You may install and use a piece of software which cost $5.50 to develop but which saves your organisation $500,000 per year. Someone sells that software to you for $450,000. You save $50,000 on the first year and $500,000 per year every year after that. The vendor makes $449,994.5 profit on the first implementation and $450,000 profit on each subsequent implementation.
What's the value of that software? $5.50? Bollocks it is.
Cost and value aren't directly related and the reason you aren't earning $1 million a year is because you don't understand that, or if you do, you're unwilling or unable to exploit the knowledge.
Restrictions are designed to increase the profitability of the vendor and therefore always increase the costs to customers. Inevitably at some point a more open and lower cost alternative always appears. If IBM hadn't released the specs, something else would have appeared which we'd be using now. It's economically inevitable. This is actually why Linux will ultimately replace Windows and most other operating systems.
We obviously have a hub & spoke system at the moment, the economic change to switched requires the hub and spoke system to become more expensive or switched transport to become less expensive. Hub & spoke is very expensive as it is, airports are expensive and large jets are also expensive. For that matter, trains are expensive, stations are expensive and rail lines are also very expensive. The additional security concerns will add to those costs.
Switched transport though has to become cheaper. At the moment it's limited primarily by the cost of the vehicle and cost of pilot/driver. The solution is to get rid of the pilot/driver entirely and to mass produce the vehicle to reduce the per unit cost. Frankly this means something like a fully automatedMoller aircar or CarterCopter for air transport and Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) for ground based transport.
While the West maintains its position as leading the global economy and farming out labor to the inhabitants of various countries in continental Asia
Actually this isn't a sustainable position economically. The more work which gets farmed out the greater the economic development of the Asian continent, the richer they become. Funnily enough they're catching up real quick now. In the meantime the US prints money to finance a war in Iraq devaluing the dollar hugely and allowing them to catch up even faster.
Yes, the fact is that Mr Bush is making you poor, the amusing part is that most USians can't see it, think the fact that everything is suddenly becoming expensive is weird economic voodoo or something.
So leading the global economy... Not for so much longer. Especially when the oil producing nations get sick of their dollar reserves devaluing and switch to the Euro or gold as the currency required for oil purchases. MMMmm, interesting times.
Other countries actually handle alcohol rather well. It seems that the habit of bingeing on alcohol in the evening and at the weekends for instance is a particularly UK issue, it simply doesn't happen to the same extent on the continent. Those same countries also happen to have far more liberal licensing laws than we do, though we've just changed ours this year.
Those societal problems you mentioned... not caused by alcohol, they're not even prevented by making alcohol illegal. Alcohol related problems are a symptom of other problems within society.
Prohibition on the other hand is a proven failure, 40 years of failure now. I can get hold of pretty much any drug of choice within 20 mins of leaving my house (they deliver btw, no need to leave). It takes only slightly longer than getting the groceries. The best the police can do is change the market price.
It's pretty trivial to completely annonymise the search data and still make useful statistical restults from it.
You give out the user accounts, with that you generate a unique key for the individual which you don't store in the account but in a cookie you give to the client browser. You create a second account based on the unique cookie key which has all of the data you're interested in, preferences, age, sex, weight, search history etc but no names, no addresses or other identity info. Then the user has control of the link between their identity and the information trail.
The user can discard the key cookie at any time and the link is broken between the identity and the preferences/information trail. The government comes in, confiscates the computer systems and they now have two sets of account information. One set with identities (names, addresses etc) and another anonymous one with all of the search information and preferences, Google can quite legitimately say that they have no way to link the information together.
I've often wondered two things. One, shouldn't I be a freakin' gazillionaire by now?
Millions of people have good ideas every day, but 99.999% of them never do anything with them. An idea is literally useless unless you actually do something with it.
Which is fair enough, some big server cards do this, it's quite neat and frees up the CPU for other tasks. Same idea as SCSI, I2O or the GPU in video cards. in which case a game might well run faster with the card installed.
