What we have here is a typical case of the book publishers being slow to innovate and therefore looking to public opinion/government intervention to "fix" the problem for them. What Amazon has done is found the most efficient use at this time of the limited resources in question. It's just a matter of time before competition in the free market brings more innovations, which will make even greater use of our limited resources. But alas, to the general public and politicians, resources are not limited and prices are arbitrary and set only by how greedy or generous a person/business is.
So long as no legislation is passed that incentivizes or limits the competition in the ebook/book market, this will be a good thing in the long run. But alas, the interventionists will surely step in.
Thank you. I was about to say the exact same. Damn, it's such a ridiculous statement: that no one knows the real price. Good grief, demand is *exactly* what determines price. So much stupid, so little time to fix it.
The Civil War was not about the freedom of slaves. The rest of the world was already moving to abolish slavery; I see no reason why we would not have followed suit in the relatively near future. The Civil War was about states' rights: the Southern states seceded from the Union and the Union didn't like that. By stating that seceding is not allowed (and winning the war), the Federal government secured more power for itself than was intended by the Constitution (arguably). Of course, the Constitution does not talk about secession and it has been ruled unconstitutional (by the Feds, of course).. speaking of which, have you ever noticed the trend of the Feds always siding with themselves in such landmark decisions? Another example of this off the top of my head is that of state nullification: it was the belief of many of the founding fathers (Thomas Jefferson, notably) that the states held the final say in what is constitutional or not. Go figure, the case went to the Supreme Court who concluded that the Supreme Court gets to decide that. Shocking.
Anyways, all that to say, please realize that the Civil War was not about freeing the slaves. Also, no it does not make sense to allow the government any special privileges (or to surrender any rights) during time of war. Many times, the government was good about relinquishing such authority once the war ended; unfortunately, they have also failed to relinquish such powers at other times or been very slow to do so. (Not to mention we've been in a perpetual state of war for a very long time now.) But we don't need history to tell us such things are wrong. Freedom should never be given up; if you don't believe that, go live elsewhere, thank you. Per Benjamin Franklin: "He who gives up freedom for safety deserves neither."
Unfortunately, "most people: don't understand what makes an economy grow: producing more than you consume (it's obviously a bit more complicated than that, but we're told "spending" stimulates the economy). In addition "most people" think that one can just regulate away these problems when historically, we all know what sorts of incentives Obamacare provides: Hire contractors or limit amount of hours worked per week per employ to sub 30. There are probably other work arounds, but I'm not that familiar with the details of Obamacare.
Except that monopolies generally only exist due to government intervention, generally by lobbying for regulations that keep new comers out or via supposed "natural monopolies." In the case of "natural monopolies," the government grants monopolies to "utility" companies to reduce duplication of the utility infrastructure, which leads to the same thing that any government-granted monopoly leads to: lack of innovation and thus higher inefficiencies and prices (if not at first, then gradually over time).
It is exceedingly rare for a company to monopolize a market without government intervention. In fact, the barriers that get erected IS the government intervention.
And yes, you can have perpetual competition without eventual victors. We like to talk a lot about economies of scale, but people seem to forget about diseconomies of scale: which brings the large corporations back down to size, more often than not. Besides, all it really takes to bring down a large corporation is a team of stupid executives, which is pretty easy to come by these days. Perpetual competition is what forces innovation which in turn utilizes the nation's scarce resources more efficiently.
Follow up:
Being poor does suck. What's worse than just being poor is that many things are more expensive to the poor due to basic economic principles: poor neighborhoods have higher crime, increasing cost of doing business in poor neighborhoods, increasing prices for said business, etc. On the other hand, coming from a middle income family most certainly doesn't not mean that you automatically know how to handle money. Most of my friends growing up did not handle money well and they came from similar upbringings as my own. On the other hand, my parents are awful with money (though not as awful as using check cashing stores), yet I do far better with it.
What you say implies that one has no choice in their decisions. It's far from possible to be brought up in poverty and work/reason one's way out of it. Suggesting anything otherwise is downright insulting to the poor.
