessarily the same religion that they grew up with, but at least some vague notion that life continues after death, or that there's a benevolent force/deity at work in the world, etc. That reversion tendency is one of the reasons that I can buy the idea of a general predisposition towards belief.
My understanding was that LAME was designed to be "fraunhofer free", and thus usable without licensing. But does that still hold up in view of the Lucent patents?
If so, then maybe more commercial outfits will move to LAME for encoding, which wouldn't be such a bad thing really.
If not, then the MP3 format (and the future utility of everyone's existing music libraries) really is in trouble...
If a police officer knew a live feed of their activities was going out via the web, don't you think they would be a little bit more carefully in how they treat people?
Or they'd just beat the crap out of you and steal your camera...
I don't like censorship either. But the problem IMHO is that they already have free-speech exceptions for profanity and "obscenity"(sex), but not for gory violence. IMHO graphic violence should be considered at least as "obscene" as a naked breast or a consensual sex scene. Granted networks have mostly self-regulated to keep the worst torture-porn type stuff off the air, but there's plenty of bloody death still being shown.
If you're going to "bend" the Constitution for the sake of the children(TM), you might as well do it properly. Why regulate "bad words" and normal bits of human anatomy, but leave probably the worst influence of them all untouched? I'd much rather have kids swearing at me than shooting at me...
Yet nobody is able to exploit this. Even Magnatunes, which pushes the cost of the music production onto the artist, still sells CDs for $8 each, direct. CDBaby, another cool company, sells CDs for $14. And there are hundreds of really cool indie labels -- run by people who are musicians, or who really and genuinely care about the music -- that also sell their CDs for typical pricing.
Caring about the music, or even the fans, does not equate to financial stupidity. As long as they can sell CDs for $15 a pop without complaint, they'll do so. (Kind of like speeders who are "just keeping up with the flow of traffic".)
The other thing is that small indie bands/labels need more income per CD to continue operating, since their volume is so low. Major labels have all kinds of economies of scale that should allow them to sell for less, but of course they don't do it.
The submitter mentions podcasts specifically as something that would be affected by this new legislation. But don't podcasts already need to license their music for wide distribution? Unlike streaming web-radio applications, podcasts are physically downloaded and retained on the listeners' hard-drives, so distributing a podcast with unauthorized music should be equivalent to distributing an MP3 of the track itself. And I don't believe that fair use applies unless they are actually discussing/critiquing the music clips they are playing. So anyone distributing podcasts with commercial music in the background, who doesn't have a license to freely distribute that music as part of their podcast, is already breaking the law. Am I missing something?
This is interesting to me as a procrastinator. The old "perfectionist" chestnut has stuck with me over the years, despite all the evidence to the contrary (eg. the current state of my living room;). OTOH, the insecurity angle is certainly part of it as well. Personally I think that both explanations are correct as contributing factors, as is the simple fact that humans tend to naturally undervalue future outcomes. By that last I mean that you'd rather maintain a current relaxed/happy state at the probable expense of a little extra stress at (just before) the end of the week (or whenever the work is due).
The simple fact is that a bus might hit you before then (or eg. "tiger attack" as a prehistoric equivalent) so evolutionarily it made sense to make the best of the current moment. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die" is pretty much the state our ancestors evolved in, so it's no surprise that we are slow to adapt to the modern (middle-class) near-certainty of survival over longer periods...
Yes and no. Realistically, even if you're completely convinced of your ability to do the job, it would be better to get the work done immediately just in case some bizarre misfortune should befall you on or before the last night (before the work is due). So if you choose to wait until the last night/minute, it's either because you're 1) Confident to the point of delusion ("nothing can hurt me"), or 2) you're really not as confident as you think. Or 3) you're skilled, but very unwise...
Ever since the leaked rumors about a widescreen, touchscreen Video iPod, I've been drooling over the possibilities. But that was when it was assumed to be a high-capacity Video iPod, totally separate from the also-rumored iPhone device. Now it looks like the only way to get that snazzy new screen is with a low-capacity hybrid phone, with an expensive exclusive service contract to boot?!
IMHO that new screen is being wasted, since you'll never be able to fit any kind of video library on it. I would much rather have seen the Touchscreen and the iPhone as two separate products; or at the very least, give us a non-Cingular-enslaved Touchscreen option at the same time...
"His passwd program has the same name as the real passwd program and works flawlessly in all respects except for the fact that it will also gather data residing on your machine such as the user details each time it is run and transmit it to a remote location or it will open a back door for outsiders by providing easy root access and all the time, you will be impervious about its actions."
...I don't think it means what you think it means.
