If there was a zombiepocalypse tomorrow cash currency would become worthless next to things like shotguns or flamethrowers.
False. Cash dollars are an easily transferable scarce resource. Your shotgun guy would accept it as payment for a shotgun, trade it for gasoline with some guy who would trade it for tinned beans with some guy who would trade it for sexual services from your mom who would trade it for protection from you and your shotgun. Scarcity (and confidince in scarcity) is sufficient for tradeability, and tradeability is value.
The scarcity is sufficient. Any scarce resource can be traded for monetary value. The actual value is determined by agents accepting the resource as payment for productive services, which again is determined by the impression that the resource can be traded. It's a circular thing.
The BitCoin project is built on a quite thorough understanding of how money actually works, which is not through component value or scarcity or magic or anything. It's through controlled scarcity and absolutely nothing else. BitCoins are money in the way that gold, oil, stock or Pokemon cards are money, with the added benefit of perfect divisibility and tightly defined scarcity.
Also, BitCoins are not in any way protected from inflation. Nothing could ever possibly be protected from inflation. It's just a thing that you can buy and sell if you want, and I'm curious as to how you would attempt to ban that.
What? That doesn't even make any sense. The amount someone is willing to pay for a thing is the value of the thing. The purchase value of the things needed to make the thing or the words printed on the thing doesn't actually factor in.
True, although I personally find it even harder to accept that not a single one of these government/military representatives would have been willing to sell him out for 25 million bucks.
Sorry, just being a little flippant:) No offense intended.
If you mean at the time of his demise, Abbottabad is located very close to Kashmir, where the state of national borders is muddled to say the least. It's definitely closer to Indian-administered Kashmir than to Afghanistan, though. The Wikipedia page has a pretty good map.
Now, If you mean where was he since the invasion, my impression is that the best available answer is that nobody really knows. It seems to be commonly accepted as fact that he was present (and nearly captured) during the battle of Tora Bora in late 2001. Since then, reports on his whereabouts are a mishmash of obituaries, wishful thinking and he's-definitely-anywhere-but-here-dear-god-stop-killing-us pleas. Here's a summary. MSNBC is running a story that indicates he might have been holed up in Abbottabad for a while, (Possibly since 2005) but I can't verify any of that.
I could be missing something, but I don't think anyone has mentioned the data being provided as a real time feed. If I were to guess I would think that the 'delay' was much longer than a week, but probably covered a considerable duration of time.
The cops probably care less about where someone is speeding right now, and more about where and when the incidence of speed limit violations are the greatest.
I didn't say there were, or even that he was wrong in saying Ubuntu would never succeed. I said that the arguments he presented were complete and utter boloney and that that indicated that he was, in fact, just pulling stuff out of his ass with no real justification.
As a side note, the notion that stock linux has a terrible user experience does not follow logically from the fact that it is not very successful/widely deployed. There are many reasons for the very limited success of desktop linux. Suggesting that it being too difficult to use (If you assume that this is the case, which I do not.) is the only - or even the most important - reason is just not very insightful.
While I agree that the linux desktop and even ubuntu has several unsolved usability issues, you come off as someone who used ubuntu for a week in 2006 and then for another two weeks in 2008 and then decided it was always going to stay the same.
I challenge you to spend a month running Natty and then a month running Win95. (Feel free to apply the most recent updates) Good luck finding the latter more UXillating (?) than the former.
Do you even know what Ubuntu is? Have you ever used it?
Linux, and by extension Ubuntu, don't care about the UX.
What? Ubuntu has always been about streamlining user experience as compared to other distributions. With varying degrees of success, sure, but that's always been their mission statement.
The only success Linux has had is with integrated applications where the UX is designed completely from scratch by a third party private company.
You mean like exactly what Ubuntu is doing with Unity? I almost hope you're a troll. "UX"..., sigh.
The basic understanding of market effects are so poor on this site it's a fucking travesty. How is this not obvious? As scarcity of IPv4 addresses diminishes, a market (inevitably) emerges. As demand for addresses continues to increase, the market price (inevitably) increases. As that price increases, the cost of providing IPv4 addresses (inevitably) increases, thus (inevitably) providing increasing incentives to transition to IPv6.
Also, in response to another poster: Yeah, this could certainly lead to IPv4 addresses becoming a luxury item. So. fucking. what?! As long as routing is in place, an IPv4 address serves exactly the same function as an IPv6 address. Why would you even care if somebody is interested in paying extra for nothing? What is the loss to you?
...all the games they can't afford or don't want to pay for...