While you *can* be productive on an iPad, I think the point is that the iPad really doesn't encourage that and its productivity uses are severely limited when compared to a PC. No one's going to be encouraged to tinker, program, or start to learn professional software (Photoshop?)--all of which have very real positive impacts not only on the skillset of the child, but our economy as a whole. But then, we should not be surprised by all of this; Apple is just doing what makes sense to them. The real problem is that our system allows for such stupidity to exist in the first place.
The beta Chromebooks that Google sent out (the CR-48's) sported between 8 and 10 hours of battery life. And they were/are way too slow to play games on. Still plenty to run a command line distro on though! That'd probably be better for the kids.:P
If you're going to create a VM to surf the web on, would you not be vastly better off running one of the many Linux distro's than Windows XP? I mean, even if you're a "MS > Linux" person, you've gotta dig *very* deep to come up with a reason why Windows XP (12 years old) is better than the latest Linux Mint when all you want to do is surf the web.:P
Amazing I always forget about @ in PHP. Still, it's not nearly as good a solution as if exceptions were used universally. It's just one more thing you have to "just know" about a very large number of things to be proficient with PHP (does it use exceptions or not?) Not to mention, it makes it makes it that much more cumbersome when you have to catch that yourself and then throw an exception so that it can travel up the chain.
Why is this down voted? These are all valid points. Per usual "Ask Slashdot", there's not enough information given to give informed advice or suggestions.
I don't want to disable error reporting. I want to respond to errors and not get stuck writing a bunch of garbage if statements just to see if every condition I can think of is covered before accessing a file or an item in an array. It's not that I "don't care about my variables/arrays", it's that I would appreciate them behing handled properly.
In Python, I can do (sort of, can't format correctly here):
try:
f = open('/path/to/file', 'r')
except IOError, e:
# Oh no, I can't do that... handle accordingly
else:
# It worked.
In PHP, to accomplish the same thing, I have to do something more along the lines of:
if (is_file('/path/to/file') && is_readable('/path/to/file') && any_other_conditions_that_must_be_checked) { // It worked
}
else { // It didn't work
}
File access always seems to bring with it unforeseen errors and as such I will not try to cover all of them here, as they are... unforeseen. Oh, also, Python (and I'm sure other languages as well) provides an excellent method of safely handling file access (or other things that *must* clean up, regardless of errors) via the with statement. PHP, of course, can't be bothered to implement things that are actually useful syntactically. All the PHP devs can ever seem to do is create more functions, all of which lack any standardization in naming or parameters, as discussed above. In short, programming anything beyond a very simple site in PHP is something that only two types of people find enjoyable: masochists and those ignorant of what a real language is like.
Yeah no kidding. Another big gripe of mine is how most of the things that you'd like to try/catch doesn't throw an exception, but some sort of "notice" or "warning", which you cannot respond to. I've managed to work around this by implementing custom error handlers, but that brings its own problems when other peoples' code expects the default behavior. What's worse is the stuff that throws warnings/notices are things that are very basic: accessing an array element that doesn't exist, opening a file without proper permissions (or doesn't exist), etc. Argh, the whole language is garbage and the community that generally uses it only adds to the problem. But alas, I am forced to work in it.
Note: To those who haven't yet ventured out beyond PHP for the web, you will likely be pleasantly surprised how much more productive you can be in a sane language.
What's sad is that "conservative" these days means pro military-industrial complex. There is nothing actually conservative about big government spending on military; the Republicans just want us to think otherwise.
By that logic, anyone who's "bound by an oath of silence" should have access to all of our personal data. What if 20% of the populace was bound by such oaths? Just because they can't talk about it doesn't mean they should know your business.
Would you like to donate to the Human Fund? It's a charity I started and my intentions are good (TM). Please send check payable to myself at 55 Lonely Drive, Houston TX. Thanks!