Run the ATM stack on your machine, miss out the local area network entirely. In theory that removes a hop and therefore that hop's latency from the route between you and the server. Not impossible, but you'd have to be a hard core gamer and a little dim to bother.
Fantastic bit of kit, I wish I still had a similar environment. i've looked for years but nothing's quite the same, including the clones. Man I could develop quickly with that stuff. Look, no mouse! Mmmm TurboRuby...
The Labour party definitely still has socialist leanings, economically they have liberalised but socially they still believe strongly in authoritative, centralised control. We see it with all of the recent legislation. The liberal democrats on the other hand do believe strongly in personal freedoms as well as economic freedoms.
It's the electoral system which decides the electability of the political parties. The Labour party for example have only 34% of the vote nationally. Mmm, highly electable. especially when the Conservatives achieved a higher (but irrelevant) 35% of the vote during the election. The UK electoral system is corrupt.
It's perverse to vote for a party you don't believe in on electability grounds when there's a party which (almost) exactly matches your beliefs and which would benefit from support.
There are no high brow video games because there are no highbrow gamers. Face it, if you play video games, you've got the attention span of a goldfish. Simple really.
On the brighter side, give it a generation or two though, eventually DOOM 2 will be considered the height of culture.
We have a big rotating tower in Glasgow, manufactured by some Swedish company I think. Contract dispute with the council, the manufacturer employees are no longer alowed on site and nobody's allowed up the tower now.
They never have been liberal. I'm rather confused that you'd think they were... The conservative party is conservative, also not remotely liberal. The Liberal Democrats are... liberal... I have to be honest I don't understand your difficulty.
Once you understand how something works it isn't particularly complex. What he's saying basically is Linux... Doh!
Linux is Linux whichever distribution. There may be things in different places now and again or may be missing here or there but lets face it, not remotely difficult to fix.
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Value is not cost.
You may install and use a piece of software which cost $5.50 to develop but which saves your organisation $500,000 per year. Someone sells that software to you for $450,000. You save $50,000 on the first year and $500,000 per year every year after that. The vendor makes $449,994.5 profit on the first implementation and $450,000 profit on each subsequent implementation.
What's the value of that software? $5.50? Bollocks it is.
Cost and value aren't directly related and the reason you aren't earning $1 million a year is because you don't understand that, or if you do, you're unwilling or unable to exploit the knowledge.
That's all muscle! No?
Restrictions are designed to increase the profitability of the vendor and therefore always increase the costs to customers. Inevitably at some point a more open and lower cost alternative always appears. If IBM hadn't released the specs, something else would have appeared which we'd be using now. It's economically inevitable. This is actually why Linux will ultimately replace Windows and most other operating systems.
We obviously have a hub & spoke system at the moment, the economic change to switched requires the hub and spoke system to become more expensive or switched transport to become less expensive. Hub & spoke is very expensive as it is, airports are expensive and large jets are also expensive. For that matter, trains are expensive, stations are expensive and rail lines are also very expensive. The additional security concerns will add to those costs.
Switched transport though has to become cheaper. At the moment it's limited primarily by the cost of the vehicle and cost of pilot/driver. The solution is to get rid of the pilot/driver entirely and to mass produce the vehicle to reduce the per unit cost. Frankly this means something like a fully automated Moller aircar or CarterCopter for air transport and Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) for ground based transport.
Someone's having a larf. Oh you do crack me up Messrs mymanfryday and CmdrTaco.
Please try the bittorrent. No, wait... Teach em a lesson, make em burn.
Actually this isn't a sustainable position economically. The more work which gets farmed out the greater the economic development of the Asian continent, the richer they become. Funnily enough they're catching up real quick now. In the meantime the US prints money to finance a war in Iraq devaluing the dollar hugely and allowing them to catch up even faster.
Yes, the fact is that Mr Bush is making you poor, the amusing part is that most USians can't see it, think the fact that everything is suddenly becoming expensive is weird economic voodoo or something.
So leading the global economy... Not for so much longer. Especially when the oil producing nations get sick of their dollar reserves devaluing and switch to the Euro or gold as the currency required for oil purchases. MMMmm, interesting times.