The thing is, there is no harm in that. Not to anyone. Pirating something that you would under no circumstance pay for is a Pareto improvement, as it leaves someone better off, and most importantly nobody worse off than if infringement had not happened.
Yeah, I'm just going to go ahead and call a big fat [Citation needed] on this one. According to Wikipedia, Chlamydophila pneumoniae, formerly TWAR "less commonly" causes myocarditis (inflammation of the heart) which has been linked in some studies to sudden unexpected death in athletes. This appears to be what you're thinking about, but I can't find any verification that Chlamydophila should be more prevalent nor more indirectly lethal in athletes than in the general population.
Also it appears that the incidence of sudden unexpected death is somewhat in debate, as is the most common causes of it, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that "died as flies" is almost certainly a massive exaggeration. If young athletes were suddenly dropping dead in large numbers in the 80s and early 90s, I'd probably be putting my money on drugs.. Pending further study, of course.
I say "does it" as the diversity of hardware did not hurt Microsoft.
This diversity of hardware is nothing like what Microsoft had to deal with. Microsoft had to deal with a multitude of vendors providing devices that resulted in, more or less, some combination consisting of a processing unit, graphics hardware, a screen, a keyboard, a mouse and a sound card. Android is supporting a multitude of devices that may or may not provide one or more of the following: a screen, a capacitive touchscreen, a resistive touchscreen, gsm hardware, gps hardware, 3g connectivity, wlan connectivity, ethernet connectivity, a physical keyboard, no physical buttons at all, any number of physical buttons offering any random functionality, sound hardware capable of reliable voice input, a useless simplistic microphone, lots of internal memory, little internal memory, limited internal memory with optional extension. I could go on.
The point is that if someone tried to put Windows on something, it was a PC. If someone tries to put android on something, it could be anything from a toaster/washing machine/fridge through a headless server through a laptop through any imaginable kind of phone through a tablet pc. Creating a system that performs reasonably well in all those use cases involves more than just writing plenty of drivers for a lot of different hardware.
This seems entirely uninteresting. The only obvious conclusion you could draw from this data is that reaching a major milestone in a major social event triggers a major outburst of communications, which seems trivially obvious. For some interesting analysis on #jan25 tweets, see for instance this, an attempt to visualize influence levels between twitter users. It is interesting to note that there are relatively few highly "influential" tweeters, many of whom were arrested or detained at some point during the protest. This could possibly indicate that the Egyptian authorities were conducting a similar analysis.
And how would it "impact confidence in Microsoft's service" were they to release personal details to the public at a whim? If the mother wants to claim she received no evidence, she should go right ahead. If she wants to have any evidence received scrutinized and hopefully refuted, she should also go ahead. If she has received evidence and concluded that it doesn't warrant any further attention, it probably doesn't warrant any further attention.
Uhm, yeah. There's clearly some ax grinding going on here, but in the guys defense I don't think he really thinks that modern day midwifery kills babies. It might be more along the lines of "The evil doctor patriarchate will pounce on this guy for taking an active part in his own treatment, just as they once pounced on midwives." Now, that's still pretty far out, but not nearly as bad as believing both those things and approving, which is what it looked like to me at first:)
I'm no historian but I thought that the origin of copyright found it self in the emergence of printing press.
I'm sure that's true, I worded myself incorrectly. I didn't explicitly mean that musicians created copyright from scratch to serve their purposes, as much as that the protection of music has been a powerful motivator in shaping copyright law as we know it today. The process took (is taking?) quite some time, following technological achievements. In the U.S, music was not protected at all until the introduction of the Copyright Act of 1831, which forbade the unauthorized reproduction of printed sheet music. Compulsory licensing of mechanical reproductions of musical compositions was introduced in the Copyright Act of 1911./p
I'm not saying economists don't understand use-value. The concept was invented by economists, so that would be absurd. What I'm saying is that some economists lead us (the common man, in this case) to believe that exchange-value is all that matters.
An interesting question to ask an economist on a festive occasion is whether they, upon receiving advice from themselves, would trust that advice if it appeared not to maximize their own personal profit.
Personally, I think that as long as an artist with a reasonable number of listeners can secure a decent wage, I'm not too interested in making sure everyone pays for each and every copy.
And this seems to be happening: total income for artists has been rising and especially there seems to be a better distribution, reducing the gap between 'big starts' and low audience bands.
True. What complicates the matter is that under the current regime of contract law and copyright transferal, artists don't really have a say. Their opinions on pricing or distribution channels have no impact, because they're not the copyright holders. The labels, who are, can comfortably continue to chase their lost profits without being hindered by consideration of existence value (Hey, there's another one) of the music itself. Increasing artist profits could in fact worsen the situation in the short term by strengthening their ties to the copyright cartels.
