Just to add, we already KNOW capital markets are inefficient. It is an expected outcome because of non-perfect information for all participants. (ie: you know about a better price than your neighbor)
Of course "inefficiencies in the marketplace" occur at lots of places. But again, we know and expect this.
Evidence of an inefficient market doesn't tell us anything. We already expect that. The closest you can come to a perfect market is the US Equity markets. In terms of "efficiency", it is ruthlessly efficient (even when we don't want it to be)
Your contention that development ceased on nuclear plants is incorrect. The plants today are NOTHING like 3mile island or the plants of old. There have been wide and vast improvements in process design and control (not only in Nuclear, either). From the safety systems to the steam process -- all of it is better understood today than it has ever been. The materials, the instrumentation, the valves, the control systems. All of it has seen improvement over the last 20 years. Have you ever actually been inside a modern plant of anykind? I have. My livelihood depends on it.
There are lots of firms who have been and are very active in this space. They haven't been sitting around twiddling their thumbs. They, in fact, have designs sitting on the shelf that can be pulled out and worked on at any moment. I am certain all of them stand ready to help whoever wants to build a nuclear power plant.
It is not a lack of technical know-how that prevents us from using nuclear plants. It's a lack of will that does it for us. We have plenty of engineering brain power to get it done. PLENTY. We're just a bunch of pussies about it.
Coincidentally, it correlates very well to my experiences. From the beginning through 2004-2005ish, I liked Ebay a lot. Since that time, they've done just about everything wrong.
Not only does it have a nicely customizable firewall, but the QoS you can do is pretty amazing for a consumer device. Re: bittorrent, I had an old Netopia R314 that used to crap out when I had bittorrent going. Since switching to the D-link router, I haven't noticed ANY issues with connectivity. It helps that I can setup QoS to handle things the way I want (ie: http traffic > bittorrent traffic, etc)
Highly recommended. Plus it's gigabit, which is a nice bonus.
I always thought it was odd that my dad (and his generation - baby boomers) had Latin as a required course in public high school.
NOBODY I know, sans the medical field, has had Latin classes, except by choice (and usually in college).
How many High Schools even teach Latin anymore? I just checked...my old HS doesn't.
You cite the doctor-patient privilege. Is that a legally recognized privilege (in the US)?
I know you are protected talking to attorneys, priests, and husbands/wives. I do not know if doctor-patient communication protection is recognized legally or not. You say it is. I have heard differently. Anyone got a citation?
Can someone smarter than me set the record straight?
If it's not a law, then it should be: "doing things that your customers like and appreciate generally provides better profits over the long run" (which maximizes shareholder value).
And the likewise: "doing things that piss off your customers generally leads to lower profits* over the long run"
While I applaud Netflix, I think it's odd/funny/sad/hilarious that we make a big deal when "companies listen to their customers".
Isn't that what they are supposed to be doing?
Thanks for fixing the issue, Netflix (really). I'm not trying to pick on you individually. I just find it hilarious when we write headlines about things that are supposed to happen. (cue Chris Rock jokes)
I did that. And I pay exactly $10 more per month than the residential. I have a SOHO package (small home office, but definitely a "business" account)
It's the best $10/mo I could have spent.
You see, I don't deal with traffic shaping, bandwidth caps, blocked ports, or anything else. It's just a standard internet connection. I can download/upload as much as I want and I haven't ever heard a peep from my ISP. And trust me, if I was on a residential account.....I would have heard from them.
I know you were joking but there is a serious answer to your question: Farming.
If you have driven from NYC to California, you know what I mean. It is the richest farmland in the world. And we have entire states of it. 100's of thousands of square miles.
Back in the "olden days", that probably looked like heaven compared to Ireland, Scotland, England, etc.
"I'll take a sunburn and sweat if I can just keep my damn crops alive!!!!!"
Of course it doesn't say guns. You are correct that is says arms. And your question is correct as well -- why can't I have a nuke?
