Why is Disney now part of the United States? There are more disneylands around the world than here. They sell more worldwide than in the US. They're an international conglomerate that profits people in many, many countries and many areas.
It's like Ikea. Ikea may have started in Finland, but they employ and enrich a heck of a lot of Americans. Toyota might have started in japan, but the US would take quite a hit if they suddenly wholesale pulled out of here.
The world is not a bunch of governments ruling over these little corporations who spread their tentrils forth for the motherland. Companies superceed governments. Sony exists as much in England and Europe as Japan, and does as much R&D around the world as in their original country. Sega was started by an American in Japan, and whose japanese-sounding name is actually an abbreviation for SErvice and GAmes. We think of Burger King as an amercan company because it started here. In Thailand, they think of Burger King as a Thai company, because the people who work there are Thai, the people who eat there are Thai, the people who make the Thai commercials for Burger King are Thai. Any given piece of electronics is likely to have bits designed in the US, EU, China, India, and many other places.
Companies are not part of a government. They are their own entities in a parallel system.
Disclaimer: I own an ultralight notebook, the smallest MP3 player I could find, a tiny car, and a Wii. I should be the target market for these things.
However, they really didn't bother to actually test market these things before putting them out there. For one, the lack of a keyboard really limits usability. Heck, keyboards are becoming standard on phones these days. To not have a keyboard on a laptop replacement is silly.
Two, they don't fit anywhere. They're way too big for a pocket, so you have to put them in a bag or backpack. At that point, you might as well just use a 3 lb Sony Vaio Tx, or a 4 lb Lenovo v, or a 4.5 lb Dell Xps or one of many other ultralight portables out there. And really, that's the key: laptops are losing weight as fast as the balance between performance and price will allow.
But worst of all, they never really had a use. They all take time to boot, so there isn't much use as a dayrunner. They have no keyboard, so word processing is out. And forget photoshop. What, exactly, are you supposed to do with one? Play halo? Web development?
Ultimately, all of the tasks that were supposed to be delegated to the UMPC were actually far better served by high-end phones. Need e-mail, texting, intranet access to a client database, and synching to a desktop? Just get a treo. They're about 1,000 dollars cheaper, and they fit in your pocket.
While I was intrigued by the concept, I won't be shedding a tear for the UMPC. They were far ahead of their time. Which is to say, someone was pushing them early in the hopes of making a quick buck.
Microsoft representative: "You know that really nifty stuff the Firefox team said they're working on? Um... Yeah, we're doing all that too. And better. And with a pony....Ok, we lied about the pony."
I wrote you off when you were so late to realize the power of digital cameras. When I couldn't get a decent digital from you, I turned to Canon, Olympus, and others who could tell which way things were going, and I didn't expect you'd ever recover. You seemed lost to me.
Now, not only will you be first on my list for consideration when buying my next printer, you will also be back on my list to look at your digital cameras. Simply by doing this, even without me buying your printer now (I just replaced mine two months ago), you've made my life better.
Thank you, Kodak. You've earned back a flood of goodwill, and a spot at the top of a short list of companies I'll consider when buying my next digital device.
Re:Valenti's family deserves simple courtesy
on
Jack Valenti, Dead at 85
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I totally agree with the sentiment that Valenti's family deserves respect, and should be allowed to mourn.
But that having been said, we're not talking about a "fallen enemy." He never lost. Valenti pretty much won the vision that he had. And that vision included heavy lobbying for the eggregious provisions of the DMCA, which to this day put people in jail for things that otherwise are defined as their right to do. Leaders still lionize him.
He instituted the hollywood ratings system, true, but he also ensured that the body was the most secrative and uncontestable organization inside the US. He also ensured that the people within that body followed his viewpoint about the world, and that it basically carried the weight of law, and as such became the most censurious organization in America. One could argue that, more than any other single individual, he's the reason why you can blow someone's head off in an R rated movie, but you can't show a woman touching herself through her clothes... Why violence is A.O.K. but physical intimacy is just wrong.
"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." When asked about using 4 second clips in a home movie project, he replied "There's no fair use to take something that doesn't belong to you."
And people really do go to jail over this stuff. We're talking about someone whose paranoia and lack of knowledge led to unbased responses which are now routinely taking chunks of people's lives away. And even before he was responsible for the death of real security research in the US, he was already the father of modern censorship here. Let's not forget his help in selling the Vietnam War to the population.
This is the perfect time to debate his actions. This is the only time to debate his actions. What is the measure of a man? Here was a man who repeatedly prioritized business over freedom. And while he may have had his own reasons for doing so, this is not the sort of thing we should be pointing to our children and saying "be like that."
