Now anyone can produce their product......and it's highly unlikely Lego will survive.
I'm having trouble reconciling that statement. It's essentially the mantra chanted by lobbyists for many "protected" industries, like for example the pharmaceutical industry. Funnily enough, anyone can make and sell acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) nowadays, and Bayer is still in business. There are plenty of denim pant manufacturers, and Levi's is still in business. I simply don't buy the "protect me" argument. Oh sure, they each make less money than in a monopoly situation, but they all still make money.
In a truly free market, if Lego Group has grown so inefficient that it can't compete, then it DESERVES to go bankrupt. The REAL free market rewards efficiency - in production, marketing and distribution. Tampering with the free market in any way allows inefficiencies to creep in. These inefficiencies incur a hidden cost for all of us, since resources are tied up that could have been used by society elsewhere.
However I guess the US has forgotten what a free market is. Just looking at the headlines is a daily reminder. Enjoy your United Socialist States of America, and continue to "protect" as much as you can... me, I live in a country that protects very little by law - but allows me a great deal of personal freedom.
I suppose I can now declare and define a new and dangerous addiction - Air addiction.
My research has shown that people deprived of air for as little as 30 seconds will present "difficulty sleeping or concentrating, yearning to breathe, irritation, and mental or physical distress." Do YOU meet these criteria?
Yawn. The problem isn't the internet, caffeine, nicotine, heroin, crack, meth, etc. The problem is the underlying psychology of the individual. People who become "addicts" aren't victims of the substance/behavior. Rather the behavior is a manifestation of serious psychological problems like depression, anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, etc. There's a REASON they're seeking that dopamine.
Perhaps the Chinese will soon announce a melamine-laced cure. Or maybe powdered rhinoceros horns will be involved somehow in the treatment.
This technology, if adopted by the military, will probably only be useful against civilians. Against another sophisticated military there will always be a way to detect what you're trying to hide through other means than visible light - magnetism/alterations in the earth's magnetic field (in the case of big chunks of metal, heat), RF emissions, overhead imaging, radar, sonar, etc.
You won't be able to hide your tank like this, but the small laser turrets to keep the neighbor's cat off the lawn might work... now if only those sharks would stop swimming.
This argument is constantly used by corporations to get away with anything. "We did it for the shareholders". Funny you should mention that, especially today with share prices near their all time lows for the past few decades, across the board.
You're right in that I don't have a business anymore. I am a day trader, so being a shareholder I can understand. However as a day trader I am not an investor. I don't care all that much about a company, I care about what its stock is doing over the next few MINUTES. And I can tell you that share price has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with a company's profit. It has to do with the market's EXPECTATIONS of the company's performance. I've seen solid, profit-making companies have their share prices cut to 1/3, and I've seen money-losing dogs resist declines and even show gains in share price against all reason.
Therefore holding a board of directors accountable for the share-price of their company is ludicrous. It's not a valid argument. Richard Fuld was not responsible at all for the drop in share price at Lehman Brothers. Running his company in an unsafe manner, creative accounting and lack of liquidity, however, are entirely his fault. This did not happen in the few days their share price plummeted. It had been happening for months and years, and shareholders were oblivious. But when the drop in share prices (due to overzealous momentum trading) meant a credit rating cut and his bluff was called, and he couldn't get his hands on more borrowed cash, the lack of liquidity was exposed and the company immediately folded.
Please try to understand yourself how your "but the shareholders" argument is rubbish. Yes some shareholders have successfully sued their boards, when gross negligence was exposed. However this is the exception, not the rule, otherwise today almost every single corporation's board would be sued successfully. The board doesn't give a damn about the shareholder. They care about the share PRICE (because that lets them borrow, or cash in their options for profit)- and up until now people thought that price was determined by posting good results - which is reasonable in a market full of long term investors (who will look for a history of "good results"). However it's time to wake up and see that price CAN move own under market forces regardless of how a company is handled. Otherwise please explain today's situation.
