You "forgot" an important example, but that's almost certainly either because it doesn't neatly fit into your preconceived notions, or because your history classes ignore it. The example is the large parts of Spain that were organized in Anarcho-syndicalist collectives during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell went to Spain a Socialist but once there, found he respected the Anarchists (Anarcho-syndicalists) more because of their ability to actually get things done while the Republicans (different meaning there and then than it has now in the USA), Communists, and Socialists bickered over politics.
You cited some examples of what happens in a "without government" situation (and I don't necessarily agree with that assessment). I'll remind you that Mussolini, Pol Pot, Stalin, and somebody Godwin prohibits me from mentioning were all able to do the horrible things they did because they used the power of governments. Would it be fair for me to say we've seen what happens when there is a government, citing these examples, and conclude that governments just don't work, except in theory?
FWIW, I'm not an anarchist, but I just hate seeing the same ol' lame authoritarian apologist arguments against anarchism (whether it be anarcho-capitalism, communist anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, or any other variety) parroted. One who believes anarchy can work is no more naïve than one who believes government can work.
I see all the points reflected in recent politics in the USA.
1. Your brain uncritically accepts the first information it gets in any new subject area as correct, whether it is or not.
I'd say Fox News understood this. On the night of the 2000 election, all the news channels received new data from Florida. There was no way Fox or anybody else could possibly have processed those data and come to any kind of a conclusion, but Fox went ahead and declared George W. Bush the victor (the person who actually made the call was a cousin of Bush). The other networks, not wanting to be last, followed suit and declared Bush the victor. The facts at that point could not support declaring either candidate the winner in Florida. But since Fox called the state for Bush and the other networks irresponsibly followed suit, the impression was created in the minds of the public that Bush had won. When the Gore campaign asked for a recount, it was seen as Gore trying to overturn a Bush victory when in fact no winner should have been declared by that point. The eventual analysis of the disputed ballots showed that if the Gore campaign had asked for and gotten a full recount, Gore would have won Florida. However, the Supreme Court stopped recounts, and one of the more delicious bits of irony in recent history is that the Democrats had only requested some weird partial recounts they had a better chance of winning, but they actually would have lost even if the Supreme Court had allowed them to continue. Only a full recount would have given a Gore victory, independent of the criterion used for counting ballots (most restrictive, most "liberal", or even allowing each county to apply its own established criteria). Further, the Gore campaign focused on undervotes, the famous "dimples" and "hanging chads," and ignored overvotes. Recent analysis has shown that there were tens of thousands of overvotes, largely from African-American districts, that would have gone for Gore. In those cases, the voter had both marked or punched to indicate a vote for Gore and written in Gore in the write-in space. Since the voter had "voted for two candidates" (even though the ballots were just marked two ways for the same candidate), those ballots were discarded. IF the Gore campaign had called for re-checking of overvotes, and depending on the criteria for accepting overvote ballots, Gore could have won Florida by tens of thousands of votes. I find something very funny in the fact that the Dems tried to get the partial recounts they thought would be most favorable for themselves, and in fact ignored much richer potential ways of winning, including the truly democratic full recount.
Instead, Bush was seen as being the rightful winner, and Gore as being a sore loser. The recounts were seen as the desperate acts of a losing campaign, when in fact there was no way, short of careful analysis of all the ballots, of knowing who had won. The first "unanimous" declaration of a winner in Florida was for Bush, and voters largely accepted that as fact and ignored further arguments about the validity of the declared result.
Fox later apologized for making that call so prematurely, but the damage was done, and there was no way to make it right.
5. Your brain has no way to know whether or not it has all the information required to respond appropriately to a given stimulus.
As a result, many people look to their "neighbors" when unsure. Since there were a lot of people saying Bush was the rightful winner and Gore was just a sore loser, and since the first "offficial" information the people had received was a Bush victory, a majority didn't want to hear anything about questioning the result, even though nobody had enough information at that time to determine who had "really" won.
I live in São Paulo. In the summer, when it isn't raining (and sometimes even when it is raining) it gets frickin' hot. When I didn't have a car (and for the short time when I had a car without air conditioning) and had to visit customers wearing at least "business casual-plus" clothes and sometimes a suit and tie during the summer, my mind naturally turned to ways to keep myself cool so I wouldn't arrive all sweaty and wrinkled at the customer sites.
I had the idea of a personal cooling unit, with a box (maybe carried in a briefcase) that would cool some liquid (water maybe) and pump it through tubes that I would be wearing to cool strategic regions of my body (major arteries and possibly veins near the skin seemed like good places to have the tubes passing). I had this amazing mental image of me walking down the Avenida Paulista (a famous major avenue in the city) in the blazing sun on the hottest day of the year, wearing a black wool suit and looking cool and comfortable while people around me in shorts, sleeveless shirts and sandals were panting and bathed in sweat.
The technical issues seemed tough to master, especially the question of how I would cool the water (or other liquid). Then it occurred to me that I could just have a reservoir filled with as much ice as it could hold, and then cold water filling the remaining space. A simple battery-operated pump would pump the water through aquarium tubing to the aforementioned strategic points and then back to the reservoir for heat exchange with the ice and cooler water. This version would be able to provide cooling for a much shorter time than the one with a portable refrigeration unit, but one could always refill the reservoir with ice and water, and it would be a lot easier to build and maintain. I would be able to build it from readily available (and inexpensive) components. Not to mention that I wouldn't have the problem of powering a portable refrigeration unit. This one seemed doable, but I ended up buying a car with air conditioning before I got around to making my personal cooling unit, and my interest in actually completing the project waned.
Apparently there was a misscommunication and the purses were marked UP to $70.00. They flew off the shelves. She sold em all within 2 weeks. Price playes a HUGE part in public perception of value.
It depends. But it's true that if there's an established price range for a given subcategory of products and your product is priced well below it, the product will be perceived as inferior even if it's an adequate replacement for other products in the subcategory.
The most famous example of this effect is in the pricing of store brand products at supermarket chains. Often the products are made by the same manufacturer as the brand-name products, and even when they are not, they are very often of equivalent quality. If the price of the store brand is above the price of the brand-name product, equal in price, or below but too close to the price of the brand-name product, it won't sell well. People will just buy the branded product they know, since the price difference is negligible (or negative!).
However, the store brand product price can't be too far below that of the famous brand product, or it will be perceived as being inferior and people will buy the product whose quality they know and trust. There is a "sweet spot" in the pricing of store brand products where sales of the store brand (and therefore the store's margin for that subcategory, because the store's margin on the store brand is usually larger than its margin on the name brand product) are maximized, because the price difference between the known name brand product and the equivalent store brand product is large enough to attract the customer, but not so large that it makes the customer suspect the product is not equivalent at all.
The problem of how to price store brand products is one of many solved by "retail revenue management" and price optimization software packages offered by companies like KhiMetrics.
Another great example is the story of the father of one of my roommates from grad school. My roommate's father was a tailor. He sold shirts from manufacturers with famous names in his shop, but he also made shirts. He started out by doing "cost-plus" pricing. He took his material and labor costs, added on a margin, and that was the price he put on his shirts. The price came out well under half the price of the famous brand name shirts, despite the fact that they were of at least equal, and probably greater, quality. They hardly sold at all. Then he tried an experiment (and I don't know where he got the idea). He set the prices of his shirts so they would be 15-25% lower than the prices of the shirts from the well-known manufacturers. The shirts sold so well he couldn't keep up with the demand. He couldn't keep them on the shelves. People were excited about getting good shirts for 20% less than the price they were used to paying, because that was enough of a discount to be interesting, but not so much that it would make them suspect the shirts were crappy.
Now I'm not so sure this will work with music files, because there's a key difference: Store brand spaghetti sauce made by the same manufacturer as the national brand really is an adequate replacement for the national brand. My ex-roommate's father's shirts really were an adequate replacement for the shirts with the well-known brand names.
Songs are much more individual than shirts or spaghetti sauce in a jar or a box of spaghetti, so it seems to me that one song may not be an adequate replacement for another. I would not expect exactly the same rules to apply. I guess the term that applies here is that songs are not quite commodity items. Heck, even among artists I like enough to have their music in my home, if I feel like listening to a specific artist, I don't think others even from the same genre would necessarily be acceptable replacements.
The fundimentalists stopped listening to Jews in A.D 33
It is with great sadness that I agree with you. If only they listened to the Jew who died around that time, whose teachings they claim to follow, but cheerfully ignore as they do things that would horrify Him.
OK, in trying to track down a reference in English, I began to understand why you saw these as being one issue. All the reports I could find in English language sites mixed the two things together.
I found some decent things in Portuguese, and I can give you the references even do a quick translation of them, but I can't do the translations at this moment. Is there somewhere else we can go to talk about this? I'm wary of posting an e-mail address on the internet where spambots can find it.
