Well, gee, what isn't gambling in that case? In Pennsylvania I can choose who I want to supply my electricity. I can pick a variable cost, which is based on the LMP in the wholesale market. That's definitely a gamble. Fine, I'll pick a fixed cost contract. Six months? A year? Who knows what the price of electricity is going to do over the next 12 months?
I go to a warehouse store and buy paper towels in bulk. It's a very low risk, but the cost of paper towels might go down in the next few weeks. Uh-oh, should I have purchased just enough to get by on the chance the price might go down?
Going outside every morning is a gamble. I might get hit by a car. I might trip and break my ankle.
Where do you want to draw the line, Jane? At some point it just gets silly. Futures markets, as described in the post to which you replied, are a way of hedging some of the risk. You give up a chance of making much more money (or losing lots) for the security of having a fixed price. This allows you to plan your cash flow much more sanely. This ends up saving money (because you know what's going to happen in six months from now) in a variety of different ways - supply chain management, cash flow, how you structure your notes from your lending institution, etc.
Of course you can. Word has had this feature baked in for quite some time now. It's rudimentary, but it works.
For those users with higher demands (specifically law), use a third party tool like DeltaView. (CompareRite used to be the de facto standard in law firms, then they went away and DeltaView became the new de facto standard.) They all integrate with your favorite document management system as well, so now you have comparisons and version control.
Who gives a shit if that content is in your search results if it's relevant? I don't care where their data comes from, as long as it's related to what I'm looking for.
If I search for "taco recipe" and one of my friends has recently posted one to G+, shouldn't I want to see that?
Perhaps not, if there are much better taco recipes available. This goes back to the concepts of precision and recall (more generically known as sensitivity and specificity) in information retrieval.
A large company sees what they perceive as a potential weakness or leverage point in a competitor's product and throws some marketing dollars around to try and take advantage of it.
Sadly I think this will actually work out for microsoft
Why "sadly"? If it works out, then arguably they've done something people want or at least want sufficiently to warrant paying $100 for it. (Even though they don't have to pay $100; remember, it's an option.)
If they drive lots of people away, those people will exercise their power of choice and go to something else.
If lots of people go for this, can't you argue that MS did something right?
However you dice it up, MS will either win (because they did something people want/need), fail badly (because they didn't), or end up with a somewhat indeterminate result.
Presumably you, charliemopps, have made your choice and are going with an alternative solution. Presumably you've informed anyone you care about of the alternatives and they've made their choice (although you may not like it if they stayed with MS; but it's their choice).
With all that said, why do you even care if this succeeds or fails for Microsoft?
Except it's not sharing. "Sharing" means John is giving or loaning something to Jane willingly and with full knowledge. The originator of the file doesn't know you're copying it, and they certainly don't want you to copy it.
Slashdotters are the first to attack people who supposedly don't recognize that technology has introduced a new paradigm and we must think about things in a different context.
Why is it, then, that they immediately retreat into the anachronistic "you're not depriving anyone of anything, it's not theft, therefore it's okay" argument when it comes to piracy?
(Rhetorical question, in case anyone doesn't get it. The answer, of course, is because this argument allows pirates to justify their activities.)
How about recognizing for once that digital distribution is a new phenomenon and these kinds of comparisons are simply wrong?
Not really a fair comparison. Nuclear plants are pretty sizeable (Seabrook is about 1200 MW, I think). Interconnection projects (biomass, coal, diesel, methane, hydro, etc) average out at around 150 MW to 200 MW if you include proposed nuclear plants. If you only look at non-nuclear proposed interconnection projects, the average size is not even 120 MW.
The average proposed wind project in the Eastern Interconnection, for reference, is 160 MW.
No matter how you cut it, building an adequate wind power infrastructure is prohibitively expensive because you have to plan for periods of your total output being zero. No matter how much technology improves, this will always be the case (well, until we can control weather).
Well, no. The actual figure used by planning is 13% of nameplate for peak hour 6 to peak hour 9. (Solar is planned at 38% of nameplate.) Lots of studies are on-going to understand how to forecast wind power much more accurately based on wind plant telemetry and other meterological data. Right now day ahead accuracy has a mean error of around 15%. Hour ahead is much better - about 2%.
That said, yes, it's still a challenge. But batteries aren't the only solution - storage comes in many forms, e.g. CAES, flywheels (at least until the manufacturer goes bankrupt like Beacon recently did), etc.
And to the guy who responded that we have a grid that can move lots of power around - yes, but it's subject to constraints (e.g. thermal limits), and building new transmission is awfully expensive. Wind is a problem in that it's locationally constrained, so you can't necessarily build it close to your load.
