For an insurance thing like this to work, you would need massively more draconian patent laws than are in place today. If a fundamental discovery made with your money pays off in 50 years time, you should be able to milk it at that time, otherwise it's not worth it. To give an example, if it was privately discovered that silicon is a semi-conductor, the private 'insurance' firm should be able to bank in on computing technology for quite a while. With patent law as it is (20 years), it's not worth it (if it would, where are these firms?). So, private fundamental research can only be made profitable by creating draconian IP laws. These will stiffle innovation, and before you know it, technology will grind to a halt, and the barbarians have taken over your country (if they not already have).
I don't think a deeply religious president would be a problem per se, it is a deeply creationist president that would be the problem. As many religious people show day after day is that a particular spiritual view of the world does not preclude rational skills. There are even many Christians out there -- to take a particular unsophisticated form of spirituality -- that don't take the bible literally, and feel comfortable with advances in Biology. Such people don't pose a threat.
However, people that will argue the side of creationism (or any other literalist attitude to ancient texts) are willfully ignoring rationalism in favour of superstition, and should not qualify for the job.
Ask any pair of laymen to define any scientific theory, including Newtonian mechanics, and you will find holes you can drive a bus through. As for evolution, try these ones for size:
"In fact, evolution can be precisely defined as any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next."
- Helena Curtis and N. Sue Barnes, Biology, 5th ed. 1989 Worth Publishers, p.974
or
Evolution is a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations.
Before you start quibbling, get some context. I took these defs from there.
Personally, I've never really understood the concept of morality apart from some belief in divine judgment.
The humanist tradition shares it's ground rule with most religions. The golden rule: do not do upon others which you do not want to be done to you. As a moral principle, this is enough. No ten commandments, no holy texts, just the golden rule as the basis for morality and for making society work.
Yes, this is kind of sad. I can't remember an election in Europe where religion of the candidates (or the absence thereof) was ever an issue. I think that it's rooted in the mistaken belief in the US that religion is a necessary basis for morality. If atheist, then immoral. That kind of thinking. Maybe this is due to lack of attention to the humanist tradition.
Okay wiseguy, let's say I'm a tenured climatologist. I get 83,000 bucks a year. I'm tenured, I cannot be fired. If I start to publish papers about global warming, I get 83,000 bucks a year. If I start to publish papers disproving global warming, I get 83,000 bucks a year + whatever Exxon/Mobile is willing to pay me for that. On which side would you expect rigged result?
The raw data is there for anyone who asks, the methods are there for anyone who can read, the self-proclaimed sceptics are there, ignoring everything.
The trouble with the entire discussion is that global warming has been predicted, has been measured, and the US in particular is loath to act upon it. The scientists themselves get emotional about this because they are asked to prove the issue, while they know that they can only prove it after several tipping points have passed and it is too late to do anything about it. Or maybe there are no tipping points, and we can all live in oblivious peace for ever hereafter. The latter is still possible, though with every passing year less likely. The court jesters are however happy to bet their children's future on ignoring the issue.
Hmm, have you read the stuff at all? There was a bug, it has been corrected, the flaws are hardly noticeable and the trends are still there. Let me summarize Hansen's statements for you. (a) The bug affected US temperature only, by 0.15 degrees. (b) Global temperature averages are unaffected (as the US is not the globe, how weird that may seem. (c) 1934 was already the hottest year in the US (by 0.01 degrees), now it is the hottest by 0.14 degrees. (d) the graphs are unaffected. (e) you're the type of moron that attempts to make a big stink out of a small correction.
Of course, Hansen is after the big money. Being working for NASA and all, he would be rich beyond imagination as long as he can keep this Fahrenhype up.
Depends on what your marketing strategy is. If your strategy is to service the office needs of the consumer business, yes, you would need Dell, and even if you succeed, Microsoft will eat you alive. Thing is: people will install what they use at work. If work uses MS Office, it's MS they will install, on top of your Dell pre-install.