Now, we all argue about regulating guns instead of outright banning them. I think we all agree that rogue bazookas in every living room are a bad idea. So we do need some limits on what can and can not be owned. It is not practical, nor safe, for every home to have a nuclear warhead "just in case". But on the same token, we DO have the right to own guns. Certainly handguns and rifles.
So we argue. We argue about what kind of rifles are allowed. Assault rifles? Machine guns? Etc, etc.
Welcome to society. Thankfully, in my country (US), we have a non-violent way to sort these things out. As flawed as it is, politics is that method.
This key here is that this decision changes what we argue about in politics. Instead of arguing about whether you can or can't have guns, we'll argue about the "kind" of guns you are allowed to have. We'll define characteristics and we'll have laws here and there that legislate those characteristics. And just like every system in the world, it will be gamed on both sides.
Meanwhile, we finally resolved the question, "are you allowed to own guns and have them in your house?". Yes. Yes, you can. Anywhere in the USA.
f or when the aliens want to be found, it will probably be in Hollywood ID4 style and not some little green guy screetching "Can you hear me now?" on all frequencies and modulations.
I do not think you understand the concept of space-time.
Methinks you would change your opinion if you understood that concept.
Short version: The universe is 20 bil yrs old. What if that smart race of aliens lived and died out between 1 and 2 billion? We'd never see them.
You see, "intelligent" man has only been around maybe a few million years. That is insignificant compared to 20 billion. In order for us to "see" aliens, we both have to be sufficiently evolved at the same time so we can chat. Now throw in the speed of light and how far/fast signals can travel and you have an interesting problem.
All of the I/O functions work properly? Copying files, renaming folders, etc. All that works perfectly?
If you say yes, you lie. We already know of documented issues with file operations. It is pretty much proven that the I/O performance of Vista is substandard compared with even XP, much less Linux or some *nix flavor. We may not know why that is the case but we can definitely see it in the benchmarks. No doubt about that.
I may be out of line here but any OS that doesn't work with files/folders "perfectly" is a lemon in my mind. That might have been acceptable back in '88 but not in 2008. It's like asking whether your car comes with tires included. Of course it does! ALL cars come with the tires on the car. If one doesn't, it should stand out like a sore thumb. That is called a minimum requirement. And Vista doesn't meet the minimum requirement for the file system.
Pretending the issue isn't there doesn't make it go away. I challenge you to find a single (non-MSFT) study that shows file system performance on Vista meets what IT nerds expect in 2008. I think, if you do the research, you will find lots of evidence to the contrary.
THIS is why/. hates Vista. It's not because we hate MSFT (we do) but it's because we see a product that lacks certain "features" that have been standard since forever. Vista truly is a step backwards, not forwards. How many issues have to be documented before you call a spade a spade?
I am strongly opposed to these high oil prices, because they are siphoning off our wealth and giving it to rich oil foreign oil companies.
Dude, you missed about half of the equation.
What about the wealth we create from the oil we buy? Like plastics, cheap electricity, a mobile workforce, etc. Surely those things help create some of the wealth we all enjoy, right?
Only focusing on the COSTS is only looking at half of the equation. And I'm nor arguing that we use oil efficiently - we don't. But you can't dismiss the wealth created from the oil we bought from the Saudis. We didn't just transfer X trillion dollars to them for nothing. We are getting at least as much out of the deal as they are.
That's called "commerce" and "the market". You should read about it sometime and I think you'd better understand what is going on. Carbon credits create artificial limits on that market. Maybe we need them, maybe we don't. But the justification you give for them is.....simple at best. High prices are the result of what is happening "in the market". They are not the starting point.
because they're in the business of selling you electricity, and the less you buy from them, the less money they make.
Right. And you don't think there are other businesses who want to sell you solar panels and steal that business away from the "greedy businessmen who want to sell you electricity"? I point you to First Solar (ticker: FSLR).
