Meh. narcotics wouldn't be such a problem if the USA finally accepted (once again) that drug prohibition/criminalization doesn't work. Education and treatment do. Though I don't have any problems with increasing sentences for associated crimes (i.e. theft, B&E, DUI), thereby to encourage them to seek treatment, when the crime is committed by addicts who abuse drugs and continued drug use increases the chance of recidivism.
Norman Doidge's The brain that changes itself makes a pretty strong argument that there's some good neurological bases for certain psychological theories and techniques. The major problem in transferring that to a courtroom though is that diagnosis and treatment are dependent on observations that are more subjective than objective, and an un-cooperative patient (which an accused is likely to be) makes it even more unreliable.
It's worse than that. The reason why the whole thing made the press is because one of the secret service twits agreed to pay an "escort" $800 for the night, but the next day provided only $30, take it or leave it. One could argue over whether these guys were off the clock, were using their own money, and weren't on the taxpayer dime at the time. But these are the guys who are supposed to make sure that the president and the money supply are safe, and one of them is trying to defraud/rip off hookers? That's just pathetic.
Well, you could fly into Canada, take the train across the border (i.e. to Seattle or Portland) and drive down from there. The land borders aren't quite as stupid as the airports. Vancouver is beautiful as a stopover from June until September and, for an East Coast visit, Montreal or Toronto are pretty nice in the spring and fall. Or you, your wife, and her sister could all vacation together in British Columbia. We'll gladly take your tourism dollars. Just don't take too long. PM Harper's been following the neo-con playbook so there's no telling how long our borders will stay sane.
Seriously, it's the 21st century and you are probably in North America or Western Europe. Excepting for the <10% that are post-pubescent and underage, the other 60% don't need to marry you to decide to share their body with you. That's even true for the people married to other spouses, although that can have consequences like divorce (just as any contract breach could result in a dissolution of the contract and associated penalties) but that's their choice.
P.S. I'm assuming you're not counting the prepubescent in your 70%. Unlike the other criteria you mentioned, there's some very good reasons (not just religious, but scientifically based) why the underage laws are on the books, and should continue to be so for a long time. Um, OK - "underage" could mean something quite different for a manufactured intelligence (AI):-)
Wow. Not wearing a seat belt, doing 108mph, the car rolls over and he escapes serious injury? The airbags saved his life, because I can't see how he would have done that 30 years ago and not wound up as dead as the Princess of Wales.
I remember somebody telling me that quoted failure rates for birth control don't control for whether the birth control is used properly. The statistics don't even control for whether the method of contraception was used when conception happened, just whether it's the method that is regularly used by the participants. So if they normally use a condom but were too excited that one time they got pregnant, it still counts against condoms.
Condom breakage/leakage is really low if you apply them properly every time. You also need to do it before contact between the sexual organs happens. Reliability of the pill also improves beyond quoted statistics if you never miss a dose (i.e. not that one week a month that is just filler). However both of those things can be difficult for easily distracted teens and young adults that really just want to get it on.
Nothing wrong with that, but those are bottom line (cost) preoccupations. They don't do much for the top line (revenues).
That's because a) we're in a contracting/static economy and b) IT is primarily a cost centre. If there's no opportunity to grow the business because your customers aren't buying, then containing costs are going to be your primary concern because forcing customers to buy more by armed threats is frowned upon. Now certainly, if marketing can figure out some need of the customers that can be filled with IT's help and will help drive sales, then IT should be all over it like ugly on an ape. However most of IT's job is going to be about cost containment - right now virtualization and data centre consolidation is an easy win providing bigger ROI than anything else on the plate.
The guy may be confused by privately owned (sole proprietorship, partnerships, private equity) vs. publicly traded corporations. However yes, normally the public sector is government (federal, state/provincial, municipal) and the private sector is everything else (privately and publicly owned businesses). Like ownership, for-profit vs. non-profit is another common subdivision of the private sector.
Again and again: 19th century up until 1913 proves you completely, utterly, 100% wrong, as prices were falling, choices were increasing and competition was fierce.
