Ah, but that's reason number 2 that I always order my drinks with no ice and send them back if they have ice in them. Reason number 1 is that I hate watered-down drinks. Reason number 3 is that drinks from a fountain are more than cold enough already, though I'll drink Coke blazing hot before I'll drink it watered-down.
In Japan, at least, the largest drink size you can get at a fast food restraunt like McDonalds is smaller than the "courtesy cup" that they give people who order water in America. Several of my friends and myself got strange looks and comments from host families when buying 1 liter drink bottles for ourselves. I remember one guy was asked by his host family if he had a party of something when he threw away the empty bottle at home. In talking with a few of my foreign friends after I returned, I've been led to believe that America is the "Land of the Super-Sized Drinks."
Can anyone from another country or who's traveled abroad comment on this trend? Is oversized drinks just an American thing?
A) It wouldn't net Apple any more hardware sales. B) The components of a Crusoe that contain the x86 instruction translation are probably not flashable. They're probably in ROMs.
It could be because they claim that they great flying airships are nuclear powered. How comfortable would you be with an active nuclear reactor flying over your head just waiting to be shot down or have a mechanical failure? Letting the public know we had something like that in our arsenal would cause all sorts of scare-mongering. Hell, I'm not fully comfortable with the idea. At least nuclear subs are likely to be in deep waters if they get sunk.
Seriously. What's wrong with AIX or Linux, the two UNIX operating systems that IBM will have running on them? If you're going to buy a Power4 system from IBM, get the operating systems that it comes with.
In addition, Darwin isn't that great of a UNIX platform. Its thread support isn't all there, its scheduler is terrible, and its missing support for a lot of common advanced UNIX APIs like SysV shared memory and semaphores, and its RPC support isn't fully SunRPC compatible. Trust me. I had to write a multithreaded web server and proxy server that took advantage of all of these UNIX system features, and I kept running into the limitations of Darwin as bundled with Mac OS X 10.1.5.
Stick with AIX or Linux if you want to be doing something serious.
Not well. It always screws up something about formatting when I import documents -- especially if you use the odd tab settings that Word likes to auto-format your documents with. I find that it doesn't do formatting of text around embedded images well, nor does it handle footnotes 100% correctly. However, with the exception of the tab settings crap, I find that it usually only takes about half a minute per page to fix imported work.
I would love a port of OpenOffice to the Mac, but I'd rather see it done using native APIs rather than have yet another half-assed attempt at a port of a Win32/UNIX app via Java. Give me speed and native system color-correction and font-smoothing!
Cute. That's a nice solution if you don't need anything like tables or fonts or any of the rest of "that fru-fru crap." While you're at it, maybe you'd like to suggest a replacement for replace Excel and Powerpoint too.
It's only hypocrisy if you can only see things in a black-and-white view that people must be anarchists or totalitarians to be consistent. Most normal people believe in the concepts of "good legislation" and "bad legislation." You might be surprised to know that most people consider SPAM and copyright to be two completely seperate issues.
Copyright law is about putting limits on ideas and concepts and selling them. I'm not 100% opposed to copyright, but I believe that current trends in legislation are destroying the balance between copyright owners and customers that makes copyright work properly. The issue here is whether or not people can take or do something with works someone else created without compensating them.
SPAM is about the ultimate expression of our crass commercial society where businesses now treat people as consumers instead of customers. It's about shoving ads down people's throat and putting the burden of the cost on them. As far as spammers are concerned, we exist just to consume advertisting from them, and we should shut up, pay the costs, and like it. The thing is, they're not providing me with a service that I want in exchange for my added cost of living. The issue here is whether or not someone can create something and force people to have to bear the costs for it when they didn't want it in the first place.
However, copyright protection and spam do share one important thing in common. Technological solutions are all useless without forcing people to adopt them. The question is whether or not we should support the "injured" party in either case. In the case of copyright, I don't believe we should. That's a matter of corporate welfare to protect an industry against technology that makes it obsolete. In the case of spam, I do believe we should. It's a matter of forcing someone to pay costs for a product he didn't want.
Even if it is a screenshot of the OQO in action, I wonder about the visibility. Scroll over to get the size of one of those icons and the compare it to the size of the headphone jack in that monster image. I mean, that's one tiny screen!
Why don't we just destroy all subs and weapons and just get the fuck along ? It seems every day the US Army is looking for a fight and it's just pathetic.