Has corporate America really lost trillions and trillions of dollars this year? No. What is deflating is people's expectations for the future, causing them to sell shares which increases supply on the market, which drops the price as people seek to get out of their positions as soon as possible (regardless of price).
view an ethical or moral standpoint (as YOU see fit)
Everyone views the world as they see fit. I wouldn't be much of a nerd if I viewed the world through another's perspective, would I? I would be a blind fanatic, then.
humans will do what comes naturally to them and that is to protect their own in the immediate, short term, future.
Exactly. And in the interest of protecting MY short term convenience, I'd appreciate it if there were less obfuscation about how a piece of hardware actually works. Oh, it's not going to happen, and therefore we will continue to whine, and reverse engineer in a tedious manner, etc - as we have been doing all along. But raising my head a moment and wishing things were simpler for ME is, as you say, only human.
Remember to kill god if you see him for he has a large list of crimes against humanity stacked up.
That was funny:)
Being an atheist, I share your view. Having been clinically dead for a few minutes due to a heart attack a few years back, I kept getting into arguments with the religious about my lack of a "near death experience". It was in fact like a switch. Didn't perceive anything at all, until I started perceiving again after being reanimated. Of course these nutcases even dare to tell me I am "remembering it wrong" because it doesn't fit their ridiculous fantasies. Yeah, I'm wrong.
Now I just avoid them. They are idiots, they cannot be salvaged, and frankly I want nothing to do with them. Life's too short and I have other things to do with my limited time.
Because the "way they want" is generally open-source, and whether you or I like it or not, there are legal hurdles to making that work.
You sold the hardware. What more do you want? God forbid everyone finds out exactly what order stuff has to be written to whatever port to make your hardware work...
So what do you want them to do? Be psychic and send you the code before you even know you need it?
No, that's what a quality assurance department is for - at least in any company that cares about the products it sells.
Yes, it would be best if there was no problem, but mistakes happen.
Saying "mistakes happen" and leaving it at that, with no consequences, means the company is either too arrogant to admit that they are far from perfect and yet do nothing to "catch" these mistakes when they happen; or the company thinks saving $200k or so a year for a few QA people is far more important than inconveniencing their customers. Mistakes happen SO DO SOMETHING TO PREVENT THEM.
I'd love to be able to get away with "mistakes happen" with my patients. "You didn't need that leg anyway".
Science doesn't care whether you agree or disagree. You may not agree with gravity but it will still kill you if you jump off a high building.
However what we must guard ourselves from is BAD science. I RTFA and frankly I think the method used is incorrect. I could just as easily claim, with the same study, that the results are explained by the fact that violent children are attracted to violent video games. What's needed is a prospective study where large groups are studied, and similar groups are then exposed to video games over different periods of time, while others aren't - as controls, to detect a statistically significant change in behavior after exposure to games while controlling all other possible variables.
However THIS kind of study design requires a lot of thought, manpower and money. Not to mention the fact that most people object to locking kids up in labs (although some parents might actually be relieved). Since there's no profit motive (unlike pharmaceutical companies who want to get their drugs on the market), we'll never see REAL science done in this area. Just the usual pet theory waving bullshit explanations we have seen to date. Unfortunately sociologists, psychologists nor politicians are scientists at all, therefore whatever explanation sounds best is the one that is "believed".
or full of some organism that they could not support life.
Whaaa? Who modded this "informative"? If the lake is "full of an organism", it is supporting life. It might not be the kind of life you'd like to hang out with, but it's life nonetheless.
As for lakes that are so saline they don't support life, please let me know where they are. Some bacteria THRIVE in ultra-saline conditions and these lakes are full of them. Yeah ok maybe there are no ducks.
Since my wife is the market research manager for Latin America for a 'Fortune 500' company, I am quite familiar with Ipsos. They do all sorts of market research, and are among the best in their field. Of course without seeing the actual design of the study neither she nor I can comment on how accurate the information is, but knowing how this company works I assume they are not pulling numbers out of their backsides. They usually don't, unlike other market research firms I could mention.
The problem is reaching the "certain speed", which requires fuel (and fuel has mass, so you have to get it into orbit in the first place) and, in order to avoid becoming a shooting star in the martian atmosphere, slowing down from that certain speed, which again requires fuel.
Now, exactly how many millions of tonnes of propellant did you plan on shooting towards Mars?