/. users always seem to miss the fact that Big Business is a competitive environment. If you try to "force" your will on people, the market will react and all of a sudden, you will find a competitor eating your lunch. Why do you think we are even TALKING about alternative energy sources? Because oil/gas is expensive. We are all looking for substitute products (read: competition to the current electricity sellers)
I guarantee you that doesn't make the seller of oil/gas energy very happy (ie: anyone selling oil or nat gas). They'd rather be our sole provider. But since their prices are higher than we want....we look for alternatives. Simple Econ 101 stuff.
(sidenote: I wholeheartedly agree with the rest of your post. But you are way offbase on the last sentence)
The fact the he was charged with child porn. I've been following this case in the news because it is such an odd case. As TFA says, they eventually figured out it was viruses and malware doing the downloading of images (over the web, BTW). Ok, fair enough.
However, another article (can't find the link, sorry) was interviewing one of the detectives involved with the case. What he said was something along the lines of "there was a LOT of porn on the computer. 99% of it was just gross stuff, not illegal. But we did find a few pics of young girls.". Which makes me wonder --- how, exactly, do they define child porn?
Are they just arresting people because pictures look young?
...or did they find real kiddie porn on there?
It just seems odd that all of a sudden there is all this kiddie porn out on the publicly available internet and it does not draw attention. I would presume, with Tor, Freenet, etc all of that activity would be driven underground (ie: encrypted). Is there really "spam" and popup based kiddie porn still going on in the WWW?
I ask because I have...err...my friend has not seen it since the early early days of the internet. Back then, you truly could stumble across it accidentally. It hasn't been that way for a long long time though, in my experience.
How could this possibly be confused with a DDOS attack?
It makes me nervous that it even got to that point. How can a competent ISP confuse DDOS attacks with streaming video (most likely, the same streaming video sent to all people)? Isn't there a pattern there? Couldn't they see the connections were all coming from the same server or block of servers? Couldn't they see all of the connections were using the same protocol? Couldn't they see they were all using the same port?
How the hell do they confuse that with a DDOS? I am just a lowly part-time IT network manager at my company and even I can see the difference between streaming video and "other bad stuff".
Someone smarter than me please help me understand more about this. How did this get far enough to convince the ISP's they were being DDOS'd?
If they had listened to the marketplace, then they would have never removed it in the first place.
Note: I am mostly talking about the business market. I don't recall businesses clamoring to get their hands on Vista. Rather, I recall Dell/MSFT trying to shove it down our throats whether we wanted to "make the move" or not. And that's the problem right there: it's not Dell's decision. It's the purchaser's decision. Why not just offer both XP and Vista so you can cover all the options? It's not like we are talking about 1% of buyers or some insignificant amount of people. Lots and Lots of people wanted to stick with XP and flat out said so. Certainly, Dell could have figured out how to do that -- but they didn't do that. They assumed we all wanted Vista. Wrong!
Since they had to bring it back, I can only conclude they were not listening. Maybe they are now but my experience with Dell has gotten so bad in the last 2 years, that they are no longer my PC provider. This, after almost 15 years with them. Heck, I even bought their very first laptop -- a 486/33 SX back in the day. What I am saying is that I've had a LONG relationship with Dell. I really want Dell to succeed. It would make my life a LOT easier. This isn't sour grapes. This is simply me taking the path of least resistance. Unfortunately for Dell, they aren't on that path anymore. Other vendors are now.
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Just to add, we already KNOW capital markets are inefficient. It is an expected outcome because of non-perfect information for all participants. (ie: you know about a better price than your neighbor)
Of course "inefficiencies in the marketplace" occur at lots of places. But again, we know and expect this.
Evidence of an inefficient market doesn't tell us anything. We already expect that. The closest you can come to a perfect market is the US Equity markets. In terms of "efficiency", it is ruthlessly efficient (even when we don't want it to be)
It's not just Vermont, you liberty lover.
Oklahoma and a few other states are against it too.
I have had that in my last two cars.
