Often counterfeit goods are made by running the real production lines for an extra shift or whatever. If you give some factory the plans for an iPhone and pay them to make a million of them for you, how do you know that they aren't running off a million more?
Well, the melamine wasn't actually a substitute for the milk. Water was the substitute for milk, but melamine was used to get the resulting substance to past the quality tests (watered down milk would test low for protein). The problem with most compendial quality tests is that they are designed to control normal manufacturing variances, not detect outright tampering. If your process could contaminate a product with arsenic then you test for it. If your process doesn't involve cyanide at any point, then chances are the quality testing isn't set up to detect it.
Wow - I'm surprised they didn't just give the guys running that operation jobs. After all, they were coordinating everything from supply chain to R&D and marketing. They're probably more effective than the real NEC executives. If they're willing to work for less than the current CEO the board would be crazy not to hire them...:)
Yup - I wish there were some decent mobile RPGs out there. All I care is that I can walk away instantly without losing my place. I don't care if it takes 15 years to complete.
Ok, so on either platform you can find good stuff in the top 100, and lots of garbage after that. What benefit does Apple bring?
This sounds like complaining that you ran a Google search and hit the next button to get to page 185, and you found a lot of irrelevant stuff.
I don't look at the garbage in the Android market, just like you don't look at the garbage in the App Store. The difference is that if I want I can install an alternative Email client or browser....
If the people paying for the research receive benefits that outweigh the costs, there isn't even any loss to bother accounting for, just crying about fairness.
The point is that pretty soon the people doing the paying figure, "gee, why spend all this money when if we don't discover the cure for AIDS somebody else will?" Having a commons isn't a tragedy, but it inevitably leads to tragedy when everybody has incentive to neglect it.
Imagine you have a communal coffee pot at work. You pool your money and buy coffee in bulk, and everybody gets to drink coffee for less than it would cost them all to make or buy their own. Pretty soon people start figuring out that you can still drink the coffee without paying for it. Pretty soon there is no coffee. Paying for the coffee had benefits that outweighed the costs from the start, and yet people will still try to get out of it. And yes, I realize that when the commune is small enough it can work.
The problem with most research is the tragedy of the commons. Once you discover something, everybody benefits (unless it is something like a military secret that you keep close control of for a few decades). What nation discovered the last antibiotic you took? Do you even care? Patents can give a company incentive to discover as long as most nations respect them, and they can also inhibit progress when they get out of control. Patents usually don't help with blue-sky research since it is too far from market. They also don't work if many nations choose to ignore them (again, the tragedy of the commons).
I think that we need to look at research on more of a global scale. Instead of every nation funding its own R&D and hoarding their own data while trying to exploit data discovered elsewhere without contributing, we should manage research as a common resource. Essentially treat it like Airbus or whatever - everybody puts something in, and everybody gets something out.
This won't work for areas with military applications since there are competing interests. However, it seems like this is not an area that is ever hurting for cash.
Hence the reason I mentioned an e-book reader, and not an android phone...
An e-book reader (that uses an e-ink display - not the fancy "color" ones) is going to go weeks without a charge.
In any case, buy all the paper you want, but don't be surprised when brick and mortar stores can't afford to stock it. I love buying enthusiast motherboards and cello strings every few years, but I know I'll never find a brick and mortar store within 50 miles that will stock a good supply of either. If blockbuster can't stay in business, then bookstores are doomed...
Stop and think - what circumstances would result in a complete loss of electrical power for an extended period of time? About the only thing I can think of would be a complete collapse of civilization - ie another round of dark ages. How common do you think books were during the dark ages?
I'm not saying that it is impossible to create a book without electricity. I'm saying that if a society didn't have the ability to create electricity, I doubt that preserving books is going to be high on their list of priorities. A society capable of printing books is probably capable of generating electricity - it just happens in the past that they lacked the knowledge to do so, but that is clearly no longer the case.
Hmm, the Google Translate of that website has the first feature described as:
Baidu powerful platform integrating the use of force, as you integrate thousands of popular applications, give you a key touch of the Chaokuaigan experience.
The third is described as:
Safe Browsing mode combines sandbox technology and the advantages of protected mode IE will completely isolate your horse with the virus, but also your "Internet sterile environment."
Well, I guess integrated use of force and a sterile Internet environment are definitely well in keeping with modern China.
(And yes, I realize these are almost certainly butchered translations...
Yup, my workplace is IE6. Didn't really cause problems until maybe a year ago when they started rolling out very Javascript-heavy websites all over the place. So, I use Chrome as much as I can (doesn't cause conflicts and navigates everything quickly), and then when I get to a URL that won't work without ActiveX I copy/paste it into IE6 and go take a bathroom break while the page loads. In IE6 the workflow is more like click link, go grab a cup of water, click link, go type up a document, click link, and so on...
Yeah, but it is a botnet on the wrong side of the Great Firewall - unless your goal is to take down some server in China. Plus, chances are the Chinese government already has half of those PCs in its own Botnets, and they might not take kindly to anybody borrowing their CPU resources. It isn't like you can send spam, since 80% of all the mail servers already block traffic from China.
They could have accomplished the same thing with a web interface and distributing their content in any number of standard formats working on any media player. The only thing that made the iPlayer successful is that a big media company decided to actually start streaming media.
This would be like calling MeeGo the most successful tablet PC because the NY Times decided to send one for free to all its subscribers so that they could move to online distribution. This isn't something winning out in the market - it is simply the case of some executives in an entrenched industry picking something.
With ebooks, you are at the whim of the ebook publisher, DRM, the ebook reader manufacturer and of course electricity.
Dude, if you get to the point where availability of electricity is preventing you from reading, you're going to be using your paper books for firewood or toilet paper. Either that, or somebody else will be stealing them from you for those purposes.
In fact, I'd really like to see more effort going into porting plan 9 features to Linux. That's what got us/proc, for starters.
The trick is to just do it in a way that maintains the old APIs until everybody migrates. The problem with Plan 9 is that nothing runs on it, since it is just so different. Create Plan 9 APIs on Linux, and eventually that is how all the software will be written, for most of the reasons that you stated.
It's not a missing MIME type. The Chromebook file browser can't browse files. The only file types it understands, that I can see, are JPEG, PNG, MP3, MP4, and OGG. AVI is not supported.
Actually, it supports quite a few file formats (not sure exactly which). The problem is that it only supports a few file EXTENSIONS. As long as you rename your media files to have an extension that for some bizarre reason Google likes, it works fine most of the time.
So yes, it is lame, but not for the reason you think.
Clearly Chrome has a way to go. However, I do find mine fairly useful. Not sure I'd pay $500 for it unless I had a small business that was largely based on Google Apps.
'Local' nations? Try 'all naval nations'. Piracy is at an international choke point, very busy with traffic. Every large vessel that does international trading will pass near there at some point or another- this elevates it into an international issue, certainly not local.
Yes and no. Patrolling the waters in general shouldn't really be a matter of US concern. Whether specific ships of interest to the US get through might be. However, simply taxing those ships and putting them in convoys is a simple solution.
[..] but they'll have to pay for it.
I do not think that people keen enough to make a fortune out of trade (I am talking about the legitimate ones here) are not aware of this option; a plausible explanation is that it is cheaper to just pay the ransom every now and then- depending on cargo etc. And who knows what arrangements they have with their insurance companies.
Certainly no objections if they want to do it this way, but they should receive no support at all from US warships if they don't pay for the service in some way. I suspect that paying ransoms will become prohibitively expensive once pirates figