I see your point, but I take issue that violations of economic liberty are not egregious. One might argue that if you're unable to make a living without being strangled by red tape, no other issue is more important. Uber is too big to garner sympathy, but the average person who faces losing their livelihood to bureaucracy doesn't look all that different from Rosa Parks. E.g.: http://ij.org/issues/economic-...
I read a comment from political scientist Ray Laraja that I thought was interesting: "It doesn't sound like [the FEC commissioners] are going to do this, but if they allow bitcoins to remain anonymous then politicians actually wouldn't know who's giving to them. And so at least in theory, that could cut off this corrupt exchange." I don't know how feasible that really is, but would it improve things if all political contribution were required to be made anonymously via bitcoin.
For a case study of how innovation and intellectual property was handled in a communist country, see the story of Otto Wichterle's invention of the soft contact lense in Czechoslovakia:
The problem, as I've heard it explained, is that "causes cancer" is not enough information to go on. You need to know the level of risk for the warning to be useful.
For example, what action should you take upon finding that naturally occuring aflatoxin in peanut butter is carcinogenic? Should you disavow Reese's Pieces and scorn the name of Jimmy Carter, or just worry about more important things.
Maybe the California cancer warnings should be color-coded like the Homeland Security warnings.
I've been thinking about opening an à la carte ISP company. Instead of getting access to all 12 billion pages on the WWW, which most people don't need (homeandgarden.com for example), you'd pay a small fee to your ISP for each site you "subscribe" access to. I hope these "net neutrality" laws being bandied about don't affect my business model.
Of course it was not a good design. If it was, it wouldn't be extinct would it?
My understanding (from watching the Discovery Channel) is that extinction is a gambit rarely predicated on good design. Mass extinctions periodically kill off most species on the planet. It's not the best designed who survive, but those who (through luck) have designs allowing survival through the particulars of the cataclysm: extreme vulcanism, ice age, drought, etc. Dinosaurs and Neanderthals were good designs for the ages they lived in.
I get around the stuck queue problem by watching movies a bit at a time. This avoids devoting a given evening to watch an entire film. I usually watch a third of a movie per day over the course of three days.
It takes a little getting used to, but is second nature to me now. It gives time to gradually digest the movie's content, like reading and reflecting on a novel over the course of a week, rather than in one sitting.
You could land on and explore each planet. Close up. Let me say that again, you could land on each planet, collect it's life, find unique artifacts and rove your little tank around for hours.
Looking into your suggestion, I read a review of Ishmael, and it does sound quite interesting. Somehow it makes me think of the new Will Wright game: Spore (about evolution, civilization, society, and survival).
I did a some research (i.e. a quick Googling), and the answer on where Malthus' 1798 predictions went wrong seems to be mostly that he didn't anticipate modern agriculture or transporation (the combine harvester, steamship, train, etc), something you can hardly blame him for.
I saw the utopia you describe depicted in a BBC series called "Walking With Cavemen." It was great; everybody had the same level of wealth: no billionaires, no corporations, no Walmart or Starbucks...
I'm curious why you didn't answer the parent's question. Why haven't the rules of Malthusian economics already seen mankind's demise?
Anyone interested in capping human achievement (returning to the age of windmills???) should read Ayn Rand's "Anthem" (even if it too is a little extreme).
It's more like Netflix than TiVo. I listen to podcasts for my specific interests: homebrewing, basketball, running, short stories, technology, and The Onion Radio News. If a particular podcast isn't good, it's just a click to unsubscribe.
What I've read about Samsung's variation of this technology is that it is accessed somewhat independently, at least by the OS. The OS determines sectors that deserve quicker read access and "pins" them to the flash drive.
I had the same thing happen to me. It looked liked the purposely broke as many components as they could taking it apart. Learned my lesson about checking a computer in as luggage.
I don't know anything about the mechanism of hearing, but I thought your post claiming the brain quanitizes audio data was interesting, so I forwarded it to a recording engineer friend. Here's his reply:
Sounds to me like when you see another TV in a room on the news it has lines running down it... the camera and the TV in the picture are out of sync so it looks horrible. Anyone knows that if two sources are quantized they must both be synced to the same master clock. To me this [the brain using PCM] is more evidence that analog is superior to digital.
Besides, people don't even necessarily like analog because it's a more perfect representation... they like it because it's been altered in a good way... unlike digital that's been altered in a very tiny almost unnoticeable bad way.
Like if you have a banana that can be saved to a media, duplicated indefinitely and distributed to millions of people. On one hand the analog version for some reason comes out with a thick coating of dove chocolate. It's way different than the original but no one's complaining. On the other hand the digital version is an almost completely perfect recreation of the original only it features a very thin almost undetectable coating of mustard.
