(Of course the penalty for being a typesafe language, and thus requiring automatic memory management, is added. But more and more software is written in such languages now anyway, so the penalty may be mostly illusory.)
GC can, for a fair number of cases, be faster than manual memory management, as it can better handle cache issues etc. The assumption that "manual memory management is faster" is not really general (though there certainly also exists cases where it is faster.)
On top of that, you have things like linear types that can analyse allocations so they're static even without explicit malloc/free.
Eivind, who knows about the pain of dealing with advanced GC, too.
On the other hand, so would our brains functioning like neural networks and using fuzzy symbols to represent "self" - which would be the natural way for a neural network to work. And, lo and behold, that's how the brain happens to be wired on a classical physics level...
Eivind, who don't doubt that there's quantum effects going on in the brain, but see no need for them for explaining "intelligence" or "awareness", and know enough psychology to not see any need for "free will" to describe how the mind works.
If what you want to do is challenge your preconceptions, I'd say that The Work of Byron Katie is more efficient than acid. It's a very simple process, and burns through preconceptions very efficiently - with less side effects.
I've seen significant, direct differences from facilitating this for people (and not quite so significant differences from doing it myself) - I've not seen similar differences either in people doing acid or from doing acid myself. I *have* heard repeated claims of acid being revolutionary, and I tend to assume that this comes from acid giving an intense *feeling* change, as all feelings are intense on acid. I just have never seen any significant actual change occur - no change in relationships, no obvious change in thinking patterns outside the time the person is taking acid. (You *do* get a boost in creativity during the taking of acid, just the same as with smoking marijuana - the problem is that you lose the ability to structure work during that time, so it's not particularly useful.)
How's the suicide statistics amongst those that have been targeted (compared to some control group)?
It would really surprise me if these lawsuits have not led to at least one death, and I would suspect several, given the age group mostly sued and their general psychological solidity.
It's how much energy you consume vs how much you use which decide if you get fatter, stay the same or thinner.
That is plain wrong.
No. It is plain right. It is just not the whole truth.
What kind of energy you eat, how stressed you are, whether you exercise, and some other factors determine whether your body will adjust your metabolism down to store energy (in the form of fat) or rise your body temperature and spend extra energy. Eating little and being stressed will generally move it into storage mode, spending as little as possible (and removing lean tissue - muscles et al - because that is metabolically expensive). However, in the end, it is the amount you take in (and absorb) vs how much you spend that makes you lose or gain fat.
So the bacteria in the twins is different... why is it worded in such a way as to imply the different bacteria is the reason that one is obese and the other isn't, instead of the type of bacteria changed because being obese (and the eating that goes along with it) favor one type over the other.
From TFA:
The issue, then was to determine which came first: the fat, or the bacteria. To find out, the lab took mice that had never been exposed to any bacteria, whose guts were totally germ-free. Half of them got bacteria taken from skinny mice. The other half got bacteria from fat mice.
Both groups put on body fat. But the mice that received bacteria from obese donors gained more fat over the course of the experiment.
Given this other part from the article:
Next, Ley looked at twelve obese people. The results, she says, were "just like the mice." And as the 12 people lost weight over a year, their gut populations changed, becoming more and more like those in skinny mice.
it seems like this is some kind of loop, where bacteria that like being in the kind of environment that is in your gut when you're fat will tend to do things to your body to keep you fat. Which makes evolutionary sense.
It matters in a simple way, based on the following well-researched principle from social psychology: "Attitudes follows behavior". If somebody has worked to defend something, they'll be more in favor of that thing. If they've supported unethical use of law to do so, they're more likely to support unethical use of law again. And so on.
Assuming breakdown of the business models, the answer to this is simple: We are not going to get that kind of content. We're not going to get news of the same form as we had before, at least not paid the same way. And we're not going to get movies that cost hundreds of millions of dollars to produce; instead, we'll get relatively cheap movies, like El Mariachi ($7000) or Sin City ($4M, from a budget of $5M), which can make a profit at a lower revenue level.
And to me this is fine. It is a price I am willing to pay. I'll be about as entertained with a cheap movie as an expensive one. The only thing I feel afraid of is losing the in-depth reporter - but I feel that is more threatened by the consumption of TV news than I do by the existence of the Internet.
