Hogwash. If a manufacturer places rules on retailers that they don't like, they're likely to find those retailers stocking competitors' products instead. All it takes is one player who sees the value of not actively alienating his distribution channels.
Errmm....retail price maintenance BENEFITS retailers, that's what it's for. The manufacturer specifies the minimum (higher than competitive market) price retailers can sell at in their contracts and uses its monopoly/market power to enforce them, and by doing so liberates the retailers from having to compete against each other on the basis of price. If the retailers were to do this themselves (by talking to each other as a cartel and agreeing on the price) it would be illegal. The manufacturer might do this either to capture some of the retailers' monopoly profits (because they can charge the retailer more without the retailer refusing to stock their products) or to encourage retailers to stock their products.
What percentage of that tax is being spent on dealing with "the consequences of that pollution" and what is being spent on pork?
That's irrelevant. If you believe otherwise then you need to brush up on your basic economics. Pigouvian taxes aren't there to clear up the consequences of your externalities, they're there to correct the decisions made by consumers who don't receive all of the benefits but only part of the cost of their consumption.
Image the price of petrol is 4/gallon. Imagine the economic cost of using petrol in a car (including refining, extraction, transport, local problems from emissions (ill health, erosion to buildings, etc.), CO2 via global climate, congestion, accident risk to others and everything else) is 8/gallon. When you make decisions affecting your transport (how to travel, what car to buy, where to live, where to work, etc.) you'll be balances the benefits to you vs the costs to you. You get all the benefit of your travel. You get half the costs of your travel. Everyone else, collectively, get the other half.
Imagine a 4/gallon tax is put on petrol. You pay 8/gallon. Since it now costs you 8/gallon, not four, you change your decisions accordingly. If you're very rich it might change nothing, more probably it'll have some affect on at least your next choice of car (and on the producers of cars, who may spend more on developing more efficient cars). Imagine this is spent on something useless - diamond encrusted spoons for president Bush, say. You STILL have to pay it. You STILL find petrol costs 8/gallon and you STILL take 8/gallon in to account in your decisions. It does no good at all for you to know it's being used to save fluffy bunny-wabbits, or spent on pollution mitigation, or spent on diamond spoons because it doesn't affect your transport decisions or your costs one bit.
Well, hell, what is it then? I think it's something hard-wired.
There's at least some genetic effect (hardly surprising, really...). IIRC, there's a gene which provides a way to detect a poison in small quantities in, amongst other things, broccoli. If you have two copies it tastes very bitter (I imagine I have two copies, broccoli is absolutely disgusting to me). If you have none, it doesn't (and one, in between).
'Monopoly' strictly means 'a market with only one seller' (and monopsony a market with one buyer). A market with multiple sellers is an oligopoly. 'Market' isn't necessarily easy to define...Apple could be considered a monopolist in iPods, but not portable music players, say. When a number of companies compete by being monopolists in only slightly different products it tends to be called 'monopolistic competition', at least in economists' circles. I've sometimes extrapolated to get the work 'oligopsony', but I've never heard anyone else say it...
These aren't very useful legal definitions, though, so the legal definition of a monopoly is often different. IIRC, in the UK 25% market share is enough to start triggering monopoly legislation. Near-monopolies and oligopolies need regulation, and there are plenty of economically-negative things that can go on even when no-one is anywhere near 100% but someone still has significant market power. In any case, the problem here seems to be Apple using it's position in two/different/ markets to reinforce each other rather than it abusing its market power to push up prices in either on its own, which is the traditional monopoly problem.
Well, in Germany it's called Danone, in the USA Dannon,
Sshhhh! Don't let the Americans know it's French!
I've been to other countries, like Ireland, and always wondered why they can't just make good good without crappy additives. It tastes better, keeps fresh just as long (even without preservatives, my food doesn't catch mold in the fridge), and I have no idea why they put all that stuff (Gelatin, weird flavorings, artificial colors... do colorful jelly beans taste any better??) in there in the first place...
Boil some milk. Let it cool to ~40oC. Stir in some (live!) yoghurt and leave where you leave your bread to rise it all day. Quite thick, isn't it? Now pump it through some industrial food processing machinery. You'll probably find it's not thick any more. Add gelatine. Thick again? Good....now you can sell it.
They seem to use starches of various kinds in the UK, rather than gelatine. Same reason, though.
The weird flavourings are there because they're cheaper than real things with flavour, and the small amounts of real things are there so that they can put them on the label. In any case, putting lumps of, say, strawberry in a yoghurt doesn't produce strawberry flavoured yoghurt...it produces yoghurt-tasting-yoghurt with lumps of strawberry in it. The sugar is there because there isn't enough real stuff with sugar in in there, and because people seem to like their yoghurt sweet. Personally, I prefer to buy plain yoghurt and add unrefined dark brown sugar.
I think you mean it's not economic. A heater designer would have to be pretty dumb not to get 100 percent efficiency out of an electric heater.