It's about time someone said it! I mean, really, we've put with the ruse long enough. It's no longer funny. We should just end all these shennanigans and get back to the peace, love, and well-being that was all of human history before the Illuminati talked everyone into starting up the Great Generational Gag of 1937. Come on, soon no one will be alive to remember that it was all just a big joke, and people will think things like hunger, famine, and disease were meant to be taken seriously or, even worse, were the natural order of human history!
There's a Texas company that makes a plugin for Outlook, called InsightConnector, that allows it to do all its groupware features over any IMAP4 server with ACL support. It's not OSS, and it's not free, but it's supposed to be cheaper than MS Exchange.
You can find a review of it here. The company's website is here.
The practically have to have experience in moving servers like this to have any business. You might try contacting them and seeing what they cost.
The keyboard is odd Pet peeve: Home, End, Page Up and Page Down don't do what you expect - they are nearly useless.
Page Up and Page Down always move the scrollbar, not the cursor. And Home and End move to the beginning and end of the document, respectively. This is inexcusable in my opinion. Every time I hit end I lose my place!
It's no worse than dealing with UNIX keyboard weirdness. Under the Mac, if you want to go to the end of the line, hit Command-(Right). For the beginning, hit Command-(Left). Using the Command key with the Up and Down arrows will move your cursor to the beginning or end of the document. Similarly, if you want a cursor that moves as you page up and down, using the Option key with the Up and Down arrow keys will do the job in many applications. (However, in others, it will move by paragraph.) Using the Option key with the Left and Right arrow keys will almost always move word-by-word.
Basically, the arrows keys on the Mac are for moving the text cursor, and the Home/End/Page Up/Page Down keys are for looking around the text without moving the cursor (which needs no side-to-side equivalent). It's a logical layout. It's just different from the Windows world.
That's pretty much how it works. However, many species of bacteria can exchange DNA with other species of bacteria. This means that many strains of bacteria get their first resistant variant without having to go through all the trouble of random mutation by swapping with other kinds of bacteria and then surviving while their peers die.
By 6100-compatible, he probably meant clone machines. All clone machines were PowerPC machines since Apple did. If they were meant to be contemporaries of the 6100s, they were probably running 603 chips, which are the next generation of PPC chips, not "860XX" chips.
Now Nubus was weird for the day. It was weird because it was pretty intelligent. Unlike PCI and ISA which had a bunch of IRQ issues, Nubus sorted out cards on its own without need for user intervention. This was a major reason for Apple deciding to use it back in the day. Unfortunately, by the time Apple switched away, Macs were the last machines using Nubus in a mainstream application for the past few years. That combined with its low bandwidth compared to PCI moved Apple to switch. (That and they'd been plagued with low-level errors since they switched to Nubus '90 when they switched from m68k to PPC chips.)
All PowerMacs still have PCI slots and still support PCI video cards. My neighbor has 3 monitors attached to his system thanks to 2 PCI video cards. The only reason AGP wasn't supported before it first came in was that it hasn't been out and used in PCs for very long. PCI will still be around on Macs for a long time until a few years after something better comes out and becomes standard in the PC industry. (Hell, modern PowerMacs still don't use DDR SDRAM or RDRAM for main memory. They're still choking on PC133.)
Incidentally, SCSI is still faster than IDE if you have multiple drives on the same chain as in a RAID for example. IDE/ATA has a huge command overhead compared to SCSI and inferior top speeds. You just don't notice the difference if you aren't really stressing it.
I have to say, this is shocking but wonderful. It won't be long before we have the ability to grow and harvest our own soldiers in a laboratory.... And any technology that prevents the senseless deaths of our world's sons should be supported, despite any moral qualms regarding the technology itself.
As opposed to, of course, the human slaves we would be creating purely to send off to their deaths. What an ethical solution.
It used to be installed as part of the bsd-games package on Red Hat and other Linux distros. I'm very disappointed to find out and report that it was removed from the package in 1998 with version 2.2 because of a lack of a clear license. As far as I can tell, it was freely published the Jan/Feb 1997 edition of "SpaceGamer/FantasyGamer." It was probably meant to be public domain. It was simple, but a lot of fun.
If you want to find it, get it from the Debian archives here.
It's not portable at all. The bastards wrote it in MFC and DirectX. Not that I'm bitter. It's only that the most innovative thing to happen to PC RPGs -- being able to DM like in real life -- is the one feature they left out of the Mac/Linux versions. Oh, here. We're giving you every bit of the game on your platforms except the part everyone's excited about. Let's just dangle it under your nose instead.