Hmm, good point. Beyond the branding, all this would add to the space MMO experience is the official 'Verse (the backstory of the world at large). But the real attraction of Firefly is not the socio-political backdrop; it's the struggling-independent-LittleGuy scenario and the quirky characters. The characters won't be a factor, other than the occasional cameo, so that just leaves the independent-scavenger scenario.
Lots of space games all the way back to "Privateer" have already explored this scenario, and space MMOs almost *have* to focus on it. Given that, and a bunch of Firefly geeks already playing together on an existing game, why do you need an official Firefly game?
Virgin is Sprint PCS network. Their coverage follows major roads as well as population centers. So if you're near an interstate you're likely to be covered; but if you're (literally) off the beaten path, not so much. But YMMV; there's often a lot of randomness involved in which providers have good coverage in one particular spot.
That may be part of it, and I do think that at least medical care suffers in such countries. But the previous poster also has a valid point. It's the currency exchange rates that determine whether someone is living on "$1" a day or $100 a day. Those rates are the result of market speculation and governmental manipulation, and are not always indicative of the true buying power of the local currency.
Everyday items like like food, clothing, housing/land, etc. are all governed by the native currency, and their prices may bear no relation to what a simple dollar-conversion would lead you to expect. The only part of the locals' lifestyle and standard of living that is necessarily and directly tied to the exchange rate is foreign imports, especially electronics and such. While that may seem like a big deal to us Nintendo-playing, iPod-listening Americans, I can assure you that many people lead fulfilling and comfortable lives without them.
And actually many people do choose to live in places like Thailand, at least for a while. I know two different people who have lived in Thailand for months or years at time, and according to them you can live like a king on a few dollars a day. Of course there are very poor people in that country, poorer in practice than those in our worst slums. But there are also a lot of people living decently on what looks to us like trivial incomes.
The problem is not with "HDTV" sets, but with the far more common "HD-Ready" sets. Many of the early HD-Ready TVs only supported a subset of the HD resolutions, and made the assumption that the external HD-tuner box would always do the scaling conversion for them.
This is especially true for CRT-based displays which made up a large portion of the early-adopter sets. Because these CRTs can do both 480i/p and 1080i "natively", they didn't need an internal scaler circuit to be compatible with both SD and (some) HD content (the way fixed-pixel displays do). So they left that circuit out, under the assumption that 1) 1080i would be more popular, and 2) Any HD tuner/source worth its salt would be able to do the scaling conversion itself. Both of these probably made sense if you believed in the underlying assumption that CRTs would still be the dominant display technology during at least the early HD era.
I believe that that is about to change. I remember seeing something to the effect that after date xx/xx/xx you will have to have a passport to enter or leave the US, even to "friendly" destinations like Canada or the caribbean. I'll try to dig up the reference... ah, here we are:
I'm another one that's about a degree low; I usually read between 97.5 and 98.0. I'm not sure exactly because none of my thermometers have been that accurate, but I do know that I've never read out at 98.5 or above unless I was sick. Speaking of which, I should point out that AFAICT I don't get sick any more often than the average person (maybe less often). Which should serve as at least anecdotal evidence agianst the people claiming this would weaken the immune system...
Of course you could look at it the other way, and say that China's explicit policy of tying the Chinese currency value to that of the US Dollar (at an extremely outdated ratio) keeps Chinese labor artificially cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
The Fixed Costs of building the plant, etc. don't apply here, since that plant is already built. Thus Toyota has spent the same money, energy, and resources on the Prius manufacturing plant whether or not you decide to buy one. What we want is the Marginal Cost of building and operating that one Prius that you hypothetically decide to buy.
Don't get me wrong, I do think that Toyota takes a loss on each Prius sold; heck they may even take a loss based on the Marginal Cost per car, not even factoring in the up-front Fixed Costs you pointed out. But that Marginal loss does not add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. And if they were factoring in the Fixed Costs you mention, then they were wrong to do so.
What?! I thought those were ones?! GAH!
They probably expect the Prius' batteries to go bad by 100K miles, kind of like the battery in an older iPod. Since the batteries are a major portion of the expense (both in money and in environmental impact) of the vehicle, it makes sense to define the lifespan of the vehicle as the lifespan of the batteries, for the purposes of this analysis.
The Hummer, like most internal combustion engines, can be kept running for much longer with mostly routine maintanence (unless the transmission blows out).
Genetically modified foods still contain the same amino acids in their proteins as all the other foods, so unless you modify their biochemistry to an extent where they'll produce real toxins, they will be digested just the same.(emphasis mine)
If you read the information in the PDF links, you'll see that they did exactly that. RTFA (and not just the fluff piece in the first link).
