I made the unfortunate mistake of watching the series finale of Alias this way. The delivery method itself works pretty well, but having been only the second episode or so of Alias that I've seen, I was pretty unimpressed with the way the show turned out.
I had to watch 3-4 30 second ads, for a total of about 90 minutes (in what I presume aired for 2 hours on normal TV, not bad). The annoying part was, you have to click to exit each ad and continue the show after 30 seconds. Overall, though, the video quality was excellent for being streamed.
I don't have cable or even an antenna, so all the shows I watch are on DVD from Netflix. However, I'd like to be able to stream (from the US, legally) World Cup games, live (or at least delayed no more than a few minutes). As far as I've been able to determine, the only way to do that is through ESPN360. It's free for certain ISPs (probably ones which agree to host mirroring/multicast equipment), but not mine. Fortunately, they're offering a demo from June 26 to July 19 (I think), so hopefully I'll catch some of the games during that period. They don't offer everything, but it's better than nothing. Still, TV is way behind radio in internet streaming, though that's rather expected. It seems like the BBC is at the forefront, but they can't/don't export even for a fee.
It's become clear that this is exactly what it applies to (as well as AT&T TV service). Still, the claim of ownership applies to "Account Information" (billing info, etc) and not "Usage Information" (web sites visited), and certainly not the content you upload. Still, it's unclear exactly what they log and under what conditions they would share it to say, the government.
The new AT&T privacy policy is here. Under "Scope", it states that, "Additional privacy policies apply to certain AT&T services, including AT&T Yahoo! Dial, High Speed Internet and Small Business[...]". The linked privacy policy for DSL is here, where the language hasn't been changed since 2004; it looks similar to the old language people here are quoting.
That said, having just renewed my DSL contract, I'm not pleased with the way things are looking for AT&T's privacy policies. Still, not having AT&T as your ISP is no guarantee that your data/phone connection/etc won't travel over their lines. It's still unclear exactly what major telecoms are providing to the NSA, but the idea of the NSA going against its own tradition and monitoring US citizens' communications is very unsettling.
I should add that economics often deals with one-period versus multi-period. In a one-period model, production, consumption, etc. take place essentially instantaneously. Thus, the opportunity costs of taking cash and investing it in bonds has no meaning in that context. Economists tend like such simplifications because they allow analysis of particular issues of interest without getting terribly bogged down in unrelated matters.
Actually, you're wrong. With perfect competition goods should cost at least marginal cost of producing plus small percentage to have a positive return on investment. Otherwise, nobody would sell it, because buying bonds would be a better investment.
Well, it all comes down to the formal definition of "costs of production". Economists like to simplify things by including opportunity costs implicitly in the definition. This allows for nice results like "zero profit", which means "zero economic profit". And thus is also leads to nice conditions like "P = MC". Since I was talking about econ theory, it made the most sense to talk in terms of economic costs (as opposed to accounting costs).
I wished I lived on your planet where the price of cable access has gone down. I've paid $50 a month for RoadRunner since 1999.
I had RoadRunner myself at that $55 price ($50 + $5 cable modem rental). These days, it looks to be about $45/mo including modem. That doesn't include the promotional pricing that lasts 3-6 months depending on your provider. Perhaps not a huge decrease in price, but still a promising general direction for consumers.
So the grandparent made the assumption that a market exists for broadband. I don't see the need to be quite so critical of him/her for going straight to the producer side.
Further, if you are not pressured by consumer needs and competition for those needs (e.g. if a monopoly or oligopoly is presently stifling competition) there is no reason to develop greater efficiency and lower those costs. Therefore the consumer suffers, they do not get optimal service for their dollar, and arguably the producer and even the environment suffer, as they are not making efficient use of their inputs.
Monopolies and oligopolies certainly do have an incentive to lower costs; it allows them to raise profit. The key is that they are able to keep prices higher than costs. Still, it is in general the best interest of any firm to make efficient use of their inputs, in the sense of using the cheapest inputs per unit of good or service produced. A monopoly, for example, will just (in general) choose to produce less quantity in total than a competitive market would.
DSL is still more expensive than cable unless you have a landline already. Home telephone service is around 40$/month here, which would make DSL (assuming I could get 32$/month anyway, which seems low) that would put me at over 70$.
My case was the opposite, actually. I didn't want basic TV nor a landline. DSL at the faster speed is about $50 + taxes (including land line), whereas cable would be about $60 + taxes (sometimes they had deals for the first 6 months or whatever). Some people might find basic cable more useful than a landline, so YMMV. Still, it's nice to have dialup as a backup (not that I've used it since I got DSL), and not having the option to watch TV saves quite a bit of time wasted watching programs I don't like all that much anyway.
I think it should cost as much as the consumer is willing to pay - at least that is how it works when you have a properly working capitalist system.
Actually, with perfect competition, firms would charge their marginal cost of producing it. The intuition behind this is that if they did not, and there exists free entry (a requirement of perfect competition), then another firm would charge slightly lower, and thus get all of the customers. Of course, in the broadband industry, there exist fairly natural monopolies because of the huge fixed costs of the infrastructure and "last mile" runs.
