Books are incredibly light actually. Maybe you should hit the weights now and again? If they were lighter and smaller they'd just get damaged more easily. Thinner pages would rip and be transparent.
I'm not saying books are heavy (though they are!), I'm saying, all else being equal, lower weigth would be an advantage. It is true that current paper-tech has problems making them ligther without making them transparent and/or more rip-prone. That's another area of possible improvement.
Books can't scale their font. Being able to select a bigger font if you have poor vision would be an improvement.
Then it's a good thing we have glasses and electricity.
That doesn't contradict my statement. The fact that you can solve a problem in *one* way is no proof that a second solution would not be preferable.
Reading backlit screens in the dark fucks your eyes up anyway.
Only if the screen-tech is poor (which it is today). Your eyes can't magically know if a certain photon was *generated* by a page of text or if it was simply *reflected* of a page of text. The reason screens offer inferior readability to paper today are things like low resolution, disturbing reflexes in the glass, limited contrast etc. All of these problems are solvable, and likely *will* be solved in the next few decades. I'm surprised if e-books don't outsell paperbased books 5:1 before I retire. (35 years)
You can get books on tape. Welcome to the 1970s.
Yeah. If you pay $20 for the audio-tape (or CD) on top of the $10 you already paid for the book, and bring some sort of player-device with you. And if you limit yourself to reading that 1% of material where there is audio-versions available. That is not the same as having the ebook-reader capable of reading any normal english text.
*describing* the sound a bird make in a bird-book is infinitely inferior to being able to play the sound.
No, it isn't. Maybe if you're illiterate.
It may not be "infinitely" superior. But it clearly is, infact, superior. A recording of a sound *plus* a textual description of a sound gives significantly more information than *only* the textual description.
How do you backup your expensive ebook reader when it's burnt to a crisp.
You're assuming the reader is the expensive part. This is very unlikely to be the case. Even today, an iPod full of legal music has music worth atleast an order of magnitude more than the player.
Furthermore, the player can (assuming you used content stored in open formats) easily be replaced if it breaks. That's not the case with the content.
A simple example will demonstrate the difference;
If my house burns, there's a high chance the letters I got from my first girlfriend way-back-when will all be irrevocably lost. It'd be a hassle out of proportion to the importance to make a "backup" of them, or to store them in such a manner that fire couldn't get to them. Making backups, or otherwise securing them would be *possible*, but very costly in time and/or money.
The emails I got in the first years I knew my now-wife, on the other hand are securely backed up, along with everything else digital that I care about, separately stored in 3 different buildings, in 2 different countries. Destroying them all would take insane unluck, or nuclear war. The total work associated with making, distributing and updating the backups is perhaps a single days work.
It takes *deliberate* stupidity to claim that this is not an advantage.
You are rigth: It is *possible* if you try very hard, to construct a scenario where my hypothethical e-book would be inferior to todays books.
That doesn't mean, though, that the e-book is in *general* inferior.
How large a portion of the reading in oh, say, the USA takes place under conditions where, as you suggest:
There is no electrical power.
There *was* no electrical power for the last week (thus the batteries are flat)
0.001% of the reading ? 0.0001% of the reading ?
I *perfectly* agree that books are about the best we can do at todays tech-level. If that wasn't so, books would already be dying out (which they aren't).
All I'm saying is that it's easy to imagine improvements to books. They are nowhere close to perfect.
Pricing is interesting. It's true a mature, good ebook (NOT the crap we have today, I explicitly said those are crap) would likely cost more than a single paper-book. The thing is though, a ebook-reader can be used to read any number of books. And the distribution and publishing-costs are a lot lower.
It's not clear that ebooks are more expensive when you take this into account. Infact it would be reasonable to expect the oposite to be true.
Please note, however, that the price you pay for books are only tangentially connected to the production and distribution-costs of those books. Mostly it's a matter of what people are *willing* to pay for the books, and how much more you'd sell if you lowered the price how much. (which explains why a song of iTunes is *more* expensive than simply buying the CD in many cases)
It's a relative axis. Has to be. They aren't plotting number of searches being for say "PHP", they are plotting *percentage* of all searches that are for "PHP".
I'm betting basically all search-terms have a downward slope -- especially technocrati ones, for the simple reason that the Internet, and Google becomes more and more common among more and more diverse sets of people, so search-terms gets more and more diverse too.
You're assuming there are no transparent yet conductive films. This assumption is false.
