The fundamentals of the broken window fallacy means that if you break the bakers window you create a demand for another window and 'stimulate' the economy. The Fallacy aspect is the fact that the baker has now spent that money on a new window instead of a new pot that he needed as well, leading to a sum of a broken window, a new whole window but no new pot. The loss is the opportunity cost of something else not getting bought and produced.
The same applies to wine bottles (if they're drinking (or breaking) them to create demand rather than to enjoy them).
The same could theoretically be applied to virtual goods destruction, but the opportunity cost for virtual goods is actually in the creation side for them. As they are artificially scarce they could theoretically be instantiated en-masse without any cost at all, freeing up money for the production of actual scarce resources being created within the economy.
However, at least for games like EVE, a significant portion of the entertainment is derived from the production of artificially scarce virtual goods. People pay to sit around producing them, unlike windows where very few pay to hang around in a window factory making windows. This means that the failure to just instantiate a titan for anyone who wants one does not carry the same cost to the real world economy as would a failure to instantly replicate a window, could it be done at the same zero cost.
The difference being that wine bottles are scarce, while EVE assets are artificially scarce and could be replaced instantly without any labour or resources being consumed. If any 'real' economic damage is inflicted it's through artificial scarcity.
Of course, as that scarcity is a significant factor in the entertainment value of EVE, and the 'labour' required actually being considered entertainment by some as well it's not as simple as saying it's 'damage' and arguments in favour of the function can't be relegated to a reflection of the broken window fallacy.
You could rewrite the headline to 'Battle causes the opportunity of $200k worth of gameplay about building starships' and it would hold some validity as well.
For whistleblower laws to do any good at all they really need to be enforced with with prohibitive and spectacular zeal, ie, anyone attempting to act against a whistleblower needs to get landed in jail so fast their head spins.
Of course, we all know it doesn't work like that. Perhaps the whistleblower won't get prosecuted but they are likely to lose their job or at the very least they'll find their social situation at work impossible to deal with. Few actions against the whistleblower will ever be punished.
Realistically it's go to the press and hope the attention makes retaliation difficult, or shut up and do something else if you don't want to be complicit in whatever illegal acts happening that should be leaked. Snowden's assessment was without a doubt correct and he chose the only possible ethical course of action.
I can't even remember when I went last, it must've been more than a decade ago. It's not like it's an excessively pleasant experience to begin with and the handing of money to the MPAA in combination with the theatre anti-piracy crap pretty much was the final nail in that coffin.
Get a good projector and download cam releases made by people wearing google glass if you want the theatre experience.
No consumer has more than 24 hours per day and most arts are infinitely duplicatable. The failure lies in demand as the entire worlds demand is easily filled by a miniscule number of producers who also get to compete with everything already produced.
Services are slightly more resilient, but frankly, replacing cooks, stylists and hairdressers is more a question of when it's profitable to do so than any inherent difficulty.
Unfortunately I think the system is a bit to susceptible to regulatory capture. And considering the nature of Monsanto as a corporation that, given a choice between developing a product that was vastly profitable and one less profitable but would also give the consumers inheritable cancer, would chose the cancer one I'm not convinced that regulation can become trustworthy enough.
I have nothing against GMO per-se, but unless companies like Monsanto can be permanently dispatched to history, and for as long as glaring misapplications of GMO tech seem to be the most common uses (ie, doomed short term applications whose use will soon be negated by resistance buildup in weeds or pests) I'd rather see bans than no bans.
Ultimately, it's not that GMO is that hard to appreciate. I think you'd find that if 90% of screwdrivers were used to build bombs there'd be a lot of interest in banning screwdrivers.
If they have even the slightest concern about appearing to care about legalities they're probably outsourcing it to GCHQ or one of their other partners who will do just enough (with NSA consultant personell if they feel like it) to cover the bare necessities. So of course they'll say no and of course they're spying on congress.