Now consider what you said: the consumer's willingness to pay. If firms are able to charge as much as each individual is willing to pay, this is perfect price discrimination. DSL and cable operators do some degree of price discrimination by offering the different tiers of speed at different prices. If I understand you correctly, I'm pretty sure having DSL cost what consumers are willing to pay is not what you want. After all, I'd certainly be willing to pay a bit more for my DSL considering how much I use it.
When is the last time you saw a new DSL provider *other* than the phone company?
I am really worried that our options are getting smaller, and not larger - thus the prices will go up, and our bandwidth will not increase with the extra cost.
Yes, in reality, internet service is fairly consolidated. If you're lucky, you'll have three good choices for broadband (many have two -- cable or DSL -- or fewer). Still, in many areas services like Speakeasy are available as alternatives in the DSL market. In my experience, options for broadband are not getting smaller, as you suggest. Some communities or apartment buildings even form their own co-op style internet service providers if they're truly unhappy with the choices. Before, when most people were on dialup, it'd be hard to convince enough of your neighbors to want to start such a service.
As for prices, we're seeing a bidding war. I would expect this to be good for consumers, so long as enough options remain. I haven't seen evidence that DSL or cable operators are selling below cost, as some have claimed. I seem to recall paying about $55/mo 5 years ago for cable internet access (in addition to the TV channels), and now prices are (much) lower and speeds are still good in most areas. The bidding wars don't seem to be driving out players like Speakeasy, so I personally just don't see such a pessimistic trend.
Certainly cable isn't the greatest, but don't you think it has gone a long way towards giving people more choice? Granted, most of cable is dominated by big companies (who also buy out the smaller ones that come along), but most people went from 3-4 channels in the 60s to 40 or so channels in the 80s, and now with digital cable, 100+. You might think 90% are crap, but you have a greater number left in that 10% these days.
That said, I gave up cable a year ago and got Netflix instead. Reducing the time spent watching TV (which went way up after I bought a TiVo) was very good for me.
It is bad for consumers when this happens. We need a healthy competition between AMD and Intel to keep prices down and performance up.
Though there wasn't much to the article, and it repeated itself. However, it gave indications that we have very healthy competition: "The average price of a PC processor in April was less than half what it was in March[...]". Intel, last I heard, still has a commanding majority of the processor market. Even if they falter a bit for a product generation or two, they have billions of dollars in cash to use to finance the next round of chips.
This article described a price war between Intel and AMD for the current product generation. Definitely good for consumers in the short term, but we'll have to wait and see how it looks for consumers in the long run.
You're making the assumption that wages have kept pace with inflation. They haven't.
Did you mean that wage growth has exceeded inflation? On occasion, especially in the last few years, they haven't. Over the long term, though, wages have far exceeded most measures of inflation. This is why there is a debate about whether to weight future Social Security benefits on inflation rather than on wages, as it currently is (see this, for example).
the G5's case was beautiful, functional, and able to cool several ridiculously hot G5 processors silently.
Silently? In my experience, the dual G5 towers will crank up their fans fairly often, and they are anything but silent. Even in a lab filled with plenty of other computers, the fans from an individual G5 tower were distinguishable. Though they appear to be variable speed, they often crank up to full speed for several seconds only to slow down again. This change in noise is more noticeable than the fans running constantly at a medium level.
Dell's may not be the prettiest things (I personally dig metal cases), but they tend to be darned quiet, even at full load (along with their CD/DVD drives).
Sadly, my home-built computers are neither terribly quiet nor completely effective at cooling to proper temperatures without the use of a room fan in this hot, upstairs room. There can be benefits to being in your parents' basement.
I can't remember when was the last time I could install anything more sophisticated than a shell script without being superuser in Unix.
Well, as one example, I've done a source install of all of KDE as a normal user. It's fairly straightforward with the use of konstruct, a build system designed to handle the dependencies involved.
I have often installed newer versions of software to test in my home directory (binary versions of OpenOffice, Mozilla/Firefox, etc) as to not interfere with what I know is a working version. In the worst case, it messes up my user preferences making them not backwards compatible. That can be fixed by either removing the user preferences or restoring from backup (I back up important directories like ~/.kde).
Of course, it tends to be the open source apps, in my experience, that work best being installed on a user level (I remember back when Firefox was called Phoenix, and you just unzipped a file and dragged the program file/folder wherever you want).
In general, if you're willing to compile from source you can get nearly anything working at the user-level from your home directory.
Of course, man-in-the-middle does not work with public key cryptography
As I understand it, not unless the initiator of the connection knows which host key to trust. If you don't distribute a trusted set of host keys by another method, then the MITM can just emulate both sender and receiver, and intercept all communications.
That's why your ssh client will save a list of trusted hosts, ask you to authenticate new hosts, and give a big warning when the key for an IP doesn't match what's on file. It's also why web pages use certifying authorities like Verisign to provide some centralized place to trust for host keys.
What I'd love to find is a 19" desktop lcd with decent res. I can't even find any that do 1600x1200
It is indeed one of the strange differences between desktop LCDs and laptop LCDs. For better than 1280x1024, you really need to move up to the 20" models.
I ended up choosing dual 17" 1280x1024 monitors (Samsung 740B) over a single 20" screen. The prices were roughly the same for similar display quality (though I chose to buy a dual-DVI NVIDIA Quadro card from Ebay to drive them both).
