Competition for the lowest price often leads to lower quality. If firms were allowed to agree to prices, then they could focus on competing on quality instead of on price.
The airline industry in the US is a great example. Under regulation, the federal government essentially fixed prices. The airlines then did all they could to provide a higher quality experience to get customers.
The other benefit of price fixing is stability. Firms have a better idea what the future holds in terms of revenue and competition. Without price fixing, firms battle with one another until come firms are forced into bankruptcy or are swallowed up by other firms. Jobs are lost. Again, the same thing happened in the airline industry.
Of course the downside is higher prices. But suppose higher prices make an industry much more profitable than it might otherwise be. Wouldn't that draw in more competitors? Price fixing only works if prices stay low enough that investors don't see opportunity. Considering the huge amount of investment in electronics and the rock bottom prices for all sorts of devices, it looks to me like price fixing hasn't stifled competition or investment.
Homeless men greatly outnumber homeless women. Or how about fixing the died-on-the-job-gap, too? Men die more often on the job. Focusing on those few men that have been wildly successful is silly when so many other men are used and thrown away.
Remember that those theaters belong to "the people" and the representative of "the people" decided it would be a good idea if they were used for something else. There are only 4,000 screens making them a limited resource, after all, and they must be used efficiently. This is strictly an economic decision.
Hey, big Chinese brother is only looking out for you.
Yes it does designate the encoding. At least in software. If you are talking about the hardware representation of the number, you should say so. That is a different matter entirely. And also almost totally irrelevant, since nobody has made computers that use BCD for decades now.
Well, I'm not sure what you mean exactly by "computers that use BCD", but I know that many processors DO support BCD, including any x86 compatible processor and 8051 based systems used in many embedded applications. And Intel thought that BCD support was important enough that they made BCD vector instructions are available when they added SIMD support.
Capitalism is not enshrined in the constitution, but regulating the commerce is. There is a better caser for socialism in the US constitution than there is for many of the things the government does.
Well, regulating interstate commerce is permitted, but even there, the word "regulate" meant "to make regular". It didn't mean to imply that the federal government had complete control over commerce. It was only meant to be a means of harmonizing commerce between the states.
I'd also like to add that the fifth amendment protects property by requiring that no property be taken for public use with just compensation. That seems to suggest that private property is at least to some extent protected.
...All want to grow their subscribership, increase their impact factor (the scientific journal measurement of notoriety.) They do that by publishing the most interesting research they can......Identical research also doesn't get published. New, fresh, interesting research is what journals want. So while Willis thinks there's a massive groupthink, there's actually little of the kind...
Wishful thinking.
I've seen the process first hand. What journals want first are subscribers. That usually means universities with money to pay big$$$/issue.
Universities spend money on those journals that are desired by current faculty. Faculty decide what journals the university will pay for.
And just what does faculty consider desirable? Journals that confirm and publish work that interests the current faculty. Faculty are not going to approve money for journals that upset the world-view of faculty or damage their careers.
The same thing goes on when it comes to hiring new faculty. Faculty usually has a big say in who gets hired and who does not.
The entire system is setup to preserve the power and authority of current faculty. "Exciting new ideas" will generally keep you unemployed if they're any threat to the reputation of those of the establishment.
Nonsense. This is only true if it's a linear relationship. Given that the greenhouse effect involves a complex feedback cycle, that is not a valid assumption.
Yeah, but it's an assumption used by climate scientists that combine a predicted exponential increase in CO2 with logarithmic response in temperature.
Anything less than exponential increase in CO2 actually implies sub-linear increases in temperature with respect to time.
Oh, and that's assuming the theory is even correct.
So I see that Gates and Buffet said recently that the economy is picking back up and all is well and there is no reason for anyone to be worried and the free market is perfect.
But how can it be perfect if the we cannot protect those who need protection most from those who would steal their money.
The elderly are doing the same thing to workers right now through Social Security and Medicare.
We're promised future product (retirement money and health care) if we make payments up front. And it's unlikely the state will be able to deliver since they've already spent the money.
Reading dozens of pages of legal patent-speak is not easy, but the main gist of the patent 5,822,523 is in claim 1 (paraphrased into english):
* A bunch of game clients send messages to a game server
* The game server collects these messages for a fixed period of time and aggregates all these messages into a big, aggregated message.