No, he means efficient. Generating electricity from (usually) heat, transporting it and then turning it back in to heat wastes most of the energy in the original heat. Burning gas or oil will waste much less, and an electric heat pump will give you three-ish times the heat as electricity used. Of course, not everyone has those choices available....but many do.
It is perfectly reasonable for the government to demand a key to obatin evidence upon a reciept of a warrent signed by a judge for a criminal investigation. Where in the world does anyone get the idea that don't have an obligation to comply with a lawful court order?
It's not a court order. Actually, it's not even legal to tell anyone that you've been served with a RIPA notice.
The example you gave is different. Requiring someone to hand over a document you know he has access to and which he is legally required to keep through an open and public process is not the same as demanding decryption of a file under the RIPA. What if the file is not encrypted? Or if you don't have the key (because, say, someone planted the file on you or simply because you've forgotten)? You can hardly 'prove' that you've forgotten a password, so what do you expect to happen when the police order someone to decrypt a file for which he no longer has the key? There isn't even a guarantee this is to be used for criminal investigations. Imagine being a pressure group - Friends of the Earth, say - and being asked to reveal files which describe how you intend to (legitimately) oppose government policy. Not only have your democratic rights been violated but you can go to prison for publically saying so.
To be honest, I live in the UK and I didn't know about this law. Am I being really ignorant, or has it not been publicised much?
It hasn't been publicized much. It's also been called the 'Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005', which hardly draws attention to the fact that it allows you to be arrested for littering. This is the section in question.
A: A crime is a crime, why shouldn't you be arrested for it? If you don't want to be arrested, don't do it.
Not committing any crimes isn't a guarantee of not being arrested for one. Even if it were, it isn't for the police to punish people by 'processing' them when there's no need to do so (you're only going to be released on bail anyway, it's not like there's any advantage). If they police accuse you of a minor crime and know who you are then they should summons you, not detain you. In fact, whilst the new law does away with the notion of 'arrestable' offences, it still says that you can only be arrested if it's 'necessary'. 'Necessary', IIRC, means that they have to do so to identify you, to stop a crime being committed, to stop you being a danger to anyone or some other reasons I can't remember. Not that many police know about the changes, or that your DNA and fingerprints would be destroyed if you were wrongfully arrested.
But it is more dangerous because it can be used to track who your political opponents are calling and what they're saying to each other.
And it can also be used by terrorists or extremist groups to help them identify and locate their victims. Take this for example, an animal rights activist used the government vehicle and driver database to persecute a farmer and everyone who associated themselves with him.
I'm sure that all of the new databases - this communications database, the up-coming UK identity card database, vehicle movement records, etc - could all be very useful to the IRA, the NI loyalist groups, US anti-abortionists, animal rights activists, Al Qaeda, hostile foreign security services and the like. I can't imagine they'll find it hard to penetrate a government agency with access to the data, or to corrupt someone who's already got access.
The issue is implementing zero-copy IO. FreeBSD's way of doing it do a setsockopt() that causes any write() on that socket to mark the buffer CoW so that it can use it exclusively for handing down to the device driver.
I'm looking at the FreeBSD manual pages, and I can't find any mention of this socket option. The zero_copy man page makes no mention of it either.
You really ought to read zero_copy(9), you appear to have some wrong ideas about how it works. You say that any write() on that socket marks the buffer CoW. It doesn't. The write must be from a page-aligned buffer, it must be at least one page long and the MTU on the interface must be at least one page. Oh, and the (non-default) ZERO_COPY_SOCKETS options must be in the kernel and the relevant sysctls must be set appropriately.
The "magic" is that if the programmer tries to use that buffer while the device driver owns it he will get a copy. BUT, the programmer has no way of knowing when that buffer is available again.
Untrue. Read the zero_copy manual page. The programmer can safely reuse the buffer once twice the socket buffer size worth of data has been sent to the socket.
Look, zero copy sockets are a specialist option, for specialist applications of the kind that need to keep a few gigabit ethernet cards fully used and have CPU time to spare. They're not there to make your web browser go faster. They're for developers who really need the extra performance and who are prepared to go to some effort (and to read the manual pages...) to achieve it.
This is economics 101. Free markets are efficient.
Perhaps they don't do the first theorem of welfare economics until economics 102, then. You'll then know that 'free markets are efficient' relies on various assumption, specifically that:
There's a market for everything anyone wants to buy or sell.
All markets in the economy are perfectly competitive. This in itself requires that there are no monopolies or monopsonies, that there's no such thing as product differentiation and that everyone knows everything there is to know about everything.
There are no transaction costs.
Externalities don't exist. Or, to put it another way, the production and consumption of everything has no effect (positive or negative) on any who hasn't agreed to it's production and consumption. (Think 'pollution', 'noise', 'congestion', 'new building' and 'research').
These assumptions are so strict (and ludicrous when compared the real world) that a vast amount of the rest of welfare economics is spent on trying to explain what happens when these assumptions are violated and how governments can respond so as to limit the reduction in efficiency. Regulation can be a useful part of that response even in non-monopolies (and so can certain taxes and subsidies and things like tradeable emissions quotas).