Well, considering the 19th century is the core of the industrial revolution, where steam power and automation greatly increased worker productivity and are pretty well the classic example of disruptive technologies upending mature industries, I sure as heck hope that prices were generally falling.
However even if that was generally true in most market segments where natural monopolies harder to come by, there were still significant exceptions where network effects and economies of scale could produce monopolies. For example Standard Oil, and some of the other monopolies that were broken up under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Anti-trust proceedings against Standard Oil were begun in 1909 and completed in 1911, short of your 1913 date, BTW. Now, the railroad trusts that were broken up through anti-trust action had often been made possible through right-of-way government land grants to defray investment costs (which were prohibitively huge barriers to entry), but they had grown into monopolies through M&As and network effects.
I'll remark that the chief resource against economies of scale is Disruption. "Sure! Build a 100 Million dollar photo processing plant! I'll work on Digital Cameras." Oops - Bye Bye Kodak.
Absolutely, and the example I gave with low-power devices/microprocessors is another example of disruption. However in the latter case, the disruption is only partial and Intel may be able to buy enough time from their desktop/server profits to be able to recover on the design phase for the low power market to the point where they can use their advantages in hardware process. Frankly I would be more concerned about an Intel dominance across all hardware markets than Apple/Facebook/Google/Microsoft.
Not that I'm thrilled about the latter either. However, if it wasn't for competitive reviews from the USA and the EU governments, it could get worse. Otherwise, if WP7 and WP8 fail to get traction, Windows 8/Metro tank, and other Microsoft revenues remain mostly static, I could see Steve Ballmer being replaced sometime in the next 5 years and the new CEO willing to entertain a merger with Google. Phones, tablets, search, browser are their big areas of competition. If MS keep on getting their butts kicked by Google in those markets, at some point someone would be smart enough to realize MS is better off working together with Google than against them, From Google's standpoint, MS's cash stash could prove pretty useful in funding new endeavours. That "Don't do evil" credo might be a sticking point though.
Just entering a market where there is an economy of scale right now, and thinking that you can be successful there WITHOUT some form of innovation that gives you the edge in terms of either production costs or distribution costs or whatever, well then why should the market care about your efforts?
Exactly. Which is why economies of scale can allow monopolies to exist. Now, reread my second paragraph to see how once they exist, a monopolist can price gouge its customers up until the point where somebody tries to compete on price, at which time they have advantages to put the competitor out of business. Wash, rinse, repeat.
You're a better debater than economist/robber baron. Economies of Scale can be used as a barrier to entry in a market, as part of a strategy to obtain and maintain a monopoly (mergers/acquisitions are often complementary tool in those efforts).
If the market is very large then economies of scale can present substantial barriers to entry. There is a cost of capital for a competitor to be able to establish production facilities at a large enough size that it gains equivalent economies of scale as an established player. Since the established player doesn't need to pay that cost of capital (interest on borrowed funds) they can cut their profit low enough to drive the new player out of business through losses, until they regain their natural monopoly and can increase prices and profit once more. Go through this cycle a few times and investors won't be willing to risk their money in that industry again no matter how much the established monopolist is gouging their clients. Established players are willing to reduce short term profits or even run a small loss to gain a monopoly because they know they can recover the lost income over the long term once they have a monopoly. Now admittedly interest rates are low and the cost of capital is theoretically pretty cheap right now, assuming you can find a banker willing to lend you some money, but that's not always been true and will probably change again.
Another example of a natural barrier to entry are the ever increasing capital costs of semiconductor manufacturing plants for microprocessors. If you want to enter that market and go up against Intel, you not only need one hell of a design team (and a protective patent portfolio which, yes, is a government granted monopoly), you also need to have enough cash to build a fab with a competitive process (in terms of feature size and power efficiency), or you need to take a smaller cut of the revenue of the finished product by letting someone else fab it for you (ARM, and now AMD). The only reason Intel isn't eating everybody's lunch in the mobile market is because they got so caught up in dominating the desktop and server markets that they got caught flatfooted, again, in the small device market where the focus is reduced power consumption instead of raw computing power.
