Not at all. The maths say, there is a 10% chance that this will happen by pure chance, with no tampering and no mistakes anywhere.
Put differently, apply this test to 100 perfectly fair non-cheated elections, and the test will say that 10 of them are "suspicious".
Now, if you -did- put this test to 100 elections -- and found that 70 of them where showing results that should only happen 10% of the time, now THAT would be suspicious.
It's like tossing 12 with two dice. Normally, you expect that to happen 3% of the time, nevertheless the fact that some guy tossed 12 is by itself no evidence at all that he's cheating.
I'm not sure about America. But over here (Norway) the public health authorities report that the average calorie-consumption has infact NOT gone up the last 50 years. What has changed is that while 50 years ago 80% of the population had a job where they spent the majority of time being physically active, today 75% have a job where the majority of time is spent sitting.
The obesity-epidemic ain't as bad as in USA, but Norwegians too, are on the average significantly heavier than we where a generation or two ago.
My point is that the fibre I have in the basement (a single-mode-fibre) with the installed tranceivers, does 1Gbps. With other tranceivers that I can buy TODAY, it can do 1Tbps. Technology doesn't tend to get worse over time.
I'm not saying they'll develop 1Tbps tranceivers for my fibre in the future. I'm saying those tranceivers exist TODAY. The only reason I ain't got them already is that a) there's no realistic need for more than 1Gbps in the next few years and b) they cost a lot more.
Sure, there's no GUARANTEE that the prices on these faster tranceivers will fall over time. But it seems a reasonable bet. Especially since there's going to be a market for them. Hundreds of thousands of people have single-mode-fibres today, and the count grows radically every year.
Besides, even if the fibre -should- end up being useless earlier than I believe, we're future proof on one more level: the physical fibre is installed inside a narrow-diameter pipe. One can replace the fibre, without breaking up the walls and digging up the garden and the street, simply by pulling out the old fibre, and "blow" a new fibre trough the pipe using compressed air. This is a specialist-operation, so more expensive than swapping tranceivers. But still an order of magnitude cheaper than digging up the garden and the street.
Yes and no. The thing is, there's 2 parts needed for a connection: some kinda physical link, and suitable tranceivers in each end of the physical link. Changing the physical link (the copper-pair or the optical fibre) is expensive and difficult. Changing the tranceivers on the ends of an existing cable, on the other hand, is as simple as buying a new faster modem (i.e. the consumer can do it himself, and the cost can be less than $100.)
We've got fibre. The current tranceiver is just capable of 1Gbps, but that's just because currently there's no demand for more, and faster tranceivers are expensive today. (infact we're currently subscribing for only 100Mbps of internet-connectivity, so they artificially limit us in their router) If in a decade a gigabit seems puny, the actual physical fibre is capable of at least 1Tbps, with TODAYS tranceivers. (yes, those things are expensive today, but so where gigabit ethernet-cards, once upon a time)
So short answer: Once you've got a decent-quality single-mode fibre to your basement, you've got enough bandwith in the fibre for a while. I don't want to guess if/when a terabit to your home is going to start feeling puny, but I doubt it'll be this decade.
But that's over-simplifying to the point where it's nonsense. The useful lifetime of the building is just -slightly- longer than the useful lifetime of the computer, you know ?
Furthermore, for a typical school, the building AND equipment cost a small fraction of the salary. So the real important part, for low TCO, is that the computers, whatever sort they are, are easy to maintain and service.
Multi-seat may or may not help. If the additional complexity causes maintenance-problems, it's gonna hurt. But if that part is fairly dependable, it'll help simply because it reduces the count of machines to maintain. Maintaining 10 quad-seat machines should be less job than maintaining 40 single-seat ones. (stronger CPU and more RAM doesn't tend to add to maintenance at all)
But "by chance" isn't true. It's chance coupled with selection. And repeated very many times.
If you toss a die, sure it's chance to get "5", you could've gotten anything.
If, on the other hand, you do it a million times, and add up the results, it's essentially guaranteed that you'll end up with a sum of 3.5 million (plus or minus a small margin).