Because sessions don't exist. Granted PayPal/bank accounts probably require authentication every time, but I imagine many people use their favorite web browser's "save password information" feature on those sites. I think the comic makes plenty of sense: for most people, if their user account on their laptop is compromised, bad things can/will happen.
Absolutely there are some who legitimately cannot take care of themselves. However, that does not mean that government needs to intervene. There used to be a time when families took care of the invalids. Churches and other non profits used to (and still sometimes do) provide help. Interestingly, now that there's so much aid for those in trouble, I've seen churches turn people in need away, but I digress.
Since I don't deny that there are those who cannot take care of themselves, I am not delusional but an ass hole. That comment is exactly the same type of drivel that is brought up in gun debates: you don't support gun control, so you must hate children. Give me a break! Just because I have a different belief to adress a problem than you does not make me an ass hole.
But... he's right. Real economy is exactly what he said it is. What he posted was in context and not total vomit, so why do you care? It's sad to think that what he's posted would challenge peoples' assumptions, but I guess we may just be that stupid as a society.
In the U.S., the vast majority of the federal budget goes to fighting unnecessary wars and entitlement programs. "Taxes suck, but roads are cool" simply isn't a good argument. Like anyone else, I think roads are cool too, but you and I both know that very little of our tax money goes to them. If the government would bug out of the business that they don't belong in: health care, policing the world, entitlement programs, the war on drugs, etc etc, we'd all be better off.
Oh, but I can see it coming now: "What about the elderly? What about the people in need?" Nothing beats having to take responsibility for your situation and do something to protect and care for it. Ultimately, the real problem with all of this big government spending is that it assumes (and encourages) that people are powerless and need to be taken care of (as if we're not adults or something?). Personally, I don't buy that: I know that I am taking care of myself and my family and I am nothing special. I believe in my fellow men and women to be able to do the same; assuming we can't is nothing short of insulting.
Slashdot Mirror
What we have here is a typical case of the book publishers being slow to innovate and therefore looking to public opinion/government intervention to "fix" the problem for them. What Amazon has done is found the most efficient use at this time of the limited resources in question. It's just a matter of time before competition in the free market brings more innovations, which will make even greater use of our limited resources. But alas, to the general public and politicians, resources are not limited and prices are arbitrary and set only by how greedy or generous a person/business is.
So long as no legislation is passed that incentivizes or limits the competition in the ebook/book market, this will be a good thing in the long run. But alas, the interventionists will surely step in.
Thank you. I was about to say the exact same. Damn, it's such a ridiculous statement: that no one knows the real price. Good grief, demand is *exactly* what determines price. So much stupid, so little time to fix it.
The Civil War was not about the freedom of slaves. The rest of the world was already moving to abolish slavery; I see no reason why we would not have followed suit in the relatively near future. The Civil War was about states' rights: the Southern states seceded from the Union and the Union didn't like that. By stating that seceding is not allowed (and winning the war), the Federal government secured more power for itself than was intended by the Constitution (arguably). Of course, the Constitution does not talk about secession and it has been ruled unconstitutional (by the Feds, of course).. speaking of which, have you ever noticed the trend of the Feds always siding with themselves in such landmark decisions? Another example of this off the top of my head is that of state nullification: it was the belief of many of the founding fathers (Thomas Jefferson, notably) that the states held the final say in what is constitutional or not. Go figure, the case went to the Supreme Court who concluded that the Supreme Court gets to decide that. Shocking.
Anyways, all that to say, please realize that the Civil War was not about freeing the slaves. Also, no it does not make sense to allow the government any special privileges (or to surrender any rights) during time of war. Many times, the government was good about relinquishing such authority once the war ended; unfortunately, they have also failed to relinquish such powers at other times or been very slow to do so. (Not to mention we've been in a perpetual state of war for a very long time now.) But we don't need history to tell us such things are wrong. Freedom should never be given up; if you don't believe that, go live elsewhere, thank you. Per Benjamin Franklin: "He who gives up freedom for safety deserves neither."