However, if your marketing strategy is to convert whole businesses to your software, Dell is immaterial, and your marketing dollars are better spent on marketing and sales. This will have a higher chance of success. Consumer demands for office productivity is minimal. Office demand for office is, eh, there.
Sorry about invoking the anthropic principle, a brief search reveals that people have widely divergent interpretations of that one. What I meant in this context is that as far as we know life on Earth is just a single configuration of all possible configurations of life. The theory is that you need non-perfect self-replicators to start things off. Nothing about exact chemistry involved, life is an information theoretic notion. At least in theory.
The fact that we are the ones witnessing life (our own) often leads to the mistaken assumption that only chemical configurations mimicking ours are capable of sustaining life. Calculating probabilities of that particular chemical configuration in this location reaching the threshold of life is uninformative as there might be billions of different configurations and billions upon billions of locations that have what it takes to sustain life. Unless we have a good theory of all these billions of configurations and billions of locations, there is no point in calculating the point probability. The point probabilities can be infinitesimally small, but can still be numerous enough -- by integrating over all possible configurations and locations -- to be almost certain that life has occurred somewhere. That it then occurred here would be certain (that's the version of the anthropic principle I was alluding to).
Calculating point probabilities this way is as if someone is calculating the probability of winning the pan-galactic super sweepstake. As individual odds are 10^30 to one against, the researcher concludes that it is impossible that the sweepstake will ever have a winner. Unfortunately for the researcher, the number of contestants is also exactly 10^30, and there is certainly a winner (with 10^30 to 1 odds against his win).
Given that windows was never really entrenched in the server room, yes, it was the desktop I was talking about. Linux greatest accomplishment is that it effectively sabotaged Microsoft's attack on the server room exactly on time. Without Linux, the situation would have been far, far worse.
And yes, I definitely concede that it is easier to compete with windows than a decade ago, it is just that it doesn't matter; unless there is unique additional value in the proposition, windows will not be beat. Doing some things slightly better (price, stability) and some slightly worse (interoperability with windows, being able to run windows applications), is not going to move things much. Same goes for office.
What is missing? A reason to switch away from MS Office! Price is not it, 400 bucks per seat is nothing compared with the cost of the employees themselves. Where's the killer feature?
Once, you could have said the same about operating systems...
Everything you say after that is true, yet the argument stands almost unaltered:
"The market isn't closed, but really, there is not a single operating system that seriously competes with MS Windows."
All your argument about BSD shows that you don't need to bleed money anymore in order to lose.
Having the app run from the company server only solves the upgrade (deployment) problem. It merely helps IT, and does not offer anything new to the user or to the business types that run the corporation. So it will fail if that's all.
What's needed is a new set of features that help productivity enormously, and which is something MS cannot easily copy. One such feature set could be fully integrated 'knowledge management', i.e., all relevant documents of the business at the fingertips of the user (e.g., it looks like you're making a product comparison presentation, here are 10 relevant slides from your collegues).
This is a massive open problem, and if tackled correctly, could bring a real boost. Google might be able to pull this off with very smart search, but it's going to be tough (and Microsoft is watching).
You might be right that all improvements are superficial, cosmetic and only marginally improving. However, point to a single competitor that has developed improvements that are significantly greater. If not, they're doomed to failure, as MS Office is entrenched and cheap enough to stay there. I personally think that the only way to best MS Office is to enable office productivity in a radically different and better way. Or hope that MS will stop development on MS Office. Both I deem unlikely.
I seriously doubt that price is the critical factor for office productivity suites. It might help in getting some initial market share, but a 150 buck difference in price will not convince a company to change. That's at most the cost of a couple hours of work per user. Even paying this annually is a negligible cost. You would need distinctive features for that. Word's distinctive feature over WP was that it ran under windows, while WP was still a DOS app. WP never caught up and lost. Lotus 123 was a piece of crap and Excel was really much better. Next to that, the integration between Excel, Word and Powerpoint was very distinctive from what was offered in the marketplace at that time. People liked that.
