The UK joined the EEC in 1973. Council Directive 83/189/EEC was passed in March 1983. It says that if a country passes "standards" it has to notify other countries.
See, the EEC (now the EU) is designed to allow freer trade between countries. You can't do that if you're implementing standards that you're not telling other people about. It makes for a "gotcha" situation: "Hey, you didn't follow the standard, and we're going to prosecute you under our laws, even though you followed all the rules you knew about."
Or... will it increase demand? At this point, at least some demand is reduced by the people averse to the risk of being arrested. Decriminalize that, and you increase the demand by those people.
The distributors are still taking risks in distribution and will demand payment for that risk. It's possible that this sort of decriminalization may make things worse rather than better.
But as you say, there is the implication that the risk at the lowest distribution tiers is also reduced, and that may have a downward push on prices.
A good heater shouldn't require more than around 1.5 kilowatts, the size of a space heater that can keep a small room toasty. The Volt's engine is rated at 111 kilowatts.
So running the heater shouldn't cost more than around 1% of your total range.
Why are they calling it out for Google Book Search? Every search tells the company what the user was searching for. Every interaction with EVERY web page tells you something about the user. Every time you walk into a bricks-and-mortar store, you're letting the owner and everybody else in the vicinity know that you have some connection with what they sell.
It sounds like the EFF is looking for you to be private-in-public, and that's just not guaranteed. Users have a right to expect a certain good-faith effort on the part of people they transact with not go to blabbing it to everybody, and the more data they have the more we need to clarify what "good faith" means, but I don't understand why they're singling out Google Book Search of all the things in the world.
And in case anybody doesn't want to RTFA (Read The Fine Abstract), the key word is "negligible", as in:
Although large-scale effects are observed, wind power has a negligible effect on global-mean surface temperature, and it would deliver enormous global benefits by reducing emissions of CO2 and air pollutants.
These statistics suggest that these blogs break a story before these mainstream media outlets about half the time.
I think that even "4 minutes or less" for first blog mention may simply be due to the sheer number of bloggers who read the story and regurgitate it into their blogs instantly. So I don't think it's as high as 50%.
Still, the idea that blogs were noticeably ahead even 25% of the time is surprising, since most blogs are opinion and not news sources. There are many possibilities.
They may simply be reporting facts that never make it to the regular media because they aren't very interesting. Political blogs often cite rumor, or out-of-context quotes that simply are not newsworthy. Sometimes, these become news stories only in the form of "Did you see what the bloggers are saying?"
Another lag is that bloggers who do break news rarely fact-check. Drudge Report does break a fair bit of news; it also reports a lot of false rumor.
I'd be curious to see how they selected their stories to report on. There would be many sources of selection bias.
Still... the data are suggestive that perhaps blogs break more news than I had realized.
You shouldn't even be reading this post for another ten minutes or so, because I should be writing it on Mars.
Er, you do realize that you yourself don't actually get to go to Mars, right?
They could have put the money into sending SOMEBODY to Mars, but the odds against it being you are, uh, astronomical. Face it: if you're very lucky, you might be able to spend $100k and get into a brief orbit before you die. Not even the Moon is in your actual reach.
If you think that a vicarious trip to another planet is worth the scores of billions of dollars we'd all have to come up with to pay for it, by all means agitate for that. But be very, very clear: it's not going to be you.
Personally, I'm not crazy about spending those billions so somebody else gets to go to space and produce very little science. I'd rather see it put into expendable robot missions, and that goes for the ISS as well.
Selecting a party instead of a candidate seems rather unscientific to me.
It's not as unscientific as you might expect. Whatever the needs of your district are, a Congressmen is also obligated to the party. Parties are where people vote against their interests on some issues to gain allies for votes on interests that are more important to them.
Many votes thus go along the party line. Even those who break the party line do so most often when the conclusion is foregone: if the vote were close, the party has leverage to apply, from committee assignments to support during the next campaign.