The pixel count increases as it's a selling point. The optics on most things like phones seem to stay the same utter crap, barely enough to saturate the ccd in full sunlight, leaving most of those megapixels as random noise. Leaving any CSI style zoom as something achievable in photos specifically taken with the proper equipment and setup to allow CSI style zoom but not in the junk quality images they pretend to enhance in CSI.
Yeah, and if that was what was going to happen, maybe Snowden would have stayed. Preferring to avoid torture followed by more torture followed by American prisonrape followed by some more torture does not cast a shadow on Snowdens heroic actions. He's certainly given up enough to prove his sincerity.
As far as I can tell, traditional 100 watt bulbs are more in the 1000 lumen range, with modern halogen incandecents being about 13-1400 lumen. A quick search places a 30watt CFL at 2000 lumen, almost twice what an incandecent does.
I actually have a couple of 60w CFL's with an output of 4200 lumens each. Granted you can't stick them in most lamps due to size but they fit in a standard socket.
They used to have audit logs but then someone pointed out Keith's LOVEINT logs and there were grumblings about Rick's kickbacks from businesses. Best just to leave accesses to data unlogged so everyone can go around their business without interference. Who could have expected someone like Snowden actually taking a moral high ground? With all that unmonitored and unsupervised access to everything about everyone he should have had some fun with the dirt, like everyone else.
With multiple sources of information and technologies, the system becomes lucrative.
You will, however, get even more false positives. Which doesn't matter as long as the account balance for the scammers selling useless junk to gullible officials gets real positive.
Was this an actual new movie or just another reskin of Save the Cat?
Frankly I find myself 'watching' movies by simply reading their wikipedia entry these days. I've seen CGI before so the text version gets to the point much more quickly.
Um, yes, NSA is engaged in industrial espionage as well. At least Petrobras has been suggested as a target as well as the known ECHELON incidents. Most likely they're just better at hiding it as they tap directly in to the infrastructure rather than engaging in directed intrusions as often.
And frankly, even as a US corporation I'd say there's cause to worry unless you're the one cosying up with the NSA or your trade secrets might just end up with your competitors who happen to be pals with the right brass.
The failure in the implementation is failing in temporal targeting. It doesn't matter if you know what someone's interests are if you don't know _when_ they are. Someone may be interested in psychedelics but they're not interested in them when at work or while chatting to a friend. They're interested in them while reading information on psychedelics.
That's why the tracking is pointless. You're getting worse targeting than if you simply target the content because it doesn't matter who they are, it only matters what they're doing at the moment. The content gives you both the information that they're interested in the target subject and that they're interested in it at that point in time.
You don't want a random sales guy sitting down at your table in a bar when you're talking with a friend and saying 'I've been following you around and would like to suggest you buy this oven I can tell you about'. But you might actually be receptive to a sales guy coming up next to you when you're looking at ovens and saying 'I can tell you something about the oven you're looking at if you want'.
Frankly I doubt it's that useful an indicator, with the prevalence probably ranging in the 50+% range (and I wouldn't be surprised at an actual 100% prevalence). Traits like empaty and reasoning like ethics take time to mature. Now, if they still abuse animals or insects at 20+ there may be some possible issues.
Personally I can recall some magnifying glass incidents I'm not proud of. 30 years later, I'll usually release flies outside if I manage to catch them alive.
The most compelling reason for blocking child porn is not that it depicts the victim of a crime or has been produced by a crime, but that the very existence and distribution of the material can arguably be considered abuse and harm the victim. Considering the strong desire expressed from some to be able to remove embarrassing private history off facebook and other places, I would imagine the psychological impact of such materials being widely spread to be several orders of magnitude worse.
Maemo could easily have been adapted to run android apps as well and the capability was even commercially available before Elop took over. An android track at Nokia could have had a decent chance competing with Samsung. Having an OS that there are actually people who want would have put Nokia at least in a better position.
Considering Nokia was selling 10 times as many phones as Apple in 2010 they certainly were utterly crushing iphones.
So, Nokia certainly had a future and Elop certainly ran one of the greatest destructions of value in history. Hopefully he'll go on doing the same and finish what Ballmer's started at Microsoft.
Right. The NSA is very picky about getting good data so they're not interested in just dragnetting the whole internet and dumping it all in a huge database... No, wait, that was the NSA in that fantasy land I made up the other day that wasn't run by asshats.
This is the NSA in this reality and yes they will store any quality data on any users fingerprint, not because it might actually be good for stopping terrorists but because they can use it as a selling point to up their budget. Or sell it to governments they can trick into thinking it's useful. So of course the NSA will get a copy, pre-hash, of the fingerprints and they'll store it together with the rest of the useless crap they have stored. They won't stop any terrorists with it, but they'll claim they did and maybe they'll nail one or two false positives for fun.
One sort of wonders if the bids to host the Olympics are drying up. If the choice is between one country that will massively riot at Olympic spending while the economy is crap, another country that might very well be in civil disorder due to conflict between a repressive religious government and a significant secular population and a third that has significant problems with radioactive materials in the hands of idiots then I suspect the events surrounding the games will be far more exciting than the actual games.
Well, on the bright side there are few things that work as well for collapsing profitability as mass producing expensive hardware that nobody actually wants. While Nokia shareholders certainly and deservedly (for hiring someone with the profile of Elop with the similarities to such as Richard Beluzzo) got thoroughly screwed, this may become a significant lodestone that sinks Microsoft faster than it would risk otherwise.
Perhaps he will replace Ballmer. He does appear to have the desired 'consumers should just shut the fsck up and buy what we tell them to' attitude to consumer relations and seems as adept at handling employees and morale to make the shift in leadership seamless.
Somehow I suspect the problem at Microsoft is the board. They aquired the stock while liking the mindset of the management and having kept Ballmer for so long they obviously want that. They'll keep running it the same way, all the way into the eventual crash into the ground.
Slashdot Mirror
The fundamentals of the broken window fallacy means that if you break the bakers window you create a demand for another window and 'stimulate' the economy. The Fallacy aspect is the fact that the baker has now spent that money on a new window instead of a new pot that he needed as well, leading to a sum of a broken window, a new whole window but no new pot. The loss is the opportunity cost of something else not getting bought and produced.
The same applies to wine bottles (if they're drinking (or breaking) them to create demand rather than to enjoy them).
The same could theoretically be applied to virtual goods destruction, but the opportunity cost for virtual goods is actually in the creation side for them. As they are artificially scarce they could theoretically be instantiated en-masse without any cost at all, freeing up money for the production of actual scarce resources being created within the economy.
However, at least for games like EVE, a significant portion of the entertainment is derived from the production of artificially scarce virtual goods. People pay to sit around producing them, unlike windows where very few pay to hang around in a window factory making windows. This means that the failure to just instantiate a titan for anyone who wants one does not carry the same cost to the real world economy as would a failure to instantly replicate a window, could it be done at the same zero cost.
The difference being that wine bottles are scarce, while EVE assets are artificially scarce and could be replaced instantly without any labour or resources being consumed. If any 'real' economic damage is inflicted it's through artificial scarcity.
Of course, as that scarcity is a significant factor in the entertainment value of EVE, and the 'labour' required actually being considered entertainment by some as well it's not as simple as saying it's 'damage' and arguments in favour of the function can't be relegated to a reflection of the broken window fallacy.
You could rewrite the headline to 'Battle causes the opportunity of $200k worth of gameplay about building starships' and it would hold some validity as well.
For whistleblower laws to do any good at all they really need to be enforced with with prohibitive and spectacular zeal, ie, anyone attempting to act against a whistleblower needs to get landed in jail so fast their head spins.
Of course, we all know it doesn't work like that. Perhaps the whistleblower won't get prosecuted but they are likely to lose their job or at the very least they'll find their social situation at work impossible to deal with. Few actions against the whistleblower will ever be punished.
Realistically it's go to the press and hope the attention makes retaliation difficult, or shut up and do something else if you don't want to be complicit in whatever illegal acts happening that should be leaked. Snowden's assessment was without a doubt correct and he chose the only possible ethical course of action.