If the price theory was correct, Open Office would have taken over from MS Office quite a while ago. It can't get much cheaper than that. The problem is however that there's no distinctive feature for Open Office, apart from the feature of 'openness', which has dubious value for corporations. Same goes for Google and Adobe's effort. As far as I can see, from the perspective of office suites, being able to run it in a web-browser doesn't really let the user's/corporation's heartbeat run faster, unless the entire world moves away from desktop applications. For an office suite to displace MS, it would need distinctive features, and a good price level. The latter is easy, the former is not. Cross-platformness could be such a feature, but only if the customer would move away from Windows first. Collaboration could be such a feature, but only if people value that enough, the secrecy issues are resolved, and MS drops the ball on that. Openness of standards could be such a feature, but only if governments start mandating that (and Microsoft drops the ball on that one as well).
The only way to break MS Office would be to solve the problem of office productivity disruptively differently, and better. Having a word processor on the web isn't that.
Oh, do please give references! On second thought: unless they contain a comprehensive theory of all possible configurations of matter that can self-replicate, and provide the integral over all that to estimate the probability of life, don't bother. Anthropic principle and all that.
Indeed, the voltage measurement is mainly psychological. Given the lack of eduction in physics of most people and their inability to juggle two numbers, voltage and amperes, at the same time, the clever engineers came up with a good scheme: as voltage is needed to determine what device can be powered by what source, that is the leading number. Now all you have to do is order danger by voltage: 1.5 volts to 9 volts for batteries, 12 volts for a car battery (already dangerous), and 110-240 volts for real danger, the psychological effect is reached. People associate the single number (voltage) with the danger associated with the device. This must have saved countless lives.
Cue the electric bug swatter. When I told my significant other that it operated by transforming that innocent 1.5 volts battery to a staggering 1500 volts, she immediately though the thing would be lethal for more than bugs. I pointed at the power source and asked if she thought that this lovely little battery could kill. She looked at me, looked at the battery, thought a bit and rationally conceded the point. She however still makes damn sure she never touches the high voltage area.
I'll bite: transporters that are not copiers. Physically and logically unsound. What seems to happen is that a person is dissassembled, the parts are transmitted and are being put together again. As the parts are just atoms, you can make duplicates of everything and thereby clone a person. This never happens in the Star Trek Universe, and I think I've seen an episode with some bullshit story why this cannot be done.
I think I've even seen episodes where whole persons were, due to a malfunction, stored in a buffer for a while, so transporting seems to be information based. Transporters that cannot copy are physically unsound as it posits some mysterious and unphysical 'selfness' to individual atoms.
What really annoys me in Star Trek is the music that is played almost constantly. Unlike phasers and explosions, music, will not, and I repeat, will not propagate through space. It might be that the leading character in the scene has an invisible ipod that is playing the tune, but still, that doesn't make sense: how come that the ipod plays tense music when situations are tense, and victorious music when the job is done. That is one hell of an Ipod! But such an ipod would be very small and low powered (it's invisible), so it wouldn't produce sufficient radio waves to be picked up from outside the ship. And if Star Trek Technology is advanced enough to create such an ipod with anticipation capabilities, how come the characters almost invariably ignore these clear signals? It just doesn't add up.
It's really these kinds of small things that lead to a complete wrong picture of the underlying physics of the real universe. Here we seldomly hear music that anticipates the action, and small children will be sorely surprised if something unusual happens to them without the music warning them.
Considering the amount of money at risk on both sides, anyone who claims a bona-fide "consensus" this early on is lying IMHO.
Care to explain where the money is on the 'consensus-declared Truth' side of things? And don't come with funding, real funding comes from the 'nothing-has-been-proven' side. So please tell me: where is the money? I could use some.
If you consider the amount of planets in the universe, the size of these planets, the stability of these planets, and the full age of the universe in which life could have started on any planet that has existed, together with the evidence that life occurs on a planet, it is far more likely that it actually started on a planet. That particular planet happened to be Earth.
In short, any theory that posits a complicated pathway for life to get on Earth, has additional odds against it. You need a very strong theory about how life can form only on a comet and not on a planet to make these odds go away.