You do know you can disable that, right? Check your stereo's settings. Even my measly GM stock radio (base model) had the option to turn it off.
What about the right to arm bears? That's pretty fundamental to America and I think that right needs to be protected too.
Stephen Colbert is gonna be pissed....
I think we agree. I might have misread your post so thanks for the clarification.
You are right that the NRC is pretty strict about what types of plants they will consider.
Your contention that development ceased on nuclear plants is incorrect. The plants today are NOTHING like 3mile island or the plants of old. There have been wide and vast improvements in process design and control (not only in Nuclear, either). From the safety systems to the steam process -- all of it is better understood today than it has ever been. The materials, the instrumentation, the valves, the control systems. All of it has seen improvement over the last 20 years. Have you ever actually been inside a modern plant of anykind? I have. My livelihood depends on it.
There are lots of firms who have been and are very active in this space. They haven't been sitting around twiddling their thumbs. They, in fact, have designs sitting on the shelf that can be pulled out and worked on at any moment. I am certain all of them stand ready to help whoever wants to build a nuclear power plant.
It is not a lack of technical know-how that prevents us from using nuclear plants. It's a lack of will that does it for us. We have plenty of engineering brain power to get it done. PLENTY. We're just a bunch of pussies about it.
Here is a link to Ebay's stock chart.
Coincidentally, it correlates very well to my experiences. From the beginning through 2004-2005ish, I liked Ebay a lot. Since that time, they've done just about everything wrong.
Agreed - the D-link gaming router is great.
Not only does it have a nicely customizable firewall, but the QoS you can do is pretty amazing for a consumer device. Re: bittorrent, I had an old Netopia R314 that used to crap out when I had bittorrent going. Since switching to the D-link router, I haven't noticed ANY issues with connectivity. It helps that I can setup QoS to handle things the way I want (ie: http traffic > bittorrent traffic, etc)
Highly recommended. Plus it's gigabit, which is a nice bonus.
because it's so obvious the US Oil Industry controls the oil supply chain...
Are you kidding? Have you heard of this little place called the Middle East? Check it out sometime.
Our oil companies ARE peanuts in relative comparison to the world's oil interests. Like a pimple on the butt of an elephant.
I always thought it was odd that my dad (and his generation - baby boomers) had Latin as a required course in public high school.
NOBODY I know, sans the medical field, has had Latin classes, except by choice (and usually in college).
How many High Schools even teach Latin anymore? I just checked...my old HS doesn't.
You cite the doctor-patient privilege. Is that a legally recognized privilege (in the US)?
I know you are protected talking to attorneys, priests, and husbands/wives. I do not know if doctor-patient communication protection is recognized legally or not. You say it is. I have heard differently. Anyone got a citation?
Can someone smarter than me set the record straight?
you're right....but my point still stands.
If it's not a law, then it should be: "doing things that your customers like and appreciate generally provides better profits over the long run" (which maximizes shareholder value).
And the likewise: "doing things that piss off your customers generally leads to lower profits* over the long run"
(* cept for monopolies)
While I applaud Netflix, I think it's odd/funny/sad/hilarious that we make a big deal when "companies listen to their customers".
Isn't that what they are supposed to be doing?
Thanks for fixing the issue, Netflix (really). I'm not trying to pick on you individually. I just find it hilarious when we write headlines about things that are supposed to happen. (cue Chris Rock jokes)
I did that. And I pay exactly $10 more per month than the residential. I have a SOHO package (small home office, but definitely a "business" account)
It's the best $10/mo I could have spent.
You see, I don't deal with traffic shaping, bandwidth caps, blocked ports, or anything else. It's just a standard internet connection. I can download/upload as much as I want and I haven't ever heard a peep from my ISP. And trust me, if I was on a residential account.....I would have heard from them.
(ps: my ISP is Cox Cable)
I know you were joking but there is a serious answer to your question: Farming.
If you have driven from NYC to California, you know what I mean. It is the richest farmland in the world. And we have entire states of it. 100's of thousands of square miles.