You are assuming that a wall/roof/floot that incorporates a thin layer of something conductive (say aluminium-foil) needs to look like a "metal wall", this is in no way true. Where I live building-regulations already require a plastic vapor-block in all outside walls, these are *inside* the walls (on the "warm" side of the insulation) and not even visible. I fail to see how it'd make the building less nice to be in if those (existing!) films where also covered with a superthin film of aluminium.
You wouldn't even *notice* being in "such a" building unless someone told you, or you attempted to use your mobile phone.
Yeah. But the registrars are the ultimate squatters:
The effectively squat *ALL* of the TLD that they administer, and run -ZERO- risk of investing in domains that they are then unable to sell, aswell as -ZERO- risk of being convicted for abusing others trademarks etc.
Normal delete. Backup of all non-deleted (i.e. non-incriminating) files. Complete, secure wipe of entire disc, restore of backup.
Is actually preferable, in the case of a new disc, there's always the off chance someone will notice the disc is much newer than the rest of the computer.
Complete wipe of an entire platter is easy. In a pinch booting from any linux rescue-cd and running cat/dev/zero >/dev/hda a few times will do. (though it's better if you use random data a few times rather than zero,/dev/urandom would work)
Actually, those items may have the best design currently possible for a reasonable price, but none of them are anywhere *CLOSE* to an optimal design. Let's take the good old book as an example. Here's a short list of changes that would be improvements, and that are, as far as I know, perfectly possible, only technology ain't there yet, atleast not for a reasonable price.
Books are to heavy. An book working exactly like todays books, but at 1/3rd the weigth would be an improvement.
Books are to thick. Storing books thus takes up to much space. If I could have the same reading-experiment with a book 1/3rd as thick, I'd take it in a second.
Books can't scale their font. Being able to select a bigger font if you have poor vision would be an improvement.
Books don't work in the dark. A backligth would be an improvement.
Books are static, and can't update themselves. A book that could, for example, at your request update itself to the newest revision would be a benefit.
Books can't read themselves aloud to you. Would be nice when you're driving
Books can't contain animated pictures. This possibility would be an improvement, particularily for say schoolbooks on physics.
Books are, very bad at storing sound. *describing* the sound a bird make in a bird-book is infinitely inferior to being able to play the sound.
Books don't remember at which page you where. (there's add-ons that'll do that though, called bookmarks)
Your bookshelf can't tell you what that book where that you so enjoyed last christmas.
Books are hard to backup. There is no practical way of preventing losing your book-collection in say a fire.
I guess what I'm saying is that a *mature* e-book technology (not the crap that goes under e-books today) would have a large number of advantages over todays books. Probably some disadvantages too, allthough I can't think of any fundamental ones at the moment other than the need to be recharged to be usable. (and that's not much of a disadvantage if we assume that battery-life can be made atleast say 20 hours of active use)
You can argue with individual points above. But I don't think you can reasonably argue that *all* of these, and more (it's not hard to make the list of faults in the design of books 3 times as long) are non-improvements.
Books are a good design -- given todays constraints on what is possible at what cost. They are nowhere near an ideal design though.
The managed funds literally take money from you to do nothing.
As you point out, they do not, in general, manage to beat the market. Some of them do, some of the time. But if you take the average of managed funds and compare them to the average index-fund, then they do exactly equally well, minus the higher fees and plus-minus the usual margin of error.
Investing randomly will not only do equally well as buying a managed fund, on the average it'll actually do about 1% better pro year, the difference being due to that being about par for the management cost of a fund.
That you need to be a active pro to be able to invest in the stock-market is the biggest lie ever. The emperor has no clothes, and never had. It's a standing joke. To the point where the Wall Street Journal usually include a monkey or a playmate or someone in their annual ranking of stock-predictions, and the monkey/playmate/whatever in general do equally well as the average "analyst".
True. But thats assuming you have no starter-capital, and can get none.
Most people with a technical insigth and some intelligence (and let's face it if you ain't got those, it's not likely you've stumbled upon anything revolutionary....) should easily be able to raise a few hundred thousand. Hell normal people manage that for buing a house. If I was in the position of a device that continually generate a single KW I could easily raise a million or more for a larger model, without having to sell off any part of the rigths for the device.
And once you have the first profit-turning machine, it's a lot like owning a fully legal money-printing-machine. It's ridicolous to assume you'd need venture-capital for building your second money-printing-machine.
Unless it's a case of "needs more expensive research before it'll work", but in that case you have to admit that what you currently have does not, infact, work.
That, offcourse, is the crucial flaw in all these literally thousands of "free energy" devices.
Assume that the earth was split into two planets with *NO* communication whatsoever and no trade whatsoever between the two halves.