...between CS and IT. It used to be that IT people did as much new programming work as they did maintanence and configuration of existing tools. Now COTS software solutions are reducing the need for (and desirability of) custom "reinvent the wheel" IT apps, the distinction between the two professions should become clearer.
...sort of. "Robert X. Cringely" (the PBS one, not the InforWorld one) has been squawking about WiFi and WiMax for years. And he predicted that Google's series of new regional data-centers was part of a secret plan to replace/take-over Internet infrastructure.
However, I don't think he put all the pieces together in *quite* this arrangement. His idea for the data-centers was more that they would take over the *backbone* side, or at the very least supplant Akamai in the distributed web content/caching business. Now it sounds like they may be intended as regional hubs for local Google-net broadcast COs?
But this innate sense of morality could be, and very probably is, yet another genetic predisposition, this one with an obvious adaptive benefit.
In short, it provides a "shorthand" for dealing with other humans in your social group. Amoral behavior leads to strife, while fully conscious consideration of the best way to react in a social context is simply too tiring. The basic "moral compass" that most humans share is simply a way of guiding us into behaviors that balance the good of the individual with the good of the tribe, without the need to constantly over-think each and every action.
Of course it's also likely that, like religion itself, the specifics of this moral compass are learned/trained, with just a few basic elements coming directly from the genetic "programming" side.
As the article explains, the form of religous belief is shaped by culture ("nurture") even if the basic predisposition to belief is already there.
And I'll suggest from prior experience that many of your newly-atheist friends will revert to some form of belief in their later years. Not necessarily the same religion that they grew up with, but at least some vague notion that life continues after death, or that there's a benevolent force/deity at work in the world, etc. That reversion tendency is one of the reasons that I can buy the idea of a general predisposition towards belief.
My understanding was that LAME was designed to be "fraunhofer free", and thus usable without licensing. But does that still hold up in view of the Lucent patents?
If so, then maybe more commercial outfits will move to LAME for encoding, which wouldn't be such a bad thing really.
If not, then the MP3 format (and the future utility of everyone's existing music libraries) really is in trouble...
The original story is reported in full here:
http://www.wsbtv.com/news/10935892/detail.html
Also, it appears that the officer dropped the charges, although I've had no luck bringing up the link to the followup article.
If a police officer knew a live feed of their activities was going out via the web, don't you think they would be a little bit more carefully in how they treat people?
Or they'd just beat the crap out of you and steal your camera...
I don't like censorship either. But the problem IMHO is that they already have free-speech exceptions for profanity and "obscenity"(sex), but not for gory violence. IMHO graphic violence should be considered at least as "obscene" as a naked breast or a consensual sex scene. Granted networks have mostly self-regulated to keep the worst torture-porn type stuff off the air, but there's plenty of bloody death still being shown.
If you're going to "bend" the Constitution for the sake of the children(TM), you might as well do it properly. Why regulate "bad words" and normal bits of human anatomy, but leave probably the worst influence of them all untouched? I'd much rather have kids swearing at me than shooting at me...
Caring about the music, or even the fans, does not equate to financial stupidity. As long as they can sell CDs for $15 a pop without complaint, they'll do so. (Kind of like speeders who are "just keeping up with the flow of traffic".)
The other thing is that small indie bands/labels need more income per CD to continue operating, since their volume is so low. Major labels have all kinds of economies of scale that should allow them to sell for less, but of course they don't do it.
The submitter mentions podcasts specifically as something that would be affected by this new legislation. But don't podcasts already need to license their music for wide distribution? Unlike streaming web-radio applications, podcasts are physically downloaded and retained on the listeners' hard-drives, so distributing a podcast with unauthorized music should be equivalent to distributing an MP3 of the track itself. And I don't believe that fair use applies unless they are actually discussing/critiquing the music clips they are playing. So anyone distributing podcasts with commercial music in the background, who doesn't have a license to freely distribute that music as part of their podcast, is already breaking the law. Am I missing something?
This is interesting to me as a procrastinator. The old "perfectionist" chestnut has stuck with me over the years, despite all the evidence to the contrary (eg. the current state of my living room ;). OTOH, the insecurity angle is certainly part of it as well. Personally I think that both explanations are correct as contributing factors, as is the simple fact that humans tend to naturally undervalue future outcomes. By that last I mean that you'd rather maintain a current relaxed/happy state at the probable expense of a little extra stress at (just before) the end of the week (or whenever the work is due).
The simple fact is that a bus might hit you before then (or eg. "tiger attack" as a prehistoric equivalent) so evolutionarily it made sense to make the best of the current moment. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die" is pretty much the state our ancestors evolved in, so it's no surprise that we are slow to adapt to the modern (middle-class) near-certainty of survival over longer periods...