* Once a fixed time interval has elapsed, the game server transmits the big, aggregated message back to all the clients. The clients then use this aggregated message to display the same shared environment on all machines
Seems obvious to me now, but it may have not been obvious in 1996. If you can prove Doom follows the same steps (isn't the source code available?), then there's prior art to invalidate it.
Read about Nagle's Algorithm and delayed ACKs under TCP. Any server using TCP to send information to a number of hosts gets aggregation along with 200ms time interval -- for free.
And immediately think of IRC, TPC, Nagle's algorithm, and delayed ACKs?
From the abstract:
The group messaging server then forwards the message to each of the target hosts. In an interactive application, many messages will be arriving at the group server close to one another in time. Rather than simply forward each message to its targeted hosts, the group messaging server aggregates the contents of each of messages received during a specified time period and then sends an aggregated message to the targeted hosts. The time period can be defined in a number of ways. This method reduces the message traffic between hosts in a networked interactive application and contributes to reducing the latency in the communications between the hosts.
IANAL, but it seems to me that if my server collects messages and then merely writes them to a socket using TCP, which buffers the messages, aggregating them into chunks of size MSS, then sends them as a single segment, I've violated this patent.
Did these guys patent IRC? And did Microsoft pay for it?
In America," Obama says, "we have this strong bias toward individual action. You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations."
- Barack Obama, Interview with the Chicago Reader, 1995
ALS is basically a slow and unpleasant death sentence unless you are lucky and can afford proper care.
It's still horrible, even if you're lucky. There are so many "better" fatal diseases I'd rather have.
And unfortunately there really isn't a lot of public research being done to find a cure. A great deal of medical research is driven by politics and popularity, and ALS just doesn't get the attention it deserves. The cynic in me believes that the lack of research dollars is due to the short average expected lifespan after diagnosis -- those with ALS just aren't around long enough to make enough noise to get the attention needed to boost funding and research interest.
Some people have unbelievable ideas about what they're entitled to. When I find an artist who actually believes he's deserves to be paid until death + 70 years, then I get that same feeling, like nothing worthwhile ever came out of that artist. At least nothing without a rancid aftertaste.
Artists don't believe they're entitled to be paid until death + 70 years. They believe they and their children ought to be paid if their work continues to be valued.
If it isn't valued, then are entitle to nothing and they get nothing.
But if it is valued, then why can't those that value it give something back in return?
The bill introduced last week in the N.C. House would raise the costs and regulations for cities marketing their broadband services. The House bill (1252) is identical to a Senate bill (1004) introduced last month.
* Prohibiting cities from using any general revenues, including property taxes or sales tax proceeds, or money from any other utility fund to start or subsidize communications services.
* Banning cities from pricing any communications service below the cost of providing the service.
* Requiring the communications service to "pay" the city an annual amount equal to the property taxes and other fees a private provider would be required to pay.
* Requiring an independent, annual audit for all costs associated with the communications services.
Catharine Rice, a communications consultant who advised Wilson's planning for Greenlight, calls the bill an attempt by the telecommunications industry to eliminate municipal broadband services, and we agree.
While some of these regulations seem reasonable -- in particular we agree that municipalities should not use tax funds or other utility funds to subsidize a prohibitively lower rate to drive the private providers away- the accumulative effect of the proposed legislation would be to make it cost prohibitive for a municipality to build and support such a network.
So by forcing the city to play by the rules that TimeWarner has to play by, and to pay the taxes TimeWarner would pay, the city admits they can't support such a network.
Why don't you read the fucking article? No taxes were imposed to pay for this. Bonds were sold to provide start-up costs. Revenue is through subscriptions.
I think you're wrong. It looks like Wilson, NC "Appropriated" $2,267,690 from the general fund (http://www.wilsonnc.org/attachments/pages/357/Broadband%20Fund%20Summary.pdf). That money came from taxes or previous debt. Even if this tax money is paid back through subscriptions, it still represents money borrowed for free from taxpayers.
Besides, you can't ignore the federal/state tax subsidy that municipal bonds enjoy. Municipal bonds pay less interest because bond holders get that money tax-free. So Wilson, NC is getting easy and cheap capital that TimeWarner doesn't have access to.
And how is employee compensation treated? Do they get paid out of the bond money, or does it come from somewhere else? If they're municipal employees, again, there's an indirect tax subsidy that TimeWarner doesn't enjoy.
You ask for a level playing field. It isn't level. And is happens to be in favor of municipalities.
