b)Manufactured cost is NOT market cost. Not even close. If a NE display lasts longer than plasma and looks equally nice- you can be damn sure it will cost MORE to the consumer.
Mod parent up. This is basic economics. If this technology drops the manufactured price from whatever it is now* to $400, then sellers can afford to sell at a lower price point to a broader audience. Sure, keeping the retail price at the current level would give them a higher profit margin per item**, but serving that bigger market at that lower price could produce much more total profit.
*The next thing we need to know is the current manufactured price of plasma screens and the shape of the demand price curve in the HDTV market. Then we can make some predictions.
**Which is what they'll do short term, since early manufacturing is sure to be in limited quantities.
Operational full color 5" video section of a 1280 x 720, 16:9, 42-inch HDTV
That's quite an impressive description, but what was demonstrated seems to have been a 5" display in 16:9 ratio having about 153x87 pixels, measuring about 4.36" x 2.45". Whether the process does scale as claimed remains to be proved.
continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena
Arguing against a statement that is accurate makes us look stupid and unreasonable. Instead, let us agree to this statement of scientific principle and the demand that the creationists use it to validate the truthfulness of their own religion. Imagine this:
"Christianity is a theory, not a law. You, the student must decide for yourself whether Christianity is true by questioning its assumptions and testing its preditions."
continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena
Arguing against a statement that is accurate makes us look stupid and unreasonable. Better that we should simply say "yes" and move on. The ID fans say enough faultable things. Let's pick our battles there, where we can win.
because [the Nobels are] not awarded posthumously, it sometimes seems a race to award the prize to older scientists before they die.
Doesn't the same logic that says awarding the prize to a dead scientist does the world little good suggest that awarding the prize to a nearly dead scientist does the world little good?
What an odd collection of states have municipal fiber-to-the-premises working! What's the pattern here? AL (Sylacauga) FL (Quincy) GA (Dalton) IN (Auburn) OK (Sallisaw) PA (Kutztown) TN (Jackson) UT (Provo) VA (Bristol) WA (Chelan Co., Clallam Co., Douglas Co., Grant Co., Mason Co.) WI (Reedsburg)
Honestly, just what is the deal with these fundamentalists?
Answer: they're losing. If we RTFA, then we RTF Wikipedia article, and then we RTF external links in support of ID, we find something positively heartwarming. When the creationists fought this fight 30+ years ago, they said:
[S]cientific creationism is defined by the following six tenets: [1.] The universe, energy and life were created from nothing. [2.] Mutations and natural selection cannot bring about the development of all living things from a single organism. [3.] "Created kinds" of plants and organism can vary only within fixed limits [4.] Humans and apes have different ancestries. [5.] Earth's geology can be explained by catastrophism, primarily a worldwide flood [6.] The earth is young--in the range of 10,000 years or so.
But, we've since knocked down (disproved) so many of those creationist tenets that all they're left with is:
Intelligent design, on the other hand, involves two basic assumptions: [1.] Intelligent causes exist. [2.] These causes can be empirically detected...
They're in retreat and they don't have much ground left to give. Just makes you smile inside, doesn't it? Here's to the victories of the next 30 years!
So, are we supposed to have a good academic discussion about where we stand on the issue or are we supposed to flame anyone who is a proponent of Intelligent Design?
Instead, let's raise a pint and celebrate our victory over creationism. Schools now teach evolution as the mechanism by which life arrived in its present form. They teach no alternative mechanism. There is no danger of this changing any time soon. That's the ballgame, ladies and gentlemen -- we won.
The only argument still in play is whether there is scientific proof (a) that god exists or (b) that god doesn't exist. Recall that the theory of ID states no more than "I observe stuff that proves an intelligent designer acted."
But, we don't need to care about this. Let the religious folks believe what they want about whether god exists! So long as they acquiese to teaching kids how the mechanism of evolution works, that's enough. All of this debate about uncaused causers, anthropic principles, et al. is post-high school level stuff anyway.
Fair enough, but I don't think you've hit the biggest distinction between clothes and video games yet. For both, a person who has decided to make a purchase has a choice between a cheap serviceable item and an expensive current item.
A bigger difference between clothes and video games is that clothes wear out. Video games more or less don't. (So long as some compatible hardware can be scrounged.) In theory, a person who has purchased a "wardrobe" of games will have no need to purchase a new one next spring.