Now, there's a second middle finger for Mac users by holding off the publishing. I'd honestly rather them have not ported the game at all than to release a late, crippled version. It's just like that time I bought HoMM3 only to find out they didn't port the damned campaign editor.
I'd just like to point out that this is not the traveling salesman problem. This is the shortest point between any two points, not all points on the map. Read the article.
Use Anti-Angiogenic Drugs
on
Kills Tumors Dead
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· Score: 4, Interesting
There is one problem, after a little while the tumor sends out little tumors throughout the body (as many know) but what many don't is that when the main tumor is destroyed the smaller ones start growing (do to a lack of a substance that the main tumor sends throughout the body).
Actually, that's exactly what anti-angiogenic drugs help fight against. The spreading cancer cells will die off because they cannot find a place to take root and grow before the immune system takes care of them. New tumors require blood vessels to feed them above a certain size. This drug prevents them from building that network of blood vessels.
Anti-angiogenic drugs have been in testing for awhile now. I remember hearing about them a couple of years ago. I'm curious to see if they've tested to see what happens when a patient is injured or works out while using these drugs. In both cases, they will need to regenerate damage to their blood vessels.
As a long time Mac user, I'd have to say that the answer lies in Apple's support for multiple monitors.
Most Mac users don't have the same level of desktop organization and task seperation needs that you or I have. I, too, am completely spoiled by virtual desktops under X and similar hacks added on for Windows.
Instead, most advanced Mac users just need more screen real estate to do their work on. The publishing and graphics design industres are the best example of this. Once you get used to having 3 monitors attached to a machine, it's just about as good as virtual desktops, though I prefer the latter.
As another poster said, though, many Mac users (and Windows users, I'd like to add) are honestly too easily confused by hidden virtual desktops. Clutter does not offend most casual PC/Mac users like it does some of the more advanced users. As a result, you'll probably never see official support for multiple workspaces in Mac OS X, just like Apple canned the support for official Apple windowing themes after finding that it confused some users.
Ooooh I am so impressed you can quote from a textbook you college student! Gee, if ONLY I was smart enough to have bother remembering all those definitions for my Economics 101 test instead of failing out of college.
It must be burdensome for you. No with the usual opening petty jabs aside, let's get to the actual debate.
The problem is that most economic forcasting can be likened to Newtonian vs. Quantum mechanics. Economics can currently only predict the actions of the market at large. Individual contributors to the market are, as you say, too unpredictable to accurately gauge. For the most part, they are free to act as they see fit. A consumer who likes buying movies typically doesn't fit much into the behavior of the market for CDs, except when they buy a CD on a whim. While people who study marketing study what makes a person buy something on a whim, the ultimate actions of the agent in the market as completely unpredictable to them.
As long as economists cannot examine the fine bits of chaos in the system, they have to step back and look at the abstractions.
The bits about monopolies that I described are one such abstraction. A true monopoly is as abstract of a figure as a Platonic solid. While economists create their models in a "perfect" abstracted world, they do not capture the full truth of the real market any more than a wind-tunnel simulation catches the actual behavior of the implemented design in the real world with its flecks and scratches in the paint creating miniature disturbances.
What I'm trying to say here, is that we have a semantic argument. Your claim that no monopoly exists in the world is like claiming that there are no cubes or spheres in the world. On the one hand, the perfected Absolute does not exist, yet what people commonly refer to as cubes, spheres, and monopolies do exist.
Of course there will never be a business that controls 100% of its market unless no one tries to bother. That there are barriers to entry does not mean that people won't try in spite of them. To say that as a result monopolies don't exist is ignoring the common use of the word just to make a semantically stacked argument. When you claim that the only monopolies that are monopolies are ones where other companies are not allowed to even try to enter the marketplace, you're also changing semantics away from real-world use to make your argument a tautology.
As for Microsoft, it's irrelevant whether or not Microsoft has less than 100% market dominance. In legal terms, they are still a monopoly. They have enough of a dominance to be able to play the sort of predatory pricing games that true monopolies are supposed to be able to play should a competitor try to enter the market. They can set their price to maximize profit without fear of getting undercut by a competitor. They can instead cut their prices to levels below their competitors. Most importantly, they can leverage their monopoly in one market to support gaining control of another.
As you say, economies of scale rarely result in natural monopolies in the real world. In general, economies of scale usually result in oligopolies, like the airline industry. Many local monopolies have sprung up as a result of economies of scale, since competitors cannot effectively create their own production bases in the same area. (I'll get to local monopolies in a minute.) Power companies are a fine example of this.