That said, on the east coast, we are currently a net west-to-east power system (i.e. power is generated in the western part of the ISO's territory and moved to the eastern part where it's needed), but that has the potential to change with significant amounts of off-shore wind being planned.
It's still expensive, but once you're up and running your fuel cost is, well, how much do you pay for wind? Coal, on the other hand - yes, traditionally cheap, but so many plants are retiring in the next three years due to prohibitive costs associated with retrofitting your plant to meet the new EPA regulations.
As people have already pointed out, it's not a one size fits all approach. You need a mixture of coal, nuclear, biomass, wind, solar, etc.
You have a number of considerations. Some of these are very important, some are of intermediate importance, some really don't matter all that much. These are your priorities; they're probably different from my priorities in thinking about such a decision. The formal AHP process takes you through rank ordering these priorities, then determining how much more important the money is than the commute (for example). The salary for you might be twice as important as the length of time you spend travelling.
Eventually you end up with an equation - 0.421 x salary + 0.103 x commute time + 0.258 x "fun quotient". You get the idea. The point is that the multipliers will be internally consistent and have been arrived at by a fairly rigorous evaluation routine.
Bottom line. We all have multiple considerations for big decisions (which job should I take? which house should I buy, taking into account how close it is to the city, how much it costs, amount of yard space, number of bedrooms, etc.) You need to figure out which parameters are your most important considerations, and make a determination taking everything into account, but not letting something that might be a really unimportant facet outweigh the considerations that really matter to you.
No-one has unlimited resources. You (and I, and everyone else) need to prioritize what you do with your time, energy, and money.
I will, therefore, pick what I do based on how much it matters to me. There are two attributes that place someone's request at the top of the list:
* Do I care about someone for emotional attachment reasons (my wife, my brother, a very close friend)? * Do I care about someone for fiscal reasons (I need money to live and that person gives me a job and signs my paycheck. Or they aren't my manager, but for some reason they matter significantly to the person who does pay me - a big customer, a good friend of theirs, someone who can help our company in some way)?
Sometimes those might conflict (work overtime or be at home with my family for dinner?) and I need to prioritize. Beyond that, everything else gets rank ordered (I care about those who are less fortunate than me and so I give to charity, after I've provided for my family).
Managers and employees all have to make decisions on how they spend their time (personal and business). If you are in law enforcement, you are upholding the laws of the land and protecting your nation's security. Politicians, judges, etc., have a great deal to do with the laws and the security of the land. That puts them high in the priority list for law enforcement.
I'm simplifying, but not very much. Isn't that common sense?
...Anonymous. Enjoy watching one group of puerile script kiddies attack another group of puerile script kiddies.
Alternate answer #1...nowhere. If they get in, they just did you a favor by exposing your weaknesses.
Or so goes the argument as to why Anonymous is/are heroes. Hey, what's good for banks is good for individuals, right?
Alternate answer #2...nowhere. Who cares? All they're going to do is copy information off of your hard drive - it's not like it actually means anything, you still have your original data.
Or so goes the argument for why piracy isn't wrong.
Regardless, I blame the people who take the money. If a bank or a shop or some other business has a pile of money sitting out the front (say in an armored car), and it's unguarded, I won't take it. It's not my money. This is one of those few instances which really is black and white.
Sure. The thing is, they didn't take anything, but merely copied it.
This is this point at which analogies that compare tangible things to intangible things always fall apart. They're not at all the same type of thing, and any argument rooted in the presumption that they are the same thing is inherently logically fallacious.
Then why do Slashdotters always insist on making this comparison when it comes to piracy, sorry, theft of songs, sorry, copyright infringement? You make a good point - they're not the same thing, so talking about copying digital bits and not being the same as theft is an inane concept. It's "digital theft", or "cyber-stealing", or some other fancy new phrase. All the arguments about "but you're not depriving anyone of physical property!!!" break down, because, as you point out, these analogies don't work because they're not the same thing.
So, if your bank left your money sitting out front and people took it, you wouldn't blame the bank?
Your analogy is a little over the top - Sony did the equivalent of leaving money sitting in a cash register.
Regardless, I blame the people who take the money. If a bank or a shop or some other business has a pile of money sitting out the front (say in an armored car), and it's unguarded, I won't take it. It's not my money. This is one of those few instances which really is black and white.
Have you ever seen news reports of people who find a windfall sitting on a table in a restaurant and they turn it in to the police? They get praised because they did the right thing. It's called being honest.