Your understanding of economics is clearly poor if you believe economists are not aware of use value, or believe that it is not related to market value. However, you have stumbeled upon an interesting point.
The concept of use value is, through various methods of measurement, commonly applied to the problem of calculating the value of a public good, a term that describes a good that is non-rivalrous (Meaning that my consumption of the good, if provided, will not reduce the amount available for consumption by you) and non-excludable. (Meaning that it is hard or impossible to effectively stop people from consuming the good if they wish to do so) The classic example is a lighthouse; If available, it may provide the same amount of light to any number of ships. However, excluding any one ship that does not want to pay while remaining operational for other ships is impossible.
You could argue that music is increasingly becoming a public good. Its non-rivalrousness is quite obvious; if you buy it and play it in my presence, we can both enjoy it fully. Its excludability has been effectively eroded by file sharing and fast internet connections, so neither you nor one of your friends need to purchase a CD in order to hear the music on it. In fact, in theory, only one person needs to purchase each CD for its contents to be readily available to most of the world in a proverbial instant.
This, clearly, affects the marketability of music and is quite detrimental to the classical price-per-unit approach to selling it. While, presumably, quite a lot of people have a nonzero willingness to pay for music, availability at a price of zero is obviously going to attract many. Interestingly, musicians have faced this problem before, when they discovered that anybody that heard their song could just go somewhere else and play that very same song themselves without fear of repercussions. This fueled the invention of copyrights.
How musicians will approach their newfound status as providers of a public good is up for debate. More legislation is one option, but it's not working very well so far and there's always the chance you're just postponing the problem. Voluntary subscriptions or advertising based streaming solutions might give some relief, as they are often easier to use than file sharing networks and thus more valuable. (Then again, revenue generated from these is currently quite puny) Involuntary contribution through taxes is used for many public goods, but this approach has its own unfortunate implications when applied to creative works.
TL;DR: Economists understand a lot more than you think.
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If there was a zombiepocalypse tomorrow cash currency would become worthless next to things like shotguns or flamethrowers.
False. Cash dollars are an easily transferable scarce resource. Your shotgun guy would accept it as payment for a shotgun, trade it for gasoline with some guy who would trade it for tinned beans with some guy who would trade it for sexual services from your mom who would trade it for protection from you and your shotgun. Scarcity (and confidince in scarcity) is sufficient for tradeability, and tradeability is value.
The scarcity is sufficient. Any scarce resource can be traded for monetary value. The actual value is determined by agents accepting the resource as payment for productive services, which again is determined by the impression that the resource can be traded. It's a circular thing.
The BitCoin project is built on a quite thorough understanding of how money actually works, which is not through component value or scarcity or magic or anything. It's through controlled scarcity and absolutely nothing else. BitCoins are money in the way that gold, oil, stock or Pokemon cards are money, with the added benefit of perfect divisibility and tightly defined scarcity.
Also, BitCoins are not in any way protected from inflation. Nothing could ever possibly be protected from inflation. It's just a thing that you can buy and sell if you want, and I'm curious as to how you would attempt to ban that.
What? That doesn't even make any sense. The amount someone is willing to pay for a thing is the value of the thing. The purchase value of the things needed to make the thing or the words printed on the thing doesn't actually factor in.
True, although I personally find it even harder to accept that not a single one of these government/military representatives would have been willing to sell him out for 25 million bucks.
Sorry, just being a little flippant :) No offense intended.
If you mean at the time of his demise, Abbottabad is located very close to Kashmir, where the state of national borders is muddled to say the least. It's definitely closer to Indian-administered Kashmir than to Afghanistan, though. The Wikipedia page has a pretty good map.
Now, If you mean where was he since the invasion, my impression is that the best available answer is that nobody really knows. It seems to be commonly accepted as fact that he was present (and nearly captured) during the battle of Tora Bora in late 2001. Since then, reports on his whereabouts are a mishmash of obituaries, wishful thinking and he's-definitely-anywhere-but-here-dear-god-stop-killing-us pleas. Here's a summary. MSNBC is running a story that indicates he might have been holed up in Abbottabad for a while, (Possibly since 2005) but I can't verify any of that.
I could be missing something, but I don't think anyone has mentioned the data being provided as a real time feed. If I were to guess I would think that the 'delay' was much longer than a week, but probably covered a considerable duration of time.