Plus, economies of scale tend to only work when products are undifferentiated. Microsoft can never truly own 100% of the market because some customers will demand a different feature set than they can provide. In the few industries where products are undifferentiated and when economies of scale work their favor, none can achieve that kind of power today because of anti-trust laws, so examples are hard to find. A look back into history can reveal a few notable natural monopolies that were created though the aid of the aggresive price fixing tactics that economies of scale allow. The history of Standard Oil is pratically one of the textbook examples of monopoly abuse that took place without government assistance.
As for local monopolies, the farmer who needs hog food is a poor example of a local monopoly. A better example might be a local hospital. When an emergency strikes, they are the only entity that can move quick enough to service the medical needs to the community surrounding them. Though the farmer could go further for medical attention if he didn't like his community hospital's prices for regular medicine, they're the only people that can help in time for a farming accident.
You seem to have a rather out-dated view of utility companies. Deregulation has been removing government barriers to market entry for the past 20 years and in fact has been forcing open monopolies when competition did not magically appear. It's been quite a disaster in my home state as the regulations to force cooperation from the once monopolies has been pretty ineffective, and the competitors have been just as bad at customer service and pricing as the old companies. Furthermore, they've lifted some of the old price caps which had been keeping the monopolies in line, giving the odd effect of causing competition to raise prices.
Monopolies exist for one reason and one reason alone, because the government forces others to accept them.... True monopolies are not arbitrary numbers of market control, a monopoly is ONLY POSSIBLE under threat of violent force. A monopoly is absolutely impossible in a free society.
This utter and complete nonsense means that it's time for a basic economics lesson.
There are generally considered to be three major types of monopolies: natural monopolies, local monopolies, and regulated monopolies.
The first type of monopoly, the natural monopoly, is the result of economies of scale. When an industry is a decreasing cost industry, increases in production lowers the LRATC (Long-Run Average Total Cost). This is what is referred to as economies of scale. The more infrastructure you build to support production, the cheaper the cost of production becomes. If the bottom of the company's LRATC curve intersects the market demand curve or is beyond it, then when the company has scaled up to cut costs as low as they can go, it has become a natural monopoly. Firms entering the market will have a much higher ATC until they can meet the same level of production as the monopoly maker. However, without the ability to lose money for long periods of time, the new entrant will never be able to reach the same level of production as the the monopoly because its costs are far above what the monopoly can charge for the product. In this case, the barrier to entry is the economies of scale.
The second type of monopoly is the kind that the phone companies are usually considered to fall under, the local monopoly. These monopolies form when only one company services an area. Utility companies are some of the most common types of local monopolies due to the expense of setting up alternative infrastructure for competitors. Without forced access to the private infrastructure of the local monopoly, the overhead costs of setting up business are usually too great to recoup at rates competitive to the local monopoly. Other local monopolies include stadium parking (only so much nearby space) and the concessions stand at a movie theater (can't bring your own food with you). In this case the barrier to entry is control of an essential resource.
Finally, you have regulated monopoly. For one reason or another the government has decided to grant monopoly control over a market to a company. Examples of this include patent holders, copyright owners, and certain kinds of government contrators. The barrier to entry is government dictated here.
Utility companies fall under all three categories. Economies of scale give the local utility the severe advantage unless the government forces them to share their production infrastructure in some fashion. They are characterized by controlling a geographically-tied market, and they are subject to many kinds of government regulation to avoid the price-gouging and customer abuse that comes with a captive market.
Violent force is completely unnecessary and happens extremely rarely in the real world. A company that is up against a natural monopoly is driven out of business by the higher cost of production. In addition, should the competitor manage to draw close to the monopoly's price, most monopolies set their production along the demand curve so that they maximize profit (when MR = MC, something that you can look up on your own). This is not nearly as low as they can go. Quite simply, market forces will drive the competition out of business. Regulated monopolies are kept out of business by the fact that entering the market may be illegal. Usually the courts are enough to stop production without need for police action. Local monopolies straddle the line. However, it's the possession of a critical resource that keeps them in control. All sorts of legal means, such as property rights and the expense of finding/creating an alternative resource are enough to keep them out.
I'd recommend taking a basic economics class before pretending to know something about monopolies. Failing that, there are several good resources online that you can find via Google. Unfortunately, all the good ones with diagrams are not in HTML format, so I couldn't post a link to a diagram of the demand curve set against the LRATC curve for you.