Have you ever seen news reports of crowds of people grabbing at paper money blowing in the breeze after being inadvertently loosed? They get panned because they did the wrong thing. It's called being dishonest.
I don't think I can make it any simpler. Wrong is wrong, whether the act is trivially easy or very difficult.
How do you know it is going to ruin lives when you havent even gone through it?
Have you ever been through a car/motorcycle accident? I have - how can you understand it if you haven't? Of course, it doesn't take a personal experience to understand that a car running into you is going to hurt, probably break some bones, that kind of thing.
It's not that difficult. You don't have to go through having your identity stolen to be able to understand the impact.
Score against banks - a bit of a headache, some minor bad P.R., a temporary drop in share price maybe. Don't worry, it'll come back up when the next scandal pushes this one off of people's memories.
Score against the people they're standing up for (the public) - millions of lives ruined as their credit goes to pot, countless hours and days of effort spent to try and recover, thousands of dollars of extra interest payments now their credit score has been dropped down, potential bankruptcies and divorces and split households from the stress...
What a bunch of jackasses. Maybe these people should think who they're really hurting once in a while.
Bloody hell. He's accused of rape. "Flaws"? Bloody hell!
The irony in all of this is astounding. An Australian, is a refugee in an Ecuador embassy, on British soil who seek to extradite him to Sweden where he fears extradition to the United States where he faces life in prison for exercising freedom of speech and defending democracy.
An Australian has broken his bail conditions to scamper off to an Ecuador embassy (less than two years after they refused him residency because of concerns over the crimes committed by Wikileaks) on British soil who seek to extradite him to Sweden (as obligated by international treaties) because he's accused of sex crimes there, where a lot of people claim he faces extradition to the United States with little more than paranoia and speculation to back it up.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, gee, what isn't gambling in that case? In Pennsylvania I can choose who I want to supply my electricity. I can pick a variable cost, which is based on the LMP in the wholesale market. That's definitely a gamble. Fine, I'll pick a fixed cost contract. Six months? A year? Who knows what the price of electricity is going to do over the next 12 months?
I go to a warehouse store and buy paper towels in bulk. It's a very low risk, but the cost of paper towels might go down in the next few weeks. Uh-oh, should I have purchased just enough to get by on the chance the price might go down?
Going outside every morning is a gamble. I might get hit by a car. I might trip and break my ankle.
Where do you want to draw the line, Jane? At some point it just gets silly. Futures markets, as described in the post to which you replied, are a way of hedging some of the risk. You give up a chance of making much more money (or losing lots) for the security of having a fixed price. This allows you to plan your cash flow much more sanely. This ends up saving money (because you know what's going to happen in six months from now) in a variety of different ways - supply chain management, cash flow, how you structure your notes from your lending institution, etc.
Err, not saying that I agree or disagree, but wasn't there a story on these hallowed pages yesterday saying exactly the opposite?
Of course you can. Word has had this feature baked in for quite some time now. It's rudimentary, but it works.
For those users with higher demands (specifically law), use a third party tool like DeltaView. (CompareRite used to be the de facto standard in law firms, then they went away and DeltaView became the new de facto standard.) They all integrate with your favorite document management system as well, so now you have comparisons and version control.
...and get you fired, if any of the people above you who get involved are having a grumpy day when this hits them.
I did this right now in IE 7 - top link is the home page for IE, with a big orange "download" button. No way Bing can't find a download link.
Who gives a shit if that content is in your search results if it's relevant? I don't care where their data comes from, as long as it's related to what I'm looking for.
If I search for "taco recipe" and one of my friends has recently posted one to G+, shouldn't I want to see that?
Perhaps not, if there are much better taco recipes available. This goes back to the concepts of precision and recall (more generically known as sensitivity and specificity) in information retrieval.
A large company sees what they perceive as a potential weakness or leverage point in a competitor's product and throws some marketing dollars around to try and take advantage of it.
Will the horrors never cease...
Sadly I think this will actually work out for microsoft
Why "sadly"? If it works out, then arguably they've done something people want or at least want sufficiently to warrant paying $100 for it. (Even though they don't have to pay $100; remember, it's an option.)
If they drive lots of people away, those people will exercise their power of choice and go to something else.
If lots of people go for this, can't you argue that MS did something right?
However you dice it up, MS will either win (because they did something people want/need), fail badly (because they didn't), or end up with a somewhat indeterminate result.
Presumably you, charliemopps, have made your choice and are going with an alternative solution. Presumably you've informed anyone you care about of the alternatives and they've made their choice (although you may not like it if they stayed with MS; but it's their choice).