Did the open source software go away when the dot-com bubble burst? No. It's stronger than ever.
I understand your situation, and am not in complete agreement with the headline. However I have to point out that there are a few very important differences between the current crisis and the dot-com bubble. In 2001 we saw a huge loss among investors of technology stocks who had bid the prices up into fantasyland despite very few of these new companies having actual business models. This loss triggered a panic among other stocks. However the financial system was fairly sound (after all, they had earned huge commissions by getting all the suckers to buy into these stocks), and the housing bubble was just beginning. The only people that were really affected were those who worked in those tech fields, or those who invested heavily in them.
Today, we have a housing bust. Everyone who has bought a home since 1998 has overpaid, exponentially so if you bought a home in the past couple years. This wasn't so much of a problem as long as prices continued to increase - it didn't matter what you paid, you would get it back. This mentality is what actually DRIVES bubbles. But now you're not getting your money back if you sell your house. And if your home prices are decreasing, the actual equity (principal repaid, downpayment, etc) in your house no longer exists. So if you used your life's savings to put a downpayment on your house, they are now gone. Your credit rating has decreased accordingly, even if you make all your payments on time. Add this to the fact that banks lied to each other, and credit rating agencies lied to everyone - and now there is a complete lack of trust among banks. They're not even lending money to each other, much less to you.
Since the middle of last century the american economy has been powered by easy access to credit. That's all gone. Combine this with a complete lack of leadership at a government level (and any of the running candidates are included, not one of them seems up to the challenge they will have to face), you have a huge mess. And just for fun, the government wants to soothe the masses by trying to keep home prices artificially inflated - locking out buyers who are willing to take up the slack at lower prices, and destroying the value of the dollar to do so. The government's reported rates of inflation are so far from reality now (yes, they're lying too - surprise surprise), eventually foreigners are going to catch on and stop buying T-bills. There are other stable currencies out there. THEN the fun will start.
It's too bad that projects like the LHC will soon run out of funding as bankrupt nations concentrate on keeping their populations fed and/or preventing the overthrow of their governments, rather than burning issues like "what is mass, really, when you get down to it?". Of course glitches and malfunctions like this (and the previous ones) will only serve to put us past the point of possibly having been able to answer that question, but failing due to lack of funding.
How many billions of Euros have been spent on this project already?
Because "bubbles", be it Dot-coms, tulips, south sea trading companies or real estate, are always powered by human greed. Rationality is NEVER part of a bubble - only the expectation that prices for the good in question will continue to rise forever. This is not rational thinking at all.
Expecting people to make sub-optimal financial decisions so that they can collectively improve the situation at a macro-scale is silly.
No, I don't expect that at all. The boom-bust cycle is a feature of human economics throughout history, and it won't change. However a government that tries to artificially prop up a broken system by devaluing a currency to keep home prices artificially inflated, now THAT is silly. The government isn't responsible for the bubble (although low interest rates and lax regulation HELPED speed it along), but it's going to get taught a basic lesson in economics when the fiat US dollar returns to its intrinsic value - zero.
have a look at the graph of the FTSE over the past 15 years and tell me that doesn't look like the mother of all double tops.
Yes the double top is striking, whatever index you look look at (except the NASDAQ which was artificially higher thanks to being rich in tech and dot-coms). What worries me is how fast we got to 800 on the S&P, and how there's no support below that (for the people that believe in that sort of thing).
Slashdot Mirror
one rogue provider doesn't undermine the good efforts of all the rest.
This sort of resilience was the whole point of the internet anyway. Of course, it was never supposed to be used for "Evil" (tm).
and it's busy right now building a world wide web.
Skynet?
Now anyone can produce their product... ...and it's highly unlikely Lego will survive.
I'm having trouble reconciling that statement. It's essentially the mantra chanted by lobbyists for many "protected" industries, like for example the pharmaceutical industry. Funnily enough, anyone can make and sell acetylsalicylic acid (aspirin) nowadays, and Bayer is still in business. There are plenty of denim pant manufacturers, and Levi's is still in business. I simply don't buy the "protect me" argument. Oh sure, they each make less money than in a monopoly situation, but they all still make money.