Am I the only one who expects a collapse of the [fashion] business soon? . . . It has happened before, and I can't see how people will keep shelling out $50 or so for a [piece of clothing] when the [clothes] have hardly changed since the invention of the [brassiere].
I complain to my kids about this, and they insist that things have changed markedly. They show me examples, and all I see are tweaks and weirder, mostly stupid [styles].
There are four or five simple [garments] and nothing really new or different.
The categories are [coats, shirts, skirts, pants, shoes, and hats, plus some add-on utilities like stockings, belts, gloves, bags, and jewelry]. That's it. Most of today's hottest [garments] are combinations of two or three of these categories, with a [marketing pitch] added to keep the [shoppers] from being bored stiff. When my kids show me [an outfit], I usually say that it's nothing but the same old [stuff] with a new [fabric, hemline, or collar]. They leave in a huff.
The categories are shooters, puzzles and mazes, adventure games, sports games, and simulations.
Video games hardly deserve all the blame for this. In the first place, humans only perceive and interact with their reality in a limited number of ways. In the second place, video games already mimic all the real-world game types played by humans (and add a few types that can't be played in real life); so, what more can we ask for?
Sure, it'd be a real acheivement if some one could come up with a video game that (a) was outside any of these categories and (b) was something humans would enjoy playing. But, it doesn't follow that video gaming is "dead" if no one does.
The categories are shooters, puzzles and mazes, adventure games, sports games, and simulations.
Did this strike anyone else as being too many categories? A better categorization would have been by interface and game rhythm: 1. First Person (Doom, PolePosition, FlightSim) 2. Third Person (Mortal Kombat, Space Invaders, Pong, PacMan, Zelda) 3. Strategy (Civ, Chess, fantasy baseball) 4. Puzzles (Tetris)
Sports is just a skin, not a category. For instance, football (american-style) can be played as 1st person, 3rd person, or strategy.
Seeing a Blackberry in 1805 would have no impact on the timeline, huh? To be sure, a modern physics books explains itself better than one Blackberry. And, we can be sure the the first guy to see a time-displaced Blackberry would, at a minimum, allow its battery to drain.
Still, just seeing the thing would have been immensely interesting to some of the scientists active in 1805, e.g. Faraday, Ohm, Avagadro, Ampere, Coulomb. By 1805, the state of the art was almost ready to try copying the materials, at least. The timeline would, at the least, have accelerated.
1687 Newton - Principia Mathematica 1800 Volta - chemical battery 1869 Mendeleyev - periodic table of elements 1879 Swan/Edison - light bulb 1907 Einstein - equivalence of mass and energy
It's hardly fair to ask the poor Blackberry to stack up against the impact of a book that condenses and distills all the physics discoveries of the last 200 years.
Independent Study in Tax Policy 455.02 (1 hours)
on
Tracking Your Taxes
·
· Score: 1
Pardon me if I don't trust the people who are deciding what's a necessity and what's not. After all, if I read the Canadian example correctly, _they_ wound up deciding that a dozen doughnuts was an essential, but that a roll of toilet paper was not. Goodness only knows what might happen if the U.S. Congress made such a list.
Yes, prohibiting publication of "Personally Identifiable Information" is censorship. It's just wise censorship.
censor: (v) to examine (as a publication or film) in order to suppress or delete any contents considered objectionable. Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of Law (1996).
It's time to refine our debate to the next level: not all censorship is evil. The classic example is surpressing the names of victims of sexual assault.
It's not that journalists have a greater right to free speech . . . but they do have this privilege (in those states that provide for one, not all do) to avoid having to reveal their sources.
It's also worth noting that a full-time journalist who spends time in jail for refusing to name a source may advance his/her career by doing so. (more respect from bosses, public, future sources; plus free publicity)
Bloggers are part-time journalists at best. Being in jail would interfere with their day jobs.
I'm more concerned about this part: "A further 72 percent favoured censorship of personal information about celebrities . .."
I'm pretty concerned about it, too. If, besides the 80% who wanted the one thing censored, there's a "further 72%" who want something else censored, that's 152%. Any time 152% of respondents are against us, there's a problem.
Men accounted for 71% or nearly 1.9 mln site visitors, compared to the women who comprised 29% or the minority population who visited in March 2005.