There is, by and large, no such thing as evil people. Jack was not an evil person. But he did many, many bad things with the combination of misdirected intentions and personal charisma. And now, with the US forcing other countries to synchronize with our draconian copyright laws, his legacy will belong to the world too. This is the perfect time to acknowledge that good people do bad things, and frequently the people whom you would define as the best people have the power to do the worst things. Also, this is the perfect time to reflect upon how our modern culture is owned by large corporations in a similar fashion to how midevil culture was owned by the church. If we're to prevent another mickey mouse copyright extension, now would be the time to harden our resolve.
One may complain that we demonize the man because he took away something as trivial as movies. This is not true. We demonize the man because, for something as trivial as movies, he was willing to take away our freedom.
The only added service a T1 buys you is a more sympathetic ear when problems crop up.
And the added expectation that your T1 may only be oversubscribed on the uplink side by a factor of 10, whereas your DSL line is likely oversubscribed by a factor of 100 or 1,000.
But yes, I'd be suprised if there were any T1 lines to first tier ISP's that weren't.
I think what the grandparent poster meant was that Mozilla didn't have tabs until long after Opera tried them... ironically, Opera was from their beginning a variant of tab-based, using the very old-school MDI interface style.
Physics also concerns itself with creating an understanding of the underlying structure of the world. If we simply knew that putting two types of objects together we get a chemical reaction, we'd have a very superficial knowledge of the situation. Once we make the jump to interpret that there are these smallest, undividable pieces of matter known as atoms, made up of slightly smaller and undividable pieces of matter known as electrons, protons, and neutrons, we could start predicting things like what would happen if we put different bits of matter together and, for that matter, what would happen if we kept dividing these undividable little things.
In the grand scheme of things, the interpretation of the mathematical model doesn't matter a darned bit when judging the validity of the theory. It either predicts well, or it doesn't. But ultimately physics does have to go one step beyond that and try to explain things in a useful groundwork that provides the basis for future research.
And most of that interpretation throughout the years has been wrong in one way or another, but it was still an essential part of developing the equations.
I'm not sure I necessarily follow, and I'm usually pretty much on the fair trade side of things. So by not buying chocolate and not putting any money into these economies (however slight) we're doing what, exactly, that helps these people?
If you want to help people in these regions, support sustainable exports. Go over and teach them the art of business negotiations. Provide development loans through kiva and other microlending organizations.
But unless you have secondary plans in place, simply saying "don't buy stuff" doesn't relly do much to pull them out of poverty.
It seems like you're taking a lot of institutions as existing in a void... like saying that the government shouldn't get involved in environmental regulation because the threat of lawsuits will prevent that from happening. The government is how lawsuits happen. Or how trademark rulings should be backed up by individual companies. Trademarks don't have an existance outside of a legal construct. Or that contract law would be functional if simply backed up simply by the threat of violence. Why would you even need contracts at that point? Threaten violence, take stuff, disappear to rio.
I'm trying to find a gentle way of phrasing this, but I'm not seeing one, so I'm just going to say it. Your viewpoint lacks a degree of subtlety. It's very black-and-white. You may have had good reasons for this originally, but somehow it seems to have morphed into firmly held dogma. For example, you've said "somebody can make a business out of replacing any government agency. ANY agency. And, they will know that they have to serve their customer well to keep getting paid." Examples that run counter to this run the gamut from the old private fire companies to the atrocity that was the privitization of the water system in argentina in 2004. Ever tried to have a private army to repell national invaders? Or a private police force? Unless you run a huge group bordering on a government anyway, it doesn't work so well.
You made many points that you seem to hold to dearly, and so I hate to cut out and refer to how something is being thought about rather than directly addressing the substance of the discussion. And maybe I'm saying this because I see it in other posters, and have seen it in friends, and from time to time see it in myself. But you appear to hold to the "free market will solve everything" mantra with the same zeal that other people hold to the "the workers must control the means of production" mantra. Which is to say, it seems like you're automatically rejecting contrary evidence not because it is wrong, but because it is contrary.
I'm probably coming off as a jerk here for saying all of this, but try seeing things from other viewpoints for a while. Try to understand in their own terms how the legislature of Switzerland was seeing the world when they passed laws providing for retirement homes for the elderly and drove taxes through the roof. Try putting yourself into Greenspan's position when he was weighing the economic ramifications of raising or lowering federal interest rates. Or put yourself in the shoes of a Londoner or Parisian of the 18th century watching helplessly as their house burned down even though they bought fire protection because the people in the burning houses around them hadn't. You don't necessarily have to agree with the conclusions they came to, but if you can understand their position without resorting to emotional shortcuts it will only serve to make your conclusions that much more grounded.
And before you decry me as some liberal commie wanker who is trying to convert you, I'm not. I've started my own business once, and think the overall goal should be highly competitive markets. I also don't think most governments are particularly good at what they do, especially at the state and national level.
Just my 2c. Remember I mean well. Feel free to ignore this if you choose.