In a truly free market, if Lego Group has grown so inefficient that it can't compete, then it DESERVES to go bankrupt. The REAL free market rewards efficiency - in production, marketing and distribution. Tampering with the free market in any way allows inefficiencies to creep in. These inefficiencies incur a hidden cost for all of us, since resources are tied up that could have been used by society elsewhere.
However I guess the US has forgotten what a free market is. Just looking at the headlines is a daily reminder. Enjoy your United Socialist States of America, and continue to "protect" as much as you can... me, I live in a country that protects very little by law - but allows me a great deal of personal freedom.
they could then collect for damages in the form of a replacement parcel, or enough money to buy a replacement parcel.
Nah, they would be declared a terrorist nation, invaded, and all its citizens would be shipped off to Guantanamo. This would be a lot cheaper...
Slashdot, where old stories from CNN come to die.
I suppose I can now declare and define a new and dangerous addiction - Air addiction.
My research has shown that people deprived of air for as little as 30 seconds will present "difficulty sleeping or concentrating, yearning to breathe, irritation, and mental or physical distress." Do YOU meet these criteria?
Yawn. The problem isn't the internet, caffeine, nicotine, heroin, crack, meth, etc. The problem is the underlying psychology of the individual. People who become "addicts" aren't victims of the substance/behavior. Rather the behavior is a manifestation of serious psychological problems like depression, anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, etc. There's a REASON they're seeking that dopamine.
Perhaps the Chinese will soon announce a melamine-laced cure. Or maybe powdered rhinoceros horns will be involved somehow in the treatment.
This technology, if adopted by the military, will probably only be useful against civilians. Against another sophisticated military there will always be a way to detect what you're trying to hide through other means than visible light - magnetism/alterations in the earth's magnetic field (in the case of big chunks of metal, heat), RF emissions, overhead imaging, radar, sonar, etc.
You won't be able to hide your tank like this, but the small laser turrets to keep the neighbor's cat off the lawn might work... now if only those sharks would stop swimming.
you're not beholden to share holders
This argument is constantly used by corporations to get away with anything. "We did it for the shareholders". Funny you should mention that, especially today with share prices near their all time lows for the past few decades, across the board.
You're right in that I don't have a business anymore. I am a day trader, so being a shareholder I can understand. However as a day trader I am not an investor. I don't care all that much about a company, I care about what its stock is doing over the next few MINUTES. And I can tell you that share price has ABSOLUTELY nothing to do with a company's profit. It has to do with the market's EXPECTATIONS of the company's performance. I've seen solid, profit-making companies have their share prices cut to 1/3, and I've seen money-losing dogs resist declines and even show gains in share price against all reason.
Therefore holding a board of directors accountable for the share-price of their company is ludicrous. It's not a valid argument. Richard Fuld was not responsible at all for the drop in share price at Lehman Brothers. Running his company in an unsafe manner, creative accounting and lack of liquidity, however, are entirely his fault. This did not happen in the few days their share price plummeted. It had been happening for months and years, and shareholders were oblivious. But when the drop in share prices (due to overzealous momentum trading) meant a credit rating cut and his bluff was called, and he couldn't get his hands on more borrowed cash, the lack of liquidity was exposed and the company immediately folded.
Please try to understand yourself how your "but the shareholders" argument is rubbish. Yes some shareholders have successfully sued their boards, when gross negligence was exposed. However this is the exception, not the rule, otherwise today almost every single corporation's board would be sued successfully. The board doesn't give a damn about the shareholder. They care about the share PRICE (because that lets them borrow, or cash in their options for profit)- and up until now people thought that price was determined by posting good results - which is reasonable in a market full of long term investors (who will look for a history of "good results"). However it's time to wake up and see that price CAN move own under market forces regardless of how a company is handled. Otherwise please explain today's situation.
Has corporate America really lost trillions and trillions of dollars this year? No. What is deflating is people's expectations for the future, causing them to sell shares which increases supply on the market, which drops the price as people seek to get out of their positions as soon as possible (regardless of price).
view an ethical or moral standpoint (as YOU see fit)
Everyone views the world as they see fit. I wouldn't be much of a nerd if I viewed the world through another's perspective, would I? I would be a blind fanatic, then.
humans will do what comes naturally to them and that is to protect their own in the immediate, short term, future.