Even better, don't go to a movie theatre.
I can't even remember when I went last, it must've been more than a decade ago. It's not like it's an excessively pleasant experience to begin with and the handing of money to the MPAA in combination with the theatre anti-piracy crap pretty much was the final nail in that coffin.
Get a good projector and download cam releases made by people wearing google glass if you want the theatre experience.
No consumer has more than 24 hours per day and most arts are infinitely duplicatable. The failure lies in demand as the entire worlds demand is easily filled by a miniscule number of producers who also get to compete with everything already produced.
Services are slightly more resilient, but frankly, replacing cooks, stylists and hairdressers is more a question of when it's profitable to do so than any inherent difficulty.
Unfortunately I think the system is a bit to susceptible to regulatory capture. And considering the nature of Monsanto as a corporation that, given a choice between developing a product that was vastly profitable and one less profitable but would also give the consumers inheritable cancer, would chose the cancer one I'm not convinced that regulation can become trustworthy enough.
I have nothing against GMO per-se, but unless companies like Monsanto can be permanently dispatched to history, and for as long as glaring misapplications of GMO tech seem to be the most common uses (ie, doomed short term applications whose use will soon be negated by resistance buildup in weeds or pests) I'd rather see bans than no bans.
Ultimately, it's not that GMO is that hard to appreciate. I think you'd find that if 90% of screwdrivers were used to build bombs there'd be a lot of interest in banning screwdrivers.
If they have even the slightest concern about appearing to care about legalities they're probably outsourcing it to GCHQ or one of their other partners who will do just enough (with NSA consultant personell if they feel like it) to cover the bare necessities. So of course they'll say no and of course they're spying on congress.
Frankly it sounded more like a threat. Maybe the NSA is planning to take their treasonous activities to the next level.
The pixel count increases as it's a selling point. The optics on most things like phones seem to stay the same utter crap, barely enough to saturate the ccd in full sunlight, leaving most of those megapixels as random noise. Leaving any CSI style zoom as something achievable in photos specifically taken with the proper equipment and setup to allow CSI style zoom but not in the junk quality images they pretend to enhance in CSI.
Yeah, and if that was what was going to happen, maybe Snowden would have stayed. Preferring to avoid torture followed by more torture followed by American prisonrape followed by some more torture does not cast a shadow on Snowdens heroic actions. He's certainly given up enough to prove his sincerity.
Even a cursory googling quickly turns up articles like this: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10609822 or this http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15950004
You obviously have no clue what you're talking about and haven't even bothered to even perform the bare minimum to inform yourself.
As far as I can tell, traditional 100 watt bulbs are more in the 1000 lumen range, with modern halogen incandecents being about 13-1400 lumen. A quick search places a 30watt CFL at 2000 lumen, almost twice what an incandecent does.
I actually have a couple of 60w CFL's with an output of 4200 lumens each. Granted you can't stick them in most lamps due to size but they fit in a standard socket.
They used to have audit logs but then someone pointed out Keith's LOVEINT logs and there were grumblings about Rick's kickbacks from businesses. Best just to leave accesses to data unlogged so everyone can go around their business without interference. Who could have expected someone like Snowden actually taking a moral high ground? With all that unmonitored and unsupervised access to everything about everyone he should have had some fun with the dirt, like everyone else.
With multiple sources of information and technologies, the system becomes lucrative.
You will, however, get even more false positives. Which doesn't matter as long as the account balance for the scammers selling useless junk to gullible officials gets real positive.
Was this an actual new movie or just another reskin of Save the Cat?
Frankly I find myself 'watching' movies by simply reading their wikipedia entry these days. I've seen CGI before so the text version gets to the point much more quickly.
Of course, as the parties providing oversight and budget are getting kickbacks it's instead considered a most lucrative waste of time.
Um, yes, NSA is engaged in industrial espionage as well. At least Petrobras has been suggested as a target as well as the known ECHELON incidents. Most likely they're just better at hiding it as they tap directly in to the infrastructure rather than engaging in directed intrusions as often.