You can find the actual generic drug law (implemented in 1999) at this ANVISA web page. ANVISA is the Agência Nacional de Vigilância Sanitária, roughly the equivalent of the US FDA.
There's also a FAQ for consumers on the page you'll reach by clicking here and then clicking on "OK" on the page that opens. Question 642 is very interesting, talking about how successful generic medications have been in the USA, Europe, and Japan.
Once again, you are confusing two completely separate issues, both of which involved (now former) Health Minister José Serra.
The first is generic drugs. The next time you have to buy a prescription medication, ask the pharmacist if a generic version is available. Much of the time, it is. This is true in many countries, including the USA, and it does not involve any violations of patents. Until just a few years ago, that option was not available to Brazilian consumers. Serra was instrumental in bringing that kind of competition to Brazil, and should be highly commended for it (FWIW, I didn't like Serra as a candidate for president in 2002, and I don't like him as mayor of São Paulo or as a candidate for president in 2006, but I think he was fantastic as health minister).
The generic drugs sold in most pharmacies in Brazil now, at a great cost savings to all consumers, are not the AIDS drugs on which Serra threatened to break the patents. That is a completely separate issue.
And I will again say that the pharmaceutical companies' attempts to stop the introduction of generic drugs in Brazil was shameful, shameful, shameful. And worse, defending those companies in the name of capitalism is woefully misguided, because in fact Serra's actions, together with the work of the Brazilian congress, brought more competition into the drug market in Brazil, helping consumers in the way capitalism is supposed to help them. The drug companies wanted to protect unnatural monopolies not based on exclusive rights to the formulations of the medications in question (again, we're not talking about the AIDS drugs here; that is a separate issue) but on exclusive access to the market. In the case of the generic drug law, Serra was taking the Milton Friedman position and the multinational pharmaceutical companies were taking the Vladimir Lenin position.
Serra's participation was critical for the introduction of generic drugs in Brazil. That was one tremendous accomplishment, and Serra was very brave to do it. Serra was also the first to adopt the position that the way to respond to the pharmaceutical companies' attempts at price gouging (way beyond the long-established price points) on AIDS drugs was to use the "national emergency" powers of the Health Ministry and break the patents. It was another bold move, and I admire Serra for it, and for exercising some restraint with it. He could have just dropped all negotiations and utterly screwed the multis, but he instead used the law as a way to negotiate down the outrageous price increases the pharmas were suddenly trying to impose on mature products with well-established prices. Add in that Serra participated very actively in getting a modern organ donation law passed in Brazil, and it's pretty easy to say that Serra was the best health minister the country has had. I still don't like him as a presidential candidate, but he was one heck of a health minister.
Once again, for those who came in late, the generic drug law in Brazil and the use of the patent-breaking threat to keep the multinational pharmaceutical companies from suddenly jacking up the prices on mature products with well-established prices were both things done by José Serra, and both involved a lot of bravery because they pissed off those multinationals. But they were two separate actions. And whether or not you agree with Serra on the breaking of the patents on the AIDS drugs, the pharmaceutical companies' opposition to the SEPARATE ISSUE of the generic drug law was shameful.
I guess you are talking about profit here? If their drugs were more profitable they would have incentive to create even more drugs. Is 20 years (a patent term) that long to wait to freely reap the benefits of the research? You are telling me there is something Brazil just can't live without, for free (or for manufacturing costs (generics)) that didn't even exist 20 years ago? All they are doing is assuring that in the future even less drugs becomes available.
In your kneejerk rush to shill for the multinational pharmaceutical companies and make the "case" for their price gouging, you seem to have confused two separate issues.
One is generic drugs, which don't violate patents. Generic drugs are available in the USA and many other places. Serra wanted to make them available to Brazilian consumers. The multinational pharmaceutical companies opposed the project to bring generic drugs to Brazil, and that is indeed shameful. They were not protecting patents or other "intellectual property;" they were only protecting the price-gouging they were doing with no viable alternatives available in the market. What Serra did was to bring Brazil's medication market into the modern world, opening up competition. That's how capitalism is supposed to work for consumers. The multinational pharmaceutical companies didn't want to allow legal competition, so they could charge whatever they damn well pleased for drugs in Brazil. What Serra did in helping push through the generic drug legislative project was nothing short of heroic, and I think Milton Friedman would agree that bringing in more competition is a good thing.
The other issue is the patent breaking for the AIDS medications. The point on that issue is that the medications had already been priced. But then somebody in the pharmaceutical companies saw the large demand in Brazil (because essentially every AIDS patient was being represented in the purchases) and saw in that an opportunity to gouge. So they jacked up their prices. The normal pharmaceutical company argument, that things like R&D costs are built into the prices of the drugs, don't apply in this case, because they had already set a price and sold the drugs for years at that price, then suddenly decided to jack up the prices in Brazil. The Brazilian government was even willing to negotiate reasonable price adjustments, but the outrageous price increases suddenly applied to these treatments would have made Brazil's AIDS policy completely inviable.
The patent-breaking threat is not a case of Brazil deciding it wanted the drugs for free or even cheaper. Serra tried very hard to get the drug companies to negotiate. In fact, he got one to the table and an accord was eventually reached. But the other decided price gouging on AIDS drugs was an important part of its business plan in Brazil, and so refused to negotiate the size of its unnecessary price increases. Serra (and since Serra left office, his successor in the current government) therefore went ahead with the patent breaking action.
As for the argument that if drugs are more profitable, that gives the pharmas more incentive to create new drugs, there may be some truth to it. Serra tried to allow these companies to continue to sell their drugs at the previously set prices, allowing even for reasonable adjustments. But the companies thought they saw an opportunity to drastically increase the prices on medications already in wide use, and their profits with it. As a result, they may end up losing all their profits from Brazil. Brazil really has no choice. The government can either continue its policy, probably the best one in the world at containing the spread of AIDS and limiting the number of AIDS-related deaths, but in so doing not allow the pharmaceutical companies to just make up new prices completely out of line with the established and market-accepted prices, or the government can allow the drug companies to jack up their prices at will, which would mak
Just elaborating a bit for those too lazy to RTFAs linked from the parent post...
José Serra, the Health Minister in the previous administration in Brazil (he unsuccessfully ran for president in 2002, losing in the runoff election to the current president, Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, and is now mayor of the city of São Paulo), was responsible for Brazil's AIDS policy, which has been very successful and is recognized as a model for government AIDS policies worldwide. One major part of the policy included making the best AIDS drugs available to patients free. The problem is that the drug companies were jacking up the prices, and Brazil's AIDS budget was not going to be large enough to be able to continue this critical part of the policy that had been so successful in controlling the spread of AIDS and the number of AIDS-related deaths.
Serra tried to negotiate with the multinational pharmaceutical companies selling the AIDS drugs in Brazil, but they didn't want to negotiate. Serra showed them that he had the power, in the event of a national emergency, to make a declaration permitting Brazilian companies to break patents. He told them it would not be difficult to make the case of AIDS being a national emergency. One of the two companies decided to negotiate and rolled back some of its price increases. The other (Roche) balked, so Serra went ahead with the process of issuing the permission to break the patent.
The pharmaceutical companies got the US government to complain to the WTO, but the complaint was eventually dropped. The pharmaceutical companies negotiated with the Brazilian government (the negotiations continued through the change of administrations and are still ongoing, nearly three years after the change) and the Brazilian government continues to buy the drugs.
FWIW, Serra is very highly respected by health professionals in Brazil. In addition to standing up to the multinational pharmaceutical companies on the AIDS drugs, he also stood up to them on generic drugs. He helped push through a new policy permitting generic drugs in Brazil, greatly reducing the cost of medications for the Brazilian people. The pharmaceutical companies, for obvious (but shameful) reasons, opposed the introduction of generics in Brazil. Brave guy. Lula, the current president, is also man of exceptional bravery, having been one of the founders of Brazil's labor movement when the government of Brazil was a right-wing military dictatorship, but that's another story.
In addition to the accomplishments mentioned above Serra was responsible for pushing through a modern organ donation law in Brazil.
If not, try this: The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft, completely free (and legal!) in HTML. His works are available in a few other places online too, like here (see the copyright information at the bottom of the page-- most or all of Lovecraft's work is in the public domain), here (complete works, mostly in PDFs-- probably your best source), here (PDFs of several works), and here (a 100-page collection in a few different formats, including PDF and HTML).
Since most of Lovecraft's work is in the public domain, you can find other sources around the internet.
If you do want books, please consider buying from Arkham House, which has done a lot to promote Lovecraft's work, encourage and publish studies of it, and keep the genre alive by publishing the works of other authors. You'll find Lovecraft, S.T. Joshi (the leading Lovecraft scholar), and other authors like August Derleth on the authors page. You may notice on the main page that despite Lovecraft's works being available in the public domain, books of his works are three of the top five sellers at Arkham House.