Unfortunately, "most people: don't understand what makes an economy grow: producing more than you consume (it's obviously a bit more complicated than that, but we're told "spending" stimulates the economy). In addition "most people" think that one can just regulate away these problems when historically, we all know what sorts of incentives Obamacare provides: Hire contractors or limit amount of hours worked per week per employ to sub 30. There are probably other work arounds, but I'm not that familiar with the details of Obamacare.
I suppose, but a Linux distro can be scaled down pretty well. But then, I don't use Linux Mint myself; maybe it's a resource hog? :P
Except that monopolies generally only exist due to government intervention, generally by lobbying for regulations that keep new comers out or via supposed "natural monopolies." In the case of "natural monopolies," the government grants monopolies to "utility" companies to reduce duplication of the utility infrastructure, which leads to the same thing that any government-granted monopoly leads to: lack of innovation and thus higher inefficiencies and prices (if not at first, then gradually over time).
It is exceedingly rare for a company to monopolize a market without government intervention. In fact, the barriers that get erected IS the government intervention.
And yes, you can have perpetual competition without eventual victors. We like to talk a lot about economies of scale, but people seem to forget about diseconomies of scale: which brings the large corporations back down to size, more often than not. Besides, all it really takes to bring down a large corporation is a team of stupid executives, which is pretty easy to come by these days. Perpetual competition is what forces innovation which in turn utilizes the nation's scarce resources more efficiently.
Follow up:
Being poor does suck. What's worse than just being poor is that many things are more expensive to the poor due to basic economic principles: poor neighborhoods have higher crime, increasing cost of doing business in poor neighborhoods, increasing prices for said business, etc. On the other hand, coming from a middle income family most certainly doesn't not mean that you automatically know how to handle money. Most of my friends growing up did not handle money well and they came from similar upbringings as my own. On the other hand, my parents are awful with money (though not as awful as using check cashing stores), yet I do far better with it.
What you say implies that one has no choice in their decisions. It's far from possible to be brought up in poverty and work/reason one's way out of it. Suggesting anything otherwise is downright insulting to the poor.
While you *can* be productive on an iPad, I think the point is that the iPad really doesn't encourage that and its productivity uses are severely limited when compared to a PC. No one's going to be encouraged to tinker, program, or start to learn professional software (Photoshop?)--all of which have very real positive impacts not only on the skillset of the child, but our economy as a whole. But then, we should not be surprised by all of this; Apple is just doing what makes sense to them. The real problem is that our system allows for such stupidity to exist in the first place.
The beta Chromebooks that Google sent out (the CR-48's) sported between 8 and 10 hours of battery life. And they were/are way too slow to play games on. Still plenty to run a command line distro on though! That'd probably be better for the kids. :P
If you're going to create a VM to surf the web on, would you not be vastly better off running one of the many Linux distro's than Windows XP? I mean, even if you're a "MS > Linux" person, you've gotta dig *very* deep to come up with a reason why Windows XP (12 years old) is better than the latest Linux Mint when all you want to do is surf the web. :P
Amazing I always forget about @ in PHP. Still, it's not nearly as good a solution as if exceptions were used universally. It's just one more thing you have to "just know" about a very large number of things to be proficient with PHP (does it use exceptions or not?) Not to mention, it makes it makes it that much more cumbersome when you have to catch that yourself and then throw an exception so that it can travel up the chain.
Why is this down voted? These are all valid points. Per usual "Ask Slashdot", there's not enough information given to give informed advice or suggestions.
I don't want to disable error reporting. I want to respond to errors and not get stuck writing a bunch of garbage if statements just to see if every condition I can think of is covered before accessing a file or an item in an array. It's not that I "don't care about my variables/arrays", it's that I would appreciate them behing handled properly.
