You didn't like my DeLorean idea? I was trying to say it'd be nice if we had real emperical data to discuss instead of the ersatz formula in this whitepaper.
To pick up on your ball throwing metaphor... If the Spurs spent eighty percent less on the salaries of their players, NBA fans in San Antonio would be that much richer, right? Of course, what would really happen without so much money in it, you'd have a less competitive game, like the Continental Basketball Association.
Imagine a world where MS is on equal footing in Australia with six other operating system companies. You couldn't cleanly compare that world to ours with a simplistic formula like "cost x 1.1 = $500/1.8 x 1.1 million". You wouldn't have Windows XP and SQL Server in a world where software wasn't such a high stakes game, not anymore than you'd have Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili if the NBA payed its players peanuts. Regardless of what one thinks of antitrust law or Microsoft, it's probably incorrect to imagine simple arthmetic can calculate the effect of a universe sans Bill Gates.
"To the economically illiterate, if some company makes a million dollars in profit, this means that their products cost a million dollars more than they would have cost without profits." - Thomas Sowell
"Never speak to me of profit. It's a dirty word." - Pandit Nehru
If I might make a modest proposal... Let's not keep this theoretical. Poor some beer in your Mr Fusion, adjust the flux capacitor for 1975, and accelerate to 88 MPH. Next, convince Bill Gates to stick with Traf-O-Data so he never starts MS. Finally, come back to 2005 and analyze the difference you made in the software industry and economy at large.
If you'd like to make your research broader, go back and stop Rockefeller from starting Standard Oil to see how it affects modern oil prices and James Hill from creating the Great Northern Railway to see what it does to shipping costs.
It will be interesting to see what you find out. I suspect it will be more complicated than a "whitepaper".
Isn't that the contrapositive of Reverend Lovejoy's famous quote:
"Once something has been approved by the government, it's no longer immoral."
It doesn't take an MS apologist to be skeptical about this audacious claim of a dollar figure for Windows' dominance. I wonder how much money Australia could have saved if Microsoft and Netscape had focused on their products instead of their lawsuits. Gartner should do a study to figure out how much money Australia would save if Eckel's hadn't stepped off the path during the tyrannosaur hunt.
It's generally considered poor debating form to impugn the source of an argument rather than its substance. Some people honestly believe Bill Gates isn't Beelzebub.
If Windows were on equal footing with BeOS, Amiga Workbench, and OS/2; if Word were on par with Wordperfect and AmiPro; and if Bill Gate and Steve Job saw eye to eye... Australia would be $200,000,000 richer? Not only that, but the differential between the cost of hardware and software would stay perpetually where it was in 1995?
Wouldn't training costs for sys admins and secretaries be higher if Windows and Word weren't de facto standards. Wouldn't developers be overworked if the market demanded every consumer program be ported for Atari ST and FreeBSD?
Isn't this whitepaper tantamount to saying Australia would save $234,670 million if only Spiro Agnew hadn't been convicted of tax evasion?
Although it's somewhat dated, Charles Papazian's Joy of Homebrewing is the canonical introduction to homebrewing. I've heard Homebrewing for Dummies is actually very good. MoreBeer.com is a good place to get equipment and ingredients online. I can vouch for the quality of their kits.
I suppose you speak Esperanto and use a metric clock? Grams and liters are OK for rocketry or robotics, but homebrewing should definitely be done in pounds and pints.
"My car gets fourty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it." - Grandpa Simpson
I baked some bread just last week using trub off a batch of brown ale. It didn't taste any different from using bread yeast. A friend of mine once didn't realize he was out of beer yeast until he was ready to pitch. He used bread yeast instead, and the ale turned out fine. There can be a lot of nuances between yeast strains, but fundamentally they're all the same critter.
On the other hand, I was chatting with a Slashdotter the other day who works at a lab that studies yeast prions. He said the beer his coworker tried making from the lab yeast turned out quite funky.
A good case study on this is Ottoman versus modern Turkish. Since Turkish was "modernized" in 1928, spelling and grammar are very straightforward and consistent. But written works of just 80 years ago can be incomprehensible. Imagine if you tried to read Calvin Coolidge's inaugural address of 1925, and it was like reading an ancient foreign language!
An interesting book that talks about the dynamic nature of language is John McWhorter's Power of Babel.
You're right about federalism being a counterintuitive term. By my understanding, it refers to states having the autonomy to set their own agendas. The Federalist Papers were opposed to the Bill of Rights because they thought it would be construed to diminish other unenumerated rights.