Since you can drive more on the same amount of fuel, taxes need to be increased at the same amount to compensate for wear and tear on our shared roads.
Road damage increases quickly with vehicle weight; roughly with the fourth power in the most well known study (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AASHTO_Road_Test). Light cars cause only trivial damage compared to trucks.
That's an excellent argument for having a layer between applications and the data. Stored procedures are certainly a way to achieve this, but they aren't the only way to achieve it. Is a bunch of, say, Java stored procedures all that different to, say, a Java server which exposes application domain methods via CORBA or J2EE (or whatever), is the only way for the rest of your system to get at the database and contains all of the queries all that different? Not really - and the second method has some advantages (like allowing you to run many copies across many computers). IMHO you really do have to think about your system architecture and it's requirements before making a decision like 'everything goes through SPs'.
This is so wrong it made my head explode. All queries are executed in the server. Stored procedures are compiled and optimized once (per connection, and most sites use connection pooling).
The OP is presumably referring to work which stored procedures do which isn't part of a query (like running business logic, chopping text about, or god knows what else). Performance wise it/might/ be better to do this on your database machine if it drastically reduces the amount of data sent across a network. Otherwise, IMHO, it's not such a good idea otherwise as you're pushing work into a part of your system which probably can't be spread across machines so easily. (Though you may have other reasons for using SPs than performance, of course.)
SPs aren't the only way of compiling and optimizing a query once. For instance, caching Perl DBI statements will, for databases which support it, result in the same thing. With Postgresql, for example, DBI will send 'PREPARE blah AS ' before the first execution and then use 'EXECUTE ' afterwards. Unlike SPs these disappear when you drop your connection (and so remain inside the client code and not in the DB).
Let's set economics aside, because I don't consider it a science
It always amuses me when people say that. They almost invariable go on to make some kind of economic argument. If thinking and arguing over how someone make a choice about whether and where to buy something isn't economics then I'm a sabre toothed lesser spotted walrus.
I say again. People will ONLY spend what they think something is worth, NOT what you're willing to sell it for. If your item is too expensive, people will either find an alternative, build their own workaround, or give up entirely.
I didn't say people wouldn't do that. What I said was that people will not only spend what they think something is worth to themselves; they'll happily pay less, too. Originally you said that people will pay *exactly* what they are willing to pay.
Whilst obvious it's important because of what you said in your first sentence: 'The market determines the value of any good or service.'. Many people are paying less than they are willing. That means that neither the price charged nor the total revenue give you much of a hint of the economic value the product brings to society. If you're lucky they'll give you a lower bound. Once the various things economists spend silly amounts of their time worrying about have taken their toll (tax, externalities, information asymmetries and plain ordinary stupidity) they might not even give you that.
Furthermore, you dont exactly arbitrarily choose your price. Some markets just don't exist because they aren't profitable to be in. If your software costs 350 and the market does not support this software, then it won't ever exist and this IS NOT an inefficiency.
It's not inefficient if the total that everyone is willing to pay is less than 350. In my example that's not true. Two people are prepared to pay 50 and two 150 - a total of 400. A perfect economy might charge, say, 40 for the first two people and 140 for the second two (it might charge other similar amounts, too). The buyers all gain - they get something they want for less than the most they'll pay. The seller gains, too - he develops the software for 350 and sells it for a total of 360.
NOT doing this is inefficient because everybody gains from it. The market might not let this happen - for the simple reason that, in many cases, it just isn't possible to charge different people different prices.
IP laws are in place because people actually value software as the several hundred/several thousand dollar price tag but there is no way of a software company to take advantage of this. We say that the benefit of having the software at all is worth having to deal with prices that are above the optimum for society(in this case, marginal cost pricing).
Oh, definitely. The question isn't whether we need IP laws, it's: how strong? Not just 'how long before literal copying is allowed?' but also questions such as 'how much protection should there be against copying look and feel, names, algorithms and business methods?'.
Weakening IP laws might mean that some worthwhile software is never written. It also means that the software which/is/ written can be put to wider use. My point is that these two must be balanced. With a powerful industry pushing the first side and no-one pushing the second it isn't surprising that the law is heading too far one way.
The market determines the value of any good or service. People will pay exactly what they are willing to pay and no more than that.
No it doesn't and no they don't.
People will not only pay exactly what they are willing to pay - they'll pay less, too. In fact, since most markets have a single price for everyone (or a small number of prices) and everyone is unlikely to put the same value on a product most people will be paying less than what they are willing to pay. The total difference between the sum of what everyone who buys is willing to pay and the total amount actually paid is known as the consumer surplus.
In the (mythical) perfectly competitive markets of basic economic theory price actually comes out as equal to the marginal cost of producing the product - close to zero in the case of sotware. It certainly doesn't find its value (how could it? most consumers would be unwilling to reveal their valuation even if they know what it is).