Assume one half manages to improve their production by 3% pro year, trough improvements in the production-process.
Assume the other half manages only to improve by 2% pro year.
Please explain to me how the *existance* of the 3% planet has any negative impact on the people on the 2% planet. Remember there is no communication, no trade, they don't even need to know that it exists. How are they "losers" ? What, exactly, are they losing? How, precisely, would they be better off if the 3% planet spontaneously blew up ? Would they then suddenly be "winners" despite nothing having changed and they potentially not even *knowing* about it ?
The sum total value of all shares is equal to the sum total value of all the companies.
If the sum total of all companies produce more value, then the value of all shares must also be higher.
Don't confuse value with dollar-amounts. It is true that absent new-dollar-supply the companies will stay at a constant dollar-value, but in that case you'd have deflation and a single dollar would be more and more valuable.
If you want zero inflation, this doesn't mean only printing dollars as population grows. It means only printing dollars corresponding to the increase in production. If your countries total production this year was 2% higher than last year, you can have 2% more dollars floating-around and still have the same purchase-power attached to every dollar.
It's only when you have say 5% more dollars to buy 2% more goods that the value of the dollar must fall (i.e. inflation).
Well ok. But I'd like to point out that it's possible to get HIV trough no fault of ones own.
For example, you can be perfectly reasonable about precautions (i.e. use a condom always except with a longtime stable-partner where you are both tested) and still get HIV for examplre trough unfaithfulness of that partner or trough rape. The latter is fairly much more common in some of the countries with higher hiv-rates than it is in western europe and the usa.
Teenagers don't generally crash more than others because they are technically unable to drive properly. They crash because of a combination of two things:
First, they *opt* to not drive properly, despite knowing better.
Two, they lack experience, which means they are more likely to overestimate themselves, or oversee the warning-signs.
All teenagers *know* that the safest way to drive isn't double the speed-limit, in the dark, on wet roads, when drunk, with loads of distractions in the car, while talking on the mobile-phone, without hands-free and a disco in the backseat.
They *know* this. They just fail to *act* on that knowledge. Some of them do some of the time anyway.
A more strict test won't fix this. It's a fair bet they'll show up sober, stay within the speed-limit, reduce speed when its slippery or vision is poor, turn their handy off, put their seatbelt on and so on for the duration of the test.
Tests would help if lack of knowledge was the problem. Most of the time though, lack of *responsibility* is the problem.
People don't steal because they are unaware that it's a crime. People don't drive while drunk because they are unaware that this is a crime. (any dangerous too) People don't go 100mph in town because they are unable to read the numbers on the signs.
That said, any technological fix for a psychological problem will fall short.
It's like the difference between the kid which doesn't touch the electrical outlet because if she does, mommy gets mad, and the kid that doesn't touch the electrical outlet because she realizes the actual danger of doing that. The difference is that the latter kid is safe even when unsupervised. The first one is not.
Same here. A kid that drives legally because otherwise dad would get mad is in danger the moment it thinks that dad won't discover. The kid, on the other hand, who understands the reality of the dangers will tend to be more careful regardless of if they're feeling observed or not.
I know *exactly* what single happening the most influenced my driving-style. I was on my first vacation with a car after getting my license, together with my girlfriend at the time. On some boring stretch of the road she fell asleep. Lateron the same day, she told me that shed never fallen asleep when someone her age was driving before, but she always felt so secure and safe when I was driving.
Ok, so simple self-preservation should've been enough for anyone to drive carefully. When you're young it frequently isn't though. However, having the girl youre madly in love with get real cuddly and explain to you how she likes it when you make her feel safe and secure is (was in my case anyway) a very efficient motivator for a male of a certain age.
/. is actually *NOT* a common "word" in shell-speak. It makes no sense, since it is simply equivalent to / (which is indeed common)
You must be thinking of./ which is used for current directory. Particularily for runnign a executable program from the current directory rather than searching for the program on $PATH. As in "Then run./install.sh to start the installation-script."
/. is a joke of sorts. http-colon-slash-slash-slash-dot-dot-org is supposed to sound silly or something.
Furthermore, the protection you get, and the ease of defending a trademark is somewhat proportional to the term used. This is so because it's much easier to argue that a competitor is likely to, and indeed intending to create confusion with your brand if your brand is an arbitrary invented term and your competitors is very similar.
If you produced pullovers under the trademarked name "FrobbyZalt(tm)" you're going to have a good case against the competitor that start selling t-shirts under the name "Frobbysalt".