Even if every year technology allows you to reduce that mustard coating (so long as you upgrade your banana duplicator) it's never gonna taste like chocolate! ~Rufuss
One's take on the matter is probably preordained by how you feel about William H Gates, but there is at least some room for rationally questioning the wisdom of the Microsoft antitrust case. Some choice quotes from those rabid foes of antitrust, Cato:
"...antitrust officials are preoccupied with antiquated notions--tying arrangements, exclusionary contracts, predatory pricing, and a host of other purported infractions--all wholly irrelevant, unless the real purpose, of course, is to pacify rent-seeking executives trying to attain in the political arena what they have been unable to attain in the market."
"Robert Bork and his new-found friends at the Antitrust Division intend to mutate Microsoft's private property into something that belongs to the public, to be designed by bureaucrats and sold on terms congenial to rivals bent on Microsoft's demise."
"Welcome to the post-modern world of high-tech antitrust, where big is once again bad, lofty profit margins are a wake-up call to government regulators, executives are brought to heel for aggressively worded e-mails, pricing too high is monopolistic, pricing too low is predatory, propping up politically wired competitors is the surreptitious aim, bundling products that consumers want is illegal, and successful companies are rewarded by dismemberment."
Of course many more people would own copies of an operating system if Windows were sold below monopoly prices. Consumers would be rolling in consumer surplus if the market could be evenly split between Windows, QNX, Plan 9, Solaris, and Hurd.
If Microsoft's profits were reasonable, they couldn't waste money on extravagant exercises like Project Green to integrate their four overlapping sets of business applications. They would stop squandering greenbacks on world-class engineers like Ray Ozzie. They'd quit financing dead-end high stakes ventures into new fields, like the Xbox. They wouldn't have an obscenely unfair hedge against the vagaries and volatility of the computer industry.
I grew up using the Commodore Amiga. I hated Microsoft for beating Amiga. I'd like nothing better than for the federal courts to use nineteenth century business regulations to squash Billy G and to restore Jay Miner (late creator of the Amiga) to his rightful prominence.
One caveat though... There's precedence of antitrust laws being used for rent seeking by competitors in the guise of consumer protection. So there may be some call for deliberation before unequivocally endorsing this tactic on our foes the way Nixon used antitrust against TV networks he didn't like. There may also be some reason to suspect that the effects of antitrust may include unanticipated consequences. Come to think of it, maybe we just should just compete on the merits and marketability of our work and leave the courts out of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I see your point, but I take issue that violations of economic liberty are not egregious. One might argue that if you're unable to make a living without being strangled by red tape, no other issue is more important. Uber is too big to garner sympathy, but the average person who faces losing their livelihood to bureaucracy doesn't look all that different from Rosa Parks. E.g.: http://ij.org/issues/economic-...
I read a comment from political scientist Ray Laraja that I thought was interesting: "It doesn't sound like [the FEC commissioners] are going to do this, but if they allow bitcoins to remain anonymous then politicians actually wouldn't know who's giving to them. And so at least in theory, that could cut off this corrupt exchange." I don't know how feasible that really is, but would it improve things if all political contribution were required to be made anonymously via bitcoin.
Al Capone wouldn't have gone to jail if tax liability were not incurred on black market transactions.
c ome_taxes_and_downfall
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Capone#Federal_in
For a case study of how innovation and intellectual property was handled in a communist country, see the story of Otto Wichterle's invention of the soft contact lense in Czechoslovakia:
p lay.html
http://www.dynamist.com/articles-speeches/forbes/
How about a deal? You give up your Volvo and NPR, we'll give up our SUVs and PlayStations.
"Once the Sun burns out, this planet is doomed. You're just making sure we spend our last days using inferior products." - B. Simpson
You might check out Eye Toy. It's a lot of fun and makes you sweat.
The problem, as I've heard it explained, is that "causes cancer" is not enough information to go on. You need to know the level of risk for the warning to be useful.
For example, what action should you take upon finding that naturally occuring aflatoxin in peanut butter is carcinogenic? Should you disavow Reese's Pieces and scorn the name of Jimmy Carter, or just worry about more important things.
Maybe the California cancer warnings should be color-coded like the Homeland Security warnings.
I've been thinking about opening an à la carte ISP company. Instead of getting access to all 12 billion pages on the WWW, which most people don't need (homeandgarden.com for example), you'd pay a small fee to your ISP for each site you "subscribe" access to. I hope these "net neutrality" laws being bandied about don't affect my business model.
Of course it was not a good design. If it was, it wouldn't be extinct would it?
My understanding (from watching the Discovery Channel) is that extinction is a gambit rarely predicated on good design. Mass extinctions periodically kill off most species on the planet. It's not the best designed who survive, but those who (through luck) have designs allowing survival through the particulars of the cataclysm: extreme vulcanism, ice age, drought, etc. Dinosaurs and Neanderthals were good designs for the ages they lived in.