I'm not fully aware of the technical differences between desktop LCDs and laptop LCDs, but I have noticed that desktop LCDs are always much thicker (basically the thickness of the entire laptop itself), capable of being much brighter (at least compared with most laptops), and never having that "glossy" design that some Sony and other laptops ship with these days. I suspect the brightness comes from having the room and power to have bigger lights, and the thickness makes them easier to manufacture. For example, my 4 year old 15" Eizo seems to have a lot better brightness and more correct color than my wife's 12" Powerbook G4 that is connected to it.
The only difference between the original PS1 controller and the PS2's controller is the analog buttons, which aren't used at all in Katamari.
Somebody already mentioned the original PS1's lack of analog control, but I thought I'd mention that pushing both analog buttons (L3 and R3) simultaneously in Katamari would turn you 180 degrees (you would jump up and land on the other side of the Katamari). This was very useful to get out of tough corners quickly.
On the contrary, the general reception amaroK gets in my experience, even (and especially) when compared to iTunes, is that amaroK is a vastly superior audio player. Now, I don't own an ipod (I own an iaudio X5, which uses simple a simple vfat mount point), so perhaps amaroK's ipod integration isn't as good as iTunes.
iTunes is fine for simple audio needs, but it just seemed too limited compared to the features I adore in amaroK. Of course, iTunes isn't really much of a contender in that I play FLAC and OGG files, and for quite some time the main iTunes OGG decoder crashed on OSX 10.4. Still, my wife reports that things like the track number don't work. I haven't tried to get any sort of FLAC support working in iTunes, but I seem to recall that it didn't exist in any convenient form.
Beyond that, amaroK has a bunch of features that iTunes either doesn't have, or requires some kind of add-on. For example, I use its wikipedia lookup on occasion. A big deal? Not really, but I probably wouldn't bother to find out what wp has to say on an artist if it weren't a simple tab.
iTunes has decent browsing by id3 tag, but amaroK's implementation makes much better use of the window real estate [note: those screenshots are getting old. amaroK development moves amazingly fast.]
amaroK's file browser is also very useful for media that's not in my established library. iTunes has no built-in equivalent (though you can use Finder/Explorer if iTunes is the default app for that media type). I could go on with other neat amaroK features I use with varying frequency.
I have encountered one area in which iTunes exceeds amaroK: podcast support. amaroK has the basics, but the interface is pretty simplistic and not as polished as that of iTunes. Of course, there is no music store/video store/etc, but not owning an ipod, I have little interest in those features.
So I end up listening to almost all of my music through amaroK in FC4, and listening to podcasts from my Mac Mini. It's the best of both apps, but if I had to choose one or the other, it would be amaroK hands down.
The KT133 was terrible. [...] A quick search on Google for KT133 problems shows NINETY THOUSAND hits.
The KT133 was immensely popular, as I recall. It's no surprise that lots of people report problems with it. On the other hand, I didn't say that the KT133 was particularly great, just that it was stable for me (while using it as an example of how the quality of the motherboard manufacturer seemed to matter a great deal). I leave beating the heck out of chipsets for review websites, which then form a decent basis of my purchases (at least since the KT400). Performance? It wasn't high on my priority list.
I don't recall noticing huge performance differences in benchmarks of articles I read, but I could certainly be mistaken. I would still take a decent performance hit if it meant greater stability (which is why I stay far away from overclocking). I tend to buy the low end (but good quality) of what's available at that time, and upgrade more often (I think it provides more consistent relative performance at a good value).
Overall, I'd jump at an Intel chipset, since Linux support is probably most consistently good there. But when the AMD options are just so much more appealing, you're left with VIA, SiS, and NVIDIA (roughly speaking), and I still have no compelling reason to move off of VIA.
VIA? I'd recommened everyone stay away.... I sure the heck do! Time isn't worth the $20 you save by walking away from an Intel or SiS chipset. Sure, these chipsets have issues, but Intel and SiS both seem a little more talkative with Linux developers.. and tend to produce a better product. VIA seems produce these flaws in almost _all_ of their chipsets.
My experience, sure. You'll have to make up your own mind.
Not that anecdotes are all that meaningful to others, but I've had relatively good luck with VIA chipsets. Since I've had AMD processors in my last three motherboards, Intel was not an option. I haven't heard good things about SiS in general, but that was a while ago. NVIDIA is the newcomer, but to get some mb features working you need proprietary drivers (annoying enough for things like video, but I'm not interested in it for good chipset functionality).
Of four motherboards (an Epox and Abit built with KT133 chipset, and an Asus with a KT400 chipset, and a brand I don't remember with an old K6-2 450 Mhz cpu), two are still running (the Epox and the Asus). The other two experienced slow deaths (worked great for years, slowly became unstable), which I largely attribute to some improper venting of the towers causing heat damage.
In my experience, as a Linux user, it's best to seek out a chipset that is reported to work well with Linux. Then find a motherboard brand you trust. At this point all I'll go with is Asus (my experience with motherboards goes beyond my personal computers, and while I used to think Abit and Asus were equal in quality, I don't think Abit is as good anymore). I had to RMA two motherboards (with KT133 chipsets), before getting the Epox. I can't blame the chipset, though (unless there are serious quality differences in the way the chips themselves are manufactured, but I doubt it), since I've used KT133 with great luck for years since then. So while my percentages might not look great, the lesson here I think is that the motherboard manufacturer plays a more important role.