I have a vista install CD sitting on my desk, next to this laptop. I made sure to pick it up (for freealreadypaid) when buying this Dell.
I can't actually install it yet. Several of the software applications that I rely upon simply don't work under Vista. Upgrades are coming, but they are largely coming in the form of more software to purchase, and as such waiting until the end of the current software upgrade cycle seems to make the most sense. Likewise it would be good to wait until some of the first-generation-technology issues are ironed out before moving on up... like asking for permission every few seconds.
I have no doubt that Vista will eventually be the default OS on most people's machines, and that the software that supports it will finally make the changeover mandatory. But in the mean time, there just isn't a compelling need to switch over yet.
Capitalism doesn't come from "class struggle". Rather, "class struggle" (code for wealth envy) follows capitalism, in which people who work hard and make good choices are rewarded while the lazy and stupid are not.
And how many businesses, exactly, has George Bush run that were profitable? I've seen studies quoted where less than 2% of people make it out of their class distinction within any given generation, which means that by far the best way to be rich is to be born rich. Of course, this should be obvious to anyone who realizes that a 10% interest rate on capital accrued will eventually outpace working hard by a pretty wide margin.
That's why it's called capitalism, and not "work harderism." It's all about who controls the primary capital, and the value they can extract from that. Even Adam Smith acknowledged this wealth accrual positive feedback loop would eventually lead to monopolies which the market needed to be protected against.
Granted, there are exceptions. Sometimes the lazy and stupid wind up rich (think about the rich liberal living-on-trust-fund brat denizens of the Hamptons), and sometimes those who work hard and make good choices are punished (victims of 9/11).
I hope I'm not shattering your world here or anything, but New York is a pretty liberal heavy city. That means the majority of victims of 9/11 were probably liberals.
Capitalism isn't designed to cure all problems. It's merely that which exists without government intervention, which always creates more problems than it solves (and it never solves anything).
That sounds oddly dogmatic.
You actually do need government intervention to support the rules of capitalism. For one, ultimately governments enforce contract laws. Governments also provide and stabilize the medium of exchange (barter isn't particularly good for capitalism). They provide rules and enforcement about raving mobs looting your business, and in exchange they put up certain protections against businesses looting their employee's retirement funds. Governments ensure that interstate commerce is possible over well lit, well-maintained roads. The EPA ensures that the mill up the river doesn't pollute it so much that it's useless to your mill, and in exchange that you adhere to the same rules for the mill south of you. It ensures that the products you are delivered meet the spirit of the agreement you entered into. It ensures that unfair non-competition practices, like Walmart saying to its suppliers not to work with small businesses like yours, don't happen. Or at least it happens less often than it otherwise would. It ensures that people don't run around selling cheap knock-off products under your name and trademark symbol, and that you can extract some value from your original ideas and work before someone else copies it.
Some of these things are so essential for the functioning of capitalism that they are frequently taken for a given. But they're not: they're achieved via government.
A truly free and open market isn't free, and it isn't simply a state of one powerful interest not getting its dirty hands all over it. There are lots of powerful interests that want to use their dirty hands to screw it all up, and sometimes you need a bigger set of hands to stop them. In this equation, the government is the ONLY entity that is at least theoretically responsible to the overall health of the system.
Valve has "a stunning" 9 million dollars in the bank? Stunning? That's suprisingly low for a company that has made two of the most successful (or at least hyped) games of all time. That's probably about 1 year of operating capital for them.
Because the value of a stock is intermediary, you're not taxed on that value until you sell it. Until that point, you've got this thing which could be worth quite a lot, or it could be worth nothing once you sell.
Same with gold / weapons / other virtual items. They have value that fluxuates rapidly, and your $500 sword of ultimate evil might be nerfed down to a $10 sword of I-remember-when-that-was-good. Same concept... you don't pay on value until that value is secure.
Also, Blizzard might have something to say about all of this, as nobody owns anything in WoW except for Blizzard. This is both by regular law and by the contract you enter with to play the game. Which is to say, those transactions online for real money might be legal (though against your TOS), but they don't transfer ownership, just temporary stewardship.
The BBC article seems pretty well thought out, and only mentions the word "crash" once, under a picture of Burnout Revenge. For the most part, it's an article about the alternative revenue sources that have been rising up to defray the additional costs of development, including advergaming, Korean-style online accessory sales, and cell-phone game tie-ins. They even go out of their way to point out that total game sales are expected to rise by 800 million dollars this year, even if the console transition will make it difficult to break even on a next-gen only title.
This isn't the worlds most accurate article about the state of costs and revenue sources in gaming, but it's a good overview of how things probably look from within a large publisher.