Software is different to most other products. If I consume a potato, say, this is a cost to the economy because I've reduced the amount of potato available for everyone else (or, if you like, because I've consumed something it's taken economic resources to create). If I 'consume' a copy of Windows it doesn't reduce the amount of Windows left for everyone else, it hasn't used up any economic resources (other than some trivial amount in the form of media or bandwidth) and it hasn't cost the economy anything. The cost of any existing software is zero!
Obviously, if software were priced this way little would be produced. If the cost of developing a particular piece of software is less than its worth (the total value to everyone who would consume it) then this is very much a bad thing (it's inefficient, in economists jargon). The problem is that charging anything above zero for software is ALSO inefficient! Suppose I charge 100 for some software I've written. Suppose someone values it at 75. Suppose it would cost me nothing (or close enough it doesn't matter) to get it to him. If I had a way to identify this person and he could prove his valuation then I could sell it to him at, say, 50 and we'd both gain. This isn't possible - so there's an economic gain of 75 going uncaptured, hence the inefficiency.
It's this (essentially insoluble) problem that ought to be at the heart of any intellectual property debate. IP, by giving it's holder a temporary monopoly, allows a creator to keep price above cost, creates this second kind of inefficiency and in doing so provides the incentives to create the product which solve the first source of inefficiency. Stronger IP laws mean that there is more incentive to create software (or drugs, or new machines, or whatever) but increase the second source of inefficiency by reducing competition and keeping prices higher for longer. Strengthening IP laws when there is already enough incentive to produce most worthwhile software is, by this argument, bad for the economy. [ Nor does it completely solve the problem, either. Imagine if two people are prepared to pay up to 50 and two up to 150 for some software and that it costs 350 to produce. You can't distinguish between these people (because they'd lie to get a lower price). There's no price at which you have an incentive to produce the software - and, unless a government or free software project steps in, an economic gain goes uncaptured ].
The reason jobs are being lost to overseas has to do entirely with labour costs, and nothing to do to with pollution controls.
Erm, nearly. Do you know what a trade deficit is and what it represents? It's the result of the US exporting fewer goods and services than it imports. It's doing this because it's borrowing a great deal from abroad. Borrowing from abroad is basically making a bargain with the rest of the world: 'if you send us more stuff than we send to you this year then we, in exchange, agree to send more stuff to you than you send to us at some time in the future'.
What you would expect to see in your economy when this happens is fewer tradeable goods being produced locally and more being imported. One obvious form of this is offshoring.
The borrowing of money from abroad sets up a capital flow from outside the US (from the lenders) to the US. Lenders have to buy dollars with their own currency before they can lend to you so this flow helps prop up the dollar. This makes foreign goods, services and labour look particularly attractive. If this flow is stopped, reversed (by making repayments) or is even just expected to reverse then the exchange rate will slide. That makes the foreign labour look a lot less cheap.
This is going to happen to the US sooner or later; foreign central banks (who hold a lot of dollar reserves) will stop wanting to lend. I'm not so sure exactly what will happen then - but I suspect it'll be a nasty mixture of rising interest rates (as the US tries to attract new overseas capital and increase domestic saving), a falling exchange rate (yes, even with rising interest rates), inflation (as the prices of imports rise), higher employment and reduced consumption (but increased GDP).
As long as it's per capita GDP, fine. If you base it on per capita then you come up with idiotic conclusions such as "The U.S. can produce only 3 times as much CO2 as Mexico" even though the U.S. economy is about 12 times larger.
'Idiotic' is a bit steep. The atmosphere and its capacity to absorb pollutants belongs just as much to an African as an American. To say 'I deserve to be allowed to use up a greater proportion of that capacity than an African because I live in a rich country' is an argument based on self-interest alone. If the US wishes to use up part of Africa's share of this capacity then the US should be prepared to buy it.
As it is the US government is intent on free-riding on others efforts to improve the global environment and is acting in a much more arrogant, selfish, myopic and reckless way than many other governments. In my opinion, the rest of the world should eventually start moving toward sanctions on the US if it doesn't improve its behaviour. Enforcing quotas on oil exports would be a particularly good one - though I can't imagine it being easy to convince middle eastern government to comply. More plausible would be, say, EU import duties on imported goods which aren't subject to as stringent environment regulation as domestically produced goods.
And the fact that the economy will be hurt is BS- the underlying assumption in economics is that our living standards are proportional to number of goods/services we produce- But what about air quality? pollution? clean water? moderate temperatures? None of those are accounted for in our economic models, so a naive economist would say destroying those for greater manufacturing output would improve our living standards, when in reality it would do the exact oposite.
Nonsense. Its widely accepted that externalities (any economic activity which affects someone other than the buyers/sellers involved - such as all of the things you list) make economies work less efficiently and produce less good outcomes. This is a fundamental part of welfare economics - even part of something called the 'First Theorem of Welfare Economics' - and is something any economist should have learnt about.