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Ah, but that's reason number 2 that I always order my drinks with no ice and send them back if they have ice in them. Reason number 1 is that I hate watered-down drinks. Reason number 3 is that drinks from a fountain are more than cold enough already, though I'll drink Coke blazing hot before I'll drink it watered-down.
In Japan, at least, the largest drink size you can get at a fast food restraunt like McDonalds is smaller than the "courtesy cup" that they give people who order water in America. Several of my friends and myself got strange looks and comments from host families when buying 1 liter drink bottles for ourselves. I remember one guy was asked by his host family if he had a party of something when he threw away the empty bottle at home. In talking with a few of my foreign friends after I returned, I've been led to believe that America is the "Land of the Super-Sized Drinks."
Can anyone from another country or who's traveled abroad comment on this trend? Is oversized drinks just an American thing?
A) It wouldn't net Apple any more hardware sales.
B) The components of a Crusoe that contain the x86 instruction translation are probably not flashable. They're probably in ROMs.
It could be because they claim that they great flying airships are nuclear powered. How comfortable would you be with an active nuclear reactor flying over your head just waiting to be shot down or have a mechanical failure? Letting the public know we had something like that in our arsenal would cause all sorts of scare-mongering. Hell, I'm not fully comfortable with the idea. At least nuclear subs are likely to be in deep waters if they get sunk.
Seriously. What's wrong with AIX or Linux, the two UNIX operating systems that IBM will have running on them? If you're going to buy a Power4 system from IBM, get the operating systems that it comes with.
In addition, Darwin isn't that great of a UNIX platform. Its thread support isn't all there, its scheduler is terrible, and its missing support for a lot of common advanced UNIX APIs like SysV shared memory and semaphores, and its RPC support isn't fully SunRPC compatible. Trust me. I had to write a multithreaded web server and proxy server that took advantage of all of these UNIX system features, and I kept running into the limitations of Darwin as bundled with Mac OS X 10.1.5.
Stick with AIX or Linux if you want to be doing something serious.
Since this is all being done by the Wireless Athens Group, is this all just an attempt to WAG the Dawgs?
Not well. It always screws up something about formatting when I import documents -- especially if you use the odd tab settings that Word likes to auto-format your documents with. I find that it doesn't do formatting of text around embedded images well, nor does it handle footnotes 100% correctly. However, with the exception of the tab settings crap, I find that it usually only takes about half a minute per page to fix imported work.
I would love a port of OpenOffice to the Mac, but I'd rather see it done using native APIs rather than have yet another half-assed attempt at a port of a Win32/UNIX app via Java. Give me speed and native system color-correction and font-smoothing!
Cute. That's a nice solution if you don't need anything like tables or fonts or any of the rest of "that fru-fru crap." While you're at it, maybe you'd like to suggest a replacement for replace Excel and Powerpoint too.
It's only hypocrisy if you can only see things in a black-and-white view that people must be anarchists or totalitarians to be consistent. Most normal people believe in the concepts of "good legislation" and "bad legislation." You might be surprised to know that most people consider SPAM and copyright to be two completely seperate issues.
Copyright law is about putting limits on ideas and concepts and selling them. I'm not 100% opposed to copyright, but I believe that current trends in legislation are destroying the balance between copyright owners and customers that makes copyright work properly. The issue here is whether or not people can take or do something with works someone else created without compensating them.
SPAM is about the ultimate expression of our crass commercial society where businesses now treat people as consumers instead of customers. It's about shoving ads down people's throat and putting the burden of the cost on them. As far as spammers are concerned, we exist just to consume advertisting from them, and we should shut up, pay the costs, and like it. The thing is, they're not providing me with a service that I want in exchange for my added cost of living. The issue here is whether or not someone can create something and force people to have to bear the costs for it when they didn't want it in the first place.
However, copyright protection and spam do share one important thing in common. Technological solutions are all useless without forcing people to adopt them. The question is whether or not we should support the "injured" party in either case. In the case of copyright, I don't believe we should. That's a matter of corporate welfare to protect an industry against technology that makes it obsolete. In the case of spam, I do believe we should. It's a matter of forcing someone to pay costs for a product he didn't want.
Even if it is a screenshot of the OQO in action, I wonder about the visibility. Scroll over to get the size of one of those icons and the compare it to the size of the headphone jack in that monster image. I mean, that's one tiny screen!
Why don't we just destroy all subs and weapons and just get the fuck along ? It seems every day the US Army is looking for a fight and it's just pathetic.