Thank you for reading the article, and for your subsequent well-informed and enlightening response. I too know that people like chief neurosurgeon professor Alok Sharma are prone to exaggerating the effectiveness of medical procedures, in a manner very similar to that of a company hawking useless anti-terrorist gear. This can be true even when clinical trials have been outsourced to them and they, therefore, have no financial stake in the marketplace success or failure of the device. Your conclusion that it should be used in conjuncture with existing tests was a brilliant masterstroke, which is only further reinforced by the fact that that is, actually, exactly what the article recommends.
And clearly, anyone in a third world village for which the measly 400,000 dollar CT scanner cost is too much should simply be airlifted to a larger national hospital where they can be treated properly. Airlifting a should be a fast and easy solution and is done in places like that all the time. And, of course, the astronomical and rising cost of healthcare in the US ensuring that 45 million of us have no health care shouldn't stop us from thinking about the children for whom the ridiculously expensive CT scanning procedure could save, assuming they ever went to a hospital. After all, access to good medical procedures shouldn't be gated on ability to pay, so it never is, right? And having a nurse do a couple of CT scans throughout a night "just to check" is a routine procedure in most trauma cases anyway, and as such the need for a cheap, easy, handheld, and fast scanner that has basically no operating costs besides a bathroom-break worth of time and a little drain on some rechargable NiCads is gratuitous.
This is exactly why I posted that some people would see a "98% accuracy rate" and immediately find fault. And you did, congratulations. Almost always, these are people who feel that you shouldn't use condoms because they're "only 99% effective when used correctly." Or those who decide not to take their diabetes medicines because it might only be about "95% successful" in stemming the tide of the disease. People want medicine to be black or white, good or bad, fixes you or not, but in reality medicine is a really mushy, nasty area. Certain tests may only have a 30% detection rate, but they do it anyway because detecting certain diseases at that level is better than not detecting them at all, especially to the people who get detected. Heck, CPR on cardiac arrest victims only reduces their death rate from 95% to 90%, which means that it's by and large almost useless. Almost. To those extra 5% who survive, it's very, very nice to have around.
Having a Sociology degree, I'm well aware of just how easy it is to make percentages lie, and am happy that people seem to have developed a healthy distrust for them. What you learn to trust, if data isn't readily available, is people. If people in the field are happy with this development, and the technological basis behind it seems sound, maybe it's worthy of further examination. If they're not, like the terrorist scanners, it's probably bunk.
My original comment was made with broad generalizations in an attempt to counterbalance the lack of perspective on medical percentages that many people seem to exhibit. On the other hand, parent appears to actually know something, so please mod him / her up.
But I have to say, watching purchased DVDs has become similar to the experience I get at the local movie house: i.e., disappointing and not what it used to be.
I just watched 300 at a movie house in London. The tickets were 10 pounds each (20 dollars). There were half an hour of commercials beforehand. Yes, I had a watch, a full 30 minutes. Assuming 80 million viewers are worth 4 million dollars per minute (roughly the superbowl rate), that 20 dollars worth of my time (low professional rate) was sold off for an additional 1.5 dollars. So let's cut the difference and say that I spent 30 dollars to watch an hour-and-a-half long movie. There were two of us, so that makes 60 dollars.
Yup. No clue why the movie houses are falling on harder times. None at all.
Let's say that the average consumer is looking at investing in a movie, but knows there is a 1 out of 10 chance that they're wasting their money. There is now a looming doubt if the thing will play at all. It may be a small doubt, but any transaction cost is real. Let's then say that 1 out of 10 decide not to buy, and instead... well, it really doesn't matter what instead, as Sony has already lost their money.
Let's also say that the average pirate is looking to change their ways, and is now out of college and making enough money to support paying for movies. Their incentive to do so is threat of legal persecution and, more significantly, a moral imperitive to support artists that they care about. Now, suddenly, on the other side of the equation is this looming doubt over whether the thing will work at all. If the scales had tipped one way earlier, this might just be enough to tip them the other way.
So in other words, Sony has succeeded in alienating a section of their customer base, prevented another section from becoming legal customers, and all the while (judging by the wide availability of pirated copies of the movies mentioned) had zero effect on the piracy of their movies.
Brilliant. Is it time to put Sony to bed with SCO yet?
Inevitably someone is going to say "Well yeah, that means 2% died. Rough lot of good that did them."
Before that person is you, think of the 98% that lived. I bet they're pretty happy that their chances of detection and survival went way up. And if you were sitting on an operating table in rural India with a poorly underfunded doctor wondering what's going wrong with you, wouldn't you like to take those odds too?
I think the idea is to get the principle of what we want these systems to do sorted out before we get the actual systems themselves sorted out.
Sort of "if the system accidentally identifies an unarmed civillian as a combatant and kills him it's a right lot better than if it correctly identifies him as unarmed and kills him anyway... except, perhaps, to the civillian."
Slashdot Mirror
Why is Disney now part of the United States? There are more disneylands around the world than here. They sell more worldwide than in the US. They're an international conglomerate that profits people in many, many countries and many areas.