Back in the "olden days", that probably looked like heaven compared to Ireland, Scotland, England, etc.
"I'll take a sunburn and sweat if I can just keep my damn crops alive!!!!!"
...unless your a felon.
(yes, I know...lame to reply to your own post.)
Of course it doesn't say guns. You are correct that is says arms. And your question is correct as well -- why can't I have a nuke?
Now, we all argue about regulating guns instead of outright banning them. I think we all agree that rogue bazookas in every living room are a bad idea. So we do need some limits on what can and can not be owned. It is not practical, nor safe, for every home to have a nuclear warhead "just in case". But on the same token, we DO have the right to own guns. Certainly handguns and rifles.
So we argue. We argue about what kind of rifles are allowed. Assault rifles? Machine guns? Etc, etc.
Welcome to society. Thankfully, in my country (US), we have a non-violent way to sort these things out. As flawed as it is, politics is that method.
This key here is that this decision changes what we argue about in politics. Instead of arguing about whether you can or can't have guns, we'll argue about the "kind" of guns you are allowed to have. We'll define characteristics and we'll have laws here and there that legislate those characteristics. And just like every system in the world, it will be gamed on both sides.
Meanwhile, we finally resolved the question, "are you allowed to own guns and have them in your house?". Yes. Yes, you can. Anywhere in the USA.
f or when the aliens want to be found, it will probably be in Hollywood ID4 style and not some little green guy screetching "Can you hear me now?" on all frequencies and modulations.
I do not think you understand the concept of space-time.
Methinks you would change your opinion if you understood that concept.
Short version: The universe is 20 bil yrs old. What if that smart race of aliens lived and died out between 1 and 2 billion? We'd never see them.
You see, "intelligent" man has only been around maybe a few million years. That is insignificant compared to 20 billion. In order for us to "see" aliens, we both have to be sufficiently evolved at the same time so we can chat. Now throw in the speed of light and how far/fast signals can travel and you have an interesting problem.
Vista works well. Really?
/. hates Vista. It's not because we hate MSFT (we do) but it's because we see a product that lacks certain "features" that have been standard since forever. Vista truly is a step backwards, not forwards. How many issues have to be documented before you call a spade a spade?
All of the I/O functions work properly? Copying files, renaming folders, etc. All that works perfectly?
If you say yes, you lie. We already know of documented issues with file operations. It is pretty much proven that the I/O performance of Vista is substandard compared with even XP, much less Linux or some *nix flavor. We may not know why that is the case but we can definitely see it in the benchmarks. No doubt about that.
I may be out of line here but any OS that doesn't work with files/folders "perfectly" is a lemon in my mind. That might have been acceptable back in '88 but not in 2008. It's like asking whether your car comes with tires included. Of course it does! ALL cars come with the tires on the car. If one doesn't, it should stand out like a sore thumb. That is called a minimum requirement. And Vista doesn't meet the minimum requirement for the file system.
Pretending the issue isn't there doesn't make it go away. I challenge you to find a single (non-MSFT) study that shows file system performance on Vista meets what IT nerds expect in 2008. I think, if you do the research, you will find lots of evidence to the contrary.
THIS is why
I am strongly opposed to these high oil prices, because they are siphoning off our wealth and giving it to rich oil foreign oil companies.
Dude, you missed about half of the equation.
What about the wealth we create from the oil we buy? Like plastics, cheap electricity, a mobile workforce, etc. Surely those things help create some of the wealth we all enjoy, right?
Only focusing on the COSTS is only looking at half of the equation. And I'm nor arguing that we use oil efficiently - we don't. But you can't dismiss the wealth created from the oil we bought from the Saudis. We didn't just transfer X trillion dollars to them for nothing. We are getting at least as much out of the deal as they are.