VIA, Intel, NVIDIA, SiS, whatever, you can probably find a particular chipset from each company that is reported to be stable with your operating system of choice. Once you've chosen that, don't skimp on the cost of the motherboard (and the cooling), and your experience should be a good one.
Trying to get two economists to agree on a macro issue is almost impossible. If it was a real science, at least the basics would be known, tested, and proven by now.
I'll grant that there are many conflicting models in macro. Many of them stem from the assumptions. For example, assuming a closed economy or an open economy. In the real world and throughout history, various countries are somewhere in between, but often closer to one or the other. Thus, choosing appropriate assumptions for the question you're asking is very important.
Beyond that, macro is very, very new. Physics had centuries from Aristotle to Newton to Einstein. The point is we can gather data and test these models for their effectiveness. Some of them work, and they tend to persist, and some of them don't (but again, choosing which model is appropriate for which data is very important). Besides, if you're a big fan of micro, there's a huge trend in macro to have the models based on micro foundations. Regarding economics as a science, see my other post in this thread.
Even if you don't like certain aggregate variables (GDP, etc), some macroeconomic variables are decided in the real world regardless (how much money to print, what interest rate the Fed sets). Macroeconomics will always exist in that sense. There's certainly plenty of room for improvement in the collection of data (especially of non-OECD countries), but that's true of micro as well.
Agreed. I have high respect for both the Turing Award and the Field's Medal. Note that neither of them call themselves the Nobel Prize.
Neither of them are decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. I wouldn't mind if everyone called it the Nobel Memorial Prize or something to that effect. If it didn't exist, there would probably be some "top prize" similar to the Field's Medal or Turing Award, and that'd be fine too (there probably was before 1968).
The pretense of economists that it is a verifiable, repeatable, quantifiable discipline like physics is the bullshit causing the sort of comment that AuMatar posted.
I certainly agree that economists should be aware of the inherent drawbacks to the methods. It's true, most of economics does not involve experiments in the traditional sense (experimental economics is the exception, but there are certainly arguments about how the results there apply to the world at large). However, many other disciplines, some considered more scientific than others, are also unable to conduct experiments. In general, fields like astronomy, meteorology and paleontology are not based on experiments. Some of the methods used can be verified in the lab, just like statistical methods and "brain-dead algebraic models" used by economists can be proved with math. Of course, assumptions of some sort are required for the models (and even for statistics itself). The data, however, are not typically generated by experiment in these fields.
I really have no problem with those who consider economics not a science. As I mentioned in my previous post, it depends largely on how you define science in the first place. For this reason I'm glad it's not referred to as "economic science", but that doesn't seem to stop this debate from coming up again and again. I also welcome informed criticisms as to the methods and data sources used by economists. This is how fields improve.
Regardless of whether modern economic theory is doing a good job, individuals, businesses, and governments make economic choices constantly. Thus it seems worthwhile to pursue a better understanding of economic issues in the hope of improving those decisions (or, at the very least, better understanding why things happened in the past). Economics is useful in the sense that it can provide actual falsifiable predictions about quantitative phenomena. Whether this is sufficient to classify economics as a science really doesn't change anything, in my view.
Quite fitting, given macroeconomics is a pseudo-science, that it be given a pseudo-award.
As you're probably aware, more than macroeconomists receive the "The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel". In fact, the 2005 prize went to two game theorists (and thus microeconomists). The debate about whether economics, or any subset of it, is a real "science" is not a very fruitful one (since one can define science in any number of ways, both including and excluding econ). I find it interesting (though not terribly surprising, since I've heard it before) that you separate macro from micro, rather than claiming all of econ is a pseudo-science (disclaimer: I am a PhD student in econ who will have macro as one field).
The existence or lack of a Nobel prize is not really appropriate for use as some indicator of how important, or reliable, or [insert adjective here] a field is. After all, there is no Nobel prize in mathematics, and if some dramatically new field emerges that doesn't fit well within currently-established categories, a new "Bank of Sweden" prize might be created. Unless, of course, you believe that the original categories will always incorporate the only worthwhile pursuits of humanity.
Economics is a much younger field than physical or biological sciences, and most of the field we study today was developed since Nobel's time. I'm no historian or biographer, so I couldn't say with any degree of authority whether Alfred Nobel, were he choosing the awards today, would choose economics or anything else as a category.
Is it a reasonable assertion that a catastrophic terrorist attack could be executed every single day of every year?
No, but is it reasonable to assume that the most a terrorist attack will kill is about 3,000 people? That was the point you excluded with ellipses in your quote. If the probability of a terrorist attack on an incredible scale is sufficiently high, then it makes sense to devote resources to avoiding such an incident.
Of course, it's clearly a matter of debate as to how likely such a threat is and what tools are appropriate to combat it. I personally prefer to err on the side of protecting civil liberties, which I believe are fundamental to our society and thus worth protecting.
Slashdot Mirror
will this be a step closer to us getting free episodes of CSI/Lost etc.
You know about this, right?