Mental problems (including but not limited to low intelligence) cause poverty. Mental problems in parents also cause increased mental problems in children. (However, as family economic problems are listed as a separate issue, I suspect that this is at least somewhat corrected for in the studies. It still might not be correct enough for, though. This is hard to tell as the "Original Article" linked from Slashdot doesn't refer the original scientific article published in some unmentioned peer-reviewed journal.)
MySQL has, in my experience, a tendency to weirdness. Examples abound:
Inserting an invalid value into a ENUM creates an empty string (even if that is invalid for the ENUM)
Inserting too long strings leads to truncation rather than an error
Inserting empty strings into numbers lead to 0 rather than an error (see a pattern here?)
On out of disk, MySQL corrupt indexes (depends a bit on version; newer versions are better)
Constraints are not fullfilled by default. To make a true foreign key constraint in MySQL, you have to
Request a special table type (usually InnoDB)
Have the table type enabled on the server (otherwise, MYSQL will silently fall back to MyISAM and not enforce your constraints)
Add the constraint to your table specification
Have a suitable index for use by the constraint, or the constraint will be silently ignored.
Replication can silently fail, while looking like it works fine. (This happens when there is a firewall between the master and slave that sometimes drop connections; the slave will believe all is fine even when it does receive any events for weeks.)
Subqueries are treated as second class citizens. First they weren't there, then they refused to work in a lot of situations (not allowing the same key used both in the subquery and the outer query), then they had horrible performance for what should be (from the view of the optimizer) simple joins. I think that's still the case, but haven't been involved with query optimization in MySQL for over half a year.
These are just off the top of my head, and not all that are there. MySQL has way more non-functionalisms. All of the above have impacted development/stability for projects I've been involved in.
So - I like PostgreSQL because it works. Better performance for complex queries is nice - but I'm mostly interested in the fact that it for the most part just works by default.
Which they wouldn't be if there were reasonable privacy laws in the US. (In Norway, where I'm from, the newspapers are not allowed to name the accused unless the person is already a public figure and which public figure it is is relevant to the accusation.)
I just don't think evolution should be presented as a scientific law.
OK, I'll bite: Why? Do you think that it should be presented in maths class instead, because the core function also a simple deduction provable in a statistical system? Or programming class, because it can easily be implemented? (My last implementation of a genetic algorithm was on Thursday, and was 47 lines of code excluding comments but including debugging infrastructure.)
I feel the right place is in biology - because that's where we primarily use it, it is a core reality of biology and necessary to understand how biology is organized, and the mathematics is not really the right place to start. But if you want it taught as a mathematical fact instead of a scientific fact - I'm open for arguments.
That is funny, you're basically saying that I haven't read the Bible. The funny thing is, 90% of the people who "believe in evolution" (/.ers are included in this) have never actually read anything about the arguments against or for evolution, aside from what they were told in their 6th grade science class. (I'm not saying that is how slashdot is, because I'll get 20 people trying to say they are someone special, and are a professional blah blah blah.)
I am going to agree with this. Just as 90% of the people that "disbelieve evolution" haven't got any idea of how science claims evolution works.
And I suspect 90% of the people that "believe in the literal truth of the Bible" haven't actually read the bible and tried actually check it against observable reality.
All of these are because each of these things are hard work, and in some unnatural. Actually looking objectively at evidence that goes against your preconceptions is unnatural.
When it comes to evolution, I have debated this with a lot of "evolution skeptics" - generally, religious people, though I've come across a couple of atheists as well - and the overall pattern is that they don't understand evolution, and attack their own conception of what evolution is. The exceptions were the two atheists and one religious person (out of about a hundred I have debated this with).
So - you say you can give good reasoning behind what you believe. And you seem to be skeptical to evolution. If so: Can you come up with a description of what evolution is? Just the normal 5-liner, which two primary mechanisms are involved, and how they interact? And, if you can: How do you feel that the conclusion from these (the endless adaption to the environment) is wrong?
Eivind, who don't believe we know everything, but do believe we know some things to a level where every rational person would believe it if they actually took the time to look at the knowledge we have - and that evolution is one of these.
I'd like to point out that science has only been around for a couple of hundred years, and that what I'd see as modern science has been around for around a hundred.
Looking at old examples is, in my opinion, fairly useless. The structures used had a number of flaws, flaws that at least for some areas of science now are addressed. This doesn't mean that we should blindly trust claims - but it means that applying old results to predict how things are going now is fraught with danger. We're estimated at doubling data amount/"knowledge" approx every 8 years, which means that approx every 25 years we have an order of magnitude more knowledge. And, in general, any human-related problem at a different order of magnitude - is a different problem. (We also have a large increase in the number of active scientists, and in communication bandwidth.)