It's politicians, the media and the general non-economist public who thing of GDP and output as being the one true measure of economic success. In fact, one of the first things many who study any economics at all will learn is just how bad GDP is as a measure of economic welfare. It's not even a particularly great measure of how many goods and services we each get to consume. Just how many people here do you think even know what it measures?
If anything there's a great deal of economic theory to support things like tradeable emissions quotas and taxes on energy and petroleum. And not just because of global climate changes either - there are plenty of more local reason like health problems and the degradation of the urban environments that many live in.
I am interested in what type of furnace you are talking about, but having lived and knowing people that live in the Northeast, Midwest, Northern (Minn, Wis), Northwest I can tell you that most heating solutions require electricity while they are running, and the few with older gravity flow or low efficiency natural gas hot water require electricity at all.
As several people have said it doesn't get all that cold in most of the UK. We don't need enormous heating systems. Power cuts are fairly unusual but it isn't unknown for some rural houses (even rural areas near London) to go without electricity for a day or two. If this happens it's probably best to find a local pub with an open fire:-)
My experience is that a typical UK heating system is a gas boiler with no forced air flow and which is lit by electricity or by a pilot light. This heats water which is electrically pumped through radiators to heat the rooms or a coil inside a water cylinder to heat water (a couple of electrically operated valves are needed to switch it as needed). My current boiler has an output of something like 15kW (which, IMO, is a little bit low but acceptable).
I've lived in a house with a boiler which did have a fan to force air through it. That heated hot water directly rather than in a tank and so needed to be a bit more powerful (26kW, I think). A lot of people I meet seem to have never heard of this type. I much preferred it.
Some areas have no gas supply. These often use electric storage heaters which use cheap night-time electricity to heat very high heat capacity ceramic bricks. Ironically, these might be the best kind to have in a power cut as they stay warm for days.
There are still quite a few people here without double glazing. Sometimes that's because modern windows would spoil the appearance of some older houses (in fact, some homeowners have 'listed' houses where it would be against the law to change the windows without permission) but sometimes it's just people being silly or poor.
Yeah...imagine wanting to drag yourself out of poverty. Tchah!
Actually, this is an important point that some people (especially those who say 'forget the environment - lets spend the money on helping the poor') forget. There is only a limited amount and flow of oil. Poorer countries need this oil to develop their infrastructure (build roads, plumbing, electricity grids, etc.) and their economies. Rich countries easily outcompete them for access to this resource (by simply paying a lot more for it and holding the prices high as a result). A reduction in western oil use would partly help the local and global environment (through reduced total oil use) and partly help those poorer countries (by allowing some of that reduction to end up as increased use by poorer countries).
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Errmm....retail price maintenance BENEFITS retailers, that's what it's for. The manufacturer specifies the minimum (higher than competitive market) price retailers can sell at in their contracts and uses its monopoly/market power to enforce them, and by doing so liberates the retailers from having to compete against each other on the basis of price. If the retailers were to do this themselves (by talking to each other as a cartel and agreeing on the price) it would be illegal. The manufacturer might do this either to capture some of the retailers' monopoly profits (because they can charge the retailer more without the retailer refusing to stock their products) or to encourage retailers to stock their products.
That's irrelevant. If you believe otherwise then you need to brush up on your basic economics. Pigouvian taxes aren't there to clear up the consequences of your externalities, they're there to correct the decisions made by consumers who don't receive all of the benefits but only part of the cost of their consumption.
Image the price of petrol is 4/gallon. Imagine the economic cost of using petrol in a car (including refining, extraction, transport, local problems from emissions (ill health, erosion to buildings, etc.), CO2 via global climate, congestion, accident risk to others and everything else) is 8/gallon. When you make decisions affecting your transport (how to travel, what car to buy, where to live, where to work, etc.) you'll be balances the benefits to you vs the costs to you. You get all the benefit of your travel. You get half the costs of your travel. Everyone else, collectively, get the other half.
Imagine a 4/gallon tax is put on petrol. You pay 8/gallon. Since it now costs you 8/gallon, not four, you change your decisions accordingly. If you're very rich it might change nothing, more probably it'll have some affect on at least your next choice of car (and on the producers of cars, who may spend more on developing more efficient cars). Imagine this is spent on something useless - diamond encrusted spoons for president Bush, say. You STILL have to pay it. You STILL find petrol costs 8/gallon and you STILL take 8/gallon in to account in your decisions. It does no good at all for you to know it's being used to save fluffy bunny-wabbits, or spent on pollution mitigation, or spent on diamond spoons because it doesn't affect your transport decisions or your costs one bit.
There's at least some genetic effect (hardly surprising, really...). IIRC, there's a gene which provides a way to detect a poison in small quantities in, amongst other things, broccoli. If you have two copies it tastes very bitter (I imagine I have two copies, broccoli is absolutely disgusting to me). If you have none, it doesn't (and one, in between).