I made the unfortunate mistake of watching the series finale of Alias this way. The delivery method itself works pretty well, but having been only the second episode or so of Alias that I've seen, I was pretty unimpressed with the way the show turned out.
I had to watch 3-4 30 second ads, for a total of about 90 minutes (in what I presume aired for 2 hours on normal TV, not bad). The annoying part was, you have to click to exit each ad and continue the show after 30 seconds. Overall, though, the video quality was excellent for being streamed.
I don't have cable or even an antenna, so all the shows I watch are on DVD from Netflix. However, I'd like to be able to stream (from the US, legally) World Cup games, live (or at least delayed no more than a few minutes). As far as I've been able to determine, the only way to do that is through ESPN360. It's free for certain ISPs (probably ones which agree to host mirroring/multicast equipment), but not mine. Fortunately, they're offering a demo from June 26 to July 19 (I think), so hopefully I'll catch some of the games during that period. They don't offer everything, but it's better than nothing. Still, TV is way behind radio in internet streaming, though that's rather expected. It seems like the BBC is at the forefront, but they can't/don't export even for a fee.
It's become clear that this is exactly what it applies to (as well as AT&T TV service). Still, the claim of ownership applies to "Account Information" (billing info, etc) and not "Usage Information" (web sites visited), and certainly not the content you upload. Still, it's unclear exactly what they log and under what conditions they would share it to say, the government.
The new AT&T privacy policy is here. Under "Scope", it states that, "Additional privacy policies apply to certain AT&T services, including AT&T Yahoo! Dial, High Speed Internet and Small Business[...]". The linked privacy policy for DSL is here, where the language hasn't been changed since 2004; it looks similar to the old language people here are quoting.
That said, having just renewed my DSL contract, I'm not pleased with the way things are looking for AT&T's privacy policies. Still, not having AT&T as your ISP is no guarantee that your data/phone connection/etc won't travel over their lines. It's still unclear exactly what major telecoms are providing to the NSA, but the idea of the NSA going against its own tradition and monitoring US citizens' communications is very unsettling.
I should add that economics often deals with one-period versus multi-period. In a one-period model, production, consumption, etc. take place essentially instantaneously. Thus, the opportunity costs of taking cash and investing it in bonds has no meaning in that context. Economists tend like such simplifications because they allow analysis of particular issues of interest without getting terribly bogged down in unrelated matters.
Actually, you're wrong. With perfect competition goods should cost at least marginal cost of producing plus small percentage to have a positive return on investment. Otherwise, nobody would sell it, because buying bonds would be a better investment.
Well, it all comes down to the formal definition of "costs of production". Economists like to simplify things by including opportunity costs implicitly in the definition. This allows for nice results like "zero profit", which means "zero economic profit". And thus is also leads to nice conditions like "P = MC". Since I was talking about econ theory, it made the most sense to talk in terms of economic costs (as opposed to accounting costs).
I wished I lived on your planet where the price of cable access has gone down. I've paid $50 a month for RoadRunner since 1999.
I had RoadRunner myself at that $55 price ($50 + $5 cable modem rental). These days, it looks to be about $45/mo including modem. That doesn't include the promotional pricing that lasts 3-6 months depending on your provider. Perhaps not a huge decrease in price, but still a promising general direction for consumers.
So the grandparent made the assumption that a market exists for broadband. I don't see the need to be quite so critical of him/her for going straight to the producer side.
Further, if you are not pressured by consumer needs and competition for those needs (e.g. if a monopoly or oligopoly is presently stifling competition) there is no reason to develop greater efficiency and lower those costs. Therefore the consumer suffers, they do not get optimal service for their dollar, and arguably the producer and even the environment suffer, as they are not making efficient use of their inputs.
Monopolies and oligopolies certainly do have an incentive to lower costs; it allows them to raise profit. The key is that they are able to keep prices higher than costs. Still, it is in general the best interest of any firm to make efficient use of their inputs, in the sense of using the cheapest inputs per unit of good or service produced. A monopoly, for example, will just (in general) choose to produce less quantity in total than a competitive market would.
DSL is still more expensive than cable unless you have a landline already. Home telephone service is around 40$/month here, which would make DSL (assuming I could get 32$/month anyway, which seems low) that would put me at over 70$.
My case was the opposite, actually. I didn't want basic TV nor a landline. DSL at the faster speed is about $50 + taxes (including land line), whereas cable would be about $60 + taxes (sometimes they had deals for the first 6 months or whatever). Some people might find basic cable more useful than a landline, so YMMV. Still, it's nice to have dialup as a backup (not that I've used it since I got DSL), and not having the option to watch TV saves quite a bit of time wasted watching programs I don't like all that much anyway.
I think it should cost as much as the consumer is willing to pay - at least that is how it works when you have a properly working capitalist system.
Actually, with perfect competition, firms would charge their marginal cost of producing it. The intuition behind this is that if they did not, and there exists free entry (a requirement of perfect competition), then another firm would charge slightly lower, and thus get all of the customers. Of course, in the broadband industry, there exist fairly natural monopolies because of the huge fixed costs of the infrastructure and "last mile" runs.