Other countries actually handle alcohol rather well. It seems that the habit of bingeing on alcohol in the evening and at the weekends for instance is a particularly UK issue, it simply doesn't happen to the same extent on the continent. Those same countries also happen to have far more liberal licensing laws than we do, though we've just changed ours this year.
Those societal problems you mentioned... not caused by alcohol, they're not even prevented by making alcohol illegal. Alcohol related problems are a symptom of other problems within society.
Prohibition on the other hand is a proven failure, 40 years of failure now. I can get hold of pretty much any drug of choice within 20 mins of leaving my house (they deliver btw, no need to leave). It takes only slightly longer than getting the groceries. The best the police can do is change the market price.
i.e. it isn't meant to be part of the A.I. system itself. Rather it's meant as a reference or teaching system for any AI systems which are developed.
It's pretty trivial to completely annonymise the search data and still make useful statistical restults from it.
You give out the user accounts, with that you generate a unique key for the individual which you don't store in the account but in a cookie you give to the client browser. You create a second account based on the unique cookie key which has all of the data you're interested in, preferences, age, sex, weight, search history etc but no names, no addresses or other identity info. Then the user has control of the link between their identity and the information trail.
The user can discard the key cookie at any time and the link is broken between the identity and the preferences/information trail. The government comes in, confiscates the computer systems and they now have two sets of account information. One set with identities (names, addresses etc) and another anonymous one with all of the search information and preferences, Google can quite legitimately say that they have no way to link the information together.
And they already been doing that for years.
http://www.google.co.uk/press/zeitgeist.html
You seriously need to visit some countries where the quality of food is important.
Millions of people have good ideas every day, but 99.999% of them never do anything with them. An idea is literally useless unless you actually do something with it.
The ability to bowl defining the level of intelligence. Homer would be proud.
Which is fair enough, some big server cards do this, it's quite neat and frees up the CPU for other tasks. Same idea as SCSI, I2O or the GPU in video cards. in which case a game might well run faster with the card installed.
Run the ATM stack on your machine, miss out the local area network entirely. In theory that removes a hop and therefore that hop's latency from the route between you and the server. Not impossible, but you'd have to be a hard core gamer and a little dim to bother.
Fantastic bit of kit, I wish I still had a similar environment. i've looked for years but nothing's quite the same, including the clones. Man I could develop quickly with that stuff. Look, no mouse! Mmmm TurboRuby...
The Labour party definitely still has socialist leanings, economically they have liberalised but socially they still believe strongly in authoritative, centralised control. We see it with all of the recent legislation. The liberal democrats on the other hand do believe strongly in personal freedoms as well as economic freedoms.
It's the electoral system which decides the electability of the political parties. The Labour party for example have only 34% of the vote nationally. Mmm, highly electable. especially when the Conservatives achieved a higher (but irrelevant) 35% of the vote during the election. The UK electoral system is corrupt.
It's perverse to vote for a party you don't believe in on electability grounds when there's a party which (almost) exactly matches your beliefs and which would benefit from support.
There are no high brow video games because there are no highbrow gamers. Face it, if you play video games, you've got the attention span of a goldfish. Simple really.
On the brighter side, give it a generation or two though, eventually DOOM 2 will be considered the height of culture.
We have a big rotating tower in Glasgow, manufactured by some Swedish company I think. Contract dispute with the council, the manufacturer employees are no longer alowed on site and nobody's allowed up the tower now.
I'm sorry, but WTF?
Don't you love it when people have no idea what they're asking for. At least it lets you point and laugh.
They never have been liberal. I'm rather confused that you'd think they were... The conservative party is conservative, also not remotely liberal. The Liberal Democrats are... liberal... I have to be honest I don't understand your difficulty.
Once you understand how something works it isn't particularly complex. What he's saying basically is Linux... Doh!
Linux is Linux whichever distribution. There may be things in different places now and again or may be missing here or there but lets face it, not remotely difficult to fix.
http://www.tivo.com/
Read all about it! Anonymous Coward is going to switch operating systems.