Before the recent Democratic sweeps, the split was often rather close, and your vote could determine who got to elect the Speaker or Majority Leader, and thus set the agenda. A vote for a superior candidate of a party you generally opposed gave a lot of power to the most extreme members of that party, even though you had no direct say in their states.
So in some ways you really are voting for the party no matter whose name is on the ballot. Perhaps the rules could be altered, such as by getting Congress to vote by secret ballot. That would remove accountability to the constituents, but then, they don't often seem to have it anyway.
Their assets are worth considerably more than a half-billion. They've got $11 billion in cash alone. But their debts dramatically outweigh their assets. That means that the stock will be wiped out, and even creditors (who are in line well ahead of stockholder) will receive nothing.
Conceivably people could continue to trade GM shares among themselves, like Magic cards, but you can't even tap them for mana.
Unfortunately, sooner or later somebody will always leak your "real" email address. They'll forward you a comic strip or include it on a mass emailing, and now it's in every spammer's book forever.
And everybody in that intermediate camp (close enough to send email regularly, not close enough to reveal your One True Email Address) is in a bind. They either can't get to you without signing up for the system, or you establish some sort of black/white/gray listing on top of the other system. Which means you might as well skip the transaction problems.
Mailing lists are also problematic, though I think that replacing push mailing lists with RSS pull mailing lists is going to take a big chunk out of that eventually.
The key advantage Netflix has over other services is that it's right there. They know what you watch and you don't have to go searching.
Of course you still have to go though the back catalog and talk about all the things you've already seen, which runs in the hundreds for somebody who likes movies. That pain is essentially the same with any service.
But going forward, Netflix can present you the opportunity to rate a movie more easily. It's a small user-interface thing, but significant.
Since we're talking about one ad per show compared to nearly two dozen, the overall revenue is going to be MUCH lower even if there were as many viewers. If one wanted to produce a show for Hulu rather than the networks, you'd need to either charge 10x as much per viewer, or radically increase the number of ads, driving a lot of viewers away.
Hulu ads are targeted, but they're not THAT well targeted.
The networks tap into the fact that a lot of people like to watch the same thing at the same time: everybody wants to know how American Idol turned out all at once. More specific viewing has gone to the scores of special-interest cable/satellite channels. They have big marketing benefits because they're showing their own ads.
Big, expensive shows like Lost may simply be squeezed out one day: insufficient profit for the networks (especially since many fail entirely) and insufficient revenue on Hulu.
Reasonably good, actually. I often add 4 star movies to my queue, and rarely regret it.
The problem is the bell curve. There aren't a lot of 5 star movies out there, and I've seen them. There are a lot of 3 star films, but my life is short and I don't want to spend a lot of time on movies I merely "like".
In fact, it's not really a bell curve. I rarely provide 1-star or 2-star ratings simply because it's not at all difficult for me to identify a film I'm going to truly hate. I don't have to waste two hours of my life to find out whether I'd merely dislike the new Transformers movie or whether it will fill my soul with disgust.
The left side of the curve is actually quite fat with movies that simply won't interest me at all. The existing algorithm is actually fairly good at telling me I won't like them. The hard part is picking out the very few movies that ARE worth my time.
They do show both the average and expected rating for each film. What I'd really like to see is a list sorted by the difference: where do I stand out from the crowd? Such movies are likely to have extra appeal.
So the 10% difference isn't completely worthless, but the real problem is that they're pursuing the wrong goal. There's a lot of information they're dropping on the floor.
A good general heuristic: plans exposed on Wired never come to fruition. Wired is where you go when you want to gain exposure for a plan that can't get traction.
So no, Facebook isn't going to challenge Google with any success. If they're lucky, they'll continue to be an interesting niche player, like blogs. More likely, they'll let their success go to their heads and they'll become MySpace, which people abandon in droves for the next flashy thing.
In this case I also RTFA and I think their plan is dumb: I use google precisely to find out what I don't already know. But even without RTFA, the Wired heuristic tells me it's a bad idea. That heuristic has served me well.