Whether you read Lovecraft in electronic format or in bound books, enjoy!
I got a 30GB 4G iPod ("The iPod Formerly Known As Photo") recently. A friend who works at Apple also recommended the ER6is, and I ended up getting a set of those too.
The safety concerns are real. I probably wouldn't use them biking or around outside in a city, because you really can't hear what's going on around you. But on commercial airline flights, they are amazing. It can actually be startling to remove the earphones mid-flight and hear how loud the engines are. What's really weird is that you can indeed listen to your music at a volume that would be completely drowned out by the ambient noise without the isolating earphones.
As mentioned in the parent and grandparent posts, Because of the noise isolation, you don't have to turn up the volume a lot. I've heard a few people complaining about the bass response, but I attribute this to two effects. First, many people are used to listening to music in a way that would be appropriate for those ridiculous cars with the monster sound systems whose bass you can hear from a distance of several km. But even more important, I think the people who complain about the ER6i bass haven't properly inserted the 'phones into their ears. I believe this is a common problem. I've seen it mentioned in a few reviews of the ER6is, and Etymotic Research is even including a slip of yellow paper in the ER6i packaging now with the following message:
IMPORTANT
For Best results:
Be sure to obtain a good seal.
Without it, you will not have an optimal bass response.
In some cases, slightly moistening the white eartips will help improve the seal in your ear canals.
So if you're researching ER6i earphones (and possibly other noise isolating earphones) online, and you read reviews saying they have "no bass" or something similar, keep this in mind.
Etymotic even makes optional smaller and larger eartips to allow for the correct placement and seal in ears that the standard eartips don't fit just right.
I do recognize that bass may be in the ear of the beholder, so YMMV. It's best if you can find somebody you trust and ask that person's opinion. I was fortunate to have the ER6i earphones recommended to me by somebody whose opinion I've come to trust, and I've been more than satisfied with them.
The point is not that the current approach to antivirus software is worse than nothing; that's ridiculous. But "default permit" and "enumerating badness" are at the heart of most of our security these days, and there are much better strategies available. It would make more sense to monitor the programs we know we've installed than to monitor the possibility of tens of thousands of different pieces of malware that could infect our machine, especially since malware that is unknown to our malware detection programs can't be stopped that way.
Condoms are not an example of "default permit" or "enumerating badness." On the contrary, they are "default deny" taken to the extreme. As long as they don't tear, nothing gets through them, in or out. They don't allow everything through except a list of things you've said they should stop. So if you have sex with a partner who has been infected with a previously unknown sexually transmitted disease (provided it's bacterial or viral), a condom will be just as effective against that disease as it is against the known ones. Antivirus programs based on "enumerating badness" don't work like that.
Unicorn Theory can also be framed in such a way that it is not in conflict with the known facts, but an argument in favor of UT is another matter altogether.
The same can be said of Flying Spaghetti Monster Theory. The name is at least as good as "Unicorn Theory," plus there's a fun site to which you can link.
Intelligence assets take a long time to develop. When they are exposed, they any anybody connected to them become useless. When a company like Brewster Jennings is exposed after years of work not only on gathering intelligence, but also in putting itself in position to gather intelligence, it is not just a matter of plopping down another company in its place. Not only would another CIA front have to spend years and years to duplicate the "getting closer" work done by Brewster Jennings, but it would be harder, because many of the techniques used by Brewster Jennings are now known. There almost certainly are other CIA fronts "out there," but that does not excuse the treason committed by whoever was responsible for exposing Valerie Plame and with her, Brewster Jennings and all the operatives associated with it.
I find at least one factual error and two cutesy word games (the kind the Republicans used to complain that Clinton used) in the WSJ piece cited in the parent post.
First, Joseph Wilson did not say he was recommended for the trip and investigation of the yellowcake claims by Cheney. What Wilson did say (and it has been verified) is that because of Cheney's office expressing interest in the yellowcake story to the CIA, the CIA decided to send somebody to investigate it. Valerie Plame recommended Wilson because of his experience in the region, and Wilson has never denied this or tried to suggest otherwise. He didn't bring it up, because his wife was an undercover CIA operative, not a person with a desk job at Langley.
The first little word game, technically a true statement, but designed to mislead, is that it appears Rove "didn't even know Ms. Plame's name." Actually, that goes beyond what Rove and Luskin (his attorney) have said. They have said that Rove didn't tell the reporters her name. But that's where the word games and technicalities come in. They have admitted he mentioned "Joseph Wilson's wife." It isn't hard for a reporter to discover more about her, given that much information. "I didn't tell the reporters her name" is a statement designed to mislead the public into thinking he didn't divulge anything about her identity, when in fact he did.
The other statement like this is the bit about Lord Butler's conclusion on the "sixteen words." He found that the statement in the State of the Union address was "well-founded." That just means that yes, British intelligence had received information (now known to have been forged) indicating that Saddam may have been seeking uranium in Niger. But what it ignores is that the information received by British Intelligence at that time was already known by the CIA to be false, and that nobody in the US or English intelligence communities now believes to be true.
I also find it funny that the folks at the Wall Street Journal editorial page give so much credence to the report by Lord Butler but sweep the Downing Street memos, also from English government sources, under the rug. Funny that, huh?
OTOH, you can have great fun outing CIA agents by googling "Brewster Jennings" and seeing who claims to work for them.
Actually, that's the real problem with the "outing" of Valerie Plame. Brewster, Jennings was a great CIA asset, with close ties to ARAMCO and other major oil companies and ministries. Now it is useless as a front for US intelligence.
What's the problem with this? Well, there's been a lot of talk of oil production having reached its peak and begun its decline. Financial Times recently reported that the Saudis had admitted that OPEC oil production won't be able to meet world demand within 20 years. I don't know whether petroleum production has yet reached its peak and started to decline, and I don't know when OPEC will not be able to meet world demand. Wouldn't it be nice if at this time of uncertainty, the USA had some kind of asset capable of investigating these things from up close?
Too bad a political vendetta destroyed major intelligence assets that could have helped with just that.
OK, once I figured out that even though there are no maps, the satellite pics of São Paulo are there, I went and found the place where I used to work, the building where I live, and a friend's home.
Hmmmm... there's a new condo with 7 buildings across the street from me. They started construction in 2002 and completed it some time last year, but in the picture, the lot appears to be in the pre-construction phases. So it looks like the sat pix of my neighborhood are from 2001 or 2002.
A friend played with the new Google satellite pics and found the Morumbi stadium, the largest in São Paulo. When it opened in 1970, it had a capacity of about 120,000 people, but its current capacity, after a few renovations, is about 80,000 people. Technically, its name is "Estádio Cicero Pompeu de Toledo," but it has various nicknames, including "La Bambinera", "A Gaiola das Loucas", and simply "Morumbi", which is the name of the neighborhood where it's located.
Here's a direct "linky" to a picture of it. For privacy reasons, I won't link to the pix of my home or my friend's home.;)
I still have to ask, what are "columns in a decimal number?"
Let's stick to the left of the decimal point. The first column to the left (the last one before the decimal point) represents "ones." We tend to use a "base ten" or "decimal" number system because we have ten fingers on our hands. In decimal numbers, the next column to the left of the "ones" column represents tens (multiples of the number you get by adding 1 to 9). So, for example, the decimal number "47" represents "four tens plus seven ones." Thinking in terms of body parts, it represents "four complete sets of fingers plus seven more fingers."
Note that the digits "8" and "9" don't exist in "Simpsons numbers" (octal). Similarly, if you think about the hexadecimal digits A, B, C, D, E, and F, they don't exist in our decimal system. But creatures with 16 fingers might well count that way. They might not use the symbols A-F to express them, but they would have fifteen distinct digits, where we only have ten (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9).
In any base, that is, independent of the number of fingers in a complete set, a "1" in a given column represents a "complete set of fingers" of the next column to the right. As I said, since most humans have ten fingers, we use decimal (base ten) numbers. The people on The Simpsons would use the base in which the next number after 7 would be "10."
"Simpsons counting" (counting in base 8 or "octal") would go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21,..., 75, 76, 77, 100, 101,...
So the number "47" in the world of The Simpsons would still represent 4 complete sets of fingers plus 7 more fingers, but that would be a different number than "47" in decimal. Expressing that number in our decimal number system, it would be 4x8 + 7 = 39.
I would have been really impressed if they'd taken that into account and expressed the 40th digit of pi in base-8 on the episode of The Simpsons from 1993 in which the 40th digit of pi is mentioned. Oh, and of course, it would have to be the 32nd digit of pi (using decimal counting of digits) expressed in base-8, because... well... "40" should mean something different to the Simpsons than it means to us.
I was a teaching assistant one academic quarter each year when I was in grad school. I was the TA for "Astro 1" twice.