It's about time someone said it! I mean, really, we've put with the ruse long enough. It's no longer funny. We should just end all these shennanigans and get back to the peace, love, and well-being that was all of human history before the Illuminati talked everyone into starting up the Great Generational Gag of 1937. Come on, soon no one will be alive to remember that it was all just a big joke, and people will think things like hunger, famine, and disease were meant to be taken seriously or, even worse, were the natural order of human history!
Let's just put an end to it all.
There's a Texas company that makes a plugin for Outlook, called InsightConnector, that allows it to do all its groupware features over any IMAP4 server with ACL support. It's not OSS, and it's not free, but it's supposed to be cheaper than MS Exchange.
You can find a review of it here.
The company's website is here.
The practically have to have experience in moving servers like this to have any business. You might try contacting them and seeing what they cost.
It's no worse than dealing with UNIX keyboard weirdness. Under the Mac, if you want to go to the end of the line, hit Command-(Right). For the beginning, hit Command-(Left). Using the Command key with the Up and Down arrows will move your cursor to the beginning or end of the document. Similarly, if you want a cursor that moves as you page up and down, using the Option key with the Up and Down arrow keys will do the job in many applications. (However, in others, it will move by paragraph.) Using the Option key with the Left and Right arrow keys will almost always move word-by-word.
Basically, the arrows keys on the Mac are for moving the text cursor, and the Home/End/Page Up/Page Down keys are for looking around the text without moving the cursor (which needs no side-to-side equivalent). It's a logical layout. It's just different from the Windows world.
I find it ironic that you're plugging your anti-spam company in an off-topic post.
That's pretty much how it works. However, many species of bacteria can exchange DNA with other species of bacteria. This means that many strains of bacteria get their first resistant variant without having to go through all the trouble of random mutation by swapping with other kinds of bacteria and then surviving while their peers die.
Both are slightly technical, but can be skimmed over without missing too much detail.
Oh, for the love of God.
By 6100-compatible, he probably meant clone machines. All clone machines were PowerPC machines since Apple did. If they were meant to be contemporaries of the 6100s, they were probably running 603 chips, which are the next generation of PPC chips, not "860XX" chips.
Now Nubus was weird for the day. It was weird because it was pretty intelligent. Unlike PCI and ISA which had a bunch of IRQ issues, Nubus sorted out cards on its own without need for user intervention. This was a major reason for Apple deciding to use it back in the day. Unfortunately, by the time Apple switched away, Macs were the last machines using Nubus in a mainstream application for the past few years. That combined with its low bandwidth compared to PCI moved Apple to switch. (That and they'd been plagued with low-level errors since they switched to Nubus '90 when they switched from m68k to PPC chips.)
All PowerMacs still have PCI slots and still support PCI video cards. My neighbor has 3 monitors attached to his system thanks to 2 PCI video cards. The only reason AGP wasn't supported before it first came in was that it hasn't been out and used in PCs for very long. PCI will still be around on Macs for a long time until a few years after something better comes out and becomes standard in the PC industry. (Hell, modern PowerMacs still don't use DDR SDRAM or RDRAM for main memory. They're still choking on PC133.)
Incidentally, SCSI is still faster than IDE if you have multiple drives on the same chain as in a RAID for example. IDE/ATA has a huge command overhead compared to SCSI and inferior top speeds. You just don't notice the difference if you aren't really stressing it.
I have to say, this is shocking but wonderful. It won't be long before we have the ability to grow and harvest our own soldiers in a laboratory. ... And any technology that prevents the senseless deaths of our world's sons should be supported, despite any moral qualms regarding the technology itself.
As opposed to, of course, the human slaves we would be creating purely to send off to their deaths. What an ethical solution.
I call troll.
It used to be installed as part of the bsd-games package on Red Hat and other Linux distros. I'm very disappointed to find out and report that it was removed from the package in 1998 with version 2.2 because of a lack of a clear license. As far as I can tell, it was freely published the Jan/Feb 1997 edition of "SpaceGamer/FantasyGamer." It was probably meant to be public domain. It was simple, but a lot of fun.
If you want to find it, get it from the Debian archives here.
It's not portable at all. The bastards wrote it in MFC and DirectX. Not that I'm bitter. It's only that the most innovative thing to happen to PC RPGs -- being able to DM like in real life -- is the one feature they left out of the Mac/Linux versions. Oh, here. We're giving you every bit of the game on your platforms except the part everyone's excited about. Let's just dangle it under your nose instead.
Now, there's a second middle finger for Mac users by holding off the publishing. I'd honestly rather them have not ported the game at all than to release a late, crippled version. It's just like that time I bought HoMM3 only to find out they didn't port the damned campaign editor.