If, on the other hand you produce the "Yummy(tm)" cake, you're going to have no case at all against a competitor that describes the food he produces as yummy.
In rough order of ease-of-protection;
Purely invented terms, not similar to any descriptive word. ("FrobbyZalt pullovers")
Words that you did not invent, but which are arbitrary for the product-class you use it for. ("Apple computers")
Words that are suggestive of the product or properties of the product. ("Salty sailing-gear")
Words that are descriptive of the product. ("salty crackers") such terms are *usually* not trademarkable at all, unless you can clearly show that that particular term is already clearly connected with your product in the marketplace)
Generic words, not trademarkable at all. You can't trademark "flour", "salt" or "webserver" used for those products.
Actually, you can bet on a cointoss in such a way as to make winning more likely than losing. Assuming you control the betting, and the coin really is entirely random. Here is how it goes: (I'm assuming the payout is 2 times your bet if you win)
Bet $1.
If you win, return to step 1 ($1 richer)
If you lose, bet $2
If you win *this* bet, return to step 1 ($1 richer)
If you lose again, bet $3
If you win this bet, return to step 1 ($1 richer)
If you lose again, bet $7
If you win this bet, return to step 1 ($1 richer)
If you lose again, bet $15
If you win this bet, return to step 1 ($2 richer)
etc...
I'm sure you see the pattern. The system is, always bet enough that once you win, you've made back all your losses, plus a small profit.
Yes, you can lose, by running out of money (and thus being unable to bet enough to make-good your losses), I'm just saying that given a large enough initial pot of money, gambling according to this scheme will, on the average, turn a profit. With 1:2 payout you need to roughly double your bet every time, which means that, for example, starting out with $250 gives you 7 chances of winning the bet before you're broke. Gueesing atleast *1* toincoss correctly in 7 tries is something you'll manage in 99.2% of the cases, so your odds of not going broke are high.
If you instead had an initial pot of $2000, you would get 10 tries of winning before being broke, which increases your odds to 99.91% or thereabout.
The advantage of selecting the betsize outstrips the fact that mathemathically odds 2 on a 50% chance would seem to be a deal where you can't systematically win.
For example, shares of the grass are not being bought and sold, therefore information about the existence of the $100 is not being incorporated into prices, which is a fundamental assumption underlying the EMH.
Which means that you can beat the market if you know something the market doesn't know. Which mostly ain't the case.
The fact is... If everyone made money, the stock market would be an impossible thing. Some people will lose while some will gain.
That's a pretty fundamental misunderstanding.
If that was true -- if the stock-market was a zero-sum game where the only way to win was to have someone else lose the same amount, then there'd be no point in playing it. Your average return would be zero.
Luckily that is not the case for investments. It *is* the case for speculation (for example day-trading) but that's something else.
When you buy $1000 worth of oh, say, Arendal Fossekompani. You are buying a certain small part of a company. The company, as most companies, try to turn a profit. On the average, they manage that. Some companies make a loss and (if they stay like that) eventually go bankrupt. But the sum total of the profits (or losses) of all companies is hugely positive.
Now, your $1000 part of the company made say $100 of profits this year. They can do two things with this money. Either they divide their profit up and give it to the owners (that's the ones holding the stock), in which case you'd get $100 cash as dividend.
Or they can invest the money, for example use this years profit to improve the powerplant so that it'll produce more power next year. In this case you still own a certain part of the company, but it's a larger, more valuable company. (your piece should now be worth on the order of $1100, but market-forces can change this in either direction)
The stock market is not a zero-sum game with no profits. It's a game where the profits are, over time, equal to the average profit of the companies you invest in.
Sure you can. But current cars with current oil run better for 10000 miles than 1975 cars with 1975 oil did 5000 miles.
The difference is due to improvements in motor-design, oil and oil-filters.
As for fuel-efficiency, even my car (a dirt-cheap Skoda Fabia) has an onboard computer that reports, among other things, fuel-economy, you'd notice it if it started creeping upward over time. And that is a excellent indicator that the car needs service and/or oilchange.
The oilchange-thing was a detail anyway. My point is that todays cars (atleast european/japanese ones) are enormously much more reliable and require a lot *less* service than they used to. So obviously competition *can* force producers to go for quality over rubbish, even though rubbish-cars that break down quickly and need replacement may be better for the manufacturers as a group.
Describing in minute detail *all* faults in the product actually makes people trust you more and consider the product *better*.
It may be counterinituitive, but I think it's just human nature.
People will prefer: "Book is like new, except there is a clearly visible stain (not affecting readability) on the lower left margin of page 35" over "Book is in a perfect condition".