Exactly. And in the interest of protecting MY short term convenience, I'd appreciate it if there were less obfuscation about how a piece of hardware actually works. Oh, it's not going to happen, and therefore we will continue to whine, and reverse engineer in a tedious manner, etc - as we have been doing all along. But raising my head a moment and wishing things were simpler for ME is, as you say, only human.
- Dating... oh wait, wrong site...
Remember to kill god if you see him for he has a large list of crimes against humanity stacked up.
That was funny :)
Being an atheist, I share your view. Having been clinically dead for a few minutes due to a heart attack a few years back, I kept getting into arguments with the religious about my lack of a "near death experience". It was in fact like a switch. Didn't perceive anything at all, until I started perceiving again after being reanimated. Of course these nutcases even dare to tell me I am "remembering it wrong" because it doesn't fit their ridiculous fantasies. Yeah, I'm wrong.
Now I just avoid them. They are idiots, they cannot be salvaged, and frankly I want nothing to do with them. Life's too short and I have other things to do with my limited time.
Because the "way they want" is generally open-source, and whether you or I like it or not, there are legal hurdles to making that work.
You sold the hardware. What more do you want? God forbid everyone finds out exactly what order stuff has to be written to whatever port to make your hardware work...
OK. It's a game, not surgery.
Ahhh, ok, if it's just a game and "not important" then they won't mind me pirating it. After all, it's JUST a game.
So what do you want them to do? Be psychic and send you the code before you even know you need it?
No, that's what a quality assurance department is for - at least in any company that cares about the products it sells.
Yes, it would be best if there was no problem, but mistakes happen.
Saying "mistakes happen" and leaving it at that, with no consequences, means the company is either too arrogant to admit that they are far from perfect and yet do nothing to "catch" these mistakes when they happen; or the company thinks saving $200k or so a year for a few QA people is far more important than inconveniencing their customers. Mistakes happen SO DO SOMETHING TO PREVENT THEM.
I'd love to be able to get away with "mistakes happen" with my patients. "You didn't need that leg anyway".
the problem only affects SOME, not all, units.
Yes, and we trust EA on that one, right?
Yet another reason not to buy anything published by EA.
I can agree... Although I don't agree...
Science doesn't care whether you agree or disagree. You may not agree with gravity but it will still kill you if you jump off a high building.
However what we must guard ourselves from is BAD science. I RTFA and frankly I think the method used is incorrect. I could just as easily claim, with the same study, that the results are explained by the fact that violent children are attracted to violent video games. What's needed is a prospective study where large groups are studied, and similar groups are then exposed to video games over different periods of time, while others aren't - as controls, to detect a statistically significant change in behavior after exposure to games while controlling all other possible variables.
However THIS kind of study design requires a lot of thought, manpower and money. Not to mention the fact that most people object to locking kids up in labs (although some parents might actually be relieved). Since there's no profit motive (unlike pharmaceutical companies who want to get their drugs on the market), we'll never see REAL science done in this area. Just the usual pet theory waving bullshit explanations we have seen to date. Unfortunately sociologists, psychologists nor politicians are scientists at all, therefore whatever explanation sounds best is the one that is "believed".
Since Pluto is no longer a planet, its portal privileges have been revoked.
or full of some organism that they could not support life.
Whaaa? Who modded this "informative"? If the lake is "full of an organism", it is supporting life. It might not be the kind of life you'd like to hang out with, but it's life nonetheless.
As for lakes that are so saline they don't support life, please let me know where they are. Some bacteria THRIVE in ultra-saline conditions and these lakes are full of them. Yeah ok maybe there are no ducks.
Where's the data from?
Since my wife is the market research manager for Latin America for a 'Fortune 500' company, I am quite familiar with Ipsos. They do all sorts of market research, and are among the best in their field. Of course without seeing the actual design of the study neither she nor I can comment on how accurate the information is, but knowing how this company works I assume they are not pulling numbers out of their backsides. They usually don't, unlike other market research firms I could mention.
