It's actually not a bad thing if you like the Star Trek way of working not for money, but to better Humanity.
Star Trek was a great show, but it had some real problems with the whole idea of money. In some episodes, main characters would laugh at the idea of money itself, as if no one had any money, and then in other episodes they'd talk about how many "credits" something cost. It was one of many huge inconsistencies in the show and the whole Star Trek universe. Go to YouTube and look for "star trek mistakes"; there's a whole series of videos showing giant consistency errors in the series.
Another one is the issue of genetic engineering. In DS9, the fact that Julian Bashir was genetically engineered becomes a huge plot point, because it's apparently highly illegal and has been for a long time (presumably since the days of Khan). But then there's a 2nd-season TNG episode where the ship visits a colony where they're genetically engineering kids with super immune systems which cause a mysterious contagious illness.
They couldn't even get straight whether Troi had ever kissed Riker with a beard or not: there's a bunch of episodes where she and Riker make out (and Riker has his beard), and then in the Generations movie he kisses her and she's disgusted by his beard and acts like he's never kissed her since he grew it.
Back to communism and money: the main problem here is how do you decide who does what job, and how do you get people to actually do jobs? Everyone wants the good jobs, and no one wants the shit jobs. Who actually wants to haul garbage for a living? Or clean toilets? Lots and lots of people would prefer not to work at all if they don't have to. How do you motivate people to do jobs that society needs done, but which everyone would prefer someone else do? If you give everyone the same amount of money so there's no rich or poor, you have to give them their paycheck whether they've earned it or not. If you withhold pay because they don't feel like doing the job they're assigned, then you're creating a wealth disparity, which is against the whole concept. The whole idea breaks down under just a little inspection.
I really don't see how basic economics isn't working here. For music, ebooks, and other digital goods, there's really an infinite supply, since these things can be reproduced at zero cost on demand, so pricing is really set solely by the demand side: if there's high demand (i.e. people are willing to pay more), then prices will go up. If people weren't willing to pay high prices, sales would drop and sellers would lower their prices in response.
It's not too much different for tangible consumer electronics, since those can be manufactured in huge quantities at fairly low cost.
It all comes down to: sellers will charge what buyers are willing to pay. I don't see how this isn't obeying supply-and-demand.
And still, no one's answered my question of why people aren't just buying this stuff over the internet. We're talking about two EU countries, right? Where there's no trade restrictions between countries any more? What's the problem?
Ok, yes, those things can affect the equation greatly, but (I don't know if you're the same AC as the one above) the person above was complaining about sellers charging "too much" for items on one side of the border. Well, the first three things you listed are all things that are solely under the control of the government, so if you don't like the prices you're being charged, and you think government policies are the cause, then you need to take it up with your government, not the sellers. With the last two things, I don't see how they'd have anything to do with a big difference in prices between tablet computers in two neighboring countries. They definitely artificially limit supply in certain situations, but not this one, or any one where we're comparing the prices of consumer goods in different countries.
Again, it's simple supply and demand. Sellers will always try to price things as high as they can, to maximize profit. Why wouldn't you? It'd be stupid not to. Sellers are under no obligation to lower prices just to be nice (unless you're dealing with an essential good or service with little or no competition, like a utility, in which case the government jumps in and regulates the market, for the good of society as a whole). But they lower prices in response to lower demand. Excessively-high prices cause low demand, so you reduce prices to increase demand, and increase sales volumes. If you lower prices too much, you get excessively low profits (or at an extreme, no profit, and instead a loss). In the middle of that curve there's a local maximum where profit is maximized.
If a seller finds that buyers in one country are apparently gullible fools and are willing to pay excessively-high prices for a product (more so than in another country), why shouldn't they raise prices there? If you don't like it, you're free to not buy the product. You do not need a Nexus 4 to live. You can buy a competing device, or an older device, or just do without. Or you can just go to another place where it's cheaper and get it there (or just order it on the internet from someplace cheaper). As long as the government doesn't put up artificial trade restrictions preventing you from exercising these options, there's no problem. If people continue to be stupid and willingly pay higher prices, that's their problem.