Even though "Astro 1" was for people with limited math and science backgrounds, there was a lot of really good content in it, at least as taught by the prof who taught it the two times I was the TA for it.
One thing that had to be covered in the basics was the concept of orders of magnitude. When we talked about orders of magnitude, I had to explain to the students what the columns mean in a decimal number. OK, they had a basic understanding, and they "should" have understood it more deeply by the time they reached college, and yes, it would have been nice if they'd seen and paid attention to "My Hero Zero" on Schoolhouse Rock, but I discovered that a sizeable percentage didn't understand these things.
After a brief talk about powers of 10, I decided to take the risk of introducing a more complex concept in order to make sure they understood the basic concept. I brought in base 8 by telling them that since the people on The Simpsons have 8 fingers, they would count differently. I showed them why and how, without spending too much time (I didn't want them to think base 8 was what they were supposed to learn). When we were done, they really did seem to understand powers of ten and orders of magnitude much better. They participated more actively and their answers (and even questions) showed they understood powers of ten and orders of magnitude better, which I believe enhanced their appreciation of some of the really cool stuff in the content of the course.
In the anonymous TA evaluations, there were several positive comments about how I was able to find unusual and interesting examples to help the students understand things.
I've heard enough of this garbage about endian-ness and how hard it is to port from one arch to another.
I didn't say anything about it being hard to port OSX. I just mentioned that Apple hadn't been warning its developers about a possible change of endian-ness. Most OSX applications probably don't depend much on byte ordering, but some might, and the switch could be a huge pain for the developers of those apps.
Of course, as I type this, the announcement has been made, and it looks like Apple really will be using Pentium chips. And now they're trying to reassure developers about the transition. The Wolfram CEO said they ported Mathematica in about 2 hours with only about 20 lines of code changed. Dammit... I was reading more and the page was slashdotted while trying to update itself (as it does every 2 minutes).
The LAST thing Apple needs to do is to piss off it's user base.
But maybe there's a way for the story to be true and Apple to not piss off its user base.
I've been told that Apple managed to put some very tough clauses into its contract with IBM over the chips. If IBM were unable to meet certain criteria, Apple would be able to take some of the intellectual property, basically allowing Apple to take the design and have somebody else make the processors.
I've noticed that the reports on C|Net don't say Apple will use Pentium chips. They say Apple will use Intel chips.
If you RTFD (D="Debunking") from the blurb, it's mentioned there that Apple pays a lot less for the chips it gets from IBM than it would pay for comparable Pentium chips.
It's also interesting (mentioned in the "debunking") that Apple has NOT been warning its developers about a pending change of endian-ness, as you might expect them to if a change to little-endian Pentium chips from big-endian PowerPC chips.
But... if it's true that Apple can take the chip design to Intel, then Intel could conceivably make PowerPC chips for Apple. That's about the only way I can see this rumor being true. It would still be tough, because I don't think it would be easy for Intel to get production of a new chip going at the required volume within a year, but I am not a silicon expert.
That's what I liked about the old Siskel and Ebert show. You got multiple reviews for each movie.
I agree. And more than that, both reviewers explained what they liked about each film and why they would give it a "thumbs up" or "thumbs down."
The two disagreed a lot, and sometimes the best information about a movie came out in those disagreements.
The cheap knockoff "two reviewers" TV shows that popped up everywhere in the late 1980s and early 1990s never came close to Siskel and Ebert's shows (Sneak Previews, At The Movies, Siskel & Ebert At The Movies, Siskel & Ebert & The Movies... many names, but the same basic format). I should note that at least once, a "two critics" movie review show continued with the same name when Siskel and Ebert left, and I'm including the post-Siskel&Ebert era on those shows as "knockoffs" too. So maybe that's not the best term, but I'll leave it because for me, the key thing wasn't the name of the show, but the content of the reviews Siskel and Ebert presented, and no other pair of movie critics on TV ever managed to match the quality of Siskel and Ebert.
Aside: I did, however, greatly enjoy Speed & Tyrone on Sneakin' In The Movies in Robert Townsend's movie Hollywood Shuffle.
The problem with the other ("knockoff") shows (except Sneakin' In The Movies)is that the other reviewers saw Siskel and Ebert discussing movies about which they had very different opinions, and they saw Siskel and Ebert making fun of each other in interviews, and they tried to imitate it. I remember watching a show in the late 80s with two reviewers, and they just attacked each other. I didn't really learn anything about the films they were supposed to be reviewing; I only learned that each thought the other didn't know anything about movies, or at least affected that position in a lame attempt to imitate Siskel and Ebert.
FWIW, I agreed with Siskel more often than with Ebert when the two disagreed and I saw the film and formed my own opinion, but I almost always got something out of Ebert discussing his position with Ebert on TV.
I often read Americans saying they had to turn on subtitles to understand parts of The Office. As an English person I've always wanted to know which parts/characters Americans find hard to understand. Or is it just the slang terms used?
I'm from the USA, but I moved to Brazil 5 years ago. I had no trouble at all understanding any of the accents on The Office (I noticed some minor variations between different characters), and I watched both seasons and the Christmas wrap-up ep. I didn't even find the slang terms difficult, and I'm not up on the newest-latest slang in use in the USA, much less the latest terms from England.
I have also had no trouble understanding the accents in the new season of Doctor Who (friends have taped and sent me the first few eps... God bless my multi-format VHS machine), but I think it's worth noting that Rose's (possibly Billie Piper's, but she may be affecting an accent for the character) accent is more odd to me than anything I recall from The Office. She seems to have difficulty with both of the "th" sounds, replacing them with either "v" or "f".
From an English person's point of view, the accents are fairly standard mid-England/London accents. But then, having driven round rural Georgia, I know we are two countries divided by a common language.
Heh. I find it funny how most folks from the US are totally unable to imitate an English accent well, and how most folks from the UK and Ireland are unable to imitate any US accent well. Gwyneth Paltrow is one (rare) example of a USian who can do a decent English accent. Bob Hoskins is an example of an English person who can do a decent US accent. I remember thinking it was weird (and not a good sign) that an English actor had been cast in the role of the gumshoe detective in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but when I was watching the film, I forgot about it and didn't even notice he wasn't a United Statesian. Hoskins does a pretty good generic US accent.
But the true master of accents in the English language is Tracey Ullman. That woman is a genius. She is English, and can do various English accents, plus a decent Australian accent, and a whole bunch of American accents. She can do a Jewish New York accent and an Italian New York accent better than I could ever do (and I have Jewish family in the New York metro area!). The two are different, and both are pretty darn good. She can do a Southern accent and a Texas accent and nail both. If I try to do a Southern US accent and a Texas accent, I end up doing the same mixed Southeastern-Texas accent that misses important aspects of both. It doesn't sound right even to my own ear, much less to people from those regions. And I lived 31 years in the USA, have family in Texas and had a best friend from the South (plus my sister lives in South Carolina now). I am in awe of Tracey Ullman.
When I went to visit a friend in England in 1986, there was a moment when my friend's family and I were waiting to get a table at a popular (and fancy) restaurant. Another man waiting for a table heard my accent and struck up a conversation with me. It was really embarassing, because my friend had to "translate," even though we were both speaking English. This fellow, in addition to having an accent that made it difficult for me to recognize words I know, used terms I'd never heard before. For example, his joke that I might order a "chip buttie" at the fancy restaurant was totally lost on me. My friend had to explain that a "chip buttie" is basically a french fry sandwich. An explained joke is never as funny, but I did my best to show amusement, because on an intellectual level, it was humorous. Still, the embarassment of having to have the joke "translated," plus the fact of it coming to me as an explained joke and not a "fresh" one kinda killed the humor. "Divided by a common language," indeed.
I thought that, for example electrons, could have a -1/2 and +1/2 spin?
Well, not exactly.
The electron is a "spin 1/2 particle." And a particle that is spin 1/2 has two states. Spin is a vector, and we can project it onto different axes. Let me put that in slightly less nerdy terms. Choose a corner of the room (where two walls and either the floor or the ceiling meet) and call that "the origin." Now consider the power indicator light on your monitor. Imagine a vector, a line (segment) pointing from the origin to the monitor's power light. Since you're seeing it in three-dimensional space, you need three numbers to describe the vector (the line segment with a specific direction) from the origin to your monitor's power indicator light. Yes, there are coördinate systems like spherical coördinates and cylindrical coördinates, but the easiest kind of coördinate system to understand is cartesian. In cartesian coördinates, you choose three axes, mutually perpendicular, and call them X, Y, and Z. In the case of the room where you are now, it's convenient to choose the X and Y axes to run along the walls that meet at the corner you called "the origin" and the Z axis to run up the line between the two. Convention usually forces you to choose X and Y so the "right-hand rule" (no masturbation jokes, please) is followed. Whatever. For this example, it doesn't matter. The point is that to describe the vector from the origin to your monitor's power light, you have to give the X, Y, and Z components. That is, you measure how far the power light is along each direction. The three numbers together define a unique point in the room.