Did the writer suppose that there was some one out there that didn't know that 29% is a minority? Or did the writer just need help calculating 1.9mln / 71% * 29% = 0.78 mln?
(The grammarian I married would also like me to point out: 1. A sentence that says "the women" should have likewise said "the men". 2. The parenthetical comment "or the minority population" should have been surrounded by parentheses, or, at least, by commas. 3. Unless "March 2005" applies only to the women, at least one other comma is missing towards the end somewhere.)
So, legitimate = anything we can do that no one can stop us doing, even if they know we're doing it -- now matter how out-of-whack the result is
And, illegitimate = something that only works until we get caught
Not that I disagree with those definitions, but do you ever stop to wonder if there isn't some moral dimension to paying taxes? That is, if we like having a government around to keep order (e.g. by enforcing the concept of property), isn't it "wrong" to avoid paying our share of the burden?
To put it another way, if we avoid paying our share of the taxes, don't we lose our standing to complain about the state of the country and the world today? Don't we become part of the problem rather than the solution?
Me: "This doesn't look like GenCon." PalmAI: "No, this is your dentist appointment. I only told you it was GenCon so you'd be here." Me: "But, but . .." PalmAI: "Now, be a good girl and go sit in the nice chair."
My point (the only one that survives may misapprehensions that plague my grandparent post) is that given the source data and the conclusions, we have everything we need to trust or not trust the research.
In theory, to verify their result, I take their data, apply my own process, and decide for myself whether their conclusion is supported. Why do I need to know their process at a source code level? Rather than suggesting that we accept the unverifiable word of a scientific priesthood, I contend that, in theory, we already have all the necessary means to perform independent verification.
((In practice, since I am not competent in climate science and only adequate in statistics, I must rely on reviews of this source data performed and published by actual competent scientists. However, they too can perform the review from the data without the source code. Quid Erat Demonstrandum.))
Email storage is quickly headed the way of online service hours and cell phone plan minutes.
Once the company offers a quota larger than 99% of its users will use, then it can increase the quota arbitrarily without needing any additional resources to supply the (unused) storage space. After that, it's just a marketing exercise in using (pointlessly) inflated numbers to sell to new subscribers.
Slashdot Mirror
b)Manufactured cost is NOT market cost. Not even close. If a NE display lasts longer than plasma and looks equally nice- you can be damn sure it will cost MORE to the consumer.
Mod parent up. This is basic economics. If this technology drops the manufactured price from whatever it is now* to $400, then sellers can afford to sell at a lower price point to a broader audience. Sure, keeping the retail price at the current level would give them a higher profit margin per item**, but serving that bigger market at that lower price could produce much more total profit.
*The next thing we need to know is the current manufactured price of plasma screens and the shape of the demand price curve in the HDTV market. Then we can make some predictions.
**Which is what they'll do short term, since early manufacturing is sure to be in limited quantities.
Operational full color 5" video section of a 1280 x 720, 16:9, 42-inch HDTV
That's quite an impressive description, but what was demonstrated seems to have been a 5" display in 16:9 ratio having about 153x87 pixels, measuring about 4.36" x 2.45". Whether the process does scale as claimed remains to be proved.
continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena
Arguing against a statement that is accurate makes us look stupid and unreasonable. Instead, let us agree to this statement of scientific principle and the demand that the creationists use it to validate the truthfulness of their own religion. Imagine this:
"Christianity is a theory, not a law. You, the student must decide for yourself whether Christianity is true by questioning its assumptions and testing its preditions."
continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena
Arguing against a statement that is accurate makes us look stupid and unreasonable. Better that we should simply say "yes" and move on. The ID fans say enough faultable things. Let's pick our battles there, where we can win.
because [the Nobels are] not awarded posthumously, it sometimes seems a race to award the prize to older scientists before they die.
Doesn't the same logic that says awarding the prize to a dead scientist does the world little good suggest that awarding the prize to a nearly dead scientist does the world little good?
What an odd collection of states have municipal fiber-to-the-premises working! What's the pattern here?
AL (Sylacauga)
FL (Quincy)
GA (Dalton)
IN (Auburn)
OK (Sallisaw)
PA (Kutztown)
TN (Jackson)
UT (Provo)
VA (Bristol)
WA (Chelan Co., Clallam Co., Douglas Co., Grant Co., Mason Co.)