With all that said, why do you even care if this succeeds or fails for Microsoft?
It's not theft. It's at best copyright infringement.
Oh, well then, that's all right, as long as it's not theft. Umm...wait...copyright infringement is still an illegal and criminal act.
It's like sharing a secret
Except it's not sharing. "Sharing" means John is giving or loaning something to Jane willingly and with full knowledge. The originator of the file doesn't know you're copying it, and they certainly don't want you to copy it.
"Legal pressure has forced Twitter to handed over messages sent by an Occupy Wall Street protester."
Where are the editors...
You must be new here.
The editors, I mean...
Slashdotters are the first to attack people who supposedly don't recognize that technology has introduced a new paradigm and we must think about things in a different context.
Why is it, then, that they immediately retreat into the anachronistic "you're not depriving anyone of anything, it's not theft, therefore it's okay" argument when it comes to piracy?
(Rhetorical question, in case anyone doesn't get it. The answer, of course, is because this argument allows pirates to justify their activities.)
How about recognizing for once that digital distribution is a new phenomenon and these kinds of comparisons are simply wrong?
Not really a fair comparison. Nuclear plants are pretty sizeable (Seabrook is about 1200 MW, I think). Interconnection projects (biomass, coal, diesel, methane, hydro, etc) average out at around 150 MW to 200 MW if you include proposed nuclear plants. If you only look at non-nuclear proposed interconnection projects, the average size is not even 120 MW.
The average proposed wind project in the Eastern Interconnection, for reference, is 160 MW.
Fair enough.
It's being done in the U.S. as well. Also known as pumped storage or pumped hydro.
No matter how you cut it, building an adequate wind power infrastructure is prohibitively expensive because you have to plan for periods of your total output being zero. No matter how much technology improves, this will always be the case (well, until we can control weather).
Well, no. The actual figure used by planning is 13% of nameplate for peak hour 6 to peak hour 9. (Solar is planned at 38% of nameplate.) Lots of studies are on-going to understand how to forecast wind power much more accurately based on wind plant telemetry and other meterological data. Right now day ahead accuracy has a mean error of around 15%. Hour ahead is much better - about 2%.
That said, yes, it's still a challenge. But batteries aren't the only solution - storage comes in many forms, e.g. CAES, flywheels (at least until the manufacturer goes bankrupt like Beacon recently did), etc.
And to the guy who responded that we have a grid that can move lots of power around - yes, but it's subject to constraints (e.g. thermal limits), and building new transmission is awfully expensive. Wind is a problem in that it's locationally constrained, so you can't necessarily build it close to your load.
That said, on the east coast, we are currently a net west-to-east power system (i.e. power is generated in the western part of the ISO's territory and moved to the eastern part where it's needed), but that has the potential to change with significant amounts of off-shore wind being planned.
It's still expensive, but once you're up and running your fuel cost is, well, how much do you pay for wind? Coal, on the other hand - yes, traditionally cheap, but so many plants are retiring in the next three years due to prohibitive costs associated with retrofitting your plant to meet the new EPA regulations.
As people have already pointed out, it's not a one size fits all approach. You need a mixture of coal, nuclear, biomass, wind, solar, etc.
Analytic Hierarchy Process.
You have a number of considerations. Some of these are very important, some are of intermediate importance, some really don't matter all that much. These are your priorities; they're probably different from my priorities in thinking about such a decision. The formal AHP process takes you through rank ordering these priorities, then determining how much more important the money is than the commute (for example). The salary for you might be twice as important as the length of time you spend travelling.
Eventually you end up with an equation - 0.421 x salary + 0.103 x commute time + 0.258 x "fun quotient". You get the idea. The point is that the multipliers will be internally consistent and have been arrived at by a fairly rigorous evaluation routine.
Bottom line. We all have multiple considerations for big decisions (which job should I take? which house should I buy, taking into account how close it is to the city, how much it costs, amount of yard space, number of bedrooms, etc.) You need to figure out which parameters are your most important considerations, and make a determination taking everything into account, but not letting something that might be a really unimportant facet outweigh the considerations that really matter to you.
No-one has unlimited resources. You (and I, and everyone else) need to prioritize what you do with your time, energy, and money.
I will, therefore, pick what I do based on how much it matters to me. There are two attributes that place someone's request at the top of the list:
* Do I care about someone for emotional attachment reasons (my wife, my brother, a very close friend)?
* Do I care about someone for fiscal reasons (I need money to live and that person gives me a job and signs my paycheck. Or they aren't my manager, but for some reason they matter significantly to the person who does pay me - a big customer, a good friend of theirs, someone who can help our company in some way)?
Sometimes those might conflict (work overtime or be at home with my family for dinner?) and I need to prioritize. Beyond that, everything else gets rank ordered (I care about those who are less fortunate than me and so I give to charity, after I've provided for my family).
Managers and employees all have to make decisions on how they spend their time (personal and business). If you are in law enforcement, you are upholding the laws of the land and protecting your nation's security. Politicians, judges, etc., have a great deal to do with the laws and the security of the land. That puts them high in the priority list for law enforcement.
I'm simplifying, but not very much. Isn't that common sense?
...Anonymous. Enjoy watching one group of puerile script kiddies attack another group of puerile script kiddies.
Alternate answer #1 ...nowhere. If they get in, they just did you a favor by exposing your weaknesses.
Or so goes the argument as to why Anonymous is/are heroes. Hey, what's good for banks is good for individuals, right?
Alternate answer #2 ...nowhere. Who cares? All they're going to do is copy information off of your hard drive - it's not like it actually means anything, you still have your original data.
Or so goes the argument for why piracy isn't wrong.
Regardless, I blame the people who take the money. If a bank or a shop or some other business has a pile of money sitting out the front (say in an armored car), and it's unguarded, I won't take it. It's not my money. This is one of those few instances which really is black and white.
Sure. The thing is, they didn't take anything, but merely copied it.
This is this point at which analogies that compare tangible things to intangible things always fall apart. They're not at all the same type of thing, and any argument rooted in the presumption that they are the same thing is inherently logically fallacious.
Then why do Slashdotters always insist on making this comparison when it comes to piracy, sorry, theft of songs, sorry, copyright infringement? You make a good point - they're not the same thing, so talking about copying digital bits and not being the same as theft is an inane concept. It's "digital theft", or "cyber-stealing", or some other fancy new phrase. All the arguments about "but you're not depriving anyone of physical property!!!" break down, because, as you point out, these analogies don't work because they're not the same thing.
So, if your bank left your money sitting out front and people took it, you wouldn't blame the bank?
Your analogy is a little over the top - Sony did the equivalent of leaving money sitting in a cash register.
Regardless, I blame the people who take the money. If a bank or a shop or some other business has a pile of money sitting out the front (say in an armored car), and it's unguarded, I won't take it. It's not my money. This is one of those few instances which really is black and white.
Have you ever seen news reports of people who find a windfall sitting on a table in a restaurant and they turn it in to the police? They get praised because they did the right thing. It's called being honest.
Have you ever seen news reports of crowds of people grabbing at paper money blowing in the breeze after being inadvertently loosed? They get panned because they did the wrong thing. It's called being dishonest.
I don't think I can make it any simpler. Wrong is wrong, whether the act is trivially easy or very difficult.
How do you know it is going to ruin lives when you havent even gone through it?
Have you ever been through a car/motorcycle accident? I have - how can you understand it if you haven't? Of course, it doesn't take a personal experience to understand that a car running into you is going to hurt, probably break some bones, that kind of thing.
It's not that difficult. You don't have to go through having your identity stolen to be able to understand the impact.
Score against banks - a bit of a headache, some minor bad P.R., a temporary drop in share price maybe. Don't worry, it'll come back up when the next scandal pushes this one off of people's memories.
Score against the people they're standing up for (the public) - millions of lives ruined as their credit goes to pot, countless hours and days of effort spent to try and recover, thousands of dollars of extra interest payments now their credit score has been dropped down, potential bankruptcies and divorces and split households from the stress...
What a bunch of jackasses. Maybe these people should think who they're really hurting once in a while.
Ok he has flaws, what human doesn't?
Bloody hell. He's accused of rape. "Flaws"? Bloody hell!
The irony in all of this is astounding. An Australian, is a refugee in an Ecuador embassy, on British soil who seek to extradite him to Sweden where he fears extradition to the United States where he faces life in prison for exercising freedom of speech and defending democracy.
An Australian has broken his bail conditions to scamper off to an Ecuador embassy (less than two years after they refused him residency because of concerns over the crimes committed by Wikileaks) on British soil who seek to extradite him to Sweden (as obligated by international treaties) because he's accused of sex crimes there, where a lot of people claim he faces extradition to the United States with little more than paranoia and speculation to back it up.
Fixed that for you.
According to the Microsoft blog (which wasn't linked in the PC Pro article), you're correct.