And frankly, even as a US corporation I'd say there's cause to worry unless you're the one cosying up with the NSA or your trade secrets might just end up with your competitors who happen to be pals with the right brass.
The failure in the implementation is failing in temporal targeting. It doesn't matter if you know what someone's interests are if you don't know _when_ they are. Someone may be interested in psychedelics but they're not interested in them when at work or while chatting to a friend. They're interested in them while reading information on psychedelics.
That's why the tracking is pointless. You're getting worse targeting than if you simply target the content because it doesn't matter who they are, it only matters what they're doing at the moment. The content gives you both the information that they're interested in the target subject and that they're interested in it at that point in time.
You don't want a random sales guy sitting down at your table in a bar when you're talking with a friend and saying 'I've been following you around and would like to suggest you buy this oven I can tell you about'. But you might actually be receptive to a sales guy coming up next to you when you're looking at ovens and saying 'I can tell you something about the oven you're looking at if you want'.
Frankly I doubt it's that useful an indicator, with the prevalence probably ranging in the 50+% range (and I wouldn't be surprised at an actual 100% prevalence). Traits like empaty and reasoning like ethics take time to mature. Now, if they still abuse animals or insects at 20+ there may be some possible issues.
Personally I can recall some magnifying glass incidents I'm not proud of. 30 years later, I'll usually release flies outside if I manage to catch them alive.
The most compelling reason for blocking child porn is not that it depicts the victim of a crime or has been produced by a crime, but that the very existence and distribution of the material can arguably be considered abuse and harm the victim. Considering the strong desire expressed from some to be able to remove embarrassing private history off facebook and other places, I would imagine the psychological impact of such materials being widely spread to be several orders of magnitude worse.
Maemo could easily have been adapted to run android apps as well and the capability was even commercially available before Elop took over. An android track at Nokia could have had a decent chance competing with Samsung. Having an OS that there are actually people who want would have put Nokia at least in a better position.
Considering Nokia was selling 10 times as many phones as Apple in 2010 they certainly were utterly crushing iphones.
So, Nokia certainly had a future and Elop certainly ran one of the greatest destructions of value in history. Hopefully he'll go on doing the same and finish what Ballmer's started at Microsoft.
Right. The NSA is very picky about getting good data so they're not interested in just dragnetting the whole internet and dumping it all in a huge database... No, wait, that was the NSA in that fantasy land I made up the other day that wasn't run by asshats.
This is the NSA in this reality and yes they will store any quality data on any users fingerprint, not because it might actually be good for stopping terrorists but because they can use it as a selling point to up their budget. Or sell it to governments they can trick into thinking it's useful. So of course the NSA will get a copy, pre-hash, of the fingerprints and they'll store it together with the rest of the useless crap they have stored. They won't stop any terrorists with it, but they'll claim they did and maybe they'll nail one or two false positives for fun.
One sort of wonders if the bids to host the Olympics are drying up. If the choice is between one country that will massively riot at Olympic spending while the economy is crap, another country that might very well be in civil disorder due to conflict between a repressive religious government and a significant secular population and a third that has significant problems with radioactive materials in the hands of idiots then I suspect the events surrounding the games will be far more exciting than the actual games.
Well, on the bright side there are few things that work as well for collapsing profitability as mass producing expensive hardware that nobody actually wants. While Nokia shareholders certainly and deservedly (for hiring someone with the profile of Elop with the similarities to such as Richard Beluzzo) got thoroughly screwed, this may become a significant lodestone that sinks Microsoft faster than it would risk otherwise.
Perhaps he will replace Ballmer. He does appear to have the desired 'consumers should just shut the fsck up and buy what we tell them to' attitude to consumer relations and seems as adept at handling employees and morale to make the shift in leadership seamless.
Somehow I suspect the problem at Microsoft is the board. They aquired the stock while liking the mindset of the management and having kept Ballmer for so long they obviously want that. They'll keep running it the same way, all the way into the eventual crash into the ground.