The problem is the micro-transactions. You'd want to charge very little, a penny or less. But the overhead of transaction processing is enormous; no credit card company will deal with it.
You could try to hold the money yourself and just shuffle it around, but that requires everybody to be on your system, and email users don't care for that.
It also represents a pain to users: protecting the authorization and authentication info that lets them charge either requires frequent human intervention, OR a spam-bot could just use the account.
So, nice idea, and I think something like it may happen some day, but not soon.
> Synthesizing information isn't cheap. It took me a long time to write that book.
I published a book some years ago, and there were a lot of other people involved, too: copy editors, reviewers, typesetters, artists. All of whom require management, secretaries, paper clips, etc etc etc. The publisher spent a lot of time and money marketing that book.
You are probably receiving only $8-$10 of that $41 in Kindle sales. The publisher's overhead probably only accounts for another $10-$15, leaving a pretty considerable overhead. Much of that is making up for projects that didn't happen, books that failed to turn a profit, etc.
So you can't sell that book for $2 online and expect to have that mean anything. The author and the host of people assisting him or her put in a lot of hours. It could probably be less than $40 and still turn a profit for the publisher, but it's still going to be pricey ($20-$30).
I don't know what kind of craziness has led to the obsession with fuel cells.
If I were paranoid, I'd wonder if maybe the oil-baron President deliberately chose a technology that sounded good but would in fact go nowhere, thus ensuring an extra decade or so for oil company profits.
I'm not paranoid, and I think the oil companies could have made equal profits by backing the right horse.
But maybe I'm just a little paranoid, because I can't shake the feeling that they should have known hydrogen made no economic sense.
Because he doesn't want the federal government to be the only entity funding R&D.
This isn't a matter of the national budget. It's a matter of getting the entire country to start thinking of R&D as something important.
In 2007, research spending was $324 billion, out of a total GDP of $14 trillion, or 2.3%. Obama's calling for everybody (mostly big corporations) to spend 50% more on it, because it's research that grows the GDP as a whole. And if we're ever going to get out of the deeeeep economic hole we've drawn for ourselves (a national debt around 80% of GDP), the only way is to make a lot more GDP.
If you read the RFI, it makes clear that they're not talking about the motive power of the taxicab. They're looking to upgrade the "in-taxi experience".
For comparison, they cite the ability to pay with credit cards and the "Passenger Information Monitor (PIM) with payment screen, live map, and various content", which they put in all taxis after the last round.
They're also hoping to improve things for drivers and the fleet, like better ways to get available drivers to where there are passengers to be picked up.
I think they want an idea like this: use your phone (and its built-in GPS) to summon a cab, without the tedious standing-in-the-street phase. Cabs go to where people need rides, rather than guessing.
That was about the election itself, and yes, it gave Democrats an extremely sour taste of Bush even before his inauguration.
With the exception of the lunatic fringe, the election of 2004 is generally considered to have validated the election of 2000 since Bush won fair and square (at least, as fair and square as anything ever happens in American elections). But by then Bush had all-new reasons for Democrats to detest him.
> The problem with so called climate science is that we can't do any controlled experiments to test the hypothesis,
In fact, they do. They don't get to have entire control planets to test the hypothesis directly, but a lot of fields of science are subject to the same limitation, from biology to astrophysics.
So they do indirect tests, from computer modeling to core sampling. The same data are open to everybody. If you want to demonstrate that they're guilty of groupthink, then all you have to do is get yourself educated and re-interpret the data.
Slashdot Mirror
IANA(British)L, but here's the gist:
The UK joined the EEC in 1973. Council Directive 83/189/EEC was passed in March 1983. It says that if a country passes "standards" it has to notify other countries.
See, the EEC (now the EU) is designed to allow freer trade between countries. You can't do that if you're implementing standards that you're not telling other people about. It makes for a "gotcha" situation: "Hey, you didn't follow the standard, and we're going to prosecute you under our laws, even though you followed all the rules you knew about."