Now consider what you said: the consumer's willingness to pay. If firms are able to charge as much as each individual is willing to pay, this is perfect price discrimination. DSL and cable operators do some degree of price discrimination by offering the different tiers of speed at different prices. If I understand you correctly, I'm pretty sure having DSL cost what consumers are willing to pay is not what you want. After all, I'd certainly be willing to pay a bit more for my DSL considering how much I use it.
When is the last time you saw a new DSL provider *other* than the phone company?
I am really worried that our options are getting smaller, and not larger - thus the prices will go up, and our bandwidth will not increase with the extra cost.
Yes, in reality, internet service is fairly consolidated. If you're lucky, you'll have three good choices for broadband (many have two -- cable or DSL -- or fewer). Still, in many areas services like Speakeasy are available as alternatives in the DSL market. In my experience, options for broadband are not getting smaller, as you suggest. Some communities or apartment buildings even form their own co-op style internet service providers if they're truly unhappy with the choices. Before, when most people were on dialup, it'd be hard to convince enough of your neighbors to want to start such a service.
As for prices, we're seeing a bidding war. I would expect this to be good for consumers, so long as enough options remain. I haven't seen evidence that DSL or cable operators are selling below cost, as some have claimed. I seem to recall paying about $55/mo 5 years ago for cable internet access (in addition to the TV channels), and now prices are (much) lower and speeds are still good in most areas. The bidding wars don't seem to be driving out players like Speakeasy, so I personally just don't see such a pessimistic trend.
They said the same thing about cable TV.
Certainly cable isn't the greatest, but don't you think it has gone a long way towards giving people more choice? Granted, most of cable is dominated by big companies (who also buy out the smaller ones that come along), but most people went from 3-4 channels in the 60s to 40 or so channels in the 80s, and now with digital cable, 100+. You might think 90% are crap, but you have a greater number left in that 10% these days.
That said, I gave up cable a year ago and got Netflix instead. Reducing the time spent watching TV (which went way up after I bought a TiVo) was very good for me.
It is bad for consumers when this happens. We need a healthy competition between AMD and Intel to keep prices down and performance up.
Though there wasn't much to the article, and it repeated itself. However, it gave indications that we have very healthy competition: "The average price of a PC processor in April was less than half what it was in March[...]". Intel, last I heard, still has a commanding majority of the processor market. Even if they falter a bit for a product generation or two, they have billions of dollars in cash to use to finance the next round of chips.
This article described a price war between Intel and AMD for the current product generation. Definitely good for consumers in the short term, but we'll have to wait and see how it looks for consumers in the long run.
You're making the assumption that wages have kept pace with inflation. They haven't.
Did you mean that wage growth has exceeded inflation? On occasion, especially in the last few years, they haven't. Over the long term, though, wages have far exceeded most measures of inflation. This is why there is a debate about whether to weight future Social Security benefits on inflation rather than on wages, as it currently is (see this, for example).
the G5's case was beautiful, functional, and able to cool several ridiculously hot G5 processors silently.
Silently? In my experience, the dual G5 towers will crank up their fans fairly often, and they are anything but silent. Even in a lab filled with plenty of other computers, the fans from an individual G5 tower were distinguishable. Though they appear to be variable speed, they often crank up to full speed for several seconds only to slow down again. This change in noise is more noticeable than the fans running constantly at a medium level.
Dell's may not be the prettiest things (I personally dig metal cases), but they tend to be darned quiet, even at full load (along with their CD/DVD drives).
Sadly, my home-built computers are neither terribly quiet nor completely effective at cooling to proper temperatures without the use of a room fan in this hot, upstairs room. There can be benefits to being in your parents' basement.
I can't remember when was the last time I could install anything more sophisticated than a shell script without being superuser in Unix.
Well, as one example, I've done a source install of all of KDE as a normal user. It's fairly straightforward with the use of konstruct, a build system designed to handle the dependencies involved.
I have often installed newer versions of software to test in my home directory (binary versions of OpenOffice, Mozilla/Firefox, etc) as to not interfere with what I know is a working version. In the worst case, it messes up my user preferences making them not backwards compatible. That can be fixed by either removing the user preferences or restoring from backup (I back up important directories like ~/.kde).
Of course, it tends to be the open source apps, in my experience, that work best being installed on a user level (I remember back when Firefox was called Phoenix, and you just unzipped a file and dragged the program file/folder wherever you want).
In general, if you're willing to compile from source you can get nearly anything working at the user-level from your home directory.
Of course, man-in-the-middle does not work with public key cryptography
As I understand it, not unless the initiator of the connection knows which host key to trust. If you don't distribute a trusted set of host keys by another method, then the MITM can just emulate both sender and receiver, and intercept all communications.
That's why your ssh client will save a list of trusted hosts, ask you to authenticate new hosts, and give a big warning when the key for an IP doesn't match what's on file. It's also why web pages use certifying authorities like Verisign to provide some centralized place to trust for host keys.
Is the pic doctored or is it real?
Yes.
What I'd love to find is a 19" desktop lcd with decent res. I can't even find any that do 1600x1200
It is indeed one of the strange differences between desktop LCDs and laptop LCDs. For better than 1280x1024, you really need to move up to the 20" models.
I ended up choosing dual 17" 1280x1024 monitors (Samsung 740B) over a single 20" screen. The prices were roughly the same for similar display quality (though I chose to buy a dual-DVI NVIDIA Quadro card from Ebay to drive them both).
I'm not fully aware of the technical differences between desktop LCDs and laptop LCDs, but I have noticed that desktop LCDs are always much thicker (basically the thickness of the entire laptop itself), capable of being much brighter (at least compared with most laptops), and never having that "glossy" design that some Sony and other laptops ship with these days. I suspect the brightness comes from having the room and power to have bigger lights, and the thickness makes them easier to manufacture. For example, my 4 year old 15" Eizo seems to have a lot better brightness and more correct color than my wife's 12" Powerbook G4 that is connected to it.
The only difference between the original PS1 controller and the PS2's controller is the analog buttons, which aren't used at all in Katamari.
Somebody already mentioned the original PS1's lack of analog control, but I thought I'd mention that pushing both analog buttons (L3 and R3) simultaneously in Katamari would turn you 180 degrees (you would jump up and land on the other side of the Katamari). This was very useful to get out of tough corners quickly.
1) No iTunes clone. amaroK - yeeeeech...
On the contrary, the general reception amaroK gets in my experience, even (and especially) when compared to iTunes, is that amaroK is a vastly superior audio player. Now, I don't own an ipod (I own an iaudio X5, which uses simple a simple vfat mount point), so perhaps amaroK's ipod integration isn't as good as iTunes.
iTunes is fine for simple audio needs, but it just seemed too limited compared to the features I adore in amaroK. Of course, iTunes isn't really much of a contender in that I play FLAC and OGG files, and for quite some time the main iTunes OGG decoder crashed on OSX 10.4. Still, my wife reports that things like the track number don't work. I haven't tried to get any sort of FLAC support working in iTunes, but I seem to recall that it didn't exist in any convenient form.
Beyond that, amaroK has a bunch of features that iTunes either doesn't have, or requires some kind of add-on. For example, I use its wikipedia lookup on occasion. A big deal? Not really, but I probably wouldn't bother to find out what wp has to say on an artist if it weren't a simple tab.
iTunes has decent browsing by id3 tag, but amaroK's implementation makes much better use of the window real estate [note: those screenshots are getting old. amaroK development moves amazingly fast.]
amaroK's file browser is also very useful for media that's not in my established library. iTunes has no built-in equivalent (though you can use Finder/Explorer if iTunes is the default app for that media type). I could go on with other neat amaroK features I use with varying frequency.
I have encountered one area in which iTunes exceeds amaroK: podcast support. amaroK has the basics, but the interface is pretty simplistic and not as polished as that of iTunes. Of course, there is no music store/video store/etc, but not owning an ipod, I have little interest in those features.
So I end up listening to almost all of my music through amaroK in FC4, and listening to podcasts from my Mac Mini. It's the best of both apps, but if I had to choose one or the other, it would be amaroK hands down.
The KT133 was terrible. [...] A quick search on Google for KT133 problems shows NINETY THOUSAND hits.
The KT133 was immensely popular, as I recall. It's no surprise that lots of people report problems with it. On the other hand, I didn't say that the KT133 was particularly great, just that it was stable for me (while using it as an example of how the quality of the motherboard manufacturer seemed to matter a great deal). I leave beating the heck out of chipsets for review websites, which then form a decent basis of my purchases (at least since the KT400). Performance? It wasn't high on my priority list.
I don't recall noticing huge performance differences in benchmarks of articles I read, but I could certainly be mistaken. I would still take a decent performance hit if it meant greater stability (which is why I stay far away from overclocking). I tend to buy the low end (but good quality) of what's available at that time, and upgrade more often (I think it provides more consistent relative performance at a good value).
Overall, I'd jump at an Intel chipset, since Linux support is probably most consistently good there. But when the AMD options are just so much more appealing, you're left with VIA, SiS, and NVIDIA (roughly speaking), and I still have no compelling reason to move off of VIA.
VIA? I'd recommened everyone stay away.... I sure the heck do! Time isn't worth the $20 you save by walking away from an Intel or SiS chipset. Sure, these chipsets have issues, but Intel and SiS both seem a little more talkative with Linux developers.. and tend to produce a better product. VIA seems produce these flaws in almost _all_ of their chipsets.
My experience, sure. You'll have to make up your own mind.
Not that anecdotes are all that meaningful to others, but I've had relatively good luck with VIA chipsets. Since I've had AMD processors in my last three motherboards, Intel was not an option. I haven't heard good things about SiS in general, but that was a while ago. NVIDIA is the newcomer, but to get some mb features working you need proprietary drivers (annoying enough for things like video, but I'm not interested in it for good chipset functionality).
Of four motherboards (an Epox and Abit built with KT133 chipset, and an Asus with a KT400 chipset, and a brand I don't remember with an old K6-2 450 Mhz cpu), two are still running (the Epox and the Asus). The other two experienced slow deaths (worked great for years, slowly became unstable), which I largely attribute to some improper venting of the towers causing heat damage.