In fact, why aren't more people just buying on the internet? We've had the same problem in the USA: local brick-n-mortar shops charge high prices on consumer electronics, especially in more rural areas. So, people just go to amazon.com or newegg.com and buy it at a much lower prices. The brick-n-mortar shops bitch and complain, but too bad. If I can buy something from Amazon for so much less than locally, that I end up saving a lot of money, even after paying sales tax (Amazon charges it now) and shipping fees, then obviously the local shop is charging too much. In the end, the local shop goes out of business, and I really don't care. Of course, a bunch of people bitch about how this is driving the "wonderful" local mom-and-pop shops out of business, that people should be happy to pay 50-100% more for the same product just to get the "service" that local shops offer (yeah right), it's "unfair", etc. Do people say the same things in your country when people drive over the border (or order on the internet) to avoid paying local prices?
Wow, that's pretty depressing. I thought Denmark was supposed to be a lot better than that. At least you guys have the most bike-friendly city in the world, and a decent healthcare system.
Don't be stupid, yes you can. No one is forcing you to watch TV. I can't even remember the last time I watched broadcast TV; my TV does nothing these days except to serve as a Netflix viewing device.
Apart from direct subsidies there's the whole licensing system that allocates spectrum to those stations, and requires enforcement - can't have unlicensed pirate stations, after all. And as a completely unintended side effect means that stations only operate as long as they get the government's blessing.
Who cares? Yes, 20+ years ago this was a problem. The internet has fixed it: if you want to make your own TV station without the government's blessing, it's easy: just set up your own web site with streaming video. Or upload your videos to YouTube.
You must live in the USA, like me. 10 years ago, conservatives and liberals were definitely two different things. But now with Obama duplicating all of Bush's policies and all the liberals supporting him, "liberal" and "conservative" are basically the same thing.
Now watch a bunch of liberals come out of the woodwork to call me names or act as Obama apologists.
No, supply and demand logic isn't broken at all. If the company found that people on one side of the border are willing to pay more, then that means there's more demand on that side. Simple economics 101 dictates that prices rise with higher demand and a fixed supply. Sounds like everything's working just fine where you are.
If people are that mad about it, what's keeping someone from going to the other side of the border, buying up lots of Nexus 4s, then driving to the other side and reselling them for less than 499EUR?
There's some problems here. Countries only have so much power to set pricing, without turning into authoritarian states. Australia, for instance, has long had problems with stuff costing much more there than in the US and other places. For a long time, they just accepted it because of the usual excuses of it being a smaller market (1/10 the population of the US), and the long distance away. However, now with so many digital goods and cheap shipping, it's become glaringly obvious that many sellers are just greedy and inflating prices because they can, such as with digital downloads costing more in Australia than in the US, even though it's the same product and there's no extra cost to provide a download to someone in another country as in the US. The Australian government called many software makers on the carpet to explain this ridiculous state of affairs. As I recall, the software makers didn't have much to say about it in their defense, didn't change the prices, and nothing was done. The government can bitch and complain, but the Australian government is still a western democratic country (probably a constitutional republic like most other such countries), not an authoritarian regime, so like most other places, unless there's some compelling public interest for the government to enact specific regulations or worse, a regulatory system (like they do with public utilities), sellers can charge whatever they want for goods and services. It's not up to the government to look at every business and every item their selling and determine if it's fairly priced or not.
The EU could do it with airlines because airlines are already a heavily regulated industry (being so safety-critical, after all). Furniture sales is not a regulated industry.
Finally, as I understand it, the whole point of the EU was to basically be a trade confederation, where there was free trade between member states, and a common currency, and a few key things done at the EU level, but where the member countries mostly kept their own sovereignty. If you have the EU government setting up regulation for pricing furniture and other such things, then basically you've given up on the idea of member countries having any sovereignty at all, and have decided to make the EU into a single country, just like the US, only worse (our US federal government does not regulate furniture pricing, and AFAIK there's nothing stopping companies from charging 3x as much in stores in Maine as they do in stores in California).
Of course, if it's that much cheaper to buy furniture or other things in other countries than Greece, what's keeping people from setting up new businesses where they buy the stuff from stores in those other countries, then drive it over to Greece and resell it there at a markup smaller than the difference that the original seller has in place? After all, that's exactly what would happen here in the USA if IKEA tried selling stuff at such a severe markup in one state for some weird reason. Heck, you could make a business just advertising IKEA stuff on the internet (without even having any stock), along with appropriate shipping costs, and then when people buy it, you run out to your local IKEA and buy it, then ship it to them.