First, it was not cosmic rays; memory was tested in a lead vault and showed the same error rate. Turns out to have been alpha particles emitted by the epoxy / ceramic that the memory chips were encapsulated in.
Experiments show that cosmic rays can cause soft errors.
Check out Ziegler, et al., "IBM experiments in soft fails in computer electronics (1978 - 1994)," IBM J. of R. & D., Vol. 40, No. 1, Jan. 1996.
and
McKee, W. R., McAdams, H. P., Smith, E. B., et al. "Cosmic Ray Neutron Induced Upsets as a Major Contributor to the Soft Error Rate of Current and Future Generation DRAMs" 1996 IEEE Annual International Reliability Physics, pp. 1-6, 1996.
It didn't take me a week to realize the iPhone was nothing more than a gateway to the iTunes store with a touch screen an accelerometer and some basic phone features.
"Nothing more"?
Oh, c'mon. Have you actually used an iPhone or iPod Touch?
The interface blows away everything else on the planet. It's seriously nice.
I don't care that it doesn't have a television built in; just like a don't care that my riding lawnmower or stapler doesn't have a built-in television.
Slashdot Mirror
Competition for the lowest price often leads to lower quality. If firms were allowed to agree to prices, then they could focus on competing on quality instead of on price.
The airline industry in the US is a great example. Under regulation, the federal government essentially fixed prices. The airlines then did all they could to provide a higher quality experience to get customers.
The other benefit of price fixing is stability. Firms have a better idea what the future holds in terms of revenue and competition. Without price fixing, firms battle with one another until come firms are forced into bankruptcy or are swallowed up by other firms. Jobs are lost. Again, the same thing happened in the airline industry.
Of course the downside is higher prices. But suppose higher prices make an industry much more profitable than it might otherwise be. Wouldn't that draw in more competitors? Price fixing only works if prices stay low enough that investors don't see opportunity. Considering the huge amount of investment in electronics and the rock bottom prices for all sorts of devices, it looks to me like price fixing hasn't stifled competition or investment.
And this seems like another example of employee theft.
The only difference between employees in upper management and all the other employees is the scale of the looting.
Why do shareholders tolerate this?
Homeless men greatly outnumber homeless women.
Or how about fixing the died-on-the-job-gap, too?
Men die more often on the job.
Focusing on those few men that have been wildly successful is silly when so many other men are used and thrown away.
Remember that those theaters belong to "the people" and the representative of "the people" decided it would be a good idea if they were used for something else. There are only 4,000 screens making them a limited resource, after all, and they must be used efficiently. This is strictly an economic decision.
Hey, big Chinese brother is only looking out for you.
The invisible hand of the free market made the data and research invisible.
Just like climate data, right?
China has next to nothing in terms of IP -- because the Chinese don't respect IP.
And that's why movies made in Hong Kong are for Western audiences instead of Chinese audiences. Most Chinese will pirate instead of pay.
Well, I'm not sure what you mean exactly by "computers that use BCD", but I know that many processors DO support BCD, including any x86 compatible processor and 8051 based systems used in many embedded applications. And Intel thought that BCD support was important enough that they made BCD vector instructions are available when they added SIMD support.
Why Does Interpol Need Immunity from American Law?
Obama exempts INTERPOL from search and seizure on US lands
Well, regulating interstate commerce is permitted, but even there, the word "regulate" meant "to make regular". It didn't mean to imply that the federal government had complete control over commerce. It was only meant to be a means of harmonizing commerce between the states.
I'd also like to add that the fifth amendment protects property by requiring that no property be taken for public use with just compensation. That seems to suggest that private property is at least to some extent protected.
Wishful thinking.
I've seen the process first hand. What journals want first are subscribers. That usually means universities with money to pay big$$$/issue.
Universities spend money on those journals that are desired by current faculty. Faculty decide what journals the university will pay for.
And just what does faculty consider desirable? Journals that confirm and publish work that interests the current faculty. Faculty are not going to approve money for journals that upset the world-view of faculty or damage their careers.
The same thing goes on when it comes to hiring new faculty. Faculty usually has a big say in who gets hired and who does not.
The entire system is setup to preserve the power and authority of current faculty. "Exciting new ideas" will generally keep you unemployed if they're any threat to the reputation of those of the establishment.
Yeah, but it's an assumption used by climate scientists that combine a predicted exponential increase in CO2 with logarithmic response in temperature.