Get a dedicated buy-only account. Nobody *cares* if a buyer has a bad rating. You can safely rate what sellers truly deserve. It's not a problem buying things with a bad rating anyway, since you generally pay in advance.
Furthermore, the most prominently displayed number on Ebay is the sellers "score", which is simply the number of different people who gave a positive feedback, minus the number of different people who left a negative feedback.
This tracks activity, not customer-satisfaction. Who'd you rather buy from, a seller with 1000 transactions, all with positive feedback, or a seller with 2000 transactions, 1600 of them with positive feedback, and 300 of them with negative ?
Thougth so !
Guess which of the two sellers will have the highest number attached to their name, get the nicest "star" etc ? Why, the ony lining Ebays pockets the most naturally ! Which would be the one with most transactions, not the one with highest customer-satisfaction.
Some simple improvements:
Give stars etc based on *percentage* of positive reviews rather than number of reviews.
Make feedback invisible for everyone until both parts have given feedback (or until the time-limit for doing so, a month or whatever is past) This prevents retaliation against honest customers in the form of negative feedback.
Let us know how many % of all transactions the seller receives and gives feedback. (A seller that consequently gives and receives feedback, with a high score, is preferable to one that tries to discourage feedback)
weight the feedback by moneyvalue of transaction. A person who has sold 98 $10 items with positive feedback, and 2 $1000 items with negative feedback should not be listed as 98% positive. By money-value he is 33% positive.
Give people the possibility of rating auctions entered by the seller. Random people rating random auctions, similar to slashdots meta-moderation-system would work best. (it'd prevent people from getting sockpuppets and using those for rating their own auctions up)
Make it possible to sort search-results and listings by sellers average auction-rating, or by auction-rating.
Actually police the categories. Delete auctions, and warn sellers, that improperly spam obviously wrong categories. Cancel their accounts if they repeat the behaviour.
My take exactly. Even 10KW around-the-clock is worth on the order of $1000/month. That is sufficient at todays interest-rate to finance aproximately $250.000.
So, if they can build a 10KW machine for less than $250.000, it's a profit-maker from the get-go.
Offcourse this all fails for a very simple reason: The machine does not, infact, work. And never will.
They can simply sell power at todays market-rate until they've made enough money to build a bigger generator. Then repeat until they're a large enough power-seller that marketrates drop. Then continue until they reach the point where all other electricity-sellers close shop.
If your closest competitor can produce power for 1c/Kwh, then you can sell power for 0.9c/kwh until someone figures out a way to beat that price.
With a money-printing-machine (a free-electricity-machine is the same thing) you don't *NEED* venture-capital.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying books are heavy (though they are!), I'm saying, all else being equal, lower weigth would be an advantage. It is true that current paper-tech has problems making them ligther without making them transparent and/or more rip-prone. That's another area of possible improvement.
Books can't scale their font. Being able to select a bigger font if you have poor vision would be an improvement.
Then it's a good thing we have glasses and electricity.That doesn't contradict my statement. The fact that you can solve a problem in *one* way is no proof that a second solution would not be preferable.
Reading backlit screens in the dark fucks your eyes up anyway.
Only if the screen-tech is poor (which it is today). Your eyes can't magically know if a certain photon was *generated* by a page of text or if it was simply *reflected* of a page of text. The reason screens offer inferior readability to paper today are things like low resolution, disturbing reflexes in the glass, limited contrast etc. All of these problems are solvable, and likely *will* be solved in the next few decades. I'm surprised if e-books don't outsell paperbased books 5:1 before I retire. (35 years)
You can get books on tape. Welcome to the 1970s.
Yeah. If you pay $20 for the audio-tape (or CD) on top of the $10 you already paid for the book, and bring some sort of player-device with you. And if you limit yourself to reading that 1% of material where there is audio-versions available. That is not the same as having the ebook-reader capable of reading any normal english text.
*describing* the sound a bird make in a bird-book is infinitely inferior to being able to play the sound.
No, it isn't. Maybe if you're illiterate.
It may not be "infinitely" superior. But it clearly is, infact, superior. A recording of a sound *plus* a textual description of a sound gives significantly more information than *only* the textual description.
How do you backup your expensive ebook reader when it's burnt to a crisp.
You're assuming the reader is the expensive part. This is very unlikely to be the case. Even today, an iPod full of legal music has music worth atleast an order of magnitude more than the player.
Furthermore, the player can (assuming you used content stored in open formats) easily be replaced if it breaks. That's not the case with the content.