Why the fuck do countries have laws that allow them to prosecute people who are did their criminal activity in another jurisdiction?
Because they want to, and because they can. Why wouldn't they want to do so? If you're allowing US residents to download novels from your Russian website, you're causing the US publishers to lose money. Since the US government is a government by the corporations, and for the corporations, obviously they're going to be very interested in shutting you down.
I don't know where you're living, but I'd like to live there if the typical personal income is 90k.
Maybe he lives in Manhattan or Silicon Valley. With typical rents being $3k/month and up, someone making $43k would never be able to afford to live there.
Interesting. This might even work in famously-friendly Canada: I've been to Ontario and Vancouver, and of course people were very friendly there, but not perfectly so; there were some assholes here and there (though one I ran into I'm pretty sure was an American...). However I've also been to Whitehorse (Yukon) and I don't think I met any assholes there at all.
That's not what the parent is asking at all: he's asking for an accounting of which parts of the Windows OS use power, and how much, not just the overall consumption. The implication is that other parts of the Windows OS are wasting power, compared to other OSes (namely Linux). Of course, this is all speculation; it'd be interesting if someone did do some measurements of some Linux systems (desktop and laptop, multiple ones of each, for better statistical data, and also using different Linux distros and DEs (Ubuntu/Unity, Fedora/Gnome3, OpenSUSE/KDE, Mint/MATE, Mint/Cinnamon, Mint/KDE, Mint/XFCE, etc.) running Firefox and Chromium, and compared this to the same systems running Windows (XP and 7 and 8) running IE, Firefox, and Chromium, to see how they all compared.
You may believe this, and it may well be true, but good luck finding any large corporations where it's not standard IT policy for computers to run a virus scanner at all times.
The OP's point is sound: a better comparison would be to run Linux with Chromium or Firefox, versus Windows with IE and a virus scanner and all the other crap that goes with it (in a standard corporate build). Most likely, the Linux system will be more power-efficient overall.
and if you're dumb enough to click on links in unsolicited email you deserve a good infection
This is exactly why you won't find a corporate IT department that forgoes virus scanners on their employees' PCs. They have lots of employees that really are that clueless, and they can't afford a "good infection".
He should have said 80 kilowatt-hours, but his point is still correct: you can get more energy savings by installing one LED bulb per every five employees or so.
You're an idiot. Countless small businesses have low-traffic sites, and don't need anything more, since they're small businesses. It's not vanity for the local pizza shop to have its own website that you can order a pizza on, and something like that has no need for a dedicated server when they might get a handful of hits per hour at best.
BMI is close enough for most of the population. Only athletes need to worry about the fat/muscle problem.
However, even back in the 90s, I remember getting body fat percentage tests done which used some handheld electronic tool that (I was told) used IR light to measure the fat, upon being applied to the arm at the bicep. It reported an absolute number. Of course, I have no idea how accurate this really was, but it was used on me in health fairs in college.
Python and PHP are the same shit as Ruby, different syntax.
We're actually not talking about Ruby proper here, but Ruby on Rails.
Anyway, Python and PHP both have far more support and popularity than Ruby. Getting a web host account that has PHP support is trivial (in fact, it'd be a real feat to get an account that doesn't support PHP these days), and Python is almost as trivial. Ruby, however, isn't that common.
I don't know about this; I thought Italians were supposed to be pretty friendly people, and that's not that far from the equator (relative to the rest of Europe).
Actually, I've met far more black people (men actually, no women at all) in tech than hispanics, and most of my career was in Arizona which is chock full of them. And of course plenty of women too, though to be fair many of these women were Asian or Indian.
Slashdot Mirror
It's actually not a bad thing if you like the Star Trek way of working not for money, but to better Humanity.
Star Trek was a great show, but it had some real problems with the whole idea of money. In some episodes, main characters would laugh at the idea of money itself, as if no one had any money, and then in other episodes they'd talk about how many "credits" something cost. It was one of many huge inconsistencies in the show and the whole Star Trek universe. Go to YouTube and look for "star trek mistakes"; there's a whole series of videos showing giant consistency errors in the series.