The cops probably care less about where someone is speeding right now, and more about where and when the incidence of speed limit violations are the greatest.
Did you consider the possibility that he might, at different points of time during the last 10 years, have visited more than one location?
I didn't say there were, or even that he was wrong in saying Ubuntu would never succeed. I said that the arguments he presented were complete and utter boloney and that that indicated that he was, in fact, just pulling stuff out of his ass with no real justification.
As a side note, the notion that stock linux has a terrible user experience does not follow logically from the fact that it is not very successful/widely deployed. There are many reasons for the very limited success of desktop linux. Suggesting that it being too difficult to use (If you assume that this is the case, which I do not.) is the only - or even the most important - reason is just not very insightful.
Replied to the wrong post, obviously. None of that was directed at you, Freaky.
While I agree that the linux desktop and even ubuntu has several unsolved usability issues, you come off as someone who used ubuntu for a week in 2006 and then for another two weeks in 2008 and then decided it was always going to stay the same.
I challenge you to spend a month running Natty and then a month running Win95. (Feel free to apply the most recent updates) Good luck finding the latter more UXillating (?) than the former.
Do you even know what Ubuntu is? Have you ever used it?
Linux, and by extension Ubuntu, don't care about the UX.
What? Ubuntu has always been about streamlining user experience as compared to other distributions. With varying degrees of success, sure, but that's always been their mission statement.
The only success Linux has had is with integrated applications where the UX is designed completely from scratch by a third party private company.
You mean like exactly what Ubuntu is doing with Unity? I almost hope you're a troll. "UX"..., sigh.
Score: 5, Insightful, seriously?
The basic understanding of market effects are so poor on this site it's a fucking travesty. How is this not obvious? As scarcity of IPv4 addresses diminishes, a market (inevitably) emerges. As demand for addresses continues to increase, the market price (inevitably) increases. As that price increases, the cost of providing IPv4 addresses (inevitably) increases, thus (inevitably) providing increasing incentives to transition to IPv6.
Also, in response to another poster: Yeah, this could certainly lead to IPv4 addresses becoming a luxury item. So. fucking. what?! As long as routing is in place, an IPv4 address serves exactly the same function as an IPv6 address. Why would you even care if somebody is interested in paying extra for nothing? What is the loss to you?
...all the games they can't afford or don't want to pay for...
The thing is, there is no harm in that. Not to anyone. Pirating something that you would under no circumstance pay for is a Pareto improvement, as it leaves someone better off, and most importantly nobody worse off than if infringement had not happened.
Yeah, I'm just going to go ahead and call a big fat [Citation needed] on this one. According to Wikipedia, Chlamydophila pneumoniae, formerly TWAR "less commonly" causes myocarditis (inflammation of the heart) which has been linked in some studies to sudden unexpected death in athletes. This appears to be what you're thinking about, but I can't find any verification that Chlamydophila should be more prevalent nor more indirectly lethal in athletes than in the general population.
Also it appears that the incidence of sudden unexpected death is somewhat in debate, as is the most common causes of it, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that "died as flies" is almost certainly a massive exaggeration. If young athletes were suddenly dropping dead in large numbers in the 80s and early 90s, I'd probably be putting my money on drugs.. Pending further study, of course.
This diversity of hardware is nothing like what Microsoft had to deal with. Microsoft had to deal with a multitude of vendors providing devices that resulted in, more or less, some combination consisting of a processing unit, graphics hardware, a screen, a keyboard, a mouse and a sound card. Android is supporting a multitude of devices that may or may not provide one or more of the following: a screen, a capacitive touchscreen, a resistive touchscreen, gsm hardware, gps hardware, 3g connectivity, wlan connectivity, ethernet connectivity, a physical keyboard, no physical buttons at all, any number of physical buttons offering any random functionality, sound hardware capable of reliable voice input, a useless simplistic microphone, lots of internal memory, little internal memory, limited internal memory with optional extension. I could go on.
The point is that if someone tried to put Windows on something, it was a PC. If someone tries to put android on something, it could be anything from a toaster/washing machine/fridge through a headless server through a laptop through any imaginable kind of phone through a tablet pc. Creating a system that performs reasonably well in all those use cases involves more than just writing plenty of drivers for a lot of different hardware.
What, you mean like that crazy Einstein guy? Challenging Newton of all people?!
Oh, trust me. We'd get it.
This seems entirely uninteresting. The only obvious conclusion you could draw from this data is that reaching a major milestone in a major social event triggers a major outburst of communications, which seems trivially obvious. For some interesting analysis on #jan25 tweets, see for instance this, an attempt to visualize influence levels between twitter users. It is interesting to note that there are relatively few highly "influential" tweeters, many of whom were arrested or detained at some point during the protest. This could possibly indicate that the Egyptian authorities were conducting a similar analysis.