Now imagine the origin is behind your monitor, that is, that your monitor faces away from the origin. That's the case here with "the origin" in my home office, because I looked at a corner that was easy to see without turning around. Now imagine something on the other side of the wall behind your monitor (even if that wall is far; in my case it's quite close to the back of the monitor). Let's say the Y axis is the one that runs in the direction from that wall to the monitor, and I defined the Y coördinate of my monitor's power light to be positive. Then an object on the other side of that wall would have a negative Y.
Why did I talk about this? Because spins, being vectors, get projected on a 3-d axis. The "Z" axis is the direction along which a measurement will be made (usually the direction of a magnetic field). In the case of a particle with spin 1/2, the Z-component of the spin can take two possible values: +1/2 times "hbar" (a constant) and -1/2 times hbar. For the rest of this discussion, let's set hbar to 1 and ignore it. We're free to choose our unit system to do that (in relativity, it's convenient to choose units where the speed of light is 1 and ignore factors of c). Whether the "z-component" of the electron's spin is measured as positive or negative 1/2, it is always a particle with spin 1/2. There is no such thing as a particle with spin -1/2.
In general, if a particle has spin n + 1/2, where n is a nonnegative integer, the particle is a fermion. A measurement of the "z component" of the spin of that particle can take on the values (m+1/2) and -(m+1/2), where m is a nonnegative integer less than or equal to n. So, for example, the "z component" of the spin of a particle with spin 5/2 (n=2) can have the values -5/2, -3/2, -1/2, +1/2, +3/2, and +5/2.
If a particle has spin n, where n is a nonnegative integer, the particle is a boson. A measurement of the "z component" of the spin can be any integer whose absolute value is less than or equal to n. So a spin-2 particle would have the following possible values for measurements of the z-component of its spin: -2, -1, 0, +1, +2.
Short version: yes, I'm sure n is a nonnegative integer. Electrons always have spin 1/2.
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You "forgot" an important example, but that's almost certainly either because it doesn't neatly fit into your preconceived notions, or because your history classes ignore it. The example is the large parts of Spain that were organized in Anarcho-syndicalist collectives during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell went to Spain a Socialist but once there, found he respected the Anarchists (Anarcho-syndicalists) more because of their ability to actually get things done while the Republicans (different meaning there and then than it has now in the USA), Communists, and Socialists bickered over politics.
You cited some examples of what happens in a "without government" situation (and I don't necessarily agree with that assessment). I'll remind you that Mussolini, Pol Pot, Stalin, and somebody Godwin prohibits me from mentioning were all able to do the horrible things they did because they used the power of governments. Would it be fair for me to say we've seen what happens when there is a government, citing these examples, and conclude that governments just don't work, except in theory?
FWIW, I'm not an anarchist, but I just hate seeing the same ol' lame authoritarian apologist arguments against anarchism (whether it be anarcho-capitalism, communist anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, or any other variety) parroted. One who believes anarchy can work is no more naïve than one who believes government can work.
I see all the points reflected in recent politics in the USA.
I'd say Fox News understood this. On the night of the 2000 election, all the news channels received new data from Florida. There was no way Fox or anybody else could possibly have processed those data and come to any kind of a conclusion, but Fox went ahead and declared George W. Bush the victor (the person who actually made the call was a cousin of Bush). The other networks, not wanting to be last, followed suit and declared Bush the victor. The facts at that point could not support declaring either candidate the winner in Florida. But since Fox called the state for Bush and the other networks irresponsibly followed suit, the impression was created in the minds of the public that Bush had won. When the Gore campaign asked for a recount, it was seen as Gore trying to overturn a Bush victory when in fact no winner should have been declared by that point. The eventual analysis of the disputed ballots showed that if the Gore campaign had asked for and gotten a full recount, Gore would have won Florida. However, the Supreme Court stopped recounts, and one of the more delicious bits of irony in recent history is that the Democrats had only requested some weird partial recounts they had a better chance of winning, but they actually would have lost even if the Supreme Court had allowed them to continue. Only a full recount would have given a Gore victory, independent of the criterion used for counting ballots (most restrictive, most "liberal", or even allowing each county to apply its own established criteria). Further, the Gore campaign focused on undervotes, the famous "dimples" and "hanging chads," and ignored overvotes. Recent analysis has shown that there were tens of thousands of overvotes, largely from African-American districts, that would have gone for Gore. In those cases, the voter had both marked or punched to indicate a vote for Gore and written in Gore in the write-in space. Since the voter had "voted for two candidates" (even though the ballots were just marked two ways for the same candidate), those ballots were discarded. IF the Gore campaign had called for re-checking of overvotes, and depending on the criteria for accepting overvote ballots, Gore could have won Florida by tens of thousands of votes. I find something very funny in the fact that the Dems tried to get the partial recounts they thought would be most favorable for themselves, and in fact ignored much richer potential ways of winning, including the truly democratic full recount.
Instead, Bush was seen as being the rightful winner, and Gore as being a sore loser. The recounts were seen as the desperate acts of a losing campaign, when in fact there was no way, short of careful analysis of all the ballots, of knowing who had won. The first "unanimous" declaration of a winner in Florida was for Bush, and voters largely accepted that as fact and ignored further arguments about the validity of the declared result.
Fox later apologized for making that call so prematurely, but the damage was done, and there was no way to make it right.
As a result, many people look to their "neighbors" when unsure. Since there were a lot of people saying Bush was the rightful winner and Gore was just a sore loser, and since the first "offficial" information the people had received was a Bush victory, a majority didn't want to hear anything about questioning the result, even though nobody had enough information at that time to determine who had "really" won.
I live in São Paulo. In the summer, when it isn't raining (and sometimes even when it is raining) it gets frickin' hot. When I didn't have a car (and for the short time when I had a car without air conditioning) and had to visit customers wearing at least "business casual-plus" clothes and sometimes a suit and tie during the summer, my mind naturally turned to ways to keep myself cool so I wouldn't arrive all sweaty and wrinkled at the customer sites.
I had the idea of a personal cooling unit, with a box (maybe carried in a briefcase) that would cool some liquid (water maybe) and pump it through tubes that I would be wearing to cool strategic regions of my body (major arteries and possibly veins near the skin seemed like good places to have the tubes passing). I had this amazing mental image of me walking down the Avenida Paulista (a famous major avenue in the city) in the blazing sun on the hottest day of the year, wearing a black wool suit and looking cool and comfortable while people around me in shorts, sleeveless shirts and sandals were panting and bathed in sweat.
The technical issues seemed tough to master, especially the question of how I would cool the water (or other liquid). Then it occurred to me that I could just have a reservoir filled with as much ice as it could hold, and then cold water filling the remaining space. A simple battery-operated pump would pump the water through aquarium tubing to the aforementioned strategic points and then back to the reservoir for heat exchange with the ice and cooler water. This version would be able to provide cooling for a much shorter time than the one with a portable refrigeration unit, but one could always refill the reservoir with ice and water, and it would be a lot easier to build and maintain. I would be able to build it from readily available (and inexpensive) components. Not to mention that I wouldn't have the problem of powering a portable refrigeration unit. This one seemed doable, but I ended up buying a car with air conditioning before I got around to making my personal cooling unit, and my interest in actually completing the project waned.
The most famous example of this effect is in the pricing of store brand products at supermarket chains. Often the products are made by the same manufacturer as the brand-name products, and even when they are not, they are very often of equivalent quality. If the price of the store brand is above the price of the brand-name product, equal in price, or below but too close to the price of the brand-name product, it won't sell well. People will just buy the branded product they know, since the price difference is negligible (or negative!).
However, the store brand product price can't be too far below that of the famous brand product, or it will be perceived as being inferior and people will buy the product whose quality they know and trust. There is a "sweet spot" in the pricing of store brand products where sales of the store brand (and therefore the store's margin for that subcategory, because the store's margin on the store brand is usually larger than its margin on the name brand product) are maximized, because the price difference between the known name brand product and the equivalent store brand product is large enough to attract the customer, but not so large that it makes the customer suspect the product is not equivalent at all.
The problem of how to price store brand products is one of many solved by "retail revenue management" and price optimization software packages offered by companies like KhiMetrics.
Another great example is the story of the father of one of my roommates from grad school. My roommate's father was a tailor. He sold shirts from manufacturers with famous names in his shop, but he also made shirts. He started out by doing "cost-plus" pricing. He took his material and labor costs, added on a margin, and that was the price he put on his shirts. The price came out well under half the price of the famous brand name shirts, despite the fact that they were of at least equal, and probably greater, quality. They hardly sold at all. Then he tried an experiment (and I don't know where he got the idea). He set the prices of his shirts so they would be 15-25% lower than the prices of the shirts from the well-known manufacturers. The shirts sold so well he couldn't keep up with the demand. He couldn't keep them on the shelves. People were excited about getting good shirts for 20% less than the price they were used to paying, because that was enough of a discount to be interesting, but not so much that it would make them suspect the shirts were crappy.