In Python, I can do (sort of, can't format correctly here):
try:
f = open('/path/to/file', 'r')
except IOError, e:
# Oh no, I can't do that... handle accordingly
else:
# It worked.
In PHP, to accomplish the same thing, I have to do something more along the lines of:
if (is_file('/path/to/file') && is_readable('/path/to/file') && any_other_conditions_that_must_be_checked) {
// It worked
// It didn't work
}
else {
}
File access always seems to bring with it unforeseen errors and as such I will not try to cover all of them here, as they are... unforeseen. Oh, also, Python (and I'm sure other languages as well) provides an excellent method of safely handling file access (or other things that *must* clean up, regardless of errors) via the with statement. PHP, of course, can't be bothered to implement things that are actually useful syntactically. All the PHP devs can ever seem to do is create more functions, all of which lack any standardization in naming or parameters, as discussed above. In short, programming anything beyond a very simple site in PHP is something that only two types of people find enjoyable: masochists and those ignorant of what a real language is like.
Yeah no kidding. Another big gripe of mine is how most of the things that you'd like to try/catch doesn't throw an exception, but some sort of "notice" or "warning", which you cannot respond to. I've managed to work around this by implementing custom error handlers, but that brings its own problems when other peoples' code expects the default behavior. What's worse is the stuff that throws warnings/notices are things that are very basic: accessing an array element that doesn't exist, opening a file without proper permissions (or doesn't exist), etc. Argh, the whole language is garbage and the community that generally uses it only adds to the problem. But alas, I am forced to work in it.
Note: To those who haven't yet ventured out beyond PHP for the web, you will likely be pleasantly surprised how much more productive you can be in a sane language.
Really? I used to work for the State of Oregon and I never saw anyone laid off for anything and believe me there was much misbehaving.
What's sad is that "conservative" these days means pro military-industrial complex. There is nothing actually conservative about big government spending on military; the Republicans just want us to think otherwise.
By that logic, anyone who's "bound by an oath of silence" should have access to all of our personal data. What if 20% of the populace was bound by such oaths? Just because they can't talk about it doesn't mean they should know your business.
Would you like to donate to the Human Fund? It's a charity I started and my intentions are good (TM). Please send check payable to myself at 55 Lonely Drive, Houston TX. Thanks!
Because sessions don't exist. Granted PayPal/bank accounts probably require authentication every time, but I imagine many people use their favorite web browser's "save password information" feature on those sites. I think the comic makes plenty of sense: for most people, if their user account on their laptop is compromised, bad things can/will happen.
I'm really glad i'm not the only one who thinks this.
Absolutely there are some who legitimately cannot take care of themselves. However, that does not mean that government needs to intervene. There used to be a time when families took care of the invalids. Churches and other non profits used to (and still sometimes do) provide help. Interestingly, now that there's so much aid for those in trouble, I've seen churches turn people in need away, but I digress.
Since I don't deny that there are those who cannot take care of themselves, I am not delusional but an ass hole. That comment is exactly the same type of drivel that is brought up in gun debates: you don't support gun control, so you must hate children. Give me a break! Just because I have a different belief to adress a problem than you does not make me an ass hole.
But... he's right. Real economy is exactly what he said it is. What he posted was in context and not total vomit, so why do you care? It's sad to think that what he's posted would challenge peoples' assumptions, but I guess we may just be that stupid as a society.
What a ridiculous assertion: that the only way we can have air traffic controllers or teachers is via the government. Get off my lawn!
In the U.S., the vast majority of the federal budget goes to fighting unnecessary wars and entitlement programs. "Taxes suck, but roads are cool" simply isn't a good argument. Like anyone else, I think roads are cool too, but you and I both know that very little of our tax money goes to them. If the government would bug out of the business that they don't belong in: health care, policing the world, entitlement programs, the war on drugs, etc etc, we'd all be better off.
Oh, but I can see it coming now: "What about the elderly? What about the people in need?" Nothing beats having to take responsibility for your situation and do something to protect and care for it. Ultimately, the real problem with all of this big government spending is that it assumes (and encourages) that people are powerless and need to be taken care of (as if we're not adults or something?). Personally, I don't buy that: I know that I am taking care of myself and my family and I am nothing special. I believe in my fellow men and women to be able to do the same; assuming we can't is nothing short of insulting.