It's like Ikea. Ikea may have started in Finland, but they employ and enrich a heck of a lot of Americans. Toyota might have started in japan, but the US would take quite a hit if they suddenly wholesale pulled out of here.
The world is not a bunch of governments ruling over these little corporations who spread their tentrils forth for the motherland. Companies superceed governments. Sony exists as much in England and Europe as Japan, and does as much R&D around the world as in their original country. Sega was started by an American in Japan, and whose japanese-sounding name is actually an abbreviation for SErvice and GAmes. We think of Burger King as an amercan company because it started here. In Thailand, they think of Burger King as a Thai company, because the people who work there are Thai, the people who eat there are Thai, the people who make the Thai commercials for Burger King are Thai. Any given piece of electronics is likely to have bits designed in the US, EU, China, India, and many other places.
Companies are not part of a government. They are their own entities in a parallel system.
Disclaimer: I own an ultralight notebook, the smallest MP3 player I could find, a tiny car, and a Wii. I should be the target market for these things.
However, they really didn't bother to actually test market these things before putting them out there. For one, the lack of a keyboard really limits usability. Heck, keyboards are becoming standard on phones these days. To not have a keyboard on a laptop replacement is silly.
Two, they don't fit anywhere. They're way too big for a pocket, so you have to put them in a bag or backpack. At that point, you might as well just use a 3 lb Sony Vaio Tx, or a 4 lb Lenovo v, or a 4.5 lb Dell Xps or one of many other ultralight portables out there. And really, that's the key: laptops are losing weight as fast as the balance between performance and price will allow.
But worst of all, they never really had a use. They all take time to boot, so there isn't much use as a dayrunner. They have no keyboard, so word processing is out. And forget photoshop. What, exactly, are you supposed to do with one? Play halo? Web development?
Ultimately, all of the tasks that were supposed to be delegated to the UMPC were actually far better served by high-end phones. Need e-mail, texting, intranet access to a client database, and synching to a desktop? Just get a treo. They're about 1,000 dollars cheaper, and they fit in your pocket.
While I was intrigued by the concept, I won't be shedding a tear for the UMPC. They were far ahead of their time. Which is to say, someone was pushing them early in the hopes of making a quick buck.
Microsoft representative: "You know that really nifty stuff the Firefox team said they're working on? Um... Yeah, we're doing all that too. And better. And with a pony. ...Ok, we lied about the pony."
Dear Kodak:
I wrote you off when you were so late to realize the power of digital cameras. When I couldn't get a decent digital from you, I turned to Canon, Olympus, and others who could tell which way things were going, and I didn't expect you'd ever recover. You seemed lost to me.
Now, not only will you be first on my list for consideration when buying my next printer, you will also be back on my list to look at your digital cameras. Simply by doing this, even without me buying your printer now (I just replaced mine two months ago), you've made my life better.
Thank you, Kodak. You've earned back a flood of goodwill, and a spot at the top of a short list of companies I'll consider when buying my next digital device.
I totally agree with the sentiment that Valenti's family deserves respect, and should be allowed to mourn.
But that having been said, we're not talking about a "fallen enemy." He never lost. Valenti pretty much won the vision that he had. And that vision included heavy lobbying for the eggregious provisions of the DMCA, which to this day put people in jail for things that otherwise are defined as their right to do. Leaders still lionize him.
He instituted the hollywood ratings system, true, but he also ensured that the body was the most secrative and uncontestable organization inside the US. He also ensured that the people within that body followed his viewpoint about the world, and that it basically carried the weight of law, and as such became the most censurious organization in America. One could argue that, more than any other single individual, he's the reason why you can blow someone's head off in an R rated movie, but you can't show a woman touching herself through her clothes... Why violence is A.O.K. but physical intimacy is just wrong.
"I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." When asked about using 4 second clips in a home movie project, he replied "There's no fair use to take something that doesn't belong to you."
And people really do go to jail over this stuff. We're talking about someone whose paranoia and lack of knowledge led to unbased responses which are now routinely taking chunks of people's lives away. And even before he was responsible for the death of real security research in the US, he was already the father of modern censorship here. Let's not forget his help in selling the Vietnam War to the population.
This is the perfect time to debate his actions. This is the only time to debate his actions. What is the measure of a man? Here was a man who repeatedly prioritized business over freedom. And while he may have had his own reasons for doing so, this is not the sort of thing we should be pointing to our children and saying "be like that."
There is, by and large, no such thing as evil people. Jack was not an evil person. But he did many, many bad things with the combination of misdirected intentions and personal charisma. And now, with the US forcing other countries to synchronize with our draconian copyright laws, his legacy will belong to the world too. This is the perfect time to acknowledge that good people do bad things, and frequently the people whom you would define as the best people have the power to do the worst things. Also, this is the perfect time to reflect upon how our modern culture is owned by large corporations in a similar fashion to how midevil culture was owned by the church. If we're to prevent another mickey mouse copyright extension, now would be the time to harden our resolve.