Another one is the issue of genetic engineering. In DS9, the fact that Julian Bashir was genetically engineered becomes a huge plot point, because it's apparently highly illegal and has been for a long time (presumably since the days of Khan). But then there's a 2nd-season TNG episode where the ship visits a colony where they're genetically engineering kids with super immune systems which cause a mysterious contagious illness.
They couldn't even get straight whether Troi had ever kissed Riker with a beard or not: there's a bunch of episodes where she and Riker make out (and Riker has his beard), and then in the Generations movie he kisses her and she's disgusted by his beard and acts like he's never kissed her since he grew it.
Back to communism and money: the main problem here is how do you decide who does what job, and how do you get people to actually do jobs? Everyone wants the good jobs, and no one wants the shit jobs. Who actually wants to haul garbage for a living? Or clean toilets? Lots and lots of people would prefer not to work at all if they don't have to. How do you motivate people to do jobs that society needs done, but which everyone would prefer someone else do? If you give everyone the same amount of money so there's no rich or poor, you have to give them their paycheck whether they've earned it or not. If you withhold pay because they don't feel like doing the job they're assigned, then you're creating a wealth disparity, which is against the whole concept. The whole idea breaks down under just a little inspection.
I really don't see how basic economics isn't working here. For music, ebooks, and other digital goods, there's really an infinite supply, since these things can be reproduced at zero cost on demand, so pricing is really set solely by the demand side: if there's high demand (i.e. people are willing to pay more), then prices will go up. If people weren't willing to pay high prices, sales would drop and sellers would lower their prices in response.
It's not too much different for tangible consumer electronics, since those can be manufactured in huge quantities at fairly low cost.
It all comes down to: sellers will charge what buyers are willing to pay. I don't see how this isn't obeying supply-and-demand.
And still, no one's answered my question of why people aren't just buying this stuff over the internet. We're talking about two EU countries, right? Where there's no trade restrictions between countries any more? What's the problem?
Ok, yes, those things can affect the equation greatly, but (I don't know if you're the same AC as the one above) the person above was complaining about sellers charging "too much" for items on one side of the border. Well, the first three things you listed are all things that are solely under the control of the government, so if you don't like the prices you're being charged, and you think government policies are the cause, then you need to take it up with your government, not the sellers. With the last two things, I don't see how they'd have anything to do with a big difference in prices between tablet computers in two neighboring countries. They definitely artificially limit supply in certain situations, but not this one, or any one where we're comparing the prices of consumer goods in different countries.
Again, it's simple supply and demand. Sellers will always try to price things as high as they can, to maximize profit. Why wouldn't you? It'd be stupid not to. Sellers are under no obligation to lower prices just to be nice (unless you're dealing with an essential good or service with little or no competition, like a utility, in which case the government jumps in and regulates the market, for the good of society as a whole). But they lower prices in response to lower demand. Excessively-high prices cause low demand, so you reduce prices to increase demand, and increase sales volumes. If you lower prices too much, you get excessively low profits (or at an extreme, no profit, and instead a loss). In the middle of that curve there's a local maximum where profit is maximized.
If a seller finds that buyers in one country are apparently gullible fools and are willing to pay excessively-high prices for a product (more so than in another country), why shouldn't they raise prices there? If you don't like it, you're free to not buy the product. You do not need a Nexus 4 to live. You can buy a competing device, or an older device, or just do without. Or you can just go to another place where it's cheaper and get it there (or just order it on the internet from someplace cheaper). As long as the government doesn't put up artificial trade restrictions preventing you from exercising these options, there's no problem. If people continue to be stupid and willingly pay higher prices, that's their problem.