See, eg: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/09/0609
These aren't very useful legal definitions, though, so the legal definition of a monopoly is often different. IIRC, in the UK 25% market share is enough to start triggering monopoly legislation. Near-monopolies and oligopolies need regulation, and there are plenty of economically-negative things that can go on even when no-one is anywhere near 100% but someone still has significant market power. In any case, the problem here seems to be Apple using it's position in two
Sshhhh! Don't let the Americans know it's French!
Boil some milk. Let it cool to ~40oC. Stir in some (live!) yoghurt and leave where you leave your bread to rise it all day. Quite thick, isn't it? Now pump it through some industrial food processing machinery. You'll probably find it's not thick any more. Add gelatine. Thick again? Good....now you can sell it.
They seem to use starches of various kinds in the UK, rather than gelatine. Same reason, though.
The weird flavourings are there because they're cheaper than real things with flavour, and the small amounts of real things are there so that they can put them on the label. In any case, putting lumps of, say, strawberry in a yoghurt doesn't produce strawberry flavoured yoghurt...it produces yoghurt-tasting-yoghurt with lumps of strawberry in it. The sugar is there because there isn't enough real stuff with sugar in in there, and because people seem to like their yoghurt sweet. Personally, I prefer to buy plain yoghurt and add unrefined dark brown sugar.
No, he means efficient. Generating electricity from (usually) heat, transporting it and then turning it back in to heat wastes most of the energy in the original heat. Burning gas or oil will waste much less, and an electric heat pump will give you three-ish times the heat as electricity used. Of course, not everyone has those choices available....but many do.
Weren't they the people who elected Peter Mandelson? The man who narrowly avoided being responsible for a recent European-wide bra shortage?
It's not a court order. Actually, it's not even legal to tell anyone that you've been served with a RIPA notice.
The example you gave is different. Requiring someone to hand over a document you know he has access to and which he is legally required to keep through an open and public process is not the same as demanding decryption of a file under the RIPA. What if the file is not encrypted? Or if you don't have the key (because, say, someone planted the file on you or simply because you've forgotten)? You can hardly 'prove' that you've forgotten a password, so what do you expect to happen when the police order someone to decrypt a file for which he no longer has the key? There isn't even a guarantee this is to be used for criminal investigations. Imagine being a pressure group - Friends of the Earth, say - and being asked to reveal files which describe how you intend to (legitimately) oppose government policy. Not only have your democratic rights been violated but you can go to prison for publically saying so.
And, of course, it couldn't possibly be mistaken for a bomb-filled wasitcoat.
Nor will it protect you from the spelling police, who would be entirely justified in shooting you.
It hasn't been publicized much. It's also been called the 'Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005', which hardly draws attention to the fact that it allows you to be arrested for littering. This is the section in question.
Not committing any crimes isn't a guarantee of not being arrested for one. Even if it were, it isn't for the police to punish people by 'processing' them when there's no need to do so (you're only going to be released on bail anyway, it's not like there's any advantage). If they police accuse you of a minor crime and know who you are then they should summons you, not detain you. In fact, whilst the new law does away with the notion of 'arrestable' offences, it still says that you can only be arrested if it's 'necessary'. 'Necessary', IIRC, means that they have to do so to identify you, to stop a crime being committed, to stop you being a danger to anyone or some other reasons I can't remember. Not that many police know about the changes, or that your DNA and fingerprints would be destroyed if you were wrongfully arrested.
And it can also be used by terrorists or extremist groups to help them identify and locate their victims. Take this for example, an animal rights activist used the government vehicle and driver database to persecute a farmer and everyone who associated themselves with him.
I'm sure that all of the new databases - this communications database, the up-coming UK identity card database, vehicle movement records, etc - could all be very useful to the IRA, the NI loyalist groups, US anti-abortionists, animal rights activists, Al Qaeda, hostile foreign security services and the like. I can't imagine they'll find it hard to penetrate a government agency with access to the data, or to corrupt someone who's already got access.
I'm looking at the FreeBSD manual pages, and I can't find any mention of this socket option. The zero_copy man page makes no mention of it either.
You really ought to read zero_copy(9), you appear to have some wrong ideas about how it works. You say that any write() on that socket marks the buffer CoW. It doesn't. The write must be from a page-aligned buffer, it must be at least one page long and the MTU on the interface must be at least one page. Oh, and the (non-default) ZERO_COPY_SOCKETS options must be in the kernel and the relevant sysctls must be set appropriately.
Untrue. Read the zero_copy manual page. The programmer can safely reuse the buffer once twice the socket buffer size worth of data has been sent to the socket.
Look, zero copy sockets are a specialist option, for specialist applications of the kind that need to keep a few gigabit ethernet cards fully used and have CPU time to spare. They're not there to make your web browser go faster. They're for developers who really need the extra performance and who are prepared to go to some effort (and to read the manual pages...) to achieve it.
These assumptions are so strict (and ludicrous when compared the real world) that a vast amount of the rest of welfare economics is spent on trying to explain what happens when these assumptions are violated and how governments can respond so as to limit the reduction in efficiency. Regulation can be a useful part of that response even in non-monopolies (and so can certain taxes and subsidies and things like tradeable emissions quotas).