WI (Reedsburg)
Answer: they're losing. If we RTFA, then we RTF Wikipedia article, and then we RTF external links in support of ID, we find something positively heartwarming. When the creationists fought this fight 30+ years ago, they said:
But, we've since knocked down (disproved) so many of those creationist tenets that all they're left with is:
They're in retreat and they don't have much ground left to give. Just makes you smile inside, doesn't it? Here's to the victories of the next 30 years!
So, are we supposed to have a good academic discussion about where we stand on the issue or are we supposed to flame anyone who is a proponent of Intelligent Design?
Instead, let's raise a pint and celebrate our victory over creationism. Schools now teach evolution as the mechanism by which life arrived in its present form. They teach no alternative mechanism. There is no danger of this changing any time soon. That's the ballgame, ladies and gentlemen -- we won.
The only argument still in play is whether there is scientific proof (a) that god exists or (b) that god doesn't exist. Recall that the theory of ID states no more than "I observe stuff that proves an intelligent designer acted."
But, we don't need to care about this. Let the religious folks believe what they want about whether god exists! So long as they acquiese to teaching kids how the mechanism of evolution works, that's enough. All of this debate about uncaused causers, anthropic principles, et al. is post-high school level stuff anyway.
Fair enough, but I don't think you've hit the biggest distinction between clothes and video games yet. For both, a person who has decided to make a purchase has a choice between a cheap serviceable item and an expensive current item.
A bigger difference between clothes and video games is that clothes wear out. Video games more or less don't. (So long as some compatible hardware can be scrounged.) In theory, a person who has purchased a "wardrobe" of games will have no need to purchase a new one next spring.
Am I the only one who expects a collapse of the [fashion] business soon? . . . It has happened before, and I can't see how people will keep shelling out $50 or so for a [piece of clothing] when the [clothes] have hardly changed since the invention of the [brassiere].
I complain to my kids about this, and they insist that things have changed markedly. They show me examples, and all I see are tweaks and weirder, mostly stupid [styles].
There are four or five simple [garments] and nothing really new or different.
The categories are [coats, shirts, skirts, pants, shoes, and hats, plus some add-on utilities like stockings, belts, gloves, bags, and jewelry]. That's it. Most of today's hottest [garments] are combinations of two or three of these categories, with a [marketing pitch] added to keep the [shoppers] from being bored stiff. When my kids show me [an outfit], I usually say that it's nothing but the same old [stuff] with a new [fabric, hemline, or collar]. They leave in a huff.
The categories are shooters, puzzles and mazes, adventure games, sports games, and simulations.
Video games hardly deserve all the blame for this. In the first place, humans only perceive and interact with their reality in a limited number of ways. In the second place, video games already mimic all the real-world game types played by humans (and add a few types that can't be played in real life); so, what more can we ask for?
Sure, it'd be a real acheivement if some one could come up with a video game that (a) was outside any of these categories and (b) was something humans would enjoy playing. But, it doesn't follow that video gaming is "dead" if no one does.
The categories are shooters, puzzles and mazes, adventure games, sports games, and simulations.
Did this strike anyone else as being too many categories? A better categorization would have been by interface and game rhythm:
1. First Person (Doom, PolePosition, FlightSim)
2. Third Person (Mortal Kombat, Space Invaders, Pong, PacMan, Zelda)
3. Strategy (Civ, Chess, fantasy baseball)
4. Puzzles (Tetris)
Sports is just a skin, not a category. For instance, football (american-style) can be played as 1st person, 3rd person, or strategy.
Seeing a Blackberry in 1805 would have no impact on the timeline, huh? To be sure, a modern physics books explains itself better than one Blackberry. And, we can be sure the the first guy to see a time-displaced Blackberry would, at a minimum, allow its battery to drain.
Still, just seeing the thing would have been immensely interesting to some of the scientists active in 1805, e.g. Faraday, Ohm, Avagadro, Ampere, Coulomb. By 1805, the state of the art was almost ready to try copying the materials, at least. The timeline would, at the least, have accelerated.
1687 Newton - Principia Mathematica
1800 Volta - chemical battery
1869 Mendeleyev - periodic table of elements
1879 Swan/Edison - light bulb
1907 Einstein - equivalence of mass and energy
It's hardly fair to ask the poor Blackberry to stack up against the impact of a book that condenses and distills all the physics discoveries of the last 200 years.