In fact, why aren't more people just buying on the internet? We've had the same problem in the USA: local brick-n-mortar shops charge high prices on consumer electronics, especially in more rural areas. So, people just go to amazon.com or newegg.com and buy it at a much lower prices. The brick-n-mortar shops bitch and complain, but too bad. If I can buy something from Amazon for so much less than locally, that I end up saving a lot of money, even after paying sales tax (Amazon charges it now) and shipping fees, then obviously the local shop is charging too much. In the end, the local shop goes out of business, and I really don't care. Of course, a bunch of people bitch about how this is driving the "wonderful" local mom-and-pop shops out of business, that people should be happy to pay 50-100% more for the same product just to get the "service" that local shops offer (yeah right), it's "unfair", etc. Do people say the same things in your country when people drive over the border (or order on the internet) to avoid paying local prices?
Yep, you got it exactly right.
Wow, that's pretty depressing. I thought Denmark was supposed to be a lot better than that. At least you guys have the most bike-friendly city in the world, and a decent healthcare system.
No, it's not the lizard people, it's the crab people. Crab people, crab people, crab people...
No, you can't.
Don't be stupid, yes you can. No one is forcing you to watch TV. I can't even remember the last time I watched broadcast TV; my TV does nothing these days except to serve as a Netflix viewing device.
Apart from direct subsidies there's the whole licensing system that allocates spectrum to those stations, and requires enforcement - can't have unlicensed pirate stations, after all. And as a completely unintended side effect means that stations only operate as long as they get the government's blessing.
Who cares? Yes, 20+ years ago this was a problem. The internet has fixed it: if you want to make your own TV station without the government's blessing, it's easy: just set up your own web site with streaming video. Or upload your videos to YouTube.
You must live in the USA, like me. 10 years ago, conservatives and liberals were definitely two different things. But now with Obama duplicating all of Bush's policies and all the liberals supporting him, "liberal" and "conservative" are basically the same thing.
Now watch a bunch of liberals come out of the woodwork to call me names or act as Obama apologists.
No, supply and demand logic isn't broken at all. If the company found that people on one side of the border are willing to pay more, then that means there's more demand on that side. Simple economics 101 dictates that prices rise with higher demand and a fixed supply. Sounds like everything's working just fine where you are.
If people are that mad about it, what's keeping someone from going to the other side of the border, buying up lots of Nexus 4s, then driving to the other side and reselling them for less than 499EUR?
There's some problems here. Countries only have so much power to set pricing, without turning into authoritarian states. Australia, for instance, has long had problems with stuff costing much more there than in the US and other places. For a long time, they just accepted it because of the usual excuses of it being a smaller market (1/10 the population of the US), and the long distance away. However, now with so many digital goods and cheap shipping, it's become glaringly obvious that many sellers are just greedy and inflating prices because they can, such as with digital downloads costing more in Australia than in the US, even though it's the same product and there's no extra cost to provide a download to someone in another country as in the US. The Australian government called many software makers on the carpet to explain this ridiculous state of affairs. As I recall, the software makers didn't have much to say about it in their defense, didn't change the prices, and nothing was done. The government can bitch and complain, but the Australian government is still a western democratic country (probably a constitutional republic like most other such countries), not an authoritarian regime, so like most other places, unless there's some compelling public interest for the government to enact specific regulations or worse, a regulatory system (like they do with public utilities), sellers can charge whatever they want for goods and services. It's not up to the government to look at every business and every item their selling and determine if it's fairly priced or not.
The EU could do it with airlines because airlines are already a heavily regulated industry (being so safety-critical, after all). Furniture sales is not a regulated industry.
Finally, as I understand it, the whole point of the EU was to basically be a trade confederation, where there was free trade between member states, and a common currency, and a few key things done at the EU level, but where the member countries mostly kept their own sovereignty. If you have the EU government setting up regulation for pricing furniture and other such things, then basically you've given up on the idea of member countries having any sovereignty at all, and have decided to make the EU into a single country, just like the US, only worse (our US federal government does not regulate furniture pricing, and AFAIK there's nothing stopping companies from charging 3x as much in stores in Maine as they do in stores in California).
Of course, if it's that much cheaper to buy furniture or other things in other countries than Greece, what's keeping people from setting up new businesses where they buy the stuff from stores in those other countries, then drive it over to Greece and resell it there at a markup smaller than the difference that the original seller has in place? After all, that's exactly what would happen here in the USA if IKEA tried selling stuff at such a severe markup in one state for some weird reason. Heck, you could make a business just advertising IKEA stuff on the internet (without even having any stock), along with appropriate shipping costs, and then when people buy it, you run out to your local IKEA and buy it, then ship it to them.