If you have serious cause to believe that the state is going to jail and/or kill you for what you say, then post anonymously, by all means--there's a strong moral reason for doing so. If you're just worried that someone else might call you out to account for what you say, then anonymity isn't going to add much weight to your message. There's a reason we call them "anonymous cowards."
The state or militant groups; I do not trust the state as protection against a number of militant groups, and that has actually been a real cause of worry for people I know. My girlfriend was part of the team that made a documentary (My Daughter The Terrorist) about the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers. Neither the Tigers nor the state of Sri Lanka were sure to like the movie - and both sides are known for using violence to express their preferences. Many of the people that worked on the movie chose to use anonymity to protect themselves and their families against possible retribution.
Apart from that, I agree that we'd be better off if people habitually used the same identity for most stuff - which is why I'm posting under my real name in defense of anonymity. I find it kind of funny that I'm arguing in favor of anonymity against somebody that refuse to show their real name (or has been so little active in public discourse that it doesn't show up anywhere but as a Slashdot alias.)
"Java basically amounts to a really clean API over C++"
Well, if you are used to writing assembly for RISCs, that is completely out of your experiency... But that is a severe understating. Java is a severely restricted subset of C++, with an (bad) API that makes a few things easier.
Java isn't successfull because of its API (if that was the case, Trolltech would have probably take over the world). When deciding what language to use on a big project, managers' main concern isn't what language does already implement those few functions that everybody uses, they ask what language historicaly leads to a bigger rate of success on that kind of project. Now, all the restritiveness of Java show its power here; since it is very hard to completely mess a Java project, it compensates for deficiencies on hiring and evaluating people, building well structured teams, and solving conflicts, leading to a bigger success rate than C++.
I am genuinely curious: Do you have any reference that supports the above, or is this conjecture (possibly a common conjecture that influence language selection)?
The reason I ask is that the kind of project messes I see generally are related to overall poor code quality, with issues like duplication and difficulty of understanding and navigating the codebase being more severe than advanced use of language features. This hit Java as much as other languages - Java has a bunch of frameworks that support making this hard, and a style of development (heavy direct IDE use) that can make mediocre developers avoid learning their project. I've repeatedly seen the lead developer of a 100kloc Java project spend 15 minutes to find a relatively core method; and 100kloc is not that large. (By comparison, for my own 100kloc project implementing the same kind of thing but carefully organized, I spent less than 2 minutes to find anything, and normally less than 15 seconds for a core function.)
At first glance, I would probably also be scared of using C++ for a large project where Java would do, as I've seen people mess up C++ on a more direct level than Java (insidious language-based bugs) - but thinking about it, I have little reason for it in terms of what I've seen of project messes. Which is why I'm asking.
Of course, today it often works out like this: Company A pays Xa to market a trademark. Company A needs something to sell to recoup marketing costs, and know their campaign generate an average product purchase rate of Za. Company A buys generic goods from production company B for Ya. Company A sets price of product to (Xa/Za)+Ya.
Well, that often comes along with it, but in principle it's not necessary unless the original design cost is so low that it is close to the design cost of copying.
Amortized of the series we're talking about design cost is negligible, even if you actually do it inhouse; design isn't a very people-intensive area. Marketing, lobbying and channel control would be far more expensive.
It varies. I've regularly seen research and design/development run up to 20-30% of product cost in breakdowns (and this hasn't looked very different in internal vs public breakdowns, though I've of course seen more public than internal breakdowns.) Marketing is usually a larger cost than design/development, true, but research/development/design isn't generally negligible (though I agree that it is negligible in many cases.)
I suspect trademarks are only slightly less damaging to the economy than patents and copyright, but at least their damage isn't infinite as far as to preventing others from distributing similar goods.
There are also reasonable ways to counter the worst of the damage; one could require goods to be designer, producer and product ID marked to be protected by trademarks, ie, if the trademark owner outsources design and production, then customers can buy the exact same unmarked good by buying no-name product ID referenced goods, basically bypassing the scam.
That's an interesting thought. I've generally been on the fence about trademarks - I don't like the automatic choices made based on trademarks, but I see the need for people to be able to do repeatable buys, too - otherwise, the overhead of re-evaluating every time is too high. With the cost of many things (e.g, cars), it is also necessary to be able to use external sources for information and "know" that it is the same thing we're looking at. Presently, the only way to do that is trademarks and reputation.