Network effects and other barriers to entry in a market create monopolies. Some of these barriers to entry (copyright, patents, legislation that favour established players in exchange for oversight) are created by government to encourage research and market development, and some (network effects, economies of scale) are inherent in the market segment.
It's actually worse than that. You could do your due diligence, check out all the options for cloud hosting, do your own background checks on all the executives, managers, and operators/admins of your preferred provider and think you are safe. Then one day, the company could be bought out by "Big Cloud Operations", who fire all the trustworthy operators and outsource administration to India or China so as to increase profits and their executive bonuses. Within days or weeks, your data and trade secrets are in the hands of your competition and there's nothing you can do about it. Oh sure, you could sue them in civil court if you have a few million for lawyers, and by the time you can get a judgment a few years later, they've closed shop, the execs have raked in the cash, and there's just a shell with nothing to pay for your award.
The only thing that you should keep on a public cloud is public data (i.e. public web sites for Internet presence, advertising, and support ). Anything that provides a substantial competitive advantage should be kept on a private virtualization infrastructure or else you're playing Russian roulette with the company's future. The last 10 years should make it pretty clear that If it can be done and there's a strong profit motive, it's only a matter of time until somebody tries it, regardless of how illegal or unethical it is. OK, that's always been true, but the last 10 years sadly make it clear that IT is no exception.
Thing is, while some third-party books do claim to "Teach... Java for Android", as far as I know Google has never claimed that Dalvik is Java. Whereas for a typical embrace and extend, be it Kerberos or Java, Microsoft did claim that their extended fork was still Java, and marketed it as such. The Microsoft lawsuit was really about the use of the Java trademark (hence why Microsoft renamed their product J++), and not a copyright infringement case. So that case doesn't really apply as precedent here and it would seem that Oracle is overreaching.
The cultural context is probably a big part of it. In many Arab nations the "proper manly" work is running businesses, and as a result the technical and scientific fields are not as popular with men and have a much higher female representation than in the West (where women are culturally expected to be poor at maths, the gateway to technical careers, with that cultural expectation acting as a self-fulfiling prophecy). Thus, since you have a higher proportion of women with the requisite technical training, it's not surprising that you would have a similarly high proportion (or even higher, when their mobility and work options are restricted) acting as entrepreneurs.
In the same way that you can hate the sin and love the sinner, I can respect the smiting and the blue while still thinking the smiter's an ass. To provide a Godwining example, Messerschmitt Me 262 or Panzerkampfwagen V Panther and Adolph Hitler.
If WB8 pans out and they get the contract extension for WB8.1, EMC2 might be able to do it for a lot less than that. Reading between the lines on the Wikipedia page, it seems that they ran into some unexpected delays with WB8 but are back on track technically, if still behind schedule. If they can get to the point where they can show a p-B11 reaction then, as long as Obama gets reelected, I suspect Chu will find the $200 million for the 100MW test system.
If Romney gets in, then I wouldn't be surprised if Big Oil gets it killed though their Wall St connections. At that point, we can start talking about a $200 million Kickstarter project.
Your last paragraph describes what I consider to be religious existentialism, with even less use and insight than secular/traditional existentialism. I rarely find practical jokes or fraud to be even remotely funny, except sometimes when practiced on people with a heavily overdrawn karma account, and any deity that engages in them indiscriminately isn't worthy of much respect in my opinion.
A big part of the cost of fission plants are decommissioning cost. With coal fired and nat. gas-combustion plants, you're adding to the GG climate change effects and, while those costs are externalized, at some point we will realize they are too high for civilization as a whole. Perhaps in 10-15 years, China will finally get a reality check on their increasing energy needs, the resulting climate impact from classical energy sources and, with the ITER results in hand, will engage in a crash fusion development. That's about the only thing with half a chance of snapping the US out of its current spiral. Or maybe we'll get lucky and EMC/Polywell will pan out by then.
In another slashdot article a few days ago, somebody claimed that the impact of producing electricity from coal to recharge the battery was about the same as the power generation used to refing enough gasoline for traveling the same distance. So the electrical power consumption is about the same either way, but (for the electric/hyrid) without the additional CO2 generation from combustion of gasoline/diesel. That's assuming you're not using biodiesel, which, depending on the source and processing, might be quite lower in terms of processing power.