That's called "commerce" and "the market". You should read about it sometime and I think you'd better understand what is going on. Carbon credits create artificial limits on that market. Maybe we need them, maybe we don't. But the justification you give for them is.....simple at best. High prices are the result of what is happening "in the market". They are not the starting point.
because they're in the business of selling you electricity, and the less you buy from them, the less money they make.
/. users always seem to miss the fact that Big Business is a competitive environment. If you try to "force" your will on people, the market will react and all of a sudden, you will find a competitor eating your lunch. Why do you think we are even TALKING about alternative energy sources? Because oil/gas is expensive. We are all looking for substitute products (read: competition to the current electricity sellers)
Right. And you don't think there are other businesses who want to sell you solar panels and steal that business away from the "greedy businessmen who want to sell you electricity"? I point you to First Solar (ticker: FSLR).
I guarantee you that doesn't make the seller of oil/gas energy very happy (ie: anyone selling oil or nat gas). They'd rather be our sole provider. But since their prices are higher than we want....we look for alternatives. Simple Econ 101 stuff.
(sidenote: I wholeheartedly agree with the rest of your post. But you are way offbase on the last sentence)
Routers are computers.
They have CPU's. They have memory. And they perform tasks....like routing packets, firewalling, stateful packet inspection, VPN server, etc.
The fact the he was charged with child porn. I've been following this case in the news because it is such an odd case. As TFA says, they eventually figured out it was viruses and malware doing the downloading of images (over the web, BTW). Ok, fair enough.
...or did they find real kiddie porn on there?
However, another article (can't find the link, sorry) was interviewing one of the detectives involved with the case. What he said was something along the lines of "there was a LOT of porn on the computer. 99% of it was just gross stuff, not illegal. But we did find a few pics of young girls.". Which makes me wonder --- how, exactly, do they define child porn?
Are they just arresting people because pictures look young?
It just seems odd that all of a sudden there is all this kiddie porn out on the publicly available internet and it does not draw attention. I would presume, with Tor, Freenet, etc all of that activity would be driven underground (ie: encrypted). Is there really "spam" and popup based kiddie porn still going on in the WWW?
I ask because I have...err...my friend has not seen it since the early early days of the internet. Back then, you truly could stumble across it accidentally. It hasn't been that way for a long long time though, in my experience.
How could this possibly be confused with a DDOS attack?
It makes me nervous that it even got to that point. How can a competent ISP confuse DDOS attacks with streaming video (most likely, the same streaming video sent to all people)? Isn't there a pattern there? Couldn't they see the connections were all coming from the same server or block of servers? Couldn't they see all of the connections were using the same protocol? Couldn't they see they were all using the same port?
How the hell do they confuse that with a DDOS? I am just a lowly part-time IT network manager at my company and even I can see the difference between streaming video and "other bad stuff".
Someone smarter than me please help me understand more about this. How did this get far enough to convince the ISP's they were being DDOS'd?
If they had listened to the marketplace, then they would have never removed it in the first place.
Note: I am mostly talking about the business market. I don't recall businesses clamoring to get their hands on Vista. Rather, I recall Dell/MSFT trying to shove it down our throats whether we wanted to "make the move" or not. And that's the problem right there: it's not Dell's decision. It's the purchaser's decision. Why not just offer both XP and Vista so you can cover all the options? It's not like we are talking about 1% of buyers or some insignificant amount of people. Lots and Lots of people wanted to stick with XP and flat out said so. Certainly, Dell could have figured out how to do that -- but they didn't do that. They assumed we all wanted Vista. Wrong!
Since they had to bring it back, I can only conclude they were not listening. Maybe they are now but my experience with Dell has gotten so bad in the last 2 years, that they are no longer my PC provider. This, after almost 15 years with them. Heck, I even bought their very first laptop -- a 486/33 SX back in the day. What I am saying is that I've had a LONG relationship with Dell. I really want Dell to succeed. It would make my life a LOT easier. This isn't sour grapes. This is simply me taking the path of least resistance. Unfortunately for Dell, they aren't on that path anymore. Other vendors are now.