If that's the case, sounds pretty good to me. I'm going to start doing my shopping on eBay.;)
I don't consider myself much of a capitalist, but I find it interesting that a company can have a product that another company reproduces for less (at the same quality), but can't compete with them. Why is that?
If company (A) pays Xa to design a product, it costs Ya to produce a unit, and they sell Za units, they have to sell the units at an average cost of (Xa/Za)+Ya to break even.
If company (B) copies the product of company A, they end up with a design cost of zero, they have to sell at a cost of Ya to break even. This is less than (Xa/Za)+Ya. (In practice, even copying leads to some design cost, but it is so much lower than the cost of the original design that the design cost of coping is effectively zero.)
I know regulations help level the playing field, but in a cold way, the consumer wins if another company can create the same product for less. I think typically though, products like this are of inferior quality - maybe the product itself, support etc...
Well, that often comes along with it, but in principle it's not necessary unless the original design cost is so low that it is close to the design cost of copying.
I second that. I have never lied on a resume or even padded mine slightly. I have, however, been asked to an interview more than once by people who then proceeded to ask me for details about my experience with things that weren't on my resume. I will never understand why employers do that, I don't like it when people waste my time. I can only assume they were to lazy to read my resume. What I have experience with is on my resume,
That may be true for you; it's not true for me. I have experience with too many things for me to bother with putting them all on my resume - unless it is technology I want to work with or feel is particularly relevant, it doesn't go in there.
I've programmed professionally in Atmel assembler - not mentioned on my resume. I've programmed professionally in Pascal - not on my resume. I've administered a couple of small Windows networks - not on my resume. And, where I presently work (Google), most of what I do is confidential, so if I switch jobs I can't put it in detail on my resume.
Given that there are people like me, where there's more breadth than indicated in the resume, it is fairly reasonable for people to ask, even if you happen to list everything in your resume.
> > About the same as your argument for not believing in Shiva or Thor and Odin, I'd guess?
>
> As for the throwing away above, try replacing "stamps" with "infectious agents" in your sentence above:
I'm not sure I get your point. We're examining the stamp analogy, so what use it is in replacing 'stamps' with anything else?
I'd say loads - if you don't have a clear grip on how X differs from arbitrary other Ys, you have little grip on X.
In this case, I was trying to show that you were exploiting the "positive value" aspect of stamps, by showing in something with negative associations.
The true fallacy in the rewrite of the metaphor - using "stamps with values" instead of looking at "not collecting stamps" like "not playing football" or "not juggling" or any other simple negative example - is that stamps are tradeable items with monetary value, while religion is an abstract and not possible to trade (for this context, at least).
> Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Is this really accurate?
I would have thought it should be more like actively throwing your stamps away; or not keeping stamps that are priceless because you don't believe they are priceless
About the same as your argument for not believing in Shiva or Thor and Odin, I'd guess?
As for the throwing away above, try replacing "stamps" with "infectious agents" in your sentence above:
I would have thought it should be more like actively throwing your infectious agents away; or not keeping infectious agents that are priceless because you don't believe they are priceless
You'd find that there are modern studies linking brain size and intelligence if you searched Google for "brain size intelligence". Here's a link. For a brief, informal review article, see here.
I have not taken the time to really dig up proper citations.
You also want unprofessional developers. A part of my professional responsibility is expressing my opinions - including being honest if I am asked to do something I dislike, in order to make my manager able to manage me effectively.
Slashdot Mirror
(Of course the penalty for being a typesafe language, and thus requiring automatic memory management, is added. But more and more software is written in such languages now anyway, so the penalty may be mostly illusory.)
GC can, for a fair number of cases, be faster than manual memory management, as it can better handle cache issues etc. The assumption that "manual memory management is faster" is not really general (though there certainly also exists cases where it is faster.)
On top of that, you have things like linear types that can analyse allocations so they're static even without explicit malloc/free.
Eivind, who knows about the pain of dealing with advanced GC, too.
Eivind, who don't doubt that there's quantum effects going on in the brain, but see no need for them for explaining "intelligence" or "awareness", and know enough psychology to not see any need for "free will" to describe how the mind works.