This is an absolute and complete fabrication. Nothing but pure slanderous bullshit.
Bullshit? On the internet? Are you SURE? Wow. I'm shocked.
and are going a certain speed
The problem is reaching the "certain speed", which requires fuel (and fuel has mass, so you have to get it into orbit in the first place) and, in order to avoid becoming a shooting star in the martian atmosphere, slowing down from that certain speed, which again requires fuel.
Now, exactly how many millions of tonnes of propellant did you plan on shooting towards Mars?
Did the open source software go away when the dot-com bubble burst? No. It's stronger than ever.
I understand your situation, and am not in complete agreement with the headline. However I have to point out that there are a few very important differences between the current crisis and the dot-com bubble. In 2001 we saw a huge loss among investors of technology stocks who had bid the prices up into fantasyland despite very few of these new companies having actual business models. This loss triggered a panic among other stocks. However the financial system was fairly sound (after all, they had earned huge commissions by getting all the suckers to buy into these stocks), and the housing bubble was just beginning. The only people that were really affected were those who worked in those tech fields, or those who invested heavily in them.
Today, we have a housing bust. Everyone who has bought a home since 1998 has overpaid, exponentially so if you bought a home in the past couple years. This wasn't so much of a problem as long as prices continued to increase - it didn't matter what you paid, you would get it back. This mentality is what actually DRIVES bubbles. But now you're not getting your money back if you sell your house. And if your home prices are decreasing, the actual equity (principal repaid, downpayment, etc) in your house no longer exists. So if you used your life's savings to put a downpayment on your house, they are now gone. Your credit rating has decreased accordingly, even if you make all your payments on time. Add this to the fact that banks lied to each other, and credit rating agencies lied to everyone - and now there is a complete lack of trust among banks. They're not even lending money to each other, much less to you.
Since the middle of last century the american economy has been powered by easy access to credit. That's all gone. Combine this with a complete lack of leadership at a government level (and any of the running candidates are included, not one of them seems up to the challenge they will have to face), you have a huge mess. And just for fun, the government wants to soothe the masses by trying to keep home prices artificially inflated - locking out buyers who are willing to take up the slack at lower prices, and destroying the value of the dollar to do so. The government's reported rates of inflation are so far from reality now (yes, they're lying too - surprise surprise), eventually foreigners are going to catch on and stop buying T-bills. There are other stable currencies out there. THEN the fun will start.
and intellectual property, which requires few reources but has a high value added;
No no no! That would be high LAWYER added. But who said lawyers add value to anything except themselves?
It's too bad that projects like the LHC will soon run out of funding as bankrupt nations concentrate on keeping their populations fed and/or preventing the overthrow of their governments, rather than burning issues like "what is mass, really, when you get down to it?". Of course glitches and malfunctions like this (and the previous ones) will only serve to put us past the point of possibly having been able to answer that question, but failing due to lack of funding.
How many billions of Euros have been spent on this project already?
Then please explain why a boom-bust cycle exists in such simple things like say, a bacterial colony?
Why would you blame "greedy" individuals?
Because "bubbles", be it Dot-coms, tulips, south sea trading companies or real estate, are always powered by human greed. Rationality is NEVER part of a bubble - only the expectation that prices for the good in question will continue to rise forever. This is not rational thinking at all.
Expecting people to make sub-optimal financial decisions so that they can collectively improve the situation at a macro-scale is silly.
No, I don't expect that at all. The boom-bust cycle is a feature of human economics throughout history, and it won't change. However a government that tries to artificially prop up a broken system by devaluing a currency to keep home prices artificially inflated, now THAT is silly. The government isn't responsible for the bubble (although low interest rates and lax regulation HELPED speed it along), but it's going to get taught a basic lesson in economics when the fiat US dollar returns to its intrinsic value - zero.
have a look at the graph of the FTSE over the past 15 years and tell me that doesn't look like the mother of all double tops.
Yes the double top is striking, whatever index you look look at (except the NASDAQ which was artificially higher thanks to being rich in tech and dot-coms). What worries me is how fast we got to 800 on the S&P, and how there's no support below that (for the people that believe in that sort of thing).