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Meh. narcotics wouldn't be such a problem if the USA finally accepted (once again) that drug prohibition/criminalization doesn't work. Education and treatment do. Though I don't have any problems with increasing sentences for associated crimes (i.e. theft, B&E, DUI), thereby to encourage them to seek treatment, when the crime is committed by addicts who abuse drugs and continued drug use increases the chance of recidivism.
Norman Doidge's The brain that changes itself makes a pretty strong argument that there's some good neurological bases for certain psychological theories and techniques. The major problem in transferring that to a courtroom though is that diagnosis and treatment are dependent on observations that are more subjective than objective, and an un-cooperative patient (which an accused is likely to be) makes it even more unreliable.
It's worse than that. The reason why the whole thing made the press is because one of the secret service twits agreed to pay an "escort" $800 for the night, but the next day provided only $30, take it or leave it. One could argue over whether these guys were off the clock, were using their own money, and weren't on the taxpayer dime at the time. But these are the guys who are supposed to make sure that the president and the money supply are safe, and one of them is trying to defraud/rip off hookers? That's just pathetic.
Um, the Canadian Rockies are in Canada. You can still come and see them. Our customs and police are still pretty reasonable.
Well, you could fly into Canada, take the train across the border (i.e. to Seattle or Portland) and drive down from there. The land borders aren't quite as stupid as the airports. Vancouver is beautiful as a stopover from June until September and, for an East Coast visit, Montreal or Toronto are pretty nice in the spring and fall. Or you, your wife, and her sister could all vacation together in British Columbia. We'll gladly take your tourism dollars. Just don't take too long. PM Harper's been following the neo-con playbook so there's no telling how long our borders will stay sane.
I don't think he's worried about the populace.
Seriously, it's the 21st century and you are probably in North America or Western Europe. Excepting for the <10% that are post-pubescent and underage, the other 60% don't need to marry you to decide to share their body with you. That's even true for the people married to other spouses, although that can have consequences like divorce (just as any contract breach could result in a dissolution of the contract and associated penalties) but that's their choice.
P.S. I'm assuming you're not counting the prepubescent in your 70%. Unlike the other criteria you mentioned, there's some very good reasons (not just religious, but scientifically based) why the underage laws are on the books, and should continue to be so for a long time. Um, OK - "underage" could mean something quite different for a manufactured intelligence (AI) :-)
Wow. Not wearing a seat belt, doing 108mph, the car rolls over and he escapes serious injury? The airbags saved his life, because I can't see how he would have done that 30 years ago and not wound up as dead as the Princess of Wales.
Look at them. Bloody Catholics! :-)
I remember somebody telling me that quoted failure rates for birth control don't control for whether the birth control is used properly. The statistics don't even control for whether the method of contraception was used when conception happened, just whether it's the method that is regularly used by the participants. So if they normally use a condom but were too excited that one time they got pregnant, it still counts against condoms.
Condom breakage/leakage is really low if you apply them properly every time. You also need to do it before contact between the sexual organs happens. Reliability of the pill also improves beyond quoted statistics if you never miss a dose (i.e. not that one week a month that is just filler). However both of those things can be difficult for easily distracted teens and young adults that really just want to get it on.
That's because a) we're in a contracting/static economy and b) IT is primarily a cost centre. If there's no opportunity to grow the business because your customers aren't buying, then containing costs are going to be your primary concern because forcing customers to buy more by armed threats is frowned upon. Now certainly, if marketing can figure out some need of the customers that can be filled with IT's help and will help drive sales, then IT should be all over it like ugly on an ape. However most of IT's job is going to be about cost containment - right now virtualization and data centre consolidation is an easy win providing bigger ROI than anything else on the plate.
The guy may be confused by privately owned (sole proprietorship, partnerships, private equity) vs. publicly traded corporations. However yes, normally the public sector is government (federal, state/provincial, municipal) and the private sector is everything else (privately and publicly owned businesses). Like ownership, for-profit vs. non-profit is another common subdivision of the private sector.