I've seen significant, direct differences from facilitating this for people (and not quite so significant differences from doing it myself) - I've not seen similar differences either in people doing acid or from doing acid myself. I *have* heard repeated claims of acid being revolutionary, and I tend to assume that this comes from acid giving an intense *feeling* change, as all feelings are intense on acid. I just have never seen any significant actual change occur - no change in relationships, no obvious change in thinking patterns outside the time the person is taking acid. (You *do* get a boost in creativity during the taking of acid, just the same as with smoking marijuana - the problem is that you lose the ability to structure work during that time, so it's not particularly useful.)
Eivind.
It would really surprise me if these lawsuits have not led to at least one death, and I would suspect several, given the age group mostly sued and their general psychological solidity.
Eivind.
It's how much energy you consume vs how much you use which decide if you get fatter, stay the same or thinner.
That is plain wrong.
No. It is plain right. It is just not the whole truth.
What kind of energy you eat, how stressed you are, whether you exercise, and some other factors determine whether your body will adjust your metabolism down to store energy (in the form of fat) or rise your body temperature and spend extra energy. Eating little and being stressed will generally move it into storage mode, spending as little as possible (and removing lean tissue - muscles et al - because that is metabolically expensive). However, in the end, it is the amount you take in (and absorb) vs how much you spend that makes you lose or gain fat.
Eivind.
So the bacteria in the twins is different... why is it worded in such a way as to imply the different bacteria is the reason that one is obese and the other isn't, instead of the type of bacteria changed because being obese (and the eating that goes along with it) favor one type over the other.
From TFA:
The issue, then was to determine which came first: the fat, or the bacteria. To find out, the lab took mice that had never been exposed to any bacteria, whose guts were totally germ-free. Half of them got bacteria taken from skinny mice. The other half got bacteria from fat mice. Both groups put on body fat. But the mice that received bacteria from obese donors gained more fat over the course of the experiment.
Given this other part from the article:
Next, Ley looked at twelve obese people. The results, she says, were "just like the mice." And as the 12 people lost weight over a year, their gut populations changed, becoming more and more like those in skinny mice.
it seems like this is some kind of loop, where bacteria that like being in the kind of environment that is in your gut when you're fat will tend to do things to your body to keep you fat. Which makes evolutionary sense.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Eivind.
And to me this is fine. It is a price I am willing to pay. I'll be about as entertained with a cheap movie as an expensive one. The only thing I feel afraid of is losing the in-depth reporter - but I feel that is more threatened by the consumption of TV news than I do by the existence of the Internet.
Eivind.
Eivind.
Why do you like it so much?
It works by default.
MySQL has, in my experience, a tendency to weirdness. Examples abound:
These are just off the top of my head, and not all that are there. MySQL has way more non-functionalisms. All of the above have impacted development/stability for projects I've been involved in.
So - I like PostgreSQL because it works. Better performance for complex queries is nice - but I'm mostly interested in the fact that it for the most part just works by default.
Eivind.
Eivind.
I just don't think evolution should be presented as a scientific law.
OK, I'll bite: Why? Do you think that it should be presented in maths class instead, because the core function also a simple deduction provable in a statistical system? Or programming class, because it can easily be implemented? (My last implementation of a genetic algorithm was on Thursday, and was 47 lines of code excluding comments but including debugging infrastructure.)
I feel the right place is in biology - because that's where we primarily use it, it is a core reality of biology and necessary to understand how biology is organized, and the mathematics is not really the right place to start. But if you want it taught as a mathematical fact instead of a scientific fact - I'm open for arguments.
Eivind.
That is funny, you're basically saying that I haven't read the Bible. The funny thing is, 90% of the people who "believe in evolution" (/.ers are included in this) have never actually read anything about the arguments against or for evolution, aside from what they were told in their 6th grade science class. (I'm not saying that is how slashdot is, because I'll get 20 people trying to say they are someone special, and are a professional blah blah blah.)
I am going to agree with this. Just as 90% of the people that "disbelieve evolution" haven't got any idea of how science claims evolution works.
And I suspect 90% of the people that "believe in the literal truth of the Bible" haven't actually read the bible and tried actually check it against observable reality.
All of these are because each of these things are hard work, and in some unnatural. Actually looking objectively at evidence that goes against your preconceptions is unnatural.
When it comes to evolution, I have debated this with a lot of "evolution skeptics" - generally, religious people, though I've come across a couple of atheists as well - and the overall pattern is that they don't understand evolution, and attack their own conception of what evolution is. The exceptions were the two atheists and one religious person (out of about a hundred I have debated this with).
So - you say you can give good reasoning behind what you believe. And you seem to be skeptical to evolution. If so: Can you come up with a description of what evolution is? Just the normal 5-liner, which two primary mechanisms are involved, and how they interact? And, if you can: How do you feel that the conclusion from these (the endless adaption to the environment) is wrong?
Eivind, who don't believe we know everything, but do believe we know some things to a level where every rational person would believe it if they actually took the time to look at the knowledge we have - and that evolution is one of these.
Looking at old examples is, in my opinion, fairly useless. The structures used had a number of flaws, flaws that at least for some areas of science now are addressed. This doesn't mean that we should blindly trust claims - but it means that applying old results to predict how things are going now is fraught with danger. We're estimated at doubling data amount/"knowledge" approx every 8 years, which means that approx every 25 years we have an order of magnitude more knowledge. And, in general, any human-related problem at a different order of magnitude - is a different problem. (We also have a large increase in the number of active scientists, and in communication bandwidth.)
Eivind.
If you have serious cause to believe that the state is going to jail and/or kill you for what you say, then post anonymously, by all means--there's a strong moral reason for doing so. If you're just worried that someone else might call you out to account for what you say, then anonymity isn't going to add much weight to your message. There's a reason we call them "anonymous cowards."
The state or militant groups; I do not trust the state as protection against a number of militant groups, and that has actually been a real cause of worry for people I know. My girlfriend was part of the team that made a documentary (My Daughter The Terrorist) about the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers. Neither the Tigers nor the state of Sri Lanka were sure to like the movie - and both sides are known for using violence to express their preferences. Many of the people that worked on the movie chose to use anonymity to protect themselves and their families against possible retribution.
Apart from that, I agree that we'd be better off if people habitually used the same identity for most stuff - which is why I'm posting under my real name in defense of anonymity. I find it kind of funny that I'm arguing in favor of anonymity against somebody that refuse to show their real name (or has been so little active in public discourse that it doesn't show up anywhere but as a Slashdot alias.)
Eivind.
Eivind.
Well, if you are used to writing assembly for RISCs, that is completely out of your experiency... But that is a severe understating. Java is a severely restricted subset of C++, with an (bad) API that makes a few things easier.
Java isn't successfull because of its API (if that was the case, Trolltech would have probably take over the world). When deciding what language to use on a big project, managers' main concern isn't what language does already implement those few functions that everybody uses, they ask what language historicaly leads to a bigger rate of success on that kind of project. Now, all the restritiveness of Java show its power here; since it is very hard to completely mess a Java project, it compensates for deficiencies on hiring and evaluating people, building well structured teams, and solving conflicts, leading to a bigger success rate than C++.
I am genuinely curious: Do you have any reference that supports the above, or is this conjecture (possibly a common conjecture that influence language selection)?
The reason I ask is that the kind of project messes I see generally are related to overall poor code quality, with issues like duplication and difficulty of understanding and navigating the codebase being more severe than advanced use of language features. This hit Java as much as other languages - Java has a bunch of frameworks that support making this hard, and a style of development (heavy direct IDE use) that can make mediocre developers avoid learning their project. I've repeatedly seen the lead developer of a 100kloc Java project spend 15 minutes to find a relatively core method; and 100kloc is not that large. (By comparison, for my own 100kloc project implementing the same kind of thing but carefully organized, I spent less than 2 minutes to find anything, and normally less than 15 seconds for a core function.)
At first glance, I would probably also be scared of using C++ for a large project where Java would do, as I've seen people mess up C++ on a more direct level than Java (insidious language-based bugs) - but thinking about it, I have little reason for it in terms of what I've seen of project messes. Which is why I'm asking.
Eivind.
Of course, today it often works out like this: Company A pays Xa to market a trademark. Company A needs something to sell to recoup marketing costs, and know their campaign generate an average product purchase rate of Za. Company A buys generic goods from production company B for Ya. Company A sets price of product to (Xa/Za)+Ya.
Well, that often comes along with it, but in principle it's not necessary unless the original design cost is so low that it is close to the design cost of copying.
Amortized of the series we're talking about design cost is negligible, even if you actually do it inhouse; design isn't a very people-intensive area. Marketing, lobbying and channel control would be far more expensive.