Or... will it increase demand? At this point, at least some demand is reduced by the people averse to the risk of being arrested. Decriminalize that, and you increase the demand by those people.
The distributors are still taking risks in distribution and will demand payment for that risk. It's possible that this sort of decriminalization may make things worse rather than better.
But as you say, there is the implication that the risk at the lowest distribution tiers is also reduced, and that may have a downward push on prices.
A good heater shouldn't require more than around 1.5 kilowatts, the size of a space heater that can keep a small room toasty. The Volt's engine is rated at 111 kilowatts.
So running the heater shouldn't cost more than around 1% of your total range.
Why are they calling it out for Google Book Search? Every search tells the company what the user was searching for. Every interaction with EVERY web page tells you something about the user. Every time you walk into a bricks-and-mortar store, you're letting the owner and everybody else in the vicinity know that you have some connection with what they sell.
It sounds like the EFF is looking for you to be private-in-public, and that's just not guaranteed. Users have a right to expect a certain good-faith effort on the part of people they transact with not go to blabbing it to everybody, and the more data they have the more we need to clarify what "good faith" means, but I don't understand why they're singling out Google Book Search of all the things in the world.
...because that's the only female US Judge I'm familiar with.
You might want to pick up a newspaper more than once a year. A female US judge is the #1 news story in just about all of them for the last week.
And in case anybody doesn't want to RTFA (Read The Fine Abstract), the key word is "negligible", as in:
Although large-scale effects are observed, wind power has a negligible effect on global-mean surface temperature, and it would deliver enormous global benefits by reducing emissions of CO2 and air pollutants.
Thanks for RTFA. I find that most of the time stories about "How incredibly stupid is this?" are often leaving out some crucial fact.
These statistics suggest that these blogs break a story before these mainstream media outlets about half the time.
I think that even "4 minutes or less" for first blog mention may simply be due to the sheer number of bloggers who read the story and regurgitate it into their blogs instantly. So I don't think it's as high as 50%.
Still, the idea that blogs were noticeably ahead even 25% of the time is surprising, since most blogs are opinion and not news sources. There are many possibilities.
They may simply be reporting facts that never make it to the regular media because they aren't very interesting. Political blogs often cite rumor, or out-of-context quotes that simply are not newsworthy. Sometimes, these become news stories only in the form of "Did you see what the bloggers are saying?"
Another lag is that bloggers who do break news rarely fact-check. Drudge Report does break a fair bit of news; it also reports a lot of false rumor.
I'd be curious to see how they selected their stories to report on. There would be many sources of selection bias.
Still... the data are suggestive that perhaps blogs break more news than I had realized.
You shouldn't even be reading this post for another ten minutes or so, because I should be writing it on Mars.
Er, you do realize that you yourself don't actually get to go to Mars, right?
They could have put the money into sending SOMEBODY to Mars, but the odds against it being you are, uh, astronomical. Face it: if you're very lucky, you might be able to spend $100k and get into a brief orbit before you die. Not even the Moon is in your actual reach.
If you think that a vicarious trip to another planet is worth the scores of billions of dollars we'd all have to come up with to pay for it, by all means agitate for that. But be very, very clear: it's not going to be you.
Personally, I'm not crazy about spending those billions so somebody else gets to go to space and produce very little science. I'd rather see it put into expendable robot missions, and that goes for the ISS as well.
Selecting a party instead of a candidate seems rather unscientific to me.
It's not as unscientific as you might expect. Whatever the needs of your district are, a Congressmen is also obligated to the party. Parties are where people vote against their interests on some issues to gain allies for votes on interests that are more important to them.
Many votes thus go along the party line. Even those who break the party line do so most often when the conclusion is foregone: if the vote were close, the party has leverage to apply, from committee assignments to support during the next campaign.