Now I'm not so sure this will work with music files, because there's a key difference: Store brand spaghetti sauce made by the same manufacturer as the national brand really is an adequate replacement for the national brand. My ex-roommate's father's shirts really were an adequate replacement for the shirts with the well-known brand names.
Songs are much more individual than shirts or spaghetti sauce in a jar or a box of spaghetti, so it seems to me that one song may not be an adequate replacement for another. I would not expect exactly the same rules to apply. I guess the term that applies here is that songs are not quite commodity items. Heck, even among artists I like enough to have their music in my home, if I feel like listening to a specific artist, I don't think others even from the same genre would necessarily be acceptable replacements.
OK, in trying to track down a reference in English, I began to understand why you saw these as being one issue. All the reports I could find in English language sites mixed the two things together.
I found some decent things in Portuguese, and I can give you the references even do a quick translation of them, but I can't do the translations at this moment. Is there somewhere else we can go to talk about this? I'm wary of posting an e-mail address on the internet where spambots can find it.
You can find the actual generic drug law (implemented in 1999) at this ANVISA web page. ANVISA is the Agência Nacional de Vigilância Sanitária, roughly the equivalent of the US FDA.
There's also a FAQ for consumers on the page you'll reach by clicking here and then clicking on "OK" on the page that opens. Question 642 is very interesting, talking about how successful generic medications have been in the USA, Europe, and Japan.
Once again, you are confusing two completely separate issues, both of which involved (now former) Health Minister José Serra.
The first is generic drugs. The next time you have to buy a prescription medication, ask the pharmacist if a generic version is available. Much of the time, it is. This is true in many countries, including the USA, and it does not involve any violations of patents. Until just a few years ago, that option was not available to Brazilian consumers. Serra was instrumental in bringing that kind of competition to Brazil, and should be highly commended for it (FWIW, I didn't like Serra as a candidate for president in 2002, and I don't like him as mayor of São Paulo or as a candidate for president in 2006, but I think he was fantastic as health minister).
The generic drugs sold in most pharmacies in Brazil now, at a great cost savings to all consumers, are not the AIDS drugs on which Serra threatened to break the patents. That is a completely separate issue.
And I will again say that the pharmaceutical companies' attempts to stop the introduction of generic drugs in Brazil was shameful, shameful, shameful. And worse, defending those companies in the name of capitalism is woefully misguided, because in fact Serra's actions, together with the work of the Brazilian congress, brought more competition into the drug market in Brazil, helping consumers in the way capitalism is supposed to help them. The drug companies wanted to protect unnatural monopolies not based on exclusive rights to the formulations of the medications in question (again, we're not talking about the AIDS drugs here; that is a separate issue) but on exclusive access to the market. In the case of the generic drug law, Serra was taking the Milton Friedman position and the multinational pharmaceutical companies were taking the Vladimir Lenin position.
Serra's participation was critical for the introduction of generic drugs in Brazil. That was one tremendous accomplishment, and Serra was very brave to do it. Serra was also the first to adopt the position that the way to respond to the pharmaceutical companies' attempts at price gouging (way beyond the long-established price points) on AIDS drugs was to use the "national emergency" powers of the Health Ministry and break the patents. It was another bold move, and I admire Serra for it, and for exercising some restraint with it. He could have just dropped all negotiations and utterly screwed the multis, but he instead used the law as a way to negotiate down the outrageous price increases the pharmas were suddenly trying to impose on mature products with well-established prices. Add in that Serra participated very actively in getting a modern organ donation law passed in Brazil, and it's pretty easy to say that Serra was the best health minister the country has had. I still don't like him as a presidential candidate, but he was one heck of a health minister.
Once again, for those who came in late, the generic drug law in Brazil and the use of the patent-breaking threat to keep the multinational pharmaceutical companies from suddenly jacking up the prices on mature products with well-established prices were both things done by José Serra, and both involved a lot of bravery because they pissed off those multinationals. But they were two separate actions. And whether or not you agree with Serra on the breaking of the patents on the AIDS drugs, the pharmaceutical companies' opposition to the SEPARATE ISSUE of the generic drug law was shameful.
In your kneejerk rush to shill for the multinational pharmaceutical companies and make the "case" for their price gouging, you seem to have confused two separate issues.
One is generic drugs, which don't violate patents. Generic drugs are available in the USA and many other places. Serra wanted to make them available to Brazilian consumers. The multinational pharmaceutical companies opposed the project to bring generic drugs to Brazil, and that is indeed shameful. They were not protecting patents or other "intellectual property;" they were only protecting the price-gouging they were doing with no viable alternatives available in the market. What Serra did was to bring Brazil's medication market into the modern world, opening up competition. That's how capitalism is supposed to work for consumers. The multinational pharmaceutical companies didn't want to allow legal competition, so they could charge whatever they damn well pleased for drugs in Brazil. What Serra did in helping push through the generic drug legislative project was nothing short of heroic, and I think Milton Friedman would agree that bringing in more competition is a good thing.
The other issue is the patent breaking for the AIDS medications. The point on that issue is that the medications had already been priced. But then somebody in the pharmaceutical companies saw the large demand in Brazil (because essentially every AIDS patient was being represented in the purchases) and saw in that an opportunity to gouge. So they jacked up their prices. The normal pharmaceutical company argument, that things like R&D costs are built into the prices of the drugs, don't apply in this case, because they had already set a price and sold the drugs for years at that price, then suddenly decided to jack up the prices in Brazil. The Brazilian government was even willing to negotiate reasonable price adjustments, but the outrageous price increases suddenly applied to these treatments would have made Brazil's AIDS policy completely inviable.
The patent-breaking threat is not a case of Brazil deciding it wanted the drugs for free or even cheaper. Serra tried very hard to get the drug companies to negotiate. In fact, he got one to the table and an accord was eventually reached. But the other decided price gouging on AIDS drugs was an important part of its business plan in Brazil, and so refused to negotiate the size of its unnecessary price increases. Serra (and since Serra left office, his successor in the current government) therefore went ahead with the patent breaking action.
As for the argument that if drugs are more profitable, that gives the pharmas more incentive to create new drugs, there may be some truth to it. Serra tried to allow these companies to continue to sell their drugs at the previously set prices, allowing even for reasonable adjustments. But the companies thought they saw an opportunity to drastically increase the prices on medications already in wide use, and their profits with it. As a result, they may end up losing all their profits from Brazil. Brazil really has no choice. The government can either continue its policy, probably the best one in the world at containing the spread of AIDS and limiting the number of AIDS-related deaths, but in so doing not allow the pharmaceutical companies to just make up new prices completely out of line with the established and market-accepted prices, or the government can allow the drug companies to jack up their prices at will, which would mak
Just elaborating a bit for those too lazy to RTFAs linked from the parent post...
José Serra, the Health Minister in the previous administration in Brazil (he unsuccessfully ran for president in 2002, losing in the runoff election to the current president, Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, and is now mayor of the city of São Paulo), was responsible for Brazil's AIDS policy, which has been very successful and is recognized as a model for government AIDS policies worldwide. One major part of the policy included making the best AIDS drugs available to patients free. The problem is that the drug companies were jacking up the prices, and Brazil's AIDS budget was not going to be large enough to be able to continue this critical part of the policy that had been so successful in controlling the spread of AIDS and the number of AIDS-related deaths.
Serra tried to negotiate with the multinational pharmaceutical companies selling the AIDS drugs in Brazil, but they didn't want to negotiate. Serra showed them that he had the power, in the event of a national emergency, to make a declaration permitting Brazilian companies to break patents. He told them it would not be difficult to make the case of AIDS being a national emergency. One of the two companies decided to negotiate and rolled back some of its price increases. The other (Roche) balked, so Serra went ahead with the process of issuing the permission to break the patent.
The pharmaceutical companies got the US government to complain to the WTO, but the complaint was eventually dropped. The pharmaceutical companies negotiated with the Brazilian government (the negotiations continued through the change of administrations and are still ongoing, nearly three years after the change) and the Brazilian government continues to buy the drugs.
FWIW, Serra is very highly respected by health professionals in Brazil. In addition to standing up to the multinational pharmaceutical companies on the AIDS drugs, he also stood up to them on generic drugs. He helped push through a new policy permitting generic drugs in Brazil, greatly reducing the cost of medications for the Brazilian people. The pharmaceutical companies, for obvious (but shameful) reasons, opposed the introduction of generics in Brazil. Brave guy. Lula, the current president, is also man of exceptional bravery, having been one of the founders of Brazil's labor movement when the government of Brazil was a right-wing military dictatorship, but that's another story. In addition to the accomplishments mentioned above Serra was responsible for pushing through a modern organ donation law in Brazil.