A simple example will demonstrate the difference;
If my house burns, there's a high chance the letters I got from my first girlfriend way-back-when will all be irrevocably lost. It'd be a hassle out of proportion to the importance to make a "backup" of them, or to store them in such a manner that fire couldn't get to them. Making backups, or otherwise securing them would be *possible*, but very costly in time and/or money.
The emails I got in the first years I knew my now-wife, on the other hand are securely backed up, along with everything else digital that I care about, separately stored in 3 different buildings, in 2 different countries. Destroying them all would take insane unluck, or nuclear war. The total work associated with making, distributing and updating the backups is perhaps a single days work.
It takes *deliberate* stupidity to claim that this is not an advantage.
That doesn't mean, though, that the e-book is in *general* inferior.
How large a portion of the reading in oh, say, the USA takes place under conditions where, as you suggest:
- There is no electrical power.
- There *was* no electrical power for the last week (thus the batteries are flat)
0.001% of the reading ? 0.0001% of the reading ?I *perfectly* agree that books are about the best we can do at todays tech-level. If that wasn't so, books would already be dying out (which they aren't).
All I'm saying is that it's easy to imagine improvements to books. They are nowhere close to perfect.
Pricing is interesting. It's true a mature, good ebook (NOT the crap we have today, I explicitly said those are crap) would likely cost more than a single paper-book. The thing is though, a ebook-reader can be used to read any number of books. And the distribution and publishing-costs are a lot lower.
It's not clear that ebooks are more expensive when you take this into account. Infact it would be reasonable to expect the oposite to be true.
Please note, however, that the price you pay for books are only tangentially connected to the production and distribution-costs of those books. Mostly it's a matter of what people are *willing* to pay for the books, and how much more you'd sell if you lowered the price how much. (which explains why a song of iTunes is *more* expensive than simply buying the CD in many cases)
I'm betting basically all search-terms have a downward slope -- especially technocrati ones, for the simple reason that the Internet, and Google becomes more and more common among more and more diverse sets of people, so search-terms gets more and more diverse too.
It migth still help reduce interference from the enormous number of wireless devices existing in some downtown neighbourhoods.
You are assuming that a wall/roof/floot that incorporates a thin layer of something conductive (say aluminium-foil) needs to look like a "metal wall", this is in no way true. Where I live building-regulations already require a plastic vapor-block in all outside walls, these are *inside* the walls (on the "warm" side of the insulation) and not even visible. I fail to see how it'd make the building less nice to be in if those (existing!) films where also covered with a superthin film of aluminium.
You wouldn't even *notice* being in "such a" building unless someone told you, or you attempted to use your mobile phone.
The effectively squat *ALL* of the TLD that they administer, and run -ZERO- risk of investing in domains that they are then unable to sell, aswell as -ZERO- risk of being convicted for abusing others trademarks etc.
Normal delete. Backup of all non-deleted (i.e. non-incriminating) files. Complete, secure wipe of entire disc, restore of backup.
Is actually preferable, in the case of a new disc, there's always the off chance someone will notice the disc is much newer than the rest of the computer.
Complete wipe of an entire platter is easy. In a pinch booting from any linux rescue-cd and running cat /dev/zero > /dev/hda a few times will do. (though it's better if you use random data a few times rather than zero, /dev/urandom would work)
I guess what I'm saying is that a *mature* e-book technology (not the crap that goes under e-books today) would have a large number of advantages over todays books. Probably some disadvantages too, allthough I can't think of any fundamental ones at the moment other than the need to be recharged to be usable. (and that's not much of a disadvantage if we assume that battery-life can be made atleast say 20 hours of active use)
You can argue with individual points above. But I don't think you can reasonably argue that *all* of these, and more (it's not hard to make the list of faults in the design of books 3 times as long) are non-improvements.
Books are a good design -- given todays constraints on what is possible at what cost. They are nowhere near an ideal design though.
As you point out, they do not, in general, manage to beat the market. Some of them do, some of the time. But if you take the average of managed funds and compare them to the average index-fund, then they do exactly equally well, minus the higher fees and plus-minus the usual margin of error.
Investing randomly will not only do equally well as buying a managed fund, on the average it'll actually do about 1% better pro year, the difference being due to that being about par for the management cost of a fund.
That you need to be a active pro to be able to invest in the stock-market is the biggest lie ever. The emperor has no clothes, and never had. It's a standing joke. To the point where the Wall Street Journal usually include a monkey or a playmate or someone in their annual ranking of stock-predictions, and the monkey/playmate/whatever in general do equally well as the average "analyst".