I get around the stuck queue problem by watching movies a bit at a time. This avoids devoting a given evening to watch an entire film. I usually watch a third of a movie per day over the course of three days.
It takes a little getting used to, but is second nature to me now. It gives time to gradually digest the movie's content, like reading and reflecting on a novel over the course of a week, rather than in one sitting.
You could land on and explore each planet. Close up. Let me say that again, you could land on each planet, collect it's life, find unique artifacts and rove your little tank around for hours.
Sounds like Spore.
Looking into your suggestion, I read a review of Ishmael, and it does sound quite interesting. Somehow it makes me think of the new Will Wright game: Spore (about evolution, civilization, society, and survival).
I did a some research (i.e. a quick Googling), and the answer on where Malthus' 1798 predictions went wrong seems to be mostly that he didn't anticipate modern agriculture or transporation (the combine harvester, steamship, train, etc), something you can hardly blame him for.
I saw the utopia you describe depicted in a BBC series called "Walking With Cavemen." It was great; everybody had the same level of wealth: no billionaires, no corporations, no Walmart or Starbucks...
I'm curious why you didn't answer the parent's question. Why haven't the rules of Malthusian economics already seen mankind's demise?
Anyone interested in capping human achievement (returning to the age of windmills???) should read Ayn Rand's "Anthem" (even if it too is a little extreme).
Our lack of a national public transportation system is wasteful and embarassing.
Why doesn't Amtrak make you proud?
It's more like Netflix than TiVo. I listen to podcasts for my specific interests: homebrewing, basketball, running, short stories, technology, and The Onion Radio News. If a particular podcast isn't good, it's just a click to unsubscribe.
What I've read about Samsung's variation of this technology is that it is accessed somewhat independently, at least by the OS. The OS determines sectors that deserve quicker read access and "pins" them to the flash drive.
My Pandora prog rock station works fine. Try basing your station on more than one band: Dream Theater, Angra, Rush, Cynic, Opeth, etc.
e.g. http://www.pandora.com/?sc=sh1426048
I had the same thing happen to me. It looked liked the purposely broke as many components as they could taking it apart. Learned my lesson about checking a computer in as luggage.
The EU is already talking about going after them for the features they are including with Vista.
You can sort by subject in the current version of Notes, 7. Mail Rules had a few quirks at first, but have worked solidly since version 6.5.
It's not just "cultural studies" who are prone to being duped. Computer scientists can fall for baloney too:
Rooter: A Methodology for the Typical Unification of Access Points and Redundancy
Joey Skaggs has got gravestones like this (and better) at Final Curtain.
One's take on the matter is probably preordained by how you feel about William H Gates, but there is at least some room for rationally questioning the wisdom of the Microsoft antitrust case. Some choice quotes from those rabid foes of antitrust, Cato:
"...antitrust officials are preoccupied with antiquated notions--tying arrangements, exclusionary contracts, predatory pricing, and a host of other purported infractions--all wholly irrelevant, unless the real purpose, of course, is to pacify rent-seeking executives trying to attain in the political arena what they have been unable to attain in the market."
"Robert Bork and his new-found friends at the Antitrust Division intend to mutate Microsoft's private property into something that belongs to the public, to be designed by bureaucrats and sold on terms congenial to rivals bent on Microsoft's demise."
"Welcome to the post-modern world of high-tech antitrust, where big is once again bad, lofty profit margins are a wake-up call to government regulators, executives are brought to heel for aggressively worded e-mails, pricing too high is monopolistic, pricing too low is predatory, propping up politically wired competitors is the surreptitious aim, bundling products that consumers want is illegal, and successful companies are rewarded by dismemberment."
Of course many more people would own copies of an operating system if Windows were sold below monopoly prices. Consumers would be rolling in consumer surplus if the market could be evenly split between Windows, QNX, Plan 9, Solaris, and Hurd.
If Microsoft's profits were reasonable, they couldn't waste money on extravagant exercises like Project Green to integrate their four overlapping sets of business applications. They would stop squandering greenbacks on world-class engineers like Ray Ozzie. They'd quit financing dead-end high stakes ventures into new fields, like the Xbox. They wouldn't have an obscenely unfair hedge against the vagaries and volatility of the computer industry.
I grew up using the Commodore Amiga. I hated Microsoft for beating Amiga. I'd like nothing better than for the federal courts to use nineteenth century business regulations to squash Billy G and to restore Jay Miner (late creator of the Amiga) to his rightful prominence.
One caveat though... There's precedence of antitrust laws being used for rent seeking by competitors in the guise of consumer protection. So there may be some call for deliberation before unequivocally endorsing this tactic on our foes the way Nixon used antitrust against TV networks he didn't like. There may also be some reason to suspect that the effects of antitrust may include unanticipated consequences. Come to think of it, maybe we just should just compete on the merits and marketability of our work and leave the courts out of it.