I'd just like to point out that this is not the traveling salesman problem. This is the shortest point between any two points, not all points on the map. Read the article.
There is one problem, after a little while the tumor sends out little tumors throughout the body (as many know) but what many don't is that when the main tumor is destroyed the smaller ones start growing (do to a lack of a substance that the main tumor sends throughout the body).
Actually, that's exactly what anti-angiogenic drugs help fight against. The spreading cancer cells will die off because they cannot find a place to take root and grow before the immune system takes care of them. New tumors require blood vessels to feed them above a certain size. This drug prevents them from building that network of blood vessels.
Anti-angiogenic drugs have been in testing for awhile now. I remember hearing about them a couple of years ago. I'm curious to see if they've tested to see what happens when a patient is injured or works out while using these drugs. In both cases, they will need to regenerate damage to their blood vessels.
As a long time Mac user, I'd have to say that the answer lies in Apple's support for multiple monitors.
Most Mac users don't have the same level of desktop organization and task seperation needs that you or I have. I, too, am completely spoiled by virtual desktops under X and similar hacks added on for Windows.
Instead, most advanced Mac users just need more screen real estate to do their work on. The publishing and graphics design industres are the best example of this. Once you get used to having 3 monitors attached to a machine, it's just about as good as virtual desktops, though I prefer the latter.
As another poster said, though, many Mac users (and Windows users, I'd like to add) are honestly too easily confused by hidden virtual desktops. Clutter does not offend most casual PC/Mac users like it does some of the more advanced users. As a result, you'll probably never see official support for multiple workspaces in Mac OS X, just like Apple canned the support for official Apple windowing themes after finding that it confused some users.
Ooooh I am so impressed you can quote from a textbook you college student! Gee, if ONLY I was smart enough to have bother remembering all those definitions for my Economics 101 test instead of failing out of college.
It must be burdensome for you. No with the usual opening petty jabs aside, let's get to the actual debate.
The problem is that most economic forcasting can be likened to Newtonian vs. Quantum mechanics. Economics can currently only predict the actions of the market at large. Individual contributors to the market are, as you say, too unpredictable to accurately gauge. For the most part, they are free to act as they see fit. A consumer who likes buying movies typically doesn't fit much into the behavior of the market for CDs, except when they buy a CD on a whim. While people who study marketing study what makes a person buy something on a whim, the ultimate actions of the agent in the market as completely unpredictable to them.
As long as economists cannot examine the fine bits of chaos in the system, they have to step back and look at the abstractions.
The bits about monopolies that I described are one such abstraction. A true monopoly is as abstract of a figure as a Platonic solid. While economists create their models in a "perfect" abstracted world, they do not capture the full truth of the real market any more than a wind-tunnel simulation catches the actual behavior of the implemented design in the real world with its flecks and scratches in the paint creating miniature disturbances.
What I'm trying to say here, is that we have a semantic argument. Your claim that no monopoly exists in the world is like claiming that there are no cubes or spheres in the world. On the one hand, the perfected Absolute does not exist, yet what people commonly refer to as cubes, spheres, and monopolies do exist.
Of course there will never be a business that controls 100% of its market unless no one tries to bother. That there are barriers to entry does not mean that people won't try in spite of them. To say that as a result monopolies don't exist is ignoring the common use of the word just to make a semantically stacked argument. When you claim that the only monopolies that are monopolies are ones where other companies are not allowed to even try to enter the marketplace, you're also changing semantics away from real-world use to make your argument a tautology.
As for Microsoft, it's irrelevant whether or not Microsoft has less than 100% market dominance. In legal terms, they are still a monopoly. They have enough of a dominance to be able to play the sort of predatory pricing games that true monopolies are supposed to be able to play should a competitor try to enter the market. They can set their price to maximize profit without fear of getting undercut by a competitor. They can instead cut their prices to levels below their competitors. Most importantly, they can leverage their monopoly in one market to support gaining control of another.
As you say, economies of scale rarely result in natural monopolies in the real world. In general, economies of scale usually result in oligopolies, like the airline industry. Many local monopolies have sprung up as a result of economies of scale, since competitors cannot effectively create their own production bases in the same area. (I'll get to local monopolies in a minute.) Power companies are a fine example of this.