In my experience, as a Linux user, it's best to seek out a chipset that is reported to work well with Linux. Then find a motherboard brand you trust. At this point all I'll go with is Asus (my experience with motherboards goes beyond my personal computers, and while I used to think Abit and Asus were equal in quality, I don't think Abit is as good anymore). I had to RMA two motherboards (with KT133 chipsets), before getting the Epox. I can't blame the chipset, though (unless there are serious quality differences in the way the chips themselves are manufactured, but I doubt it), since I've used KT133 with great luck for years since then. So while my percentages might not look great, the lesson here I think is that the motherboard manufacturer plays a more important role.
VIA, Intel, NVIDIA, SiS, whatever, you can probably find a particular chipset from each company that is reported to be stable with your operating system of choice. Once you've chosen that, don't skimp on the cost of the motherboard (and the cooling), and your experience should be a good one.
Trying to get two economists to agree on a macro issue is almost impossible. If it was a real science, at least the basics would be known, tested, and proven by now.
I'll grant that there are many conflicting models in macro. Many of them stem from the assumptions. For example, assuming a closed economy or an open economy. In the real world and throughout history, various countries are somewhere in between, but often closer to one or the other. Thus, choosing appropriate assumptions for the question you're asking is very important.
Beyond that, macro is very, very new. Physics had centuries from Aristotle to Newton to Einstein. The point is we can gather data and test these models for their effectiveness. Some of them work, and they tend to persist, and some of them don't (but again, choosing which model is appropriate for which data is very important). Besides, if you're a big fan of micro, there's a huge trend in macro to have the models based on micro foundations. Regarding economics as a science, see my other post in this thread.
Even if you don't like certain aggregate variables (GDP, etc), some macroeconomic variables are decided in the real world regardless (how much money to print, what interest rate the Fed sets). Macroeconomics will always exist in that sense. There's certainly plenty of room for improvement in the collection of data (especially of non-OECD countries), but that's true of micro as well.
Agreed. I have high respect for both the Turing Award and the Field's Medal. Note that neither of them call themselves the Nobel Prize.
Neither of them are decided by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. I wouldn't mind if everyone called it the Nobel Memorial Prize or something to that effect. If it didn't exist, there would probably be some "top prize" similar to the Field's Medal or Turing Award, and that'd be fine too (there probably was before 1968).
The pretense of economists that it is a verifiable, repeatable, quantifiable discipline like physics is the bullshit causing the sort of comment that AuMatar posted.
I certainly agree that economists should be aware of the inherent drawbacks to the methods. It's true, most of economics does not involve experiments in the traditional sense (experimental economics is the exception, but there are certainly arguments about how the results there apply to the world at large). However, many other disciplines, some considered more scientific than others, are also unable to conduct experiments. In general, fields like astronomy, meteorology and paleontology are not based on experiments. Some of the methods used can be verified in the lab, just like statistical methods and "brain-dead algebraic models" used by economists can be proved with math. Of course, assumptions of some sort are required for the models (and even for statistics itself). The data, however, are not typically generated by experiment in these fields.
I really have no problem with those who consider economics not a science. As I mentioned in my previous post, it depends largely on how you define science in the first place. For this reason I'm glad it's not referred to as "economic science", but that doesn't seem to stop this debate from coming up again and again. I also welcome informed criticisms as to the methods and data sources used by economists. This is how fields improve.
Regardless of whether modern economic theory is doing a good job, individuals, businesses, and governments make economic choices constantly. Thus it seems worthwhile to pursue a better understanding of economic issues in the hope of improving those decisions (or, at the very least, better understanding why things happened in the past). Economics is useful in the sense that it can provide actual falsifiable predictions about quantitative phenomena. Whether this is sufficient to classify economics as a science really doesn't change anything, in my view.
Quite fitting, given macroeconomics is a pseudo-science, that it be given a pseudo-award.
As you're probably aware, more than macroeconomists receive the "The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel". In fact, the 2005 prize went to two game theorists (and thus microeconomists). The debate about whether economics, or any subset of it, is a real "science" is not a very fruitful one (since one can define science in any number of ways, both including and excluding econ). I find it interesting (though not terribly surprising, since I've heard it before) that you separate macro from micro, rather than claiming all of econ is a pseudo-science (disclaimer: I am a PhD student in econ who will have macro as one field).
The existence or lack of a Nobel prize is not really appropriate for use as some indicator of how important, or reliable, or [insert adjective here] a field is. After all, there is no Nobel prize in mathematics, and if some dramatically new field emerges that doesn't fit well within currently-established categories, a new "Bank of Sweden" prize might be created. Unless, of course, you believe that the original categories will always incorporate the only worthwhile pursuits of humanity.
Economics is a much younger field than physical or biological sciences, and most of the field we study today was developed since Nobel's time. I'm no historian or biographer, so I couldn't say with any degree of authority whether Alfred Nobel, were he choosing the awards today, would choose economics or anything else as a category.
Is it a reasonable assertion that a catastrophic terrorist attack could be executed every single day of every year?
No, but is it reasonable to assume that the most a terrorist attack will kill is about 3,000 people? That was the point you excluded with ellipses in your quote. If the probability of a terrorist attack on an incredible scale is sufficiently high, then it makes sense to devote resources to avoiding such an incident.
Of course, it's clearly a matter of debate as to how likely such a threat is and what tools are appropriate to combat it. I personally prefer to err on the side of protecting civil liberties, which I believe are fundamental to our society and thus worth protecting.