One may complain that we demonize the man because he took away something as trivial as movies. This is not true. We demonize the man because, for something as trivial as movies, he was willing to take away our freedom.
The only added service a T1 buys you is a more sympathetic ear when problems crop up.
And the added expectation that your T1 may only be oversubscribed on the uplink side by a factor of 10, whereas your DSL line is likely oversubscribed by a factor of 100 or 1,000.
But yes, I'd be suprised if there were any T1 lines to first tier ISP's that weren't.
I think what the grandparent poster meant was that Mozilla didn't have tabs until long after Opera tried them... ironically, Opera was from their beginning a variant of tab-based, using the very old-school MDI interface style.
Existance and consciousness have one thing in common. They either exist or they don't, there is no inbetween.
You've never been really drunk, have you?
Physics also concerns itself with creating an understanding of the underlying structure of the world. If we simply knew that putting two types of objects together we get a chemical reaction, we'd have a very superficial knowledge of the situation. Once we make the jump to interpret that there are these smallest, undividable pieces of matter known as atoms, made up of slightly smaller and undividable pieces of matter known as electrons, protons, and neutrons, we could start predicting things like what would happen if we put different bits of matter together and, for that matter, what would happen if we kept dividing these undividable little things.
In the grand scheme of things, the interpretation of the mathematical model doesn't matter a darned bit when judging the validity of the theory. It either predicts well, or it doesn't. But ultimately physics does have to go one step beyond that and try to explain things in a useful groundwork that provides the basis for future research.
And most of that interpretation throughout the years has been wrong in one way or another, but it was still an essential part of developing the equations.
I'm not sure I necessarily follow, and I'm usually pretty much on the fair trade side of things. So by not buying chocolate and not putting any money into these economies (however slight) we're doing what, exactly, that helps these people?
If you want to help people in these regions, support sustainable exports. Go over and teach them the art of business negotiations. Provide development loans through kiva and other microlending organizations.
But unless you have secondary plans in place, simply saying "don't buy stuff" doesn't relly do much to pull them out of poverty.
It seems like you're taking a lot of institutions as existing in a void... like saying that the government shouldn't get involved in environmental regulation because the threat of lawsuits will prevent that from happening. The government is how lawsuits happen. Or how trademark rulings should be backed up by individual companies. Trademarks don't have an existance outside of a legal construct. Or that contract law would be functional if simply backed up simply by the threat of violence. Why would you even need contracts at that point? Threaten violence, take stuff, disappear to rio.
I'm trying to find a gentle way of phrasing this, but I'm not seeing one, so I'm just going to say it. Your viewpoint lacks a degree of subtlety. It's very black-and-white. You may have had good reasons for this originally, but somehow it seems to have morphed into firmly held dogma. For example, you've said "somebody can make a business out of replacing any government agency. ANY agency. And, they will know that they have to serve their customer well to keep getting paid." Examples that run counter to this run the gamut from the old private fire companies to the atrocity that was the privitization of the water system in argentina in 2004. Ever tried to have a private army to repell national invaders? Or a private police force? Unless you run a huge group bordering on a government anyway, it doesn't work so well.
You made many points that you seem to hold to dearly, and so I hate to cut out and refer to how something is being thought about rather than directly addressing the substance of the discussion. And maybe I'm saying this because I see it in other posters, and have seen it in friends, and from time to time see it in myself. But you appear to hold to the "free market will solve everything" mantra with the same zeal that other people hold to the "the workers must control the means of production" mantra. Which is to say, it seems like you're automatically rejecting contrary evidence not because it is wrong, but because it is contrary.
I'm probably coming off as a jerk here for saying all of this, but try seeing things from other viewpoints for a while. Try to understand in their own terms how the legislature of Switzerland was seeing the world when they passed laws providing for retirement homes for the elderly and drove taxes through the roof. Try putting yourself into Greenspan's position when he was weighing the economic ramifications of raising or lowering federal interest rates. Or put yourself in the shoes of a Londoner or Parisian of the 18th century watching helplessly as their house burned down even though they bought fire protection because the people in the burning houses around them hadn't. You don't necessarily have to agree with the conclusions they came to, but if you can understand their position without resorting to emotional shortcuts it will only serve to make your conclusions that much more grounded.
And before you decry me as some liberal commie wanker who is trying to convert you, I'm not. I've started my own business once, and think the overall goal should be highly competitive markets. I also don't think most governments are particularly good at what they do, especially at the state and national level.
Just my 2c. Remember I mean well. Feel free to ignore this if you choose.
I have a vista install CD sitting on my desk, next to this laptop. I made sure to pick it up (for freealreadypaid) when buying this Dell.