Why vote for a lesser evil?
Dos it have to be a print copy?
If not, try this: The Complete Works of H.P. Lovecraft, completely free (and legal!) in HTML. His works are available in a few other places online too, like here (see the copyright information at the bottom of the page-- most or all of Lovecraft's work is in the public domain), here (complete works, mostly in PDFs-- probably your best source), here (PDFs of several works), and here (a 100-page collection in a few different formats, including PDF and HTML).
Since most of Lovecraft's work is in the public domain, you can find other sources around the internet.
If you do want books, please consider buying from Arkham House, which has done a lot to promote Lovecraft's work, encourage and publish studies of it, and keep the genre alive by publishing the works of other authors. You'll find Lovecraft, S.T. Joshi (the leading Lovecraft scholar), and other authors like August Derleth on the authors page. You may notice on the main page that despite Lovecraft's works being available in the public domain, books of his works are three of the top five sellers at Arkham House.
Whether you read Lovecraft in electronic format or in bound books, enjoy!
The safety concerns are real. I probably wouldn't use them biking or around outside in a city, because you really can't hear what's going on around you. But on commercial airline flights, they are amazing. It can actually be startling to remove the earphones mid-flight and hear how loud the engines are. What's really weird is that you can indeed listen to your music at a volume that would be completely drowned out by the ambient noise without the isolating earphones.
As mentioned in the parent and grandparent posts, Because of the noise isolation, you don't have to turn up the volume a lot. I've heard a few people complaining about the bass response, but I attribute this to two effects. First, many people are used to listening to music in a way that would be appropriate for those ridiculous cars with the monster sound systems whose bass you can hear from a distance of several km. But even more important, I think the people who complain about the ER6i bass haven't properly inserted the 'phones into their ears. I believe this is a common problem. I've seen it mentioned in a few reviews of the ER6is, and Etymotic Research is even including a slip of yellow paper in the ER6i packaging now with the following message: So if you're researching ER6i earphones (and possibly other noise isolating earphones) online, and you read reviews saying they have "no bass" or something similar, keep this in mind.
Etymotic even makes optional smaller and larger eartips to allow for the correct placement and seal in ears that the standard eartips don't fit just right.
I do recognize that bass may be in the ear of the beholder, so YMMV. It's best if you can find somebody you trust and ask that person's opinion. I was fortunate to have the ER6i earphones recommended to me by somebody whose opinion I've come to trust, and I've been more than satisfied with them.
Condoms are not an example of "default permit" or "enumerating badness." On the contrary, they are "default deny" taken to the extreme. As long as they don't tear, nothing gets through them, in or out. They don't allow everything through except a list of things you've said they should stop. So if you have sex with a partner who has been infected with a previously unknown sexually transmitted disease (provided it's bacterial or viral), a condom will be just as effective against that disease as it is against the known ones. Antivirus programs based on "enumerating badness" don't work like that.
Intelligence assets take a long time to develop. When they are exposed, they any anybody connected to them become useless. When a company like Brewster Jennings is exposed after years of work not only on gathering intelligence, but also in putting itself in position to gather intelligence, it is not just a matter of plopping down another company in its place. Not only would another CIA front have to spend years and years to duplicate the "getting closer" work done by Brewster Jennings, but it would be harder, because many of the techniques used by Brewster Jennings are now known. There almost certainly are other CIA fronts "out there," but that does not excuse the treason committed by whoever was responsible for exposing Valerie Plame and with her, Brewster Jennings and all the operatives associated with it.
I find at least one factual error and two cutesy word games (the kind the Republicans used to complain that Clinton used) in the WSJ piece cited in the parent post.
First, Joseph Wilson did not say he was recommended for the trip and investigation of the yellowcake claims by Cheney. What Wilson did say (and it has been verified) is that because of Cheney's office expressing interest in the yellowcake story to the CIA, the CIA decided to send somebody to investigate it. Valerie Plame recommended Wilson because of his experience in the region, and Wilson has never denied this or tried to suggest otherwise. He didn't bring it up, because his wife was an undercover CIA operative, not a person with a desk job at Langley.
The first little word game, technically a true statement, but designed to mislead, is that it appears Rove "didn't even know Ms. Plame's name." Actually, that goes beyond what Rove and Luskin (his attorney) have said. They have said that Rove didn't tell the reporters her name. But that's where the word games and technicalities come in. They have admitted he mentioned "Joseph Wilson's wife." It isn't hard for a reporter to discover more about her, given that much information. "I didn't tell the reporters her name" is a statement designed to mislead the public into thinking he didn't divulge anything about her identity, when in fact he did.
The other statement like this is the bit about Lord Butler's conclusion on the "sixteen words." He found that the statement in the State of the Union address was "well-founded." That just means that yes, British intelligence had received information (now known to have been forged) indicating that Saddam may have been seeking uranium in Niger. But what it ignores is that the information received by British Intelligence at that time was already known by the CIA to be false, and that nobody in the US or English intelligence communities now believes to be true.
I also find it funny that the folks at the Wall Street Journal editorial page give so much credence to the report by Lord Butler but sweep the Downing Street memos, also from English government sources, under the rug. Funny that, huh?
What's the problem with this? Well, there's been a lot of talk of oil production having reached its peak and begun its decline. Financial Times recently reported that the Saudis had admitted that OPEC oil production won't be able to meet world demand within 20 years.
I don't know whether petroleum production has yet reached its peak and started to decline, and I don't know when OPEC will not be able to meet world demand. Wouldn't it be nice if at this time of uncertainty, the USA had some kind of asset capable of investigating these things from up close?
Too bad a political vendetta destroyed major intelligence assets that could have helped with just that.
OK, once I figured out that even though there are no maps, the satellite pics of São Paulo are there, I went and found the place where I used to work, the building where I live, and a friend's home.
;)
Hmmmm... there's a new condo with 7 buildings across the street from me. They started construction in 2002 and completed it some time last year, but in the picture, the lot appears to be in the pre-construction phases. So it looks like the sat pix of my neighborhood are from 2001 or 2002.
A friend played with the new Google satellite pics and found the Morumbi stadium, the largest in São Paulo. When it opened in 1970, it had a capacity of about 120,000 people, but its current capacity, after a few renovations, is about 80,000 people. Technically, its name is "Estádio Cicero Pompeu de Toledo," but it has various nicknames, including "La Bambinera", "A Gaiola das Loucas", and simply "Morumbi", which is the name of the neighborhood where it's located.
Here's a direct "linky" to a picture of it. For privacy reasons, I won't link to the pix of my home or my friend's home.
Note that the digits "8" and "9" don't exist in "Simpsons numbers" (octal). Similarly, if you think about the hexadecimal digits A, B, C, D, E, and F, they don't exist in our decimal system. But creatures with 16 fingers might well count that way. They might not use the symbols A-F to express them, but they would have fifteen distinct digits, where we only have ten (0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9).
In any base, that is, independent of the number of fingers in a complete set, a "1" in a given column represents a "complete set of fingers" of the next column to the right. As I said, since most humans have ten fingers, we use decimal (base ten) numbers. The people on The Simpsons would use the base in which the next number after 7 would be "10."
"Simpsons counting" (counting in base 8 or "octal") would go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 20, 21,
So the number "47" in the world of The Simpsons would still represent 4 complete sets of fingers plus 7 more fingers, but that would be a different number than "47" in decimal. Expressing that number in our decimal number system, it would be 4x8 + 7 = 39.
I would have been really impressed if they'd taken that into account and expressed the 40th digit of pi in base-8 on the episode of The Simpsons from 1993 in which the 40th digit of pi is mentioned. Oh, and of course, it would have to be the 32nd digit of pi (using decimal counting of digits) expressed in base-8, because... well... "40" should mean something different to the Simpsons than it means to us.
I was a teaching assistant one academic quarter each year when I was in grad school. I was the TA for "Astro 1" twice.
Even though "Astro 1" was for people with limited math and science backgrounds, there was a lot of really good content in it, at least as taught by the prof who taught it the two times I was the TA for it.
One thing that had to be covered in the basics was the concept of orders of magnitude. When we talked about orders of magnitude, I had to explain to the students what the columns mean in a decimal number. OK, they had a basic understanding, and they "should" have understood it more deeply by the time they reached college, and yes, it would have been nice if they'd seen and paid attention to "My Hero Zero" on Schoolhouse Rock, but I discovered that a sizeable percentage didn't understand these things.