Anything less than exponential increase in CO2 actually implies sub-linear increases in temperature with respect to time.
Oh, and that's assuming the theory is even correct.
"We condemn this undemocratic act of censoring our event... "
The UN is a democratic organization and this act of censorship is completely democratic. It's wrong, but democratic.
That should be a lesson to those that confuse freedom and democracy.
The elderly are doing the same thing to workers right now through Social Security and Medicare.
We're promised future product (retirement money and health care) if we make payments up front. And it's unlikely the state will be able to deliver since they've already spent the money.
Sound familiar?
...we no longer have a democracy.
Oh, we still have democracy. It's freedom that's been lost.
Read about Nagle's Algorithm and delayed ACKs under TCP. Any server using TCP to send information to a number of hosts gets aggregation along with 200ms time interval -- for free.
And immediately think of IRC, TPC, Nagle's algorithm, and delayed ACKs?
From the abstract:
IANAL, but it seems to me that if my server collects messages and then merely writes them to a socket using TCP, which buffers the messages, aggregating them into chunks of size MSS, then sends them as a single segment, I've violated this patent.
Did these guys patent IRC? And did Microsoft pay for it?
In America," Obama says, "we have this strong bias toward individual action. You know, we idolize the John Wayne hero who comes in to correct things with both guns blazing. But individual actions, individual dreams, are not sufficient. We must unite in collective action, build collective institutions and organizations."
- Barack Obama,
Interview with the Chicago Reader, 1995
It's still horrible, even if you're lucky. There are so many "better" fatal diseases I'd rather have.
And unfortunately there really isn't a lot of public research being done to find a cure. A great deal of medical research is driven by politics and popularity, and ALS just doesn't get the attention it deserves. The cynic in me believes that the lack of research dollars is due to the short average expected lifespan after diagnosis -- those with ALS just aren't around long enough to make enough noise to get the attention needed to boost funding and research interest.
Yeah, but these aren't random letters. These are letters from the government. The VA is basically the government health care system for veterans.
If they sent me a letter, I'd think I'd take it seriously.
Artists don't believe they're entitled to be paid until death + 70 years. They believe they and their children ought to be paid if their work continues to be valued.
If it isn't valued, then are entitle to nothing and they get nothing.
But if it is valued, then why can't those that value it give something back in return?
They admit it right in Save NC Broadband.com blog:
So by forcing the city to play by the rules that TimeWarner has to play by, and to pay the taxes TimeWarner would pay, the city admits they can't support such a network.
I think you're wrong. It looks like Wilson, NC "Appropriated" $2,267,690 from the general fund (http://www.wilsonnc.org/attachments/pages/357/Broadband%20Fund%20Summary.pdf). That money came from taxes or previous debt. Even if this tax money is paid back through subscriptions, it still represents money borrowed for free from taxpayers.
Besides, you can't ignore the federal/state tax subsidy that municipal bonds enjoy. Municipal bonds pay less interest because bond holders get that money tax-free. So Wilson, NC is getting easy and cheap capital that TimeWarner doesn't have access to.
And how is employee compensation treated? Do they get paid out of the bond money, or does it come from somewhere else? If they're municipal employees, again, there's an indirect tax subsidy that TimeWarner doesn't enjoy.
You ask for a level playing field. It isn't level. And is happens to be in favor of municipalities.
Of course it looked solid -- the prosecution withheld evidence that helped the defense.
It doesn't look so solid when we have all the facts.
Experiments show that cosmic rays can cause soft errors.
Check out Ziegler, et al., "IBM experiments in soft fails in computer electronics (1978 - 1994)," IBM J. of R. & D., Vol. 40, No. 1, Jan. 1996.
and
McKee, W. R., McAdams, H. P., Smith, E. B., et al.
"Cosmic Ray Neutron Induced Upsets as a Major Contributor to the Soft Error Rate of Current and Future Generation DRAMs"
1996 IEEE Annual International Reliability Physics, pp. 1-6, 1996.
It didn't take me a week to realize the iPhone was nothing more than a gateway to the iTunes store with a touch screen an accelerometer and some basic phone features.
"Nothing more"?
Oh, c'mon. Have you actually used an iPhone or iPod Touch?
The interface blows away everything else on the planet. It's seriously nice.
I don't care that it doesn't have a television built in; just like a don't care that my riding lawnmower or stapler doesn't have a built-in television.