I'm not enough of a consitutional scholar to say whether the court made the right choice here. My personal biases predispose me to favor a narrower, more literal interpretation of the words "public use".
It was an important decision, but I don't see that its implications apply much beyond eminent domain. A couple weeks ago the Supreme Court ruled that states don't have the right to prohibit direct wine shipment. This week they ruled that they do have the right to apply eminent domain in any circumstance. Given my druthers, I might trade the wine for the eminent domain, but I'm not convinced we're headed for hell in a handbasket on the issue of state's rights.
You might be less willing to forgive abuse of property owners for the sake of "civic planning" if you could put yourself in the shoes of someone who lived through the destruction of Poletown. Maybe you should reconsider calling yourself "pretty damn distrustful of private business interests" since you seem to be supporting for the law to favor Walmart over small businesses and millionaires over widows.
"With no power, of which they are possessed, do [legislatures] seem to be less familiar, or to handle less awkwardly, than that of eminent domain. . . . At times they fail, or seem to fail, to distinguish accurately between public and private ends, and if their terms and language be alone consulted, to pervert the power to uses to which it cannot lawfully be applied."
-- Sherman v. Buick (California Supreme Court, 1867)
You're mischaracterizing libertarians, as if they want to go back to the Articles of Confederation. They obviously don't believe a state should be able to violate the First Amendment. This case is just about interpreting the Fifth Amendment. The court decided that the word "public" in the Fifth Amendment is meaningless.
Eminent domain is supposed to be able to be invoked for the public good. What's changed is that now it can be used merely to benefit the politically connected. This decision says eminent domain is no longer for roads and schools, it's now for Costcos and condos.
It sounds like you're saying drug companies should be run like Walmart (focusing on low prices instead of innovation), like European drug companies. If it sounds so easy, you might try your hand at financing the approval of a new drug. You may find it a more expensive and risky proposition than you imagine.
You work at a yeast lab? That sounds pretty cool. Is it one I would have heard of, like White Labs or Wyeast?
I've only brewed one batch of beer, so I don't really know what I'm talking about. But I thought saccharomyces cerevisiae was ale yeast and saccharomyces carlsbergensis was lager yeast.
I had a friend who brewed a batch of beer with generic baker's yeast, and it turned out fine. Granted, I wouldn't try that for a beer where the aroma is a significant factor in the flavor, like a wheat beer.
Not sure if this is exactly on-topic with Neal Stephenson's review of Revenge of the Sith, but Douglas Adams has already conclusively answered everything that needs to be said about science versus religion.
Excuse me? Since when have geeks had a problem with beer? You're telling me the members of your local Linux Users Group don't geek-out over saccharomyces cerevisiae?
When we were developing the idea we read a lot of books and were inspired by Hernando DeSoto's The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else.
I would have been interested to hear more about how they included De Soto's ideas in their game.
From the comments on the review of Mystery of Capital, I got the impression a lot of Slashdotters totally missed De Soto's point. He doesn't advocate for or against capitalism in the book. He argues for making existing capitalist economies more inclusive. De Soto describes a method for cracking the "bell jar" that insolates the rich and excludes the poor.
There were plenty of qualms when credit and debit cards first started gaining popularity. Hernando De Soto mentions in Mystery of Capital that Europeans were totally weirded out by Marco Polo's accounts of the Chinese using paper money. Marx was weirded out by another intangible property of assets: capital.
You're right that a clash between two nations amounts to just anecdotal evidence. Starting with a level playing field, do you think an autocracy stands a chance against a free society?
Why is tiny Hong Kong an economic powerhouse (even with no natural resources, land, etc...), while Cuba can barely feed itself? Why does South Korea flourish while the North is impoverished? How did the Rebel Alliance beat the Empire?
My opinion is that totalitarianism is too prone to be constrained by (to adapt a quote by Vaclav Havel)"mental short circuits". Instead of spinning its wheels managing gulags and cracking down on "kulaks", a free society self-manages its ultimate resource: its people.
The Rebel Alliance had more stacked against it than the Soviets. The Rebels won because they tapped the talents of each member, while the Empire's plans were constrained to the vision of the Emperor and his toady.
> I found it tremendously irritating that again and again they would get started with something neat, only to let it fizzle.
I think you're quit wrong. A few things got compressed, like combing the characters of the Squire and the Doctor. But they actually expanded on some themes over what's in the original. For example, emphasizing Silver's role as a surrogate father figure in Treasure Planet added a layer of emotional depth to the plot.
> Treasure Planet took one of the greatest adventure stories ever written and turned it into a muling pile of crap.