Yes, in principle you -could- do that and get 1 million, or 6 million. The odds for either are ridicolous though.
That is an excellent point, one people ALWAYS miss. Long shelf-life is not productive in a setting where storage space pro dollar increases exponentially. Because the maintenance, verification, reading-equipment and so on gets MORE expensive over time, whereas the data-amount gets more and more trivial.
Sure, you could try to maintain the infrastructure for reading 50MB tapes from 1985. But would that really be cheaper than having those 50% occupy a TRIVIAL part of a modern HDD ?
By the time it gets tricky to find computers with a IDE-connection, the data from that IDE-disk will occupy a trivial percentage of a SATA-disk. By the time it gets hard to find computers with SATA-connections, you can take an image of that 2TB sata-disk, and store it as an email-attachment in your gmail account.:)
They put a 40 gallon gas-tank in a vehicle that normally has a 20 gallon one, and ended up getting aproximately double range of what the vehicle had previously.
Everybody knew this would be the result, and there wasn't any significant advances in engineering or science at all. Indeed there's mass-produced standard vehicles with very similar performance.
"Students install 40 gallon tank in a Polo -- get 1200 mile range" be a 'moon landing' for internal-combustion vehicles ? No ? So why is the same thing groundbreaking just 'cos it's electric ?
Energy storage is the killer, yes. Electrical engines are AWESOME. A 50KW electric engine, will outperform a 75KW IC one any day (nicer torque-curves, ability to over-perform for a short time, regenerative braking, efficiency, less waste-heat)
It's the batteries that are hopeless, compared to a plain old gas-tank. When you need 25 kgs of batteries, to do the job of a -single- kg of gas, it's a tricky proposition.
Thus the most interesting part of making a better electric car isn't making a better car, it is making a better battery. If someone could make a battery with reasonable performance, the electric car would be a instant worldwide hit. If someone could make a 100kg battery with the performance of a 50kg gas-tank, gas-guzzlers would die as quickly as the metal-presses are capable of running, more or less.
Thus cramming a ton of todays batteries into a car with space for nothing else isn't terribly interesting. Making a battery with higher performance, however, WOULD be very interesting. It seems to be a hard problem though.
So what -does- it prove ? That if you stuff a lightweight car to the top with batteries, then you've got 50Kwh worth of energy, or an amount comparable to the energy in 1.5 gallons of gas. Sure, electric drivetrains are more efficient, so this gives the car the range of perhaps 3 gallons of gas. But at the cost of having no space for storage, and of making the car hundreds of kilos heavier.
If you stuffed a 18-wheeler with batteries, and drove it at 40mph, it'd go a fair distance too, but it wouldn't be terribly useful, the entire point of 18-wheelers is to have space for CARGO.
Gets better though. International lobbying to "protect the children" has ensured that erotic pictures of people under 18, is generally considered child-porn; even in jurisdictions where the age of consent isn't 18. (i.e. most countries, the norm for age-of-consent is more like 15-16)
That's right: You can be a 17 year old Norwegian couple, and screw eachothers brains out, perfectly legally. However, if you document it, by taking pictures, then exchange those pictures with eachothers, then BOTH of the participants are guilty of production, distribution and possession of child-porn.
It's not about the words. It's about learning apropriate behaviour, including language. If a certain sentence is acceptable or not, doesn't depend on a pre-defined list of "bad" words, but rather on the context.
Does anyone consider it rude or out of the ordinary if a building-worker accidentally break a pane of glass, and say "shit!" ? I'd say no. Nevertheless, when interviewing for the same job, it WOULD be considered bad behaviour to say the very same thing (without a reason to)
Thus you're missing the target when you focus on allowed and forbidden -words-. It's not using certain words that is bad. It is certain behaviour.
Is it possible that there's solutions to the supply-side of this problem too ?
To put the resources spent in perspective, the US alone has over 400 bilion, in a country with a GDP of around 15. Other countries have spent less, but also significant amounts, overall it's likely that 50 times the GDP of Afghanistan has sbeen spent in Afghanistan.