Before the recent Democratic sweeps, the split was often rather close, and your vote could determine who got to elect the Speaker or Majority Leader, and thus set the agenda. A vote for a superior candidate of a party you generally opposed gave a lot of power to the most extreme members of that party, even though you had no direct say in their states.
So in some ways you really are voting for the party no matter whose name is on the ballot. Perhaps the rules could be altered, such as by getting Congress to vote by secret ballot. That would remove accountability to the constituents, but then, they don't often seem to have it anyway.
But they've got asset sheets. Those assets are probably worth half a billion. I don't know, I'm just guessing.
They also have $54 billion in debts, and I'm not guessing about that number.
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/ks?s=GMGMQ.PK
Their assets are worth considerably more than a half-billion. They've got $11 billion in cash alone. But their debts dramatically outweigh their assets. That means that the stock will be wiped out, and even creditors (who are in line well ahead of stockholder) will receive nothing.
Conceivably people could continue to trade GM shares among themselves, like Magic cards, but you can't even tap them for mana.
Unfortunately, sooner or later somebody will always leak your "real" email address. They'll forward you a comic strip or include it on a mass emailing, and now it's in every spammer's book forever.
And everybody in that intermediate camp (close enough to send email regularly, not close enough to reveal your One True Email Address) is in a bind. They either can't get to you without signing up for the system, or you establish some sort of black/white/gray listing on top of the other system. Which means you might as well skip the transaction problems.
Mailing lists are also problematic, though I think that replacing push mailing lists with RSS pull mailing lists is going to take a big chunk out of that eventually.
The key advantage Netflix has over other services is that it's right there. They know what you watch and you don't have to go searching.
Of course you still have to go though the back catalog and talk about all the things you've already seen, which runs in the hundreds for somebody who likes movies. That pain is essentially the same with any service.
But going forward, Netflix can present you the opportunity to rate a movie more easily. It's a small user-interface thing, but significant.
Since we're talking about one ad per show compared to nearly two dozen, the overall revenue is going to be MUCH lower even if there were as many viewers. If one wanted to produce a show for Hulu rather than the networks, you'd need to either charge 10x as much per viewer, or radically increase the number of ads, driving a lot of viewers away.
Hulu ads are targeted, but they're not THAT well targeted.
The networks tap into the fact that a lot of people like to watch the same thing at the same time: everybody wants to know how American Idol turned out all at once. More specific viewing has gone to the scores of special-interest cable/satellite channels. They have big marketing benefits because they're showing their own ads.
Big, expensive shows like Lost may simply be squeezed out one day: insufficient profit for the networks (especially since many fail entirely) and insufficient revenue on Hulu.
Reasonably good, actually. I often add 4 star movies to my queue, and rarely regret it.
The problem is the bell curve. There aren't a lot of 5 star movies out there, and I've seen them. There are a lot of 3 star films, but my life is short and I don't want to spend a lot of time on movies I merely "like".
In fact, it's not really a bell curve. I rarely provide 1-star or 2-star ratings simply because it's not at all difficult for me to identify a film I'm going to truly hate. I don't have to waste two hours of my life to find out whether I'd merely dislike the new Transformers movie or whether it will fill my soul with disgust.
The left side of the curve is actually quite fat with movies that simply won't interest me at all. The existing algorithm is actually fairly good at telling me I won't like them. The hard part is picking out the very few movies that ARE worth my time.
They do show both the average and expected rating for each film. What I'd really like to see is a list sorted by the difference: where do I stand out from the crowd? Such movies are likely to have extra appeal.
So the 10% difference isn't completely worthless, but the real problem is that they're pursuing the wrong goal. There's a lot of information they're dropping on the floor.
A good general heuristic: plans exposed on Wired never come to fruition. Wired is where you go when you want to gain exposure for a plan that can't get traction.
So no, Facebook isn't going to challenge Google with any success. If they're lucky, they'll continue to be an interesting niche player, like blogs. More likely, they'll let their success go to their heads and they'll become MySpace, which people abandon in droves for the next flashy thing.