Develop a standard form for evaluating new tax proposals. Use as a model the
Considerations:
tax where the money is -- those without money cannot pay
avoid overly impeding the flow of resources towards efficient uses
don't take so much from anyone that they cannot live adequately
provide sufficient tax revenue (completion of Introduction to Spending Policy 360 is suggested, though not required)
keep it simple -- to minimize illegal avoidance, cost of collection, and general confusion
provide steady revenue under all economic conditions to extent possible
objective results will determine more of your grade than subjective "fairness"
So nobody pays tax on necessities.
Pardon me if I don't trust the people who are deciding what's a necessity and what's not. After all, if I read the Canadian example correctly, _they_ wound up deciding that a dozen doughnuts was an essential, but that a roll of toilet paper was not. Goodness only knows what might happen if the U.S. Congress made such a list.
It's time to refine our debate to the next level: not all censorship is evil. The classic example is surpressing the names of victims of sexual assault.
It's not that journalists have a greater right to free speech . . . but they do have this privilege (in those states that provide for one, not all do) to avoid having to reveal their sources.
It's also worth noting that a full-time journalist who spends time in jail for refusing to name a source may advance his/her career by doing so. (more respect from bosses, public, future sources; plus free publicity)
Bloggers are part-time journalists at best. Being in jail would interfere with their day jobs.
Neither. The things to wish for are either (a) that the husband had been home half an hour earlier or (b) that the wife had had a weapon.
"Choice of armaments" is such a poor thing to waste a wish on!
I'm more concerned about this part: "A further 72 percent favoured censorship of personal information about celebrities . . ."
I'm pretty concerned about it, too. If, besides the 80% who wanted the one thing censored, there's a "further 72%" who want something else censored, that's 152%. Any time 152% of respondents are against us, there's a problem.
Men accounted for 71% or nearly 1.9 mln site visitors, compared to the women who comprised 29% or the minority population who visited in March 2005.
Did the writer suppose that there was some one out there that didn't know that 29% is a minority? Or did the writer just need help calculating 1.9mln / 71% * 29% = 0.78 mln?
(The grammarian I married would also like me to point out:
1. A sentence that says "the women" should have likewise said "the men".
2. The parenthetical comment "or the minority population" should have been surrounded by parentheses, or, at least, by commas.
3. Unless "March 2005" applies only to the women, at least one other comma is missing towards the end somewhere.)
Well, teach me! It actually _is_ a word. . .
performant (n): a performer (Etymology: based on informant, etc.)
Source: Webster's New Millennium(TM) Dictionary of English
...a legitimate way of avoiding paying tax...
So, legitimate = anything we can do that no one can stop us doing, even if they know we're doing it -- now matter how out-of-whack the result is
And, illegitimate = something that only works until we get caught
Not that I disagree with those definitions, but do you ever stop to wonder if there isn't some moral dimension to paying taxes? That is, if we like having a government around to keep order (e.g. by enforcing the concept of property), isn't it "wrong" to avoid paying our share of the burden?
To put it another way, if we avoid paying our share of the taxes, don't we lose our standing to complain about the state of the country and the world today? Don't we become part of the problem rather than the solution?
Me: "This doesn't look like GenCon." ."
PalmAI: "No, this is your dentist appointment. I only told you it was GenCon so you'd be here."
Me: "But, but . .
PalmAI: "Now, be a good girl and go sit in the nice chair."
My point (the only one that survives may misapprehensions that plague my grandparent post) is that given the source data and the conclusions, we have everything we need to trust or not trust the research.
In theory, to verify their result, I take their data, apply my own process, and decide for myself whether their conclusion is supported. Why do I need to know their process at a source code level? Rather than suggesting that we accept the unverifiable word of a scientific priesthood, I contend that, in theory, we already have all the necessary means to perform independent verification.
((In practice, since I am not competent in climate science and only adequate in statistics, I must rely on reviews of this source data performed and published by actual competent scientists. However, they too can perform the review from the data without the source code. Quid Erat Demonstrandum.))
Email storage is quickly headed the way of online service hours and cell phone plan minutes.
Once the company offers a quota larger than 99% of its users will use, then it can increase the quota arbitrarily without needing any additional resources to supply the (unused) storage space. After that, it's just a marketing exercise in using (pointlessly) inflated numbers to sell to new subscribers.