Well, considering the 19th century is the core of the industrial revolution, where steam power and automation greatly increased worker productivity and are pretty well the classic example of disruptive technologies upending mature industries, I sure as heck hope that prices were generally falling.
However even if that was generally true in most market segments where natural monopolies harder to come by, there were still significant exceptions where network effects and economies of scale could produce monopolies. For example Standard Oil, and some of the other monopolies that were broken up under the Sherman Anti-Trust Act. Anti-trust proceedings against Standard Oil were begun in 1909 and completed in 1911, short of your 1913 date, BTW. Now, the railroad trusts that were broken up through anti-trust action had often been made possible through right-of-way government land grants to defray investment costs (which were prohibitively huge barriers to entry), but they had grown into monopolies through M&As and network effects.
Absolutely, and the example I gave with low-power devices/microprocessors is another example of disruption. However in the latter case, the disruption is only partial and Intel may be able to buy enough time from their desktop/server profits to be able to recover on the design phase for the low power market to the point where they can use their advantages in hardware process. Frankly I would be more concerned about an Intel dominance across all hardware markets than Apple/Facebook/Google/Microsoft.
Not that I'm thrilled about the latter either. However, if it wasn't for competitive reviews from the USA and the EU governments, it could get worse. Otherwise, if WP7 and WP8 fail to get traction, Windows 8/Metro tank, and other Microsoft revenues remain mostly static, I could see Steve Ballmer being replaced sometime in the next 5 years and the new CEO willing to entertain a merger with Google. Phones, tablets, search, browser are their big areas of competition. If MS keep on getting their butts kicked by Google in those markets, at some point someone would be smart enough to realize MS is better off working together with Google than against them, From Google's standpoint, MS's cash stash could prove pretty useful in funding new endeavours. That "Don't do evil" credo might be a sticking point though.
Exactly. Which is why economies of scale can allow monopolies to exist. Now, reread my second paragraph to see how once they exist, a monopolist can price gouge its customers up until the point where somebody tries to compete on price, at which time they have advantages to put the competitor out of business. Wash, rinse, repeat.
You're a better debater than economist/robber baron. Economies of Scale can be used as a barrier to entry in a market, as part of a strategy to obtain and maintain a monopoly (mergers/acquisitions are often complementary tool in those efforts).
If the market is very large then economies of scale can present substantial barriers to entry. There is a cost of capital for a competitor to be able to establish production facilities at a large enough size that it gains equivalent economies of scale as an established player. Since the established player doesn't need to pay that cost of capital (interest on borrowed funds) they can cut their profit low enough to drive the new player out of business through losses, until they regain their natural monopoly and can increase prices and profit once more. Go through this cycle a few times and investors won't be willing to risk their money in that industry again no matter how much the established monopolist is gouging their clients. Established players are willing to reduce short term profits or even run a small loss to gain a monopoly because they know they can recover the lost income over the long term once they have a monopoly. Now admittedly interest rates are low and the cost of capital is theoretically pretty cheap right now, assuming you can find a banker willing to lend you some money, but that's not always been true and will probably change again.
Another example of a natural barrier to entry are the ever increasing capital costs of semiconductor manufacturing plants for microprocessors. If you want to enter that market and go up against Intel, you not only need one hell of a design team (and a protective patent portfolio which, yes, is a government granted monopoly), you also need to have enough cash to build a fab with a competitive process (in terms of feature size and power efficiency), or you need to take a smaller cut of the revenue of the finished product by letting someone else fab it for you (ARM, and now AMD). The only reason Intel isn't eating everybody's lunch in the mobile market is because they got so caught up in dominating the desktop and server markets that they got caught flatfooted, again, in the small device market where the focus is reduced power consumption instead of raw computing power.
Network effects and other barriers to entry in a market create monopolies. Some of these barriers to entry (copyright, patents, legislation that favour established players in exchange for oversight) are created by government to encourage research and market development, and some (network effects, economies of scale) are inherent in the market segment.