I can't actually install it yet. Several of the software applications that I rely upon simply don't work under Vista. Upgrades are coming, but they are largely coming in the form of more software to purchase, and as such waiting until the end of the current software upgrade cycle seems to make the most sense. Likewise it would be good to wait until some of the first-generation-technology issues are ironed out before moving on up... like asking for permission every few seconds.
I have no doubt that Vista will eventually be the default OS on most people's machines, and that the software that supports it will finally make the changeover mandatory. But in the mean time, there just isn't a compelling need to switch over yet.
Capitalism doesn't come from "class struggle". Rather, "class struggle" (code for wealth envy) follows capitalism, in which people who work hard and make good choices are rewarded while the lazy and stupid are not.
And how many businesses, exactly, has George Bush run that were profitable? I've seen studies quoted where less than 2% of people make it out of their class distinction within any given generation, which means that by far the best way to be rich is to be born rich. Of course, this should be obvious to anyone who realizes that a 10% interest rate on capital accrued will eventually outpace working hard by a pretty wide margin.
That's why it's called capitalism, and not "work harderism." It's all about who controls the primary capital, and the value they can extract from that. Even Adam Smith acknowledged this wealth accrual positive feedback loop would eventually lead to monopolies which the market needed to be protected against.
Granted, there are exceptions. Sometimes the lazy and stupid wind up rich (think about the rich liberal living-on-trust-fund brat denizens of the Hamptons), and sometimes those who work hard and make good choices are punished (victims of 9/11).
I hope I'm not shattering your world here or anything, but New York is a pretty liberal heavy city. That means the majority of victims of 9/11 were probably liberals.
Capitalism isn't designed to cure all problems. It's merely that which exists without government intervention, which always creates more problems than it solves (and it never solves anything).
That sounds oddly dogmatic.
You actually do need government intervention to support the rules of capitalism. For one, ultimately governments enforce contract laws. Governments also provide and stabilize the medium of exchange (barter isn't particularly good for capitalism). They provide rules and enforcement about raving mobs looting your business, and in exchange they put up certain protections against businesses looting their employee's retirement funds. Governments ensure that interstate commerce is possible over well lit, well-maintained roads. The EPA ensures that the mill up the river doesn't pollute it so much that it's useless to your mill, and in exchange that you adhere to the same rules for the mill south of you. It ensures that the products you are delivered meet the spirit of the agreement you entered into. It ensures that unfair non-competition practices, like Walmart saying to its suppliers not to work with small businesses like yours, don't happen. Or at least it happens less often than it otherwise would. It ensures that people don't run around selling cheap knock-off products under your name and trademark symbol, and that you can extract some value from your original ideas and work before someone else copies it.
Some of these things are so essential for the functioning of capitalism that they are frequently taken for a given. But they're not: they're achieved via government.
A truly free and open market isn't free, and it isn't simply a state of one powerful interest not getting its dirty hands all over it. There are lots of powerful interests that want to use their dirty hands to screw it all up, and sometimes you need a bigger set of hands to stop them. In this equation, the government is the ONLY entity that is at least theoretically responsible to the overall health of the system.
I would have been suspicious too.
A drummer? With soap? Something was up.
Valve has "a stunning" 9 million dollars in the bank? Stunning? That's suprisingly low for a company that has made two of the most successful (or at least hyped) games of all time. That's probably about 1 year of operating capital for them.
This hacker isn't earning himself much respect.
Remember, he's at:
Maddoxx@no-steam.org
Because the value of a stock is intermediary, you're not taxed on that value until you sell it. Until that point, you've got this thing which could be worth quite a lot, or it could be worth nothing once you sell.
Same with gold / weapons / other virtual items. They have value that fluxuates rapidly, and your $500 sword of ultimate evil might be nerfed down to a $10 sword of I-remember-when-that-was-good. Same concept... you don't pay on value until that value is secure.
Also, Blizzard might have something to say about all of this, as nobody owns anything in WoW except for Blizzard. This is both by regular law and by the contract you enter with to play the game. Which is to say, those transactions online for real money might be legal (though against your TOS), but they don't transfer ownership, just temporary stewardship.
So...what movies would this include?
Anything with the Olsen Twins. Terrifying. *shudders*.
The BBC article seems pretty well thought out, and only mentions the word "crash" once, under a picture of Burnout Revenge. For the most part, it's an article about the alternative revenue sources that have been rising up to defray the additional costs of development, including advergaming, Korean-style online accessory sales, and cell-phone game tie-ins. They even go out of their way to point out that total game sales are expected to rise by 800 million dollars this year, even if the console transition will make it difficult to break even on a next-gen only title.
This isn't the worlds most accurate article about the state of costs and revenue sources in gaming, but it's a good overview of how things probably look from within a large publisher.