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For an insurance thing like this to work, you would need massively more draconian patent laws than are in place today. If a fundamental discovery made with your money pays off in 50 years time, you should be able to milk it at that time, otherwise it's not worth it. To give an example, if it was privately discovered that silicon is a semi-conductor, the private 'insurance' firm should be able to bank in on computing technology for quite a while. With patent law as it is (20 years), it's not worth it (if it would, where are these firms?). So, private fundamental research can only be made profitable by creating draconian IP laws. These will stiffle innovation, and before you know it, technology will grind to a halt, and the barbarians have taken over your country (if they not already have).
However, people that will argue the side of creationism (or any other literalist attitude to ancient texts) are willfully ignoring rationalism in favour of superstition, and should not qualify for the job.
"In fact, evolution can be precisely defined as any change in the frequency of alleles within a gene pool from one generation to the next."
- Helena Curtis and N. Sue Barnes, Biology, 5th ed. 1989 Worth Publishers, p.974
or
Evolution is a process that results in heritable changes in a population spread over many generations.
Before you start quibbling, get some context. I took these defs from there.
The humanist tradition shares it's ground rule with most religions. The golden rule: do not do upon others which you do not want to be done to you. As a moral principle, this is enough. No ten commandments, no holy texts, just the golden rule as the basis for morality and for making society work.
Yes, this is kind of sad. I can't remember an election in Europe where religion of the candidates (or the absence thereof) was ever an issue. I think that it's rooted in the mistaken belief in the US that religion is a necessary basis for morality. If atheist, then immoral. That kind of thinking. Maybe this is due to lack of attention to the humanist tradition.
Okay wiseguy, let's say I'm a tenured climatologist. I get 83,000 bucks a year. I'm tenured, I cannot be fired. If I start to publish papers about global warming, I get 83,000 bucks a year. If I start to publish papers disproving global warming, I get 83,000 bucks a year + whatever Exxon/Mobile is willing to pay me for that. On which side would you expect rigged result?
I'll chime in with the grandparent. Where is your Mars data to show that Earth and Mars temperature are correlated?
The trouble with the entire discussion is that global warming has been predicted, has been measured, and the US in particular is loath to act upon it. The scientists themselves get emotional about this because they are asked to prove the issue, while they know that they can only prove it after several tipping points have passed and it is too late to do anything about it. Or maybe there are no tipping points, and we can all live in oblivious peace for ever hereafter. The latter is still possible, though with every passing year less likely. The court jesters are however happy to bet their children's future on ignoring the issue.
Hmm, have you read the stuff at all? There was a bug, it has been corrected, the flaws are hardly noticeable and the trends are still there. Let me summarize Hansen's statements for you. (a) The bug affected US temperature only, by 0.15 degrees. (b) Global temperature averages are unaffected (as the US is not the globe, how weird that may seem. (c) 1934 was already the hottest year in the US (by 0.01 degrees), now it is the hottest by 0.14 degrees. (d) the graphs are unaffected. (e) you're the type of moron that attempts to make a big stink out of a small correction.
Yes, these are sarcasm tags /. stripped.
However, if your marketing strategy is to convert whole businesses to your software, Dell is immaterial, and your marketing dollars are better spent on marketing and sales. This will have a higher chance of success. Consumer demands for office productivity is minimal. Office demand for office is, eh, there.
Yes, ODF might be a killing feature. We will however need government (or actually the public) to step in and force the issue.
The fact that we are the ones witnessing life (our own) often leads to the mistaken assumption that only chemical configurations mimicking ours are capable of sustaining life. Calculating probabilities of that particular chemical configuration in this location reaching the threshold of life is uninformative as there might be billions of different configurations and billions upon billions of locations that have what it takes to sustain life. Unless we have a good theory of all these billions of configurations and billions of locations, there is no point in calculating the point probability. The point probabilities can be infinitesimally small, but can still be numerous enough -- by integrating over all possible configurations and locations -- to be almost certain that life has occurred somewhere. That it then occurred here would be certain (that's the version of the anthropic principle I was alluding to).