Road damage increases quickly with vehicle weight; roughly with the fourth power in the most well known study (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AASHTO_Road_Test). Light cars cause only trivial damage compared to trucks.
That's an excellent argument for having a layer between applications and the data. Stored procedures are certainly a way to achieve this, but they aren't the only way to achieve it. Is a bunch of, say, Java stored procedures all that different to, say, a Java server which exposes application domain methods via CORBA or J2EE (or whatever), is the only way for the rest of your system to get at the database and contains all of the queries all that different? Not really - and the second method has some advantages (like allowing you to run many copies across many computers). IMHO you really do have to think about your system architecture and it's requirements before making a decision like 'everything goes through SPs'.
SPs aren't the only way of compiling and optimizing a query once. For instance, caching Perl DBI statements will, for databases which support it, result in the same thing. With Postgresql, for example, DBI will send 'PREPARE blah AS ' before the first execution and then use 'EXECUTE ' afterwards. Unlike SPs these disappear when you drop your connection (and so remain inside the client code and not in the DB).
It always amuses me when people say that. They almost invariable go on to make some kind of economic argument. If thinking and arguing over how someone make a choice about whether and where to buy something isn't economics then I'm a sabre toothed lesser spotted walrus.
I didn't say people wouldn't do that. What I said was that people will not only spend what they think something is worth to themselves; they'll happily pay less, too. Originally you said that people will pay *exactly* what they are willing to pay.
Whilst obvious it's important because of what you said in your first sentence: 'The market determines the value of any good or service.'. Many people are paying less than they are willing. That means that neither the price charged nor the total revenue give you much of a hint of the economic value the product brings to society. If you're lucky they'll give you a lower bound. Once the various things economists spend silly amounts of their time worrying about have taken their toll (tax, externalities, information asymmetries and plain ordinary stupidity) they might not even give you that.
It's not inefficient if the total that everyone is willing to pay is less than 350. In my example that's not true. Two people are prepared to pay 50 and two 150 - a total of 400. A perfect economy might charge, say, 40 for the first two people and 140 for the second two (it might charge other similar amounts, too). The buyers all gain - they get something they want for less than the most they'll pay. The seller gains, too - he develops the software for 350 and sells it for a total of 360.
NOT doing this is inefficient because everybody gains from it. The market might not let this happen - for the simple reason that, in many cases, it just isn't possible to charge different people different prices.
Oh, definitely. The question isn't whether we need IP laws, it's: how strong? Not just 'how long before literal copying is allowed?' but also questions such as 'how much protection should there be against copying look and feel, names, algorithms and business methods?'.
Weakening IP laws might mean that some worthwhile software is never written. It also means that the software which
No it doesn't and no they don't.
People will not only pay exactly what they are willing to pay - they'll pay less, too. In fact, since most markets have a single price for everyone (or a small number of prices) and everyone is unlikely to put the same value on a product most people will be paying less than what they are willing to pay. The total difference between the sum of what everyone who buys is willing to pay and the total amount actually paid is known as the consumer surplus.
In the (mythical) perfectly competitive markets of basic economic theory price actually comes out as equal to the marginal cost of producing the product - close to zero in the case of sotware. It certainly doesn't find its value (how could it? most consumers would be unwilling to reveal their valuation even if they know what it is).
Software is different to most other products. If I consume a potato, say, this is a cost to the economy because I've reduced the amount of potato available for everyone else (or, if you like, because I've consumed something it's taken economic resources to create). If I 'consume' a copy of Windows it doesn't reduce the amount of Windows left for everyone else, it hasn't used up any economic resources (other than some trivial amount in the form of media or bandwidth) and it hasn't cost the economy anything. The cost of any existing software is zero!
Obviously, if software were priced this way little would be produced. If the cost of developing a particular piece of software is less than its worth (the total value to everyone who would consume it) then this is very much a bad thing (it's inefficient, in economists jargon). The problem is that charging anything above zero for software is ALSO inefficient! Suppose I charge 100 for some software I've written. Suppose someone values it at 75. Suppose it would cost me nothing (or close enough it doesn't matter) to get it to him. If I had a way to identify this person and he could prove his valuation then I could sell it to him at, say, 50 and we'd both gain. This isn't possible - so there's an economic gain of 75 going uncaptured, hence the inefficiency.
It's this (essentially insoluble) problem that ought to be at the heart of any intellectual property debate. IP, by giving it's holder a temporary monopoly, allows a creator to keep price above cost, creates this second kind of inefficiency and in doing so provides the incentives to create the product which solve the first source of inefficiency. Stronger IP laws mean that there is more incentive to create software (or drugs, or new machines, or whatever) but increase the second source of inefficiency by reducing competition and keeping prices higher for longer. Strengthening IP laws when there is already enough incentive to produce most worthwhile software is, by this argument, bad for the economy. [ Nor does it completely solve the problem, either. Imagine if two people are prepared to pay up to 50 and two up to 150 for some software and that it costs 350 to produce. You can't distinguish between these people (because they'd lie to get a lower price). There's no price at which you have an incentive to produce the software - and, unless a government or free software project steps in, an economic gain goes uncaptured ].