After a brief talk about powers of 10, I decided to take the risk of introducing a more complex concept in order to make sure they understood the basic concept. I brought in base 8 by telling them that since the people on The Simpsons have 8 fingers, they would count differently. I showed them why and how, without spending too much time (I didn't want them to think base 8 was what they were supposed to learn). When we were done, they really did seem to understand powers of ten and orders of magnitude much better. They participated more actively and their answers (and even questions) showed they understood powers of ten and orders of magnitude better, which I believe enhanced their appreciation of some of the really cool stuff in the content of the course.
In the anonymous TA evaluations, there were several positive comments about how I was able to find unusual and interesting examples to help the students understand things.
Of course, as I type this, the announcement has been made, and it looks like Apple really will be using Pentium chips. And now they're trying to reassure developers about the transition. The Wolfram CEO said they ported Mathematica in about 2 hours with only about 20 lines of code changed. Dammit... I was reading more and the page was slashdotted while trying to update itself (as it does every 2 minutes).
I've been told that Apple managed to put some very tough clauses into its contract with IBM over the chips. If IBM were unable to meet certain criteria, Apple would be able to take some of the intellectual property, basically allowing Apple to take the design and have somebody else make the processors.
I've noticed that the reports on C|Net don't say Apple will use Pentium chips. They say Apple will use Intel chips.
If you RTFD (D="Debunking") from the blurb, it's mentioned there that Apple pays a lot less for the chips it gets from IBM than it would pay for comparable Pentium chips.
It's also interesting (mentioned in the "debunking") that Apple has NOT been warning its developers about a pending change of endian-ness, as you might expect them to if a change to little-endian Pentium chips from big-endian PowerPC chips.
But... if it's true that Apple can take the chip design to Intel, then Intel could conceivably make PowerPC chips for Apple. That's about the only way I can see this rumor being true. It would still be tough, because I don't think it would be easy for Intel to get production of a new chip going at the required volume within a year, but I am not a silicon expert.
The two disagreed a lot, and sometimes the best information about a movie came out in those disagreements.
The cheap knockoff "two reviewers" TV shows that popped up everywhere in the late 1980s and early 1990s never came close to Siskel and Ebert's shows (Sneak Previews, At The Movies, Siskel & Ebert At The Movies, Siskel & Ebert & The Movies... many names, but the same basic format). I should note that at least once, a "two critics" movie review show continued with the same name when Siskel and Ebert left, and I'm including the post-Siskel&Ebert era on those shows as "knockoffs" too. So maybe that's not the best term, but I'll leave it because for me, the key thing wasn't the name of the show, but the content of the reviews Siskel and Ebert presented, and no other pair of movie critics on TV ever managed to match the quality of Siskel and Ebert.
Aside: I did, however, greatly enjoy Speed & Tyrone on Sneakin' In The Movies in Robert Townsend's movie Hollywood Shuffle.
The problem with the other ("knockoff") shows (except Sneakin' In The Movies)is that the other reviewers saw Siskel and Ebert discussing movies about which they had very different opinions, and they saw Siskel and Ebert making fun of each other in interviews, and they tried to imitate it. I remember watching a show in the late 80s with two reviewers, and they just attacked each other. I didn't really learn anything about the films they were supposed to be reviewing; I only learned that each thought the other didn't know anything about movies, or at least affected that position in a lame attempt to imitate Siskel and Ebert.
FWIW, I agreed with Siskel more often than with Ebert when the two disagreed and I saw the film and formed my own opinion, but I almost always got something out of Ebert discussing his position with Ebert on TV.
I have also had no trouble understanding the accents in the new season of Doctor Who (friends have taped and sent me the first few eps... God bless my multi-format VHS machine), but I think it's worth noting that Rose's (possibly Billie Piper's, but she may be affecting an accent for the character) accent is more odd to me than anything I recall from The Office. She seems to have difficulty with both of the "th" sounds, replacing them with either "v" or "f". Heh. I find it funny how most folks from the US are totally unable to imitate an English accent well, and how most folks from the UK and Ireland are unable to imitate any US accent well. Gwyneth Paltrow is one (rare) example of a USian who can do a decent English accent. Bob Hoskins is an example of an English person who can do a decent US accent. I remember thinking it was weird (and not a good sign) that an English actor had been cast in the role of the gumshoe detective in Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, but when I was watching the film, I forgot about it and didn't even notice he wasn't a United Statesian. Hoskins does a pretty good generic US accent.
But the true master of accents in the English language is Tracey Ullman. That woman is a genius. She is English, and can do various English accents, plus a decent Australian accent, and a whole bunch of American accents. She can do a Jewish New York accent and an Italian New York accent better than I could ever do (and I have Jewish family in the New York metro area!). The two are different, and both are pretty darn good. She can do a Southern accent and a Texas accent and nail both. If I try to do a Southern US accent and a Texas accent, I end up doing the same mixed Southeastern-Texas accent that misses important aspects of both. It doesn't sound right even to my own ear, much less to people from those regions. And I lived 31 years in the USA, have family in Texas and had a best friend from the South (plus my sister lives in South Carolina now). I am in awe of Tracey Ullman.
When I went to visit a friend in England in 1986, there was a moment when my friend's family and I were waiting to get a table at a popular (and fancy) restaurant. Another man waiting for a table heard my accent and struck up a conversation with me. It was really embarassing, because my friend had to "translate," even though we were both speaking English. This fellow, in addition to having an accent that made it difficult for me to recognize words I know, used terms I'd never heard before. For example, his joke that I might order a "chip buttie" at the fancy restaurant was totally lost on me. My friend had to explain that a "chip buttie" is basically a french fry sandwich. An explained joke is never as funny, but I did my best to show amusement, because on an intellectual level, it was humorous. Still, the embarassment of having to have the joke "translated," plus the fact of it coming to me as an explained joke and not a "fresh" one kinda killed the humor. "Divided by a common language," indeed.
The electron is a "spin 1/2 particle." And a particle that is spin 1/2 has two states. Spin is a vector, and we can project it onto different axes. Let me put that in slightly less nerdy terms. Choose a corner of the room (where two walls and either the floor or the ceiling meet) and call that "the origin." Now consider the power indicator light on your monitor. Imagine a vector, a line (segment) pointing from the origin to the monitor's power light. Since you're seeing it in three-dimensional space, you need three numbers to describe the vector (the line segment with a specific direction) from the origin to your monitor's power indicator light. Yes, there are coördinate systems like spherical coördinates and cylindrical coördinates, but the easiest kind of coördinate system to understand is cartesian. In cartesian coördinates, you choose three axes, mutually perpendicular, and call them X, Y, and Z. In the case of the room where you are now, it's convenient to choose the X and Y axes to run along the walls that meet at the corner you called "the origin" and the Z axis to run up the line between the two. Convention usually forces you to choose X and Y so the "right-hand rule" (no masturbation jokes, please) is followed. Whatever. For this example, it doesn't matter. The point is that to describe the vector from the origin to your monitor's power light, you have to give the X, Y, and Z components. That is, you measure how far the power light is along each direction. The three numbers together define a unique point in the room.
Now imagine the origin is behind your monitor, that is, that your monitor faces away from the origin. That's the case here with "the origin" in my home office, because I looked at a corner that was easy to see without turning around. Now imagine something on the other side of the wall behind your monitor (even if that wall is far; in my case it's quite close to the back of the monitor). Let's say the Y axis is the one that runs in the direction from that wall to the monitor, and I defined the Y coördinate of my monitor's power light to be positive. Then an object on the other side of that wall would have a negative Y.
Why did I talk about this? Because spins, being vectors, get projected on a 3-d axis. The "Z" axis is the direction along which a measurement will be made (usually the direction of a magnetic field). In the case of a particle with spin 1/2, the Z-component of the spin can take two possible values: +1/2 times "hbar" (a constant) and -1/2 times hbar. For the rest of this discussion, let's set hbar to 1 and ignore it. We're free to choose our unit system to do that (in relativity, it's convenient to choose units where the speed of light is 1 and ignore factors of c). Whether the "z-component" of the electron's spin is measured as positive or negative 1/2, it is always a particle with spin 1/2. There is no such thing as a particle with spin -1/2.
In general, if a particle has spin n + 1/2, where n is a nonnegative integer, the particle is a fermion. A measurement of the "z component" of the spin of that particle can take on the values (m+1/2) and -(m+1/2), where m is a nonnegative integer less than or equal to n. So, for example, the "z component" of the spin of a particle with spin 5/2 (n=2) can have the values -5/2, -3/2, -1/2, +1/2, +3/2, and +5/2.
If a particle has spin n, where n is a nonnegative integer, the particle is a boson. A measurement of the "z component" of the spin can be any integer whose absolute value is less than or equal to n. So a spin-2 particle would have the following possible values for measurements of the z-component of its spin: -2, -1, 0, +1, +2.
Short version: yes, I'm sure n is a nonnegative integer. Electrons always have spin 1/2.