In this case I also RTFA and I think their plan is dumb: I use google precisely to find out what I don't already know. But even without RTFA, the Wired heuristic tells me it's a bad idea. That heuristic has served me well.
The problem is the micro-transactions. You'd want to charge very little, a penny or less. But the overhead of transaction processing is enormous; no credit card company will deal with it.
You could try to hold the money yourself and just shuffle it around, but that requires everybody to be on your system, and email users don't care for that.
It also represents a pain to users: protecting the authorization and authentication info that lets them charge either requires frequent human intervention, OR a spam-bot could just use the account.
So, nice idea, and I think something like it may happen some day, but not soon.
its the same as being in a sexually arousing situation and suddenly being asked to fill out form 1040A and pay your taxes right now
Are you really, really bad at putting on a condom, or are you really, really good at filling out your taxes?
I'm out of mod points, so I'll just say "thanks".
> Synthesizing information isn't cheap. It took me a long time to write that book.
I published a book some years ago, and there were a lot of other people involved, too: copy editors, reviewers, typesetters, artists. All of whom require management, secretaries, paper clips, etc etc etc. The publisher spent a lot of time and money marketing that book.
You are probably receiving only $8-$10 of that $41 in Kindle sales. The publisher's overhead probably only accounts for another $10-$15, leaving a pretty considerable overhead. Much of that is making up for projects that didn't happen, books that failed to turn a profit, etc.
So you can't sell that book for $2 online and expect to have that mean anything. The author and the host of people assisting him or her put in a lot of hours. It could probably be less than $40 and still turn a profit for the publisher, but it's still going to be pricey ($20-$30).
I don't know what kind of craziness has led to the obsession with fuel cells.
If I were paranoid, I'd wonder if maybe the oil-baron President deliberately chose a technology that sounded good but would in fact go nowhere, thus ensuring an extra decade or so for oil company profits.
I'm not paranoid, and I think the oil companies could have made equal profits by backing the right horse.
But maybe I'm just a little paranoid, because I can't shake the feeling that they should have known hydrogen made no economic sense.
Because he doesn't want the federal government to be the only entity funding R&D.
This isn't a matter of the national budget. It's a matter of getting the entire country to start thinking of R&D as something important.
In 2007, research spending was $324 billion, out of a total GDP of $14 trillion, or 2.3%. Obama's calling for everybody (mostly big corporations) to spend 50% more on it, because it's research that grows the GDP as a whole. And if we're ever going to get out of the deeeeep economic hole we've drawn for ourselves (a national debt around 80% of GDP), the only way is to make a lot more GDP.
If you read the RFI, it makes clear that they're not talking about the motive power of the taxicab. They're looking to upgrade the "in-taxi experience".
For comparison, they cite the ability to pay with credit cards and the "Passenger Information Monitor (PIM) with payment screen, live map, and various content", which they put in all taxis after the last round.
They're also hoping to improve things for drivers and the fleet, like better ways to get available drivers to where there are passengers to be picked up.
I think they want an idea like this: use your phone (and its built-in GPS) to summon a cab, without the tedious standing-in-the-street phase. Cabs go to where people need rides, rather than guessing.
That was about the election itself, and yes, it gave Democrats an extremely sour taste of Bush even before his inauguration.
With the exception of the lunatic fringe, the election of 2004 is generally considered to have validated the election of 2000 since Bush won fair and square (at least, as fair and square as anything ever happens in American elections). But by then Bush had all-new reasons for Democrats to detest him.
> The problem with so called climate science is that we can't do any controlled experiments to test the hypothesis,
In fact, they do. They don't get to have entire control planets to test the hypothesis directly, but a lot of fields of science are subject to the same limitation, from biology to astrophysics.
So they do indirect tests, from computer modeling to core sampling. The same data are open to everybody. If you want to demonstrate that they're guilty of groupthink, then all you have to do is get yourself educated and re-interpret the data.