Thank you for reading the article, and for your subsequent well-informed and enlightening response. I too know that people like chief neurosurgeon professor Alok Sharma are prone to exaggerating the effectiveness of medical procedures, in a manner very similar to that of a company hawking useless anti-terrorist gear. This can be true even when clinical trials have been outsourced to them and they, therefore, have no financial stake in the marketplace success or failure of the device. Your conclusion that it should be used in conjuncture with existing tests was a brilliant masterstroke, which is only further reinforced by the fact that that is, actually, exactly what the article recommends.
And clearly, anyone in a third world village for which the measly 400,000 dollar CT scanner cost is too much should simply be airlifted to a larger national hospital where they can be treated properly. Airlifting a should be a fast and easy solution and is done in places like that all the time. And, of course, the astronomical and rising cost of healthcare in the US ensuring that 45 million of us have no health care shouldn't stop us from thinking about the children for whom the ridiculously expensive CT scanning procedure could save, assuming they ever went to a hospital. After all, access to good medical procedures shouldn't be gated on ability to pay, so it never is, right? And having a nurse do a couple of CT scans throughout a night "just to check" is a routine procedure in most trauma cases anyway, and as such the need for a cheap, easy, handheld, and fast scanner that has basically no operating costs besides a bathroom-break worth of time and a little drain on some rechargable NiCads is gratuitous.
This is exactly why I posted that some people would see a "98% accuracy rate" and immediately find fault. And you did, congratulations. Almost always, these are people who feel that you shouldn't use condoms because they're "only 99% effective when used correctly." Or those who decide not to take their diabetes medicines because it might only be about "95% successful" in stemming the tide of the disease. People want medicine to be black or white, good or bad, fixes you or not, but in reality medicine is a really mushy, nasty area. Certain tests may only have a 30% detection rate, but they do it anyway because detecting certain diseases at that level is better than not detecting them at all, especially to the people who get detected. Heck, CPR on cardiac arrest victims only reduces their death rate from 95% to 90%, which means that it's by and large almost useless. Almost. To those extra 5% who survive, it's very, very nice to have around.
Having a Sociology degree, I'm well aware of just how easy it is to make percentages lie, and am happy that people seem to have developed a healthy distrust for them. What you learn to trust, if data isn't readily available, is people. If people in the field are happy with this development, and the technological basis behind it seems sound, maybe it's worthy of further examination. If they're not, like the terrorist scanners, it's probably bunk.
My original comment was made with broad generalizations in an attempt to counterbalance the lack of perspective on medical percentages that many people seem to exhibit. On the other hand, parent appears to actually know something, so please mod him / her up.
But I have to say, watching purchased DVDs has become similar to the experience I get at the local movie house: i.e., disappointing and not what it used to be.
I just watched 300 at a movie house in London. The tickets were 10 pounds each (20 dollars). There were half an hour of commercials beforehand. Yes, I had a watch, a full 30 minutes. Assuming 80 million viewers are worth 4 million dollars per minute (roughly the superbowl rate), that 20 dollars worth of my time (low professional rate) was sold off for an additional 1.5 dollars. So let's cut the difference and say that I spent 30 dollars to watch an hour-and-a-half long movie. There were two of us, so that makes 60 dollars.
Yup. No clue why the movie houses are falling on harder times. None at all.
Let's say that the average consumer is looking at investing in a movie, but knows there is a 1 out of 10 chance that they're wasting their money. There is now a looming doubt if the thing will play at all. It may be a small doubt, but any transaction cost is real. Let's then say that 1 out of 10 decide not to buy, and instead... well, it really doesn't matter what instead, as Sony has already lost their money.
Let's also say that the average pirate is looking to change their ways, and is now out of college and making enough money to support paying for movies. Their incentive to do so is threat of legal persecution and, more significantly, a moral imperitive to support artists that they care about. Now, suddenly, on the other side of the equation is this looming doubt over whether the thing will work at all. If the scales had tipped one way earlier, this might just be enough to tip them the other way.
So in other words, Sony has succeeded in alienating a section of their customer base, prevented another section from becoming legal customers, and all the while (judging by the wide availability of pirated copies of the movies mentioned) had zero effect on the piracy of their movies.
Brilliant. Is it time to put Sony to bed with SCO yet?
Inevitably someone is going to say "Well yeah, that means 2% died. Rough lot of good that did them."
Before that person is you, think of the 98% that lived. I bet they're pretty happy that their chances of detection and survival went way up. And if you were sitting on an operating table in rural India with a poorly underfunded doctor wondering what's going wrong with you, wouldn't you like to take those odds too?
I think the idea is to get the principle of what we want these systems to do sorted out before we get the actual systems themselves sorted out.
Sort of "if the system accidentally identifies an unarmed civillian as a combatant and kills him it's a right lot better than if it correctly identifies him as unarmed and kills him anyway... except, perhaps, to the civillian."
How does it work with un-uniformed combatants?
Poorly?