That is a truly stupendous amount. Is it possible that a small fraction of this money, spent on activities designed to undermine terrorist recruitment, would suceed in reducing the supply of terrorists from Afghanistan ? For that matter, is it likely that the current war *increase* or *decrease* the headcount of Afghans who hate the US sufficiently to be willing to die to punish you ?
I'm not saying I know the answer. But I think it's worthwhile pondering the question.
But contraception is a -shared- responsibility for a couple that doesn't want to have kids. What fairly typically happens in a marriage is that the female is on the pill from you start dating, and until you reach the point where you're certain that you do not want any more kids, which often happens around 35.
I don't think it's all that unfair to ask the male to endure the 15-minutes procedure, and a few days soreness, when you consider the inconvenience and risks associated with taking the pill for 1-2 decades.
Offcourse the male should never do it, unless he is personally 100% certain that he will not ever want any more kids, not even if the current relationship ends. But that goes for both sexes.
Also, permanently sterilising females is a slightly more complicated procedure, and carries slightly higher risk of complications than the procedure for males do. Both are routine surgery with fairly low risks, though.
Thanks for pointing out that the user-interface is lying about this feature.
They call it "backup". People have spesific expectations about what a backup is, and what is is for. (it's a copy of your data on some other location, the purpose of which is to make it possible to restore the data if the primary copy suffers a catastrophic loss of some sort)
"Enable backup" sounds -very- different to users than "Transmit info about your highlights to amazon, for them to use to create statistics on popular highlights etc"
In all jurisdictions I can think of, it qualifies as bodily harm. It doesn't matter which method of harm is used. What matters is a willfull (or in some cases grossly reckless can be enough) action that causes another person to suffer bodily harm.
Getting infected by a disease, or getting parasites, is harm.
Not very major harm, mind you, since the damage is limited to some itching until you can buy a bottle of $2 lice-killing-shampoo.
The ATM is supposed to withdraw money from your account, and dispense cash, and ideally do the same amount of both.
If it withdraws -more- from the account than it dispenses, odds are plenty of account-holders will notice in quick order (not everyone checks, but ENOUGH people do), whereas if it does the oposite, odds are the bank will notice real quickly. (plenty of those who get too much cash from the ATM will talk about it too)
I'm not convinced politicians universally care about voting, other than perhaps if they think they're likely to be cheated AGAINST. But neither do they typically notice, and that makes it worse, sure.
Not only the spending, but the economy as a whole has been growing "exponentially".
As it happens, I -do- agree that the US government is being financially fairly reckless. But exponential growth, by itself, doesn't say anything. A government in a country where the economy grows at 2% a year, which ups it's spending by 1% year, is also growing "exponentially".
What it's supposed to mean to grow exponentially, relative to revenue, is unclear.
It could be, offcourse. But cost of equipment is strongly related to wages.
If a man with a shovel, is $5/day, equipping him with a excavator that costs $100/day in maintenance and deprecation isn't worth it, even if it lets him get ten times the amount of work done.
If a man with a shovel cost $100/day, equipping him with an excavator that doubles his cost, but makes him ten times as efficient, becomes a nobrainer.
This is why the $50 shovel that is 20% better is going to be a good alternative where wages are low, whereas where the people are -already- using excavators, it'll be less interesting.
It's a war out there. Marketeers would, if they could, tatoo blinking ads on the inside of peoples eyelids. There's a battle for attention in public and private spaces, and advertisers have blown it. They have, repeatedly, proved that they'll do anything they can get away with. Please explain why I should treat with respect someone who has never extended the same courtesy to me ?
You are right that ads provide some revenue. But at the same time, who do you think -pays- for those ads ? When Microsoft or Shell or H&M pay to have ads displayed on websites, whose pockets does the money for that ultimately come from ?
Ads are unproductive. More ads in the world, does not generally speaking make my life better. Paying for ads, is thus against my self-interest. Yes, with less ads, some websites would close, and others might become more expensive in other ways. But on the flipside, other products would get cheaper, to a larger degree. The math works like this:
Company A spends 100K on ads, 20K of that is spent making the ads, 80K is paid to have them shown. Company B shows ads, but they use a ad-network for doing so, to not have to take the technical work themselves (plus A and B needs an arbitrator anyway), the ad-network takes a cut of the action, so though they're paid 80K, only 50K end up in the pockets of B.