And how would it "impact confidence in Microsoft's service" were they to release personal details to the public at a whim? If the mother wants to claim she received no evidence, she should go right ahead. If she wants to have any evidence received scrutinized and hopefully refuted, she should also go ahead. If she has received evidence and concluded that it doesn't warrant any further attention, it probably doesn't warrant any further attention.
Uhm, yeah. There's clearly some ax grinding going on here, but in the guys defense I don't think he really thinks that modern day midwifery kills babies. It might be more along the lines of "The evil doctor patriarchate will pounce on this guy for taking an active part in his own treatment, just as they once pounced on midwives." Now, that's still pretty far out, but not nearly as bad as believing both those things and approving, which is what it looked like to me at first :)
I'm no historian but I thought that the origin of copyright found it self in the emergence of printing press.
I'm sure that's true, I worded myself incorrectly. I didn't explicitly mean that musicians created copyright from scratch to serve their purposes, as much as that the protection of music has been a powerful motivator in shaping copyright law as we know it today. The process took (is taking?) quite some time, following technological achievements. In the U.S, music was not protected at all until the introduction of the Copyright Act of 1831, which forbade the unauthorized reproduction of printed sheet music. Compulsory licensing of mechanical reproductions of musical compositions was introduced in the Copyright Act of 1911./p
So please explain how Wikipedia raised $16 million last year, despite offering a totally free service?
You say that like it's a lot. It's really, really not.
I'm not saying economists don't understand use-value. The concept was invented by economists, so that would be absurd. What I'm saying is that some economists lead us (the common man, in this case) to believe that exchange-value is all that matters.
An interesting question to ask an economist on a festive occasion is whether they, upon receiving advice from themselves, would trust that advice if it appeared not to maximize their own personal profit.
Personally, I think that as long as an artist with a reasonable number of listeners can secure a decent wage, I'm not too interested in making sure everyone pays for each and every copy. And this seems to be happening: total income for artists has been rising and especially there seems to be a better distribution, reducing the gap between 'big starts' and low audience bands.
True. What complicates the matter is that under the current regime of contract law and copyright transferal, artists don't really have a say. Their opinions on pricing or distribution channels have no impact, because they're not the copyright holders. The labels, who are, can comfortably continue to chase their lost profits without being hindered by consideration of existence value (Hey, there's another one) of the music itself. Increasing artist profits could in fact worsen the situation in the short term by strengthening their ties to the copyright cartels.
Your understanding of economics is clearly poor if you believe economists are not aware of use value, or believe that it is not related to market value. However, you have stumbeled upon an interesting point.
The concept of use value is, through various methods of measurement, commonly applied to the problem of calculating the value of a public good, a term that describes a good that is non-rivalrous (Meaning that my consumption of the good, if provided, will not reduce the amount available for consumption by you) and non-excludable. (Meaning that it is hard or impossible to effectively stop people from consuming the good if they wish to do so) The classic example is a lighthouse; If available, it may provide the same amount of light to any number of ships. However, excluding any one ship that does not want to pay while remaining operational for other ships is impossible.
You could argue that music is increasingly becoming a public good. Its non-rivalrousness is quite obvious; if you buy it and play it in my presence, we can both enjoy it fully. Its excludability has been effectively eroded by file sharing and fast internet connections, so neither you nor one of your friends need to purchase a CD in order to hear the music on it. In fact, in theory, only one person needs to purchase each CD for its contents to be readily available to most of the world in a proverbial instant.
This, clearly, affects the marketability of music and is quite detrimental to the classical price-per-unit approach to selling it. While, presumably, quite a lot of people have a nonzero willingness to pay for music, availability at a price of zero is obviously going to attract many. Interestingly, musicians have faced this problem before, when they discovered that anybody that heard their song could just go somewhere else and play that very same song themselves without fear of repercussions. This fueled the invention of copyrights.
How musicians will approach their newfound status as providers of a public good is up for debate. More legislation is one option, but it's not working very well so far and there's always the chance you're just postponing the problem. Voluntary subscriptions or advertising based streaming solutions might give some relief, as they are often easier to use than file sharing networks and thus more valuable. (Then again, revenue generated from these is currently quite puny) Involuntary contribution through taxes is used for many public goods, but this approach has its own unfortunate implications when applied to creative works.
TL;DR: Economists understand a lot more than you think.
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