I take exception to that. Treasure Planet captured the spirit of the story and most of the details. The whole eighteenth century with robots and rockets style was cool. The soundtrack was good. The voice for Billy Bones was great. It had the most creative version of Ben Gunn since Miss Piggy in the Muppet version. The scene where Israel Hands flies out into space from the mast instead of dropping into the sea was a nice way to reimagine the story's most exciting moment.
Treasure Planet was good. I think it was too esoteric to be a commercial success.
Slashdot Mirror
You didn't like my DeLorean idea? I was trying to say it'd be nice if we had real emperical data to discuss instead of the ersatz formula in this whitepaper.
To pick up on your ball throwing metaphor... If the Spurs spent eighty percent less on the salaries of their players, NBA fans in San Antonio would be that much richer, right? Of course, what would really happen without so much money in it, you'd have a less competitive game, like the Continental Basketball Association.
Imagine a world where MS is on equal footing in Australia with six other operating system companies. You couldn't cleanly compare that world to ours with a simplistic formula like "cost x 1.1 = $500/1.8 x 1.1 million". You wouldn't have Windows XP and SQL Server in a world where software wasn't such a high stakes game, not anymore than you'd have Tim Duncan and Manu Ginobili if the NBA payed its players peanuts. Regardless of what one thinks of antitrust law or Microsoft, it's probably incorrect to imagine simple arthmetic can calculate the effect of a universe sans Bill Gates.
"To the economically illiterate, if some company makes a million dollars in profit, this means that their products cost a million dollars more than they would have cost without profits." - Thomas Sowell
"Never speak to me of profit. It's a dirty word." - Pandit Nehru
If I might make a modest proposal... Let's not keep this theoretical. Poor some beer in your Mr Fusion, adjust the flux capacitor for 1975, and accelerate to 88 MPH. Next, convince Bill Gates to stick with Traf-O-Data so he never starts MS. Finally, come back to 2005 and analyze the difference you made in the software industry and economy at large.
If you'd like to make your research broader, go back and stop Rockefeller from starting Standard Oil to see how it affects modern oil prices and James Hill from creating the Great Northern Railway to see what it does to shipping costs.
It will be interesting to see what you find out. I suspect it will be more complicated than a "whitepaper".
It's generally considered poor debating form to impugn the source of an argument rather than its substance. Some people honestly believe Bill Gates isn't Beelzebub.
If Windows were on equal footing with BeOS, Amiga Workbench, and OS/2; if Word were on par with Wordperfect and AmiPro; and if Bill Gate and Steve Job saw eye to eye... Australia would be $200,000,000 richer? Not only that, but the differential between the cost of hardware and software would stay perpetually where it was in 1995?
Wouldn't training costs for sys admins and secretaries be higher if Windows and Word weren't de facto standards. Wouldn't developers be overworked if the market demanded every consumer program be ported for Atari ST and FreeBSD?
Isn't this whitepaper tantamount to saying Australia would save $234,670 million if only Spiro Agnew hadn't been convicted of tax evasion?
Although it's somewhat dated, Charles Papazian's Joy of Homebrewing is the canonical introduction to homebrewing. I've heard Homebrewing for Dummies is actually very good. MoreBeer.com is a good place to get equipment and ingredients online. I can vouch for the quality of their kits.
I suppose you speak Esperanto and use a metric clock? Grams and liters are OK for rocketry or robotics, but homebrewing should definitely be done in pounds and pints.
"My car gets fourty rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it." - Grandpa Simpson
I baked some bread just last week using trub off a batch of brown ale. It didn't taste any different from using bread yeast. A friend of mine once didn't realize he was out of beer yeast until he was ready to pitch. He used bread yeast instead, and the ale turned out fine. There can be a lot of nuances between yeast strains, but fundamentally they're all the same critter.
On the other hand, I was chatting with a Slashdotter the other day who works at a lab that studies yeast prions. He said the beer his coworker tried making from the lab yeast turned out quite funky.
...so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
A good case study on this is Ottoman versus modern Turkish. Since Turkish was "modernized" in 1928, spelling and grammar are very straightforward and consistent. But written works of just 80 years ago can be incomprehensible. Imagine if you tried to read Calvin Coolidge's inaugural address of 1925, and it was like reading an ancient foreign language!
An interesting book that talks about the dynamic nature of language is John McWhorter's Power of Babel.
What a perfect response for the spelling bee protesters.
You're right about federalism being a counterintuitive term. By my understanding, it refers to states having the autonomy to set their own agendas. The Federalist Papers were opposed to the Bill of Rights because they thought it would be construed to diminish other unenumerated rights.