End-result ? A have spent 100K, but B is only 50K richer. The rest is wasted in the ad-making-and-distributing-machinery.
Just because the article doesn't contain it, doesn't mean there's no theory behind the function of the drug, it's not as if it's created by randomly pouring stuff in a jar and shaking it about.
In any case, knowing statistically -that- something has an effect, and search for the reason why, is a hell of a lot better than what the alternative world typically does; which is have a lot of explanations (bullshit ones: water has memory etc) for how something is supposed to work, but not the tiniest hint of evidence that it -does- infact work.
I heard, though it's entirely possible it's just an urban myth, that several US states does not -have- and official language, because if they did, they'd be required to have two (english and spanish) because of legislation for minority rights. Thus they'd be required to have all government forms in both languages, and provide spanish versions of all government-communications etc.
So to save themselves the trouble, they never actually decided on an official language at all, they just sorta -tend- to use english, but it's not actually ever decided.
Like I said, I don't know if it's true. But I -do- know you get government stuff in Sami in those parts of Norway where the sami make up a nontrivial percentage of the population. (i.e. the northernmost 2 districts)
That's hardly the reason. Bulk transport by boat is literally dirt-cheap. And paper is a reasonable simple good, requiring neither speedy delivery, nor refrigiration. The paper you link to is only 25% hemp and 75% recycled wood-paper anyway.
True. Closed social "networks" are natural monopolies. The biggest ones will tend to be most attractive to new users, not because they're nessecarily best, but BECAUSE they are the biggest. Which network are you going to choose, the one that has 90% of your school-class registered, or the one that's got -one- other person from your school ?
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all. The maths say, there is a 10% chance that this will happen by pure chance, with no tampering and no mistakes anywhere.
Put differently, apply this test to 100 perfectly fair non-cheated elections, and the test will say that 10 of them are "suspicious".
Now, if you -did- put this test to 100 elections -- and found that 70 of them where showing results that should only happen 10% of the time, now THAT would be suspicious.
It's like tossing 12 with two dice. Normally, you expect that to happen 3% of the time, nevertheless the fact that some guy tossed 12 is by itself no evidence at all that he's cheating.
I'm not sure about America. But over here (Norway) the public health authorities report that the average calorie-consumption has infact NOT gone up the last 50 years. What has changed is that while 50 years ago 80% of the population had a job where they spent the majority of time being physically active, today 75% have a job where the majority of time is spent sitting.
The obesity-epidemic ain't as bad as in USA, but Norwegians too, are on the average significantly heavier than we where a generation or two ago.
My point is that the fibre I have in the basement (a single-mode-fibre) with the installed tranceivers, does 1Gbps. With other tranceivers that I can buy TODAY, it can do 1Tbps. Technology doesn't tend to get worse over time.
I'm not saying they'll develop 1Tbps tranceivers for my fibre in the future. I'm saying those tranceivers exist TODAY. The only reason I ain't got them already is that a) there's no realistic need for more than 1Gbps in the next few years and b) they cost a lot more.
Sure, there's no GUARANTEE that the prices on these faster tranceivers will fall over time. But it seems a reasonable bet. Especially since there's going to be a market for them. Hundreds of thousands of people have single-mode-fibres today, and the count grows radically every year.
Besides, even if the fibre -should- end up being useless earlier than I believe, we're future proof on one more level: the physical fibre is installed inside a narrow-diameter pipe. One can replace the fibre, without breaking up the walls and digging up the garden and the street, simply by pulling out the old fibre, and "blow" a new fibre trough the pipe using compressed air. This is a specialist-operation, so more expensive than swapping tranceivers. But still an order of magnitude cheaper than digging up the garden and the street.