Calculating point probabilities this way is as if someone is calculating the probability of winning the pan-galactic super sweepstake. As individual odds are 10^30 to one against, the researcher concludes that it is impossible that the sweepstake will ever have a winner. Unfortunately for the researcher, the number of contestants is also exactly 10^30, and there is certainly a winner (with 10^30 to 1 odds against his win).
And yes, I definitely concede that it is easier to compete with windows than a decade ago, it is just that it doesn't matter; unless there is unique additional value in the proposition, windows will not be beat. Doing some things slightly better (price, stability) and some slightly worse (interoperability with windows, being able to run windows applications), is not going to move things much. Same goes for office.
All your argument about BSD shows that you don't need to bleed money anymore in order to lose.
What's needed is a new set of features that help productivity enormously, and which is something MS cannot easily copy. One such feature set could be fully integrated 'knowledge management', i.e., all relevant documents of the business at the fingertips of the user (e.g., it looks like you're making a product comparison presentation, here are 10 relevant slides from your collegues).
This is a massive open problem, and if tackled correctly, could bring a real boost. Google might be able to pull this off with very smart search, but it's going to be tough (and Microsoft is watching).
You might be right that all improvements are superficial, cosmetic and only marginally improving. However, point to a single competitor that has developed improvements that are significantly greater. If not, they're doomed to failure, as MS Office is entrenched and cheap enough to stay there. I personally think that the only way to best MS Office is to enable office productivity in a radically different and better way. Or hope that MS will stop development on MS Office. Both I deem unlikely.
If the price theory was correct, Open Office would have taken over from MS Office quite a while ago. It can't get much cheaper than that. The problem is however that there's no distinctive feature for Open Office, apart from the feature of 'openness', which has dubious value for corporations. Same goes for Google and Adobe's effort. As far as I can see, from the perspective of office suites, being able to run it in a web-browser doesn't really let the user's/corporation's heartbeat run faster, unless the entire world moves away from desktop applications. For an office suite to displace MS, it would need distinctive features, and a good price level. The latter is easy, the former is not. Cross-platformness could be such a feature, but only if the customer would move away from Windows first. Collaboration could be such a feature, but only if people value that enough, the secrecy issues are resolved, and MS drops the ball on that. Openness of standards could be such a feature, but only if governments start mandating that (and Microsoft drops the ball on that one as well).
The only way to break MS Office would be to solve the problem of office productivity disruptively differently, and better. Having a word processor on the web isn't that.
Oh, do please give references! On second thought: unless they contain a comprehensive theory of all possible configurations of matter that can self-replicate, and provide the integral over all that to estimate the probability of life, don't bother. Anthropic principle and all that.
Cue the electric bug swatter. When I told my significant other that it operated by transforming that innocent 1.5 volts battery to a staggering 1500 volts, she immediately though the thing would be lethal for more than bugs. I pointed at the power source and asked if she thought that this lovely little battery could kill. She looked at me, looked at the battery, thought a bit and rationally conceded the point. She however still makes damn sure she never touches the high voltage area.
I'll bite: transporters that are not copiers. Physically and logically unsound. What seems to happen is that a person is dissassembled, the parts are transmitted and are being put together again. As the parts are just atoms, you can make duplicates of everything and thereby clone a person. This never happens in the Star Trek Universe, and I think I've seen an episode with some bullshit story why this cannot be done. I think I've even seen episodes where whole persons were, due to a malfunction, stored in a buffer for a while, so transporting seems to be information based. Transporters that cannot copy are physically unsound as it posits some mysterious and unphysical 'selfness' to individual atoms.
It's really these kinds of small things that lead to a complete wrong picture of the underlying physics of the real universe. Here we seldomly hear music that anticipates the action, and small children will be sorely surprised if something unusual happens to them without the music warning them.
In short, any theory that posits a complicated pathway for life to get on Earth, has additional odds against it. You need a very strong theory about how life can form only on a comet and not on a planet to make these odds go away.