Plus, economies of scale tend to only work when products are undifferentiated. Microsoft can never truly own 100% of the market because some customers will demand a different feature set than they can provide. In the few industries where products are undifferentiated and when economies of scale work their favor, none can achieve that kind of power today because of anti-trust laws, so examples are hard to find. A look back into history can reveal a few notable natural monopolies that were created though the aid of the aggresive price fixing tactics that economies of scale allow. The history of Standard Oil is pratically one of the textbook examples of monopoly abuse that took place without government assistance.
As for local monopolies, the farmer who needs hog food is a poor example of a local monopoly. A better example might be a local hospital. When an emergency strikes, they are the only entity that can move quick enough to service the medical needs to the community surrounding them. Though the farmer could go further for medical attention if he didn't like his community hospital's prices for regular medicine, they're the only people that can help in time for a farming accident.
You seem to have a rather out-dated view of utility companies. Deregulation has been removing government barriers to market entry for the past 20 years and in fact has been forcing open monopolies when competition did not magically appear. It's been quite a disaster in my home state as the regulations to force cooperation from the once monopolies has been pretty ineffective, and the competitors have been just as bad at customer service and pricing as the old companies. Furthermore, they've lifted some of the old price caps which had been keeping the monopolies in line, giving the odd effect of causing competition to raise prices.
- Open your Preferences panel.
- Expand the tree for "Advanced" and click on "Scripts & Windows".
- Deselect the ability of Javascript to:
- Open unrequested windows
- Move or resize existing windows
- Raise or lower windows
That should get rid of all the most annoying features of JavaScript without killing the useful or "pretty" website enhancements.Monopolies exist for one reason and one reason alone, because the government forces others to accept them. ... True monopolies are not arbitrary numbers of market control, a monopoly is ONLY POSSIBLE under threat of violent force. A monopoly is absolutely impossible in a free society.
This utter and complete nonsense means that it's time for a basic economics lesson.
There are generally considered to be three major types of monopolies: natural monopolies, local monopolies, and regulated monopolies.
The first type of monopoly, the natural monopoly, is the result of economies of scale. When an industry is a decreasing cost industry, increases in production lowers the LRATC (Long-Run Average Total Cost). This is what is referred to as economies of scale. The more infrastructure you build to support production, the cheaper the cost of production becomes. If the bottom of the company's LRATC curve intersects the market demand curve or is beyond it, then when the company has scaled up to cut costs as low as they can go, it has become a natural monopoly. Firms entering the market will have a much higher ATC until they can meet the same level of production as the monopoly maker. However, without the ability to lose money for long periods of time, the new entrant will never be able to reach the same level of production as the the monopoly because its costs are far above what the monopoly can charge for the product. In this case, the barrier to entry is the economies of scale.
The second type of monopoly is the kind that the phone companies are usually considered to fall under, the local monopoly. These monopolies form when only one company services an area. Utility companies are some of the most common types of local monopolies due to the expense of setting up alternative infrastructure for competitors. Without forced access to the private infrastructure of the local monopoly, the overhead costs of setting up business are usually too great to recoup at rates competitive to the local monopoly. Other local monopolies include stadium parking (only so much nearby space) and the concessions stand at a movie theater (can't bring your own food with you). In this case the barrier to entry is control of an essential resource.
Finally, you have regulated monopoly. For one reason or another the government has decided to grant monopoly control over a market to a company. Examples of this include patent holders, copyright owners, and certain kinds of government contrators. The barrier to entry is government dictated here.
Utility companies fall under all three categories. Economies of scale give the local utility the severe advantage unless the government forces them to share their production infrastructure in some fashion. They are characterized by controlling a geographically-tied market, and they are subject to many kinds of government regulation to avoid the price-gouging and customer abuse that comes with a captive market.
Violent force is completely unnecessary and happens extremely rarely in the real world. A company that is up against a natural monopoly is driven out of business by the higher cost of production. In addition, should the competitor manage to draw close to the monopoly's price, most monopolies set their production along the demand curve so that they maximize profit (when MR = MC, something that you can look up on your own). This is not nearly as low as they can go. Quite simply, market forces will drive the competition out of business. Regulated monopolies are kept out of business by the fact that entering the market may be illegal. Usually the courts are enough to stop production without need for police action. Local monopolies straddle the line. However, it's the possession of a critical resource that keeps them in control. All sorts of legal means, such as property rights and the expense of finding/creating an alternative resource are enough to keep them out.
I'd recommend taking a basic economics class before pretending to know something about monopolies. Failing that, there are several good resources online that you can find via Google. Unfortunately, all the good ones with diagrams are not in HTML format, so I couldn't post a link to a diagram of the demand curve set against the LRATC curve for you.