Yes and no. The thing is, there's 2 parts needed for a connection: some kinda physical link, and suitable tranceivers in each end of the physical link. Changing the physical link (the copper-pair or the optical fibre) is expensive and difficult. Changing the tranceivers on the ends of an existing cable, on the other hand, is as simple as buying a new faster modem (i.e. the consumer can do it himself, and the cost can be less than $100.)
We've got fibre. The current tranceiver is just capable of 1Gbps, but that's just because currently there's no demand for more, and faster tranceivers are expensive today. (infact we're currently subscribing for only 100Mbps of internet-connectivity, so they artificially limit us in their router) If in a decade a gigabit seems puny, the actual physical fibre is capable of at least 1Tbps, with TODAYS tranceivers. (yes, those things are expensive today, but so where gigabit ethernet-cards, once upon a time)
So short answer: Once you've got a decent-quality single-mode fibre to your basement, you've got enough bandwith in the fibre for a while. I don't want to guess if/when a terabit to your home is going to start feeling puny, but I doubt it'll be this decade.
But that's over-simplifying to the point where it's nonsense. The useful lifetime of the building is just -slightly- longer than the useful lifetime of the computer, you know ?
Furthermore, for a typical school, the building AND equipment cost a small fraction of the salary. So the real important part, for low TCO, is that the computers, whatever sort they are, are easy to maintain and service.
Multi-seat may or may not help. If the additional complexity causes maintenance-problems, it's gonna hurt. But if that part is fairly dependable, it'll help simply because it reduces the count of machines to maintain. Maintaining 10 quad-seat machines should be less job than maintaining 40 single-seat ones. (stronger CPU and more RAM doesn't tend to add to maintenance at all)
But "by chance" isn't true. It's chance coupled with selection. And repeated very many times.
If you toss a die, sure it's chance to get "5", you could've gotten anything.
If, on the other hand, you do it a million times, and add up the results, it's essentially guaranteed that you'll end up with a sum of 3.5 million (plus or minus a small margin).
Yes, in principle you -could- do that and get 1 million, or 6 million. The odds for either are ridicolous though.
That is an excellent point, one people ALWAYS miss. Long shelf-life is not productive in a setting where storage space pro dollar increases exponentially. Because the maintenance, verification, reading-equipment and so on gets MORE expensive over time, whereas the data-amount gets more and more trivial.
Sure, you could try to maintain the infrastructure for reading 50MB tapes from 1985. But would that really be cheaper than having those 50% occupy a TRIVIAL part of a modern HDD ?
By the time it gets tricky to find computers with a IDE-connection, the data from that IDE-disk will occupy a trivial percentage of a SATA-disk. By the time it gets hard to find computers with SATA-connections, you can take an image of that 2TB sata-disk, and store it as an email-attachment in your gmail account. :)
But they didn't land on the moon.
They put a 40 gallon gas-tank in a vehicle that normally has a 20 gallon one, and ended up getting aproximately double range of what the vehicle had previously.
Everybody knew this would be the result, and there wasn't any significant advances in engineering or science at all. Indeed there's mass-produced standard vehicles with very similar performance.
"Students install 40 gallon tank in a Polo -- get 1200 mile range" be a 'moon landing' for internal-combustion vehicles ? No ? So why is the same thing groundbreaking just 'cos it's electric ?
Energy storage is the killer, yes. Electrical engines are AWESOME. A 50KW electric engine, will outperform a 75KW IC one any day (nicer torque-curves, ability to over-perform for a short time, regenerative braking, efficiency, less waste-heat)
It's the batteries that are hopeless, compared to a plain old gas-tank. When you need 25 kgs of batteries, to do the job of a -single- kg of gas, it's a tricky proposition.
Thus the most interesting part of making a better electric car isn't making a better car, it is making a better battery. If someone could make a battery with reasonable performance, the electric car would be a instant worldwide hit. If someone could make a 100kg battery with the performance of a 50kg gas-tank, gas-guzzlers would die as quickly as the metal-presses are capable of running, more or less.
Thus cramming a ton of todays batteries into a car with space for nothing else isn't terribly interesting. Making a battery with higher performance, however, WOULD be very interesting. It seems to be a hard problem though.