Most people with a technical insigth and some intelligence (and let's face it if you ain't got those, it's not likely you've stumbled upon anything revolutionary....) should easily be able to raise a few hundred thousand. Hell normal people manage that for buing a house. If I was in the position of a device that continually generate a single KW I could easily raise a million or more for a larger model, without having to sell off any part of the rigths for the device.
And once you have the first profit-turning machine, it's a lot like owning a fully legal money-printing-machine. It's ridicolous to assume you'd need venture-capital for building your second money-printing-machine.
Unless it's a case of "needs more expensive research before it'll work", but in that case you have to admit that what you currently have does not, infact, work.
That, offcourse, is the crucial flaw in all these literally thousands of "free energy" devices.
They do not, infact, actually work.
Assume one half manages to improve their production by 3% pro year, trough improvements in the production-process.
Assume the other half manages only to improve by 2% pro year.
Please explain to me how the *existance* of the 3% planet has any negative impact on the people on the 2% planet. Remember there is no communication, no trade, they don't even need to know that it exists. How are they "losers" ? What, exactly, are they losing? How, precisely, would they be better off if the 3% planet spontaneously blew up ? Would they then suddenly be "winners" despite nothing having changed and they potentially not even *knowing* about it ?
The sum total value of all shares is equal to the sum total value of all the companies.
If the sum total of all companies produce more value, then the value of all shares must also be higher.
Don't confuse value with dollar-amounts. It is true that absent new-dollar-supply the companies will stay at a constant dollar-value, but in that case you'd have deflation and a single dollar would be more and more valuable.
If you want zero inflation, this doesn't mean only printing dollars as population grows. It means only printing dollars corresponding to the increase in production. If your countries total production this year was 2% higher than last year, you can have 2% more dollars floating-around and still have the same purchase-power attached to every dollar.
It's only when you have say 5% more dollars to buy 2% more goods that the value of the dollar must fall (i.e. inflation).
For example, you can be perfectly reasonable about precautions (i.e. use a condom always except with a longtime stable-partner where you are both tested) and still get HIV for examplre trough unfaithfulness of that partner or trough rape. The latter is fairly much more common in some of the countries with higher hiv-rates than it is in western europe and the usa.
Teenagers don't generally crash more than others because they are technically unable to drive properly. They crash because of a combination of two things:
First, they *opt* to not drive properly, despite knowing better.
Two, they lack experience, which means they are more likely to overestimate themselves, or oversee the warning-signs.
All teenagers *know* that the safest way to drive isn't double the speed-limit, in the dark, on wet roads, when drunk, with loads of distractions in the car, while talking on the mobile-phone, without hands-free and a disco in the backseat.
They *know* this. They just fail to *act* on that knowledge. Some of them do some of the time anyway.
A more strict test won't fix this. It's a fair bet they'll show up sober, stay within the speed-limit, reduce speed when its slippery or vision is poor, turn their handy off, put their seatbelt on and so on for the duration of the test.
Tests would help if lack of knowledge was the problem. Most of the time though, lack of *responsibility* is the problem.
People don't steal because they are unaware that it's a crime. People don't drive while drunk because they are unaware that this is a crime. (any dangerous too) People don't go 100mph in town because they are unable to read the numbers on the signs.
That said, any technological fix for a psychological problem will fall short.
It's like the difference between the kid which doesn't touch the electrical outlet because if she does, mommy gets mad, and the kid that doesn't touch the electrical outlet because she realizes the actual danger of doing that. The difference is that the latter kid is safe even when unsupervised. The first one is not.
Same here. A kid that drives legally because otherwise dad would get mad is in danger the moment it thinks that dad won't discover. The kid, on the other hand, who understands the reality of the dangers will tend to be more careful regardless of if they're feeling observed or not.
I know *exactly* what single happening the most influenced my driving-style. I was on my first vacation with a car after getting my license, together with my girlfriend at the time. On some boring stretch of the road she fell asleep. Lateron the same day, she told me that shed never fallen asleep when someone her age was driving before, but she always felt so secure and safe when I was driving.
Ok, so simple self-preservation should've been enough for anyone to drive carefully. When you're young it frequently isn't though. However, having the girl youre madly in love with get real cuddly and explain to you how she likes it when you make her feel safe and secure is (was in my case anyway) a very efficient motivator for a male of a certain age.
You must be thinking of ./ which is used for current directory. Particularily for runnign a executable program from the current directory rather than searching for the program on $PATH. As in "Then run ./install.sh to start the installation-script."