Erm, nearly. Do you know what a trade deficit is and what it represents? It's the result of the US exporting fewer goods and services than it imports. It's doing this because it's borrowing a great deal from abroad. Borrowing from abroad is basically making a bargain with the rest of the world: 'if you send us more stuff than we send to you this year then we, in exchange, agree to send more stuff to you than you send to us at some time in the future'.
What you would expect to see in your economy when this happens is fewer tradeable goods being produced locally and more being imported. One obvious form of this is offshoring.
The borrowing of money from abroad sets up a capital flow from outside the US (from the lenders) to the US. Lenders have to buy dollars with their own currency before they can lend to you so this flow helps prop up the dollar. This makes foreign goods, services and labour look particularly attractive. If this flow is stopped, reversed (by making repayments) or is even just expected to reverse then the exchange rate will slide. That makes the foreign labour look a lot less cheap.
This is going to happen to the US sooner or later; foreign central banks (who hold a lot of dollar reserves) will stop wanting to lend. I'm not so sure exactly what will happen then - but I suspect it'll be a nasty mixture of rising interest rates (as the US tries to attract new overseas capital and increase domestic saving), a falling exchange rate (yes, even with rising interest rates), inflation (as the prices of imports rise), higher employment and reduced consumption (but increased GDP).
'Idiotic' is a bit steep. The atmosphere and its capacity to absorb pollutants belongs just as much to an African as an American. To say 'I deserve to be allowed to use up a greater proportion of that capacity than an African because I live in a rich country' is an argument based on self-interest alone. If the US wishes to use up part of Africa's share of this capacity then the US should be prepared to buy it.
As it is the US government is intent on free-riding on others efforts to improve the global environment and is acting in a much more arrogant, selfish, myopic and reckless way than many other governments. In my opinion, the rest of the world should eventually start moving toward sanctions on the US if it doesn't improve its behaviour. Enforcing quotas on oil exports would be a particularly good one - though I can't imagine it being easy to convince middle eastern government to comply. More plausible would be, say, EU import duties on imported goods which aren't subject to as stringent environment regulation as domestically produced goods.
Nonsense. Its widely accepted that externalities (any economic activity which affects someone other than the buyers/sellers involved - such as all of the things you list) make economies work less efficiently and produce less good outcomes. This is a fundamental part of welfare economics - even part of something called the 'First Theorem of Welfare Economics' - and is something any economist should have learnt about.
It's politicians, the media and the general non-economist public who thing of GDP and output as being the one true measure of economic success. In fact, one of the first things many who study any economics at all will learn is just how bad GDP is as a measure of economic welfare. It's not even a particularly great measure of how many goods and services we each get to consume. Just how many people here do you think even know what it measures?
If anything there's a great deal of economic theory to support things like tradeable emissions quotas and taxes on energy and petroleum. And not just because of global climate changes either - there are plenty of more local reason like health problems and the degradation of the urban environments that many live in.
As several people have said it doesn't get all that cold in most of the UK. We don't need enormous heating systems. Power cuts are fairly unusual but it isn't unknown for some rural houses (even rural areas near London) to go without electricity for a day or two. If this happens it's probably best to find a local pub with an open fire
My experience is that a typical UK heating system is a gas boiler with no forced air flow and which is lit by electricity or by a pilot light. This heats water which is electrically pumped through radiators to heat the rooms or a coil inside a water cylinder to heat water (a couple of electrically operated valves are needed to switch it as needed). My current boiler has an output of something like 15kW (which, IMO, is a little bit low but acceptable).
I've lived in a house with a boiler which did have a fan to force air through it. That heated hot water directly rather than in a tank and so needed to be a bit more powerful (26kW, I think). A lot of people I meet seem to have never heard of this type. I much preferred it.
Some areas have no gas supply. These often use electric storage heaters which use cheap night-time electricity to heat very high heat capacity ceramic bricks. Ironically, these might be the best kind to have in a power cut as they stay warm for days.
There are still quite a few people here without double glazing. Sometimes that's because modern windows would spoil the appearance of some older houses (in fact, some homeowners have 'listed' houses where it would be against the law to change the windows without permission) but sometimes it's just people being silly or poor.
Yeah...imagine wanting to drag yourself out of poverty. Tchah!
Actually, this is an important point that some people (especially those who say 'forget the environment - lets spend the money on helping the poor') forget. There is only a limited amount and flow of oil. Poorer countries need this oil to develop their infrastructure (build roads, plumbing, electricity grids, etc.) and their economies. Rich countries easily outcompete them for access to this resource (by simply paying a lot more for it and holding the prices high as a result). A reduction in western oil use would partly help the local and global environment (through reduced total oil use) and partly help those poorer countries (by allowing some of that reduction to end up as increased use by poorer countries).