Why the fuck do countries have laws that allow them to prosecute people who are did their criminal activity in another jurisdiction?
Because they want to, and because they can. Why wouldn't they want to do so? If you're allowing US residents to download novels from your Russian website, you're causing the US publishers to lose money. Since the US government is a government by the corporations, and for the corporations, obviously they're going to be very interested in shutting you down.
I don't know where you're living, but I'd like to live there if the typical personal income is 90k.
Maybe he lives in Manhattan or Silicon Valley. With typical rents being $3k/month and up, someone making $43k would never be able to afford to live there.
Interesting. This might even work in famously-friendly Canada: I've been to Ontario and Vancouver, and of course people were very friendly there, but not perfectly so; there were some assholes here and there (though one I ran into I'm pretty sure was an American...). However I've also been to Whitehorse (Yukon) and I don't think I met any assholes there at all.
That's not what the parent is asking at all: he's asking for an accounting of which parts of the Windows OS use power, and how much, not just the overall consumption. The implication is that other parts of the Windows OS are wasting power, compared to other OSes (namely Linux). Of course, this is all speculation; it'd be interesting if someone did do some measurements of some Linux systems (desktop and laptop, multiple ones of each, for better statistical data, and also using different Linux distros and DEs (Ubuntu/Unity, Fedora/Gnome3, OpenSUSE/KDE, Mint/MATE, Mint/Cinnamon, Mint/KDE, Mint/XFCE, etc.) running Firefox and Chromium, and compared this to the same systems running Windows (XP and 7 and 8) running IE, Firefox, and Chromium, to see how they all compared.
You may believe this, and it may well be true, but good luck finding any large corporations where it's not standard IT policy for computers to run a virus scanner at all times.
The OP's point is sound: a better comparison would be to run Linux with Chromium or Firefox, versus Windows with IE and a virus scanner and all the other crap that goes with it (in a standard corporate build). Most likely, the Linux system will be more power-efficient overall.
and if you're dumb enough to click on links in unsolicited email you deserve a good infection
This is exactly why you won't find a corporate IT department that forgoes virus scanners on their employees' PCs. They have lots of employees that really are that clueless, and they can't afford a "good infection".
How does it feel to be a pedantic asshole, AC?
He should have said 80 kilowatt-hours, but his point is still correct: you can get more energy savings by installing one LED bulb per every five employees or so.
the rail travel is comparable to sea and more fuel efficient.
Wrong. Container transport by ship is about 2.5 times as efficient as rail, according to these people in the shipping industry:
http://www.worldshipping.org/about-the-industry/liner-ships/container-ship-design
You're an idiot. Countless small businesses have low-traffic sites, and don't need anything more, since they're small businesses. It's not vanity for the local pizza shop to have its own website that you can order a pizza on, and something like that has no need for a dedicated server when they might get a handful of hits per hour at best.
They are? Where? And for less than $4/month please.
BMI is close enough for most of the population. Only athletes need to worry about the fat/muscle problem.
However, even back in the 90s, I remember getting body fat percentage tests done which used some handheld electronic tool that (I was told) used IR light to measure the fat, upon being applied to the arm at the bicep. It reported an absolute number. Of course, I have no idea how accurate this really was, but it was used on me in health fairs in college.
What's wrong with a shared hosting account for a low-traffic site?
Hey, I didn't say it was a big favorite of mine, just that it's widely used and accepted.
Python and PHP are the same shit as Ruby, different syntax.
We're actually not talking about Ruby proper here, but Ruby on Rails.
Anyway, Python and PHP both have far more support and popularity than Ruby. Getting a web host account that has PHP support is trivial (in fact, it'd be a real feat to get an account that doesn't support PHP these days), and Python is almost as trivial. Ruby, however, isn't that common.
I don't know about this; I thought Italians were supposed to be pretty friendly people, and that's not that far from the equator (relative to the rest of Europe).
Actually, I've met far more black people (men actually, no women at all) in tech than hispanics, and most of my career was in Arizona which is chock full of them. And of course plenty of women too, though to be fair many of these women were Asian or Indian.