Yes and no. Realistically, even if you're completely convinced of your ability to do the job, it would be better to get the work done immediately just in case some bizarre misfortune should befall you on or before the last night (before the work is due). So if you choose to wait until the last night/minute, it's either because you're 1) Confident to the point of delusion ("nothing can hurt me"), or 2) you're really not as confident as you think. Or 3) you're skilled, but very unwise...
Ever since the leaked rumors about a widescreen, touchscreen Video iPod, I've been drooling over the possibilities. But that was when it was assumed to be a high-capacity Video iPod, totally separate from the also-rumored iPhone device. Now it looks like the only way to get that snazzy new screen is with a low-capacity hybrid phone, with an expensive exclusive service contract to boot?!
IMHO that new screen is being wasted, since you'll never be able to fit any kind of video library on it. I would much rather have seen the Touchscreen and the iPhone as two separate products; or at the very least, give us a non-Cingular-enslaved Touchscreen option at the same time...
...I don't think it means what you think it means.
http://www.answers.com/impervious&r=67
Hmm, good point. Beyond the branding, all this would add to the space MMO experience is the official 'Verse (the backstory of the world at large). But the real attraction of Firefly is not the socio-political backdrop; it's the struggling-independent-LittleGuy scenario and the quirky characters. The characters won't be a factor, other than the occasional cameo, so that just leaves the independent-scavenger scenario.
Lots of space games all the way back to "Privateer" have already explored this scenario, and space MMOs almost *have* to focus on it. Given that, and a bunch of Firefly geeks already playing together on an existing game, why do you need an official Firefly game?
Virgin is Sprint PCS network. Their coverage follows major roads as well as population centers. So if you're near an interstate you're likely to be covered; but if you're (literally) off the beaten path, not so much. But YMMV; there's often a lot of randomness involved in which providers have good coverage in one particular spot.
That may be part of it, and I do think that at least medical care suffers in such countries. But the previous poster also has a valid point. It's the currency exchange rates that determine whether someone is living on "$1" a day or $100 a day. Those rates are the result of market speculation and governmental manipulation, and are not always indicative of the true buying power of the local currency.
Everyday items like like food, clothing, housing/land, etc. are all governed by the native currency, and their prices may bear no relation to what a simple dollar-conversion would lead you to expect. The only part of the locals' lifestyle and standard of living that is necessarily and directly tied to the exchange rate is foreign imports, especially electronics and such. While that may seem like a big deal to us Nintendo-playing, iPod-listening Americans, I can assure you that many people lead fulfilling and comfortable lives without them.
And actually many people do choose to live in places like Thailand, at least for a while. I know two different people who have lived in Thailand for months or years at time, and according to them you can live like a king on a few dollars a day. Of course there are very poor people in that country, poorer in practice than those in our worst slums. But there are also a lot of people living decently on what looks to us like trivial incomes.
The problem is not with "HDTV" sets, but with the far more common "HD-Ready" sets. Many of the early HD-Ready TVs only supported a subset of the HD resolutions, and made the assumption that the external HD-tuner box would always do the scaling conversion for them.
This is especially true for CRT-based displays which made up a large portion of the early-adopter sets. Because these CRTs can do both 480i/p and 1080i "natively", they didn't need an internal scaler circuit to be compatible with both SD and (some) HD content (the way fixed-pixel displays do). So they left that circuit out, under the assumption that 1) 1080i would be more popular, and 2) Any HD tuner/source worth its salt would be able to do the scaling conversion itself. Both of these probably made sense if you believed in the underlying assumption that CRTs would still be the dominant display technology during at least the early HD era.
I believe that that is about to change. I remember seeing something to the effect that after date xx/xx/xx you will have to have a passport to enter or leave the US, even to "friendly" destinations like Canada or the caribbean. I'll try to dig up the reference... ah, here we are:
t ml
http://travel.state.gov/travel/cbpmc/cbpmc_2223.h
(scroll down a bit)
Hmm, I wonder if this story is a misinterpretation of that policy change? The dates are in January...
I'm another one that's about a degree low; I usually read between 97.5 and 98.0. I'm not sure exactly because none of my thermometers have been that accurate, but I do know that I've never read out at 98.5 or above unless I was sick. Speaking of which, I should point out that AFAICT I don't get sick any more often than the average person (maybe less often). Which should serve as at least anecdotal evidence agianst the people claiming this would weaken the immune system...
Of course you could look at it the other way, and say that China's explicit policy of tying the Chinese currency value to that of the US Dollar (at an extremely outdated ratio) keeps Chinese labor artificially cheap.