If you produced pullovers under the trademarked name "FrobbyZalt(tm)" you're going to have a good case against the competitor that start selling t-shirts under the name "Frobbysalt".
If, on the other hand you produce the "Yummy(tm)" cake, you're going to have no case at all against a competitor that describes the food he produces as yummy.
In rough order of ease-of-protection;
I'm sure you see the pattern. The system is, always bet enough that once you win, you've made back all your losses, plus a small profit.
Yes, you can lose, by running out of money (and thus being unable to bet enough to make-good your losses), I'm just saying that given a large enough initial pot of money, gambling according to this scheme will, on the average, turn a profit. With 1:2 payout you need to roughly double your bet every time, which means that, for example, starting out with $250 gives you 7 chances of winning the bet before you're broke. Gueesing atleast *1* toincoss correctly in 7 tries is something you'll manage in 99.2% of the cases, so your odds of not going broke are high.
If you instead had an initial pot of $2000, you would get 10 tries of winning before being broke, which increases your odds to 99.91% or thereabout.
The advantage of selecting the betsize outstrips the fact that mathemathically odds 2 on a 50% chance would seem to be a deal where you can't systematically win.
Which means that you can beat the market if you know something the market doesn't know. Which mostly ain't the case.
That's a pretty fundamental misunderstanding.
If that was true -- if the stock-market was a zero-sum game where the only way to win was to have someone else lose the same amount, then there'd be no point in playing it. Your average return would be zero.
Luckily that is not the case for investments. It *is* the case for speculation (for example day-trading) but that's something else.
When you buy $1000 worth of oh, say, Arendal Fossekompani. You are buying a certain small part of a company. The company, as most companies, try to turn a profit. On the average, they manage that. Some companies make a loss and (if they stay like that) eventually go bankrupt. But the sum total of the profits (or losses) of all companies is hugely positive.
Now, your $1000 part of the company made say $100 of profits this year. They can do two things with this money. Either they divide their profit up and give it to the owners (that's the ones holding the stock), in which case you'd get $100 cash as dividend.
Or they can invest the money, for example use this years profit to improve the powerplant so that it'll produce more power next year. In this case you still own a certain part of the company, but it's a larger, more valuable company. (your piece should now be worth on the order of $1100, but market-forces can change this in either direction) The stock market is not a zero-sum game with no profits. It's a game where the profits are, over time, equal to the average profit of the companies you invest in.
The difference is due to improvements in motor-design, oil and oil-filters.
As for fuel-efficiency, even my car (a dirt-cheap Skoda Fabia) has an onboard computer that reports, among other things, fuel-economy, you'd notice it if it started creeping upward over time. And that is a excellent indicator that the car needs service and/or oilchange.
The oilchange-thing was a detail anyway. My point is that todays cars (atleast european/japanese ones) are enormously much more reliable and require a lot *less* service than they used to. So obviously competition *can* force producers to go for quality over rubbish, even though rubbish-cars that break down quickly and need replacement may be better for the manufacturers as a group.
Describing in minute detail *all* faults in the product actually makes people trust you more and consider the product *better*.
It may be counterinituitive, but I think it's just human nature.
People will prefer: "Book is like new, except there is a clearly visible stain (not affecting readability) on the lower left margin of page 35" over "Book is in a perfect condition".
Get a dedicated buy-only account. Nobody *cares* if a buyer has a bad rating. You can safely rate what sellers truly deserve. It's not a problem buying things with a bad rating anyway, since you generally pay in advance.
This tracks activity, not customer-satisfaction. Who'd you rather buy from, a seller with 1000 transactions, all with positive feedback, or a seller with 2000 transactions, 1600 of them with positive feedback, and 300 of them with negative ?
Thougth so !
Guess which of the two sellers will have the highest number attached to their name, get the nicest "star" etc ? Why, the ony lining Ebays pockets the most naturally ! Which would be the one with most transactions, not the one with highest customer-satisfaction.
Some simple improvements:
So, if they can build a 10KW machine for less than $250.000, it's a profit-maker from the get-go.
Offcourse this all fails for a very simple reason: The machine does not, infact, work. And never will.
They can simply sell power at todays market-rate until they've made enough money to build a bigger generator. Then repeat until they're a large enough power-seller that marketrates drop. Then continue until they reach the point where all other electricity-sellers close shop.
If your closest competitor can produce power for 1c/Kwh, then you can sell power for 0.9c/kwh until someone figures out a way to beat that price.
With a money-printing-machine (a free-electricity-machine is the same thing) you don't *NEED* venture-capital.