I'm not enough of a consitutional scholar to say whether the court made the right choice here. My personal biases predispose me to favor a narrower, more literal interpretation of the words "public use".
It was an important decision, but I don't see that its implications apply much beyond eminent domain. A couple weeks ago the Supreme Court ruled that states don't have the right to prohibit direct wine shipment. This week they ruled that they do have the right to apply eminent domain in any circumstance. Given my druthers, I might trade the wine for the eminent domain, but I'm not convinced we're headed for hell in a handbasket on the issue of state's rights.
Are you saying federalism and the Bill of Rights are incompatible? They seem to work pretty well in concert to me.
You're mischaracterizing libertarians, as if they want to go back to the Articles of Confederation. They obviously don't believe a state should be able to violate the First Amendment. This case is just about interpreting the Fifth Amendment. The court decided that the word "public" in the Fifth Amendment is meaningless.
Eminent domain is supposed to be able to be invoked for the public good. What's changed is that now it can be used merely to benefit the politically connected. This decision says eminent domain is no longer for roads and schools, it's now for Costcos and condos.
It sounds like you're saying drug companies should be run like Walmart (focusing on low prices instead of innovation), like European drug companies. If it sounds so easy, you might try your hand at financing the approval of a new drug. You may find it a more expensive and risky proposition than you imagine.
You work at a yeast lab? That sounds pretty cool. Is it one I would have heard of, like White Labs or Wyeast?
I've only brewed one batch of beer, so I don't really know what I'm talking about. But I thought saccharomyces cerevisiae was ale yeast and saccharomyces carlsbergensis was lager yeast.
I had a friend who brewed a batch of beer with generic baker's yeast, and it turned out fine. Granted, I wouldn't try that for a beer where the aroma is a significant factor in the flavor, like a wheat beer.
Not sure if this is exactly on-topic with Neal Stephenson's review of Revenge of the Sith, but Douglas Adams has already conclusively answered everything that needs to be said about science versus religion.
beer
Excuse me? Since when have geeks had a problem with beer? You're telling me the members of your local Linux Users Group don't geek-out over saccharomyces cerevisiae?
When we were developing the idea we read a lot of books and were inspired by Hernando DeSoto's The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else.
I would have been interested to hear more about how they included De Soto's ideas in their game.
From the comments on the review of Mystery of Capital, I got the impression a lot of Slashdotters totally missed De Soto's point. He doesn't advocate for or against capitalism in the book. He argues for making existing capitalist economies more inclusive. De Soto describes a method for cracking the "bell jar" that insolates the rich and excludes the poor.
There were plenty of qualms when credit and debit cards first started gaining popularity. Hernando De Soto mentions in Mystery of Capital that Europeans were totally weirded out by Marco Polo's accounts of the Chinese using paper money. Marx was weirded out by another intangible property of assets: capital.
You're right that a clash between two nations amounts to just anecdotal evidence. Starting with a level playing field, do you think an autocracy stands a chance against a free society?
Why is tiny Hong Kong an economic powerhouse (even with no natural resources, land, etc...), while Cuba can barely feed itself? Why does South Korea flourish while the North is impoverished? How did the Rebel Alliance beat the Empire?
My opinion is that totalitarianism is too prone to be constrained by (to adapt a quote by Vaclav Havel)"mental short circuits". Instead of spinning its wheels managing gulags and cracking down on "kulaks", a free society self-manages its ultimate resource: its people.
The Rebel Alliance had more stacked against it than the Soviets. The Rebels won because they tapped the talents of each member, while the Empire's plans were constrained to the vision of the Emperor and his toady.
> I found it tremendously irritating that again and again they would get started with something neat, only to let it fizzle.
I think you're quit wrong. A few things got compressed, like combing the characters of the Squire and the Doctor. But they actually expanded on some themes over what's in the original. For example, emphasizing Silver's role as a surrogate father figure in Treasure Planet added a layer of emotional depth to the plot.
> Treasure Planet took one of the greatest adventure stories ever written and turned it into a muling pile of crap.
I take exception to that. Treasure Planet captured the spirit of the story and most of the details. The whole eighteenth century with robots and rockets style was cool. The soundtrack was good. The voice for Billy Bones was great. It had the most creative version of Ben Gunn since Miss Piggy in the Muppet version. The scene where Israel Hands flies out into space from the mast instead of dropping into the sea was a nice way to reimagine the story's most exciting moment.
Treasure Planet was good. I think it was too esoteric to be a commercial success.