So what -does- it prove ? That if you stuff a lightweight car to the top with batteries, then you've got 50Kwh worth of energy, or an amount comparable to the energy in 1.5 gallons of gas. Sure, electric drivetrains are more efficient, so this gives the car the range of perhaps 3 gallons of gas. But at the cost of having no space for storage, and of making the car hundreds of kilos heavier.
If you stuffed a 18-wheeler with batteries, and drove it at 40mph, it'd go a fair distance too, but it wouldn't be terribly useful, the entire point of 18-wheelers is to have space for CARGO.
Gets better though. International lobbying to "protect the children" has ensured that erotic pictures of people under 18, is generally considered child-porn; even in jurisdictions where the age of consent isn't 18. (i.e. most countries, the norm for age-of-consent is more like 15-16)
That's right: You can be a 17 year old Norwegian couple, and screw eachothers brains out, perfectly legally. However, if you document it, by taking pictures, then exchange those pictures with eachothers, then BOTH of the participants are guilty of production, distribution and possession of child-porn.
How's -that- for absurd ?
It's not about the words. It's about learning apropriate behaviour, including language. If a certain sentence is acceptable or not, doesn't depend on a pre-defined list of "bad" words, but rather on the context.
Does anyone consider it rude or out of the ordinary if a building-worker accidentally break a pane of glass, and say "shit!" ? I'd say no. Nevertheless, when interviewing for the same job, it WOULD be considered bad behaviour to say the very same thing (without a reason to)
Thus you're missing the target when you focus on allowed and forbidden -words-. It's not using certain words that is bad. It is certain behaviour.
Is it possible that there's solutions to the supply-side of this problem too ?
To put the resources spent in perspective, the US alone has over 400 bilion, in a country with a GDP of around 15. Other countries have spent less, but also significant amounts, overall it's likely that 50 times the GDP of Afghanistan has sbeen spent in Afghanistan.
That is a truly stupendous amount. Is it possible that a small fraction of this money, spent on activities designed to undermine terrorist recruitment, would suceed in reducing the supply of terrorists from Afghanistan ? For that matter, is it likely that the current war *increase* or *decrease* the headcount of Afghans who hate the US sufficiently to be willing to die to punish you ?
I'm not saying I know the answer. But I think it's worthwhile pondering the question.
Nah. It's applicable to both.
But contraception is a -shared- responsibility for a couple that doesn't want to have kids. What fairly typically happens in a marriage is that the female is on the pill from you start dating, and until you reach the point where you're certain that you do not want any more kids, which often happens around 35.
I don't think it's all that unfair to ask the male to endure the 15-minutes procedure, and a few days soreness, when you consider the inconvenience and risks associated with taking the pill for 1-2 decades.
Offcourse the male should never do it, unless he is personally 100% certain that he will not ever want any more kids, not even if the current relationship ends. But that goes for both sexes.
Also, permanently sterilising females is a slightly more complicated procedure, and carries slightly higher risk of complications than the procedure for males do. Both are routine surgery with fairly low risks, though.
Thanks for pointing out that the user-interface is lying about this feature.
They call it "backup". People have spesific expectations about what a backup is, and what is is for. (it's a copy of your data on some other location, the purpose of which is to make it possible to restore the data if the primary copy suffers a catastrophic loss of some sort)
"Enable backup" sounds -very- different to users than "Transmit info about your highlights to amazon, for them to use to create statistics on popular highlights etc"
It is.
In all jurisdictions I can think of, it qualifies as bodily harm. It doesn't matter which method of harm is used. What matters is a willfull (or in some cases grossly reckless can be enough) action that causes another person to suffer bodily harm.
Getting infected by a disease, or getting parasites, is harm.
Not very major harm, mind you, since the damage is limited to some itching until you can buy a bottle of $2 lice-killing-shampoo.
Yeah. That too. They care, AND they notice.
The ATM is supposed to withdraw money from your account, and dispense cash, and ideally do the same amount of both.