It's actually worse than that. You could do your due diligence, check out all the options for cloud hosting, do your own background checks on all the executives, managers, and operators/admins of your preferred provider and think you are safe. Then one day, the company could be bought out by "Big Cloud Operations", who fire all the trustworthy operators and outsource administration to India or China so as to increase profits and their executive bonuses. Within days or weeks, your data and trade secrets are in the hands of your competition and there's nothing you can do about it. Oh sure, you could sue them in civil court if you have a few million for lawyers, and by the time you can get a judgment a few years later, they've closed shop, the execs have raked in the cash, and there's just a shell with nothing to pay for your award.
The only thing that you should keep on a public cloud is public data (i.e. public web sites for Internet presence, advertising, and support ). Anything that provides a substantial competitive advantage should be kept on a private virtualization infrastructure or else you're playing Russian roulette with the company's future. The last 10 years should make it pretty clear that If it can be done and there's a strong profit motive, it's only a matter of time until somebody tries it, regardless of how illegal or unethical it is. OK, that's always been true, but the last 10 years sadly make it clear that IT is no exception.
Thing is, while some third-party books do claim to "Teach ... Java for Android", as far as I know Google has never claimed that Dalvik is Java. Whereas for a typical embrace and extend, be it Kerberos or Java, Microsoft did claim that their extended fork was still Java, and marketed it as such. The Microsoft lawsuit was really about the use of the Java trademark (hence why Microsoft renamed their product J++), and not a copyright infringement case. So that case doesn't really apply as precedent here and it would seem that Oracle is overreaching.
The cultural context is probably a big part of it. In many Arab nations the "proper manly" work is running businesses, and as a result the technical and scientific fields are not as popular with men and have a much higher female representation than in the West (where women are culturally expected to be poor at maths, the gateway to technical careers, with that cultural expectation acting as a self-fulfiling prophecy). Thus, since you have a higher proportion of women with the requisite technical training, it's not surprising that you would have a similarly high proportion (or even higher, when their mobility and work options are restricted) acting as entrepreneurs.
In the same way that you can hate the sin and love the sinner, I can respect the smiting and the blue while still thinking the smiter's an ass. To provide a Godwining example, Messerschmitt Me 262 or Panzerkampfwagen V Panther and Adolph Hitler.
If WB8 pans out and they get the contract extension for WB8.1, EMC2 might be able to do it for a lot less than that. Reading between the lines on the Wikipedia page, it seems that they ran into some unexpected delays with WB8 but are back on track technically, if still behind schedule. If they can get to the point where they can show a p-B11 reaction then, as long as Obama gets reelected, I suspect Chu will find the $200 million for the 100MW test system.
If Romney gets in, then I wouldn't be surprised if Big Oil gets it killed though their Wall St connections. At that point, we can start talking about a $200 million Kickstarter project.
Your last paragraph describes what I consider to be religious existentialism, with even less use and insight than secular/traditional existentialism. I rarely find practical jokes or fraud to be even remotely funny, except sometimes when practiced on people with a heavily overdrawn karma account, and any deity that engages in them indiscriminately isn't worthy of much respect in my opinion.
A big part of the cost of fission plants are decommissioning cost. With coal fired and nat. gas-combustion plants, you're adding to the GG climate change effects and, while those costs are externalized, at some point we will realize they are too high for civilization as a whole. Perhaps in 10-15 years, China will finally get a reality check on their increasing energy needs, the resulting climate impact from classical energy sources and, with the ITER results in hand, will engage in a crash fusion development. That's about the only thing with half a chance of snapping the US out of its current spiral. Or maybe we'll get lucky and EMC/Polywell will pan out by then.
You must mean sadists. True masochists aren't really into collective punishments. They're more like Ben from Monty Python's Life of Brian, and get upset if somebody gets punished more than they do.
<mutter>Lucky Bastard.</mutter>
In another slashdot article a few days ago, somebody claimed that the impact of producing electricity from coal to recharge the battery was about the same as the power generation used to refing enough gasoline for traveling the same distance. So the electrical power consumption is about the same either way, but (for the electric/hyrid) without the additional CO2 generation from combustion of gasoline/diesel. That's assuming you're not using biodiesel, which, depending on the source and processing, might be quite lower in terms of processing power.