It varies. I've regularly seen research and design/development run up to 20-30% of product cost in breakdowns (and this hasn't looked very different in internal vs public breakdowns, though I've of course seen more public than internal breakdowns.) Marketing is usually a larger cost than design/development, true, but research/development/design isn't generally negligible (though I agree that it is negligible in many cases.)
I suspect trademarks are only slightly less damaging to the economy than patents and copyright, but at least their damage isn't infinite as far as to preventing others from distributing similar goods.
There are also reasonable ways to counter the worst of the damage; one could require goods to be designer, producer and product ID marked to be protected by trademarks, ie, if the trademark owner outsources design and production, then customers can buy the exact same unmarked good by buying no-name product ID referenced goods, basically bypassing the scam.
That's an interesting thought. I've generally been on the fence about trademarks - I don't like the automatic choices made based on trademarks, but I see the need for people to be able to do repeatable buys, too - otherwise, the overhead of re-evaluating every time is too high. With the cost of many things (e.g, cars), it is also necessary to be able to use external sources for information and "know" that it is the same thing we're looking at. Presently, the only way to do that is trademarks and reputation.
Eivind.
there is no way to know if its real or not.
If that's the case, sounds pretty good to me. I'm going to start doing my shopping on eBay. ;)
I don't consider myself much of a capitalist, but I find it interesting that a company can have a product that another company reproduces for less (at the same quality), but can't compete with them. Why is that?
If company (A) pays Xa to design a product, it costs Ya to produce a unit, and they sell Za units, they have to sell the units at an average cost of (Xa/Za)+Ya to break even. If company (B) copies the product of company A, they end up with a design cost of zero, they have to sell at a cost of Ya to break even. This is less than (Xa/Za)+Ya. (In practice, even copying leads to some design cost, but it is so much lower than the cost of the original design that the design cost of coping is effectively zero.)
I know regulations help level the playing field, but in a cold way, the consumer wins if another company can create the same product for less. I think typically though, products like this are of inferior quality - maybe the product itself, support etc...
Well, that often comes along with it, but in principle it's not necessary unless the original design cost is so low that it is close to the design cost of copying.
Eivind.
I second that. I have never lied on a resume or even padded mine slightly. I have, however, been asked to an interview more than once by people who then proceeded to ask me for details about my experience with things that weren't on my resume. I will never understand why employers do that, I don't like it when people waste my time. I can only assume they were to lazy to read my resume. What I have experience with is on my resume,
That may be true for you; it's not true for me. I have experience with too many things for me to bother with putting them all on my resume - unless it is technology I want to work with or feel is particularly relevant, it doesn't go in there.
I've programmed professionally in Atmel assembler - not mentioned on my resume. I've programmed professionally in Pascal - not on my resume. I've administered a couple of small Windows networks - not on my resume. And, where I presently work (Google), most of what I do is confidential, so if I switch jobs I can't put it in detail on my resume.
Given that there are people like me, where there's more breadth than indicated in the resume, it is fairly reasonable for people to ask, even if you happen to list everything in your resume.
Eivind.
> > About the same as your argument for not believing in Shiva or Thor and Odin, I'd guess? > > As for the throwing away above, try replacing "stamps" with "infectious agents" in your sentence above:
I'm not sure I get your point. We're examining the stamp analogy, so what use it is in replacing 'stamps' with anything else?
I'd say loads - if you don't have a clear grip on how X differs from arbitrary other Ys, you have little grip on X.
In this case, I was trying to show that you were exploiting the "positive value" aspect of stamps, by showing in something with negative associations.
The true fallacy in the rewrite of the metaphor - using "stamps with values" instead of looking at "not collecting stamps" like "not playing football" or "not juggling" or any other simple negative example - is that stamps are tradeable items with monetary value, while religion is an abstract and not possible to trade (for this context, at least).
Eivind.
> Atheism is a religion to the same extent that not collecting stamps is a hobby.
Is this really accurate?
I would have thought it should be more like actively throwing your stamps away; or not keeping stamps that are priceless because you don't believe they are priceless
About the same as your argument for not believing in Shiva or Thor and Odin, I'd guess?
As for the throwing away above, try replacing "stamps" with "infectious agents" in your sentence above:
I would have thought it should be more like actively throwing your infectious agents away; or not keeping infectious agents that are priceless because you don't believe they are priceless
Eivind.
I have not taken the time to really dig up proper citations.
Eivind.
Eivind.