If it withdraws -more- from the account than it dispenses, odds are plenty of account-holders will notice in quick order (not everyone checks, but ENOUGH people do), whereas if it does the oposite, odds are the bank will notice real quickly. (plenty of those who get too much cash from the ATM will talk about it too)
I'm not convinced politicians universally care about voting, other than perhaps if they think they're likely to be cheated AGAINST. But neither do they typically notice, and that makes it worse, sure.
There's a much simpler reason.
The people ordering ATMs, care a great deal more about their correct and secure operation, than the people ordering voting-machines.
Not only the spending, but the economy as a whole has been growing "exponentially".
As it happens, I -do- agree that the US government is being financially fairly reckless. But exponential growth, by itself, doesn't say anything. A government in a country where the economy grows at 2% a year, which ups it's spending by 1% year, is also growing "exponentially".
What it's supposed to mean to grow exponentially, relative to revenue, is unclear.
It could be, offcourse. But cost of equipment is strongly related to wages.
If a man with a shovel, is $5/day, equipping him with a excavator that costs $100/day in maintenance and deprecation isn't worth it, even if it lets him get ten times the amount of work done.
If a man with a shovel cost $100/day, equipping him with an excavator that doubles his cost, but makes him ten times as efficient, becomes a nobrainer.
This is why the $50 shovel that is 20% better is going to be a good alternative where wages are low, whereas where the people are -already- using excavators, it'll be less interesting.
Hi listen.
It's a war out there. Marketeers would, if they could, tatoo blinking ads on the inside of peoples eyelids. There's a battle for attention in public and private spaces, and advertisers have blown it. They have, repeatedly, proved that they'll do anything they can get away with. Please explain why I should treat with respect someone who has never extended the same courtesy to me ?
You are right that ads provide some revenue. But at the same time, who do you think -pays- for those ads ? When Microsoft or Shell or H&M pay to have ads displayed on websites, whose pockets does the money for that ultimately come from ?
Ads are unproductive. More ads in the world, does not generally speaking make my life better. Paying for ads, is thus against my self-interest. Yes, with less ads, some websites would close, and others might become more expensive in other ways. But on the flipside, other products would get cheaper, to a larger degree. The math works like this:
Company A spends 100K on ads, 20K of that is spent making the ads, 80K is paid to have them shown. Company B shows ads, but they use a ad-network for doing so, to not have to take the technical work themselves (plus A and B needs an arbitrator anyway), the ad-network takes a cut of the action, so though they're paid 80K, only 50K end up in the pockets of B.
End-result ? A have spent 100K, but B is only 50K richer. The rest is wasted in the ad-making-and-distributing-machinery.
Just because the article doesn't contain it, doesn't mean there's no theory behind the function of the drug, it's not as if it's created by randomly pouring stuff in a jar and shaking it about.
In any case, knowing statistically -that- something has an effect, and search for the reason why, is a hell of a lot better than what the alternative world typically does; which is have a lot of explanations (bullshit ones: water has memory etc) for how something is supposed to work, but not the tiniest hint of evidence that it -does- infact work.
I heard, though it's entirely possible it's just an urban myth, that several US states does not -have- and official language, because if they did, they'd be required to have two (english and spanish) because of legislation for minority rights. Thus they'd be required to have all government forms in both languages, and provide spanish versions of all government-communications etc.
So to save themselves the trouble, they never actually decided on an official language at all, they just sorta -tend- to use english, but it's not actually ever decided.
Like I said, I don't know if it's true. But I -do- know you get government stuff in Sami in those parts of Norway where the sami make up a nontrivial percentage of the population. (i.e. the northernmost 2 districts)
That's hardly the reason. Bulk transport by boat is literally dirt-cheap. And paper is a reasonable simple good, requiring neither speedy delivery, nor refrigiration. The paper you link to is only 25% hemp and 75% recycled wood-paper anyway.
True. Closed social "networks" are natural monopolies. The biggest ones will tend to be most attractive to new users, not because they're nessecarily best, but BECAUSE they are the biggest. Which network are you going to choose, the one that has 90% of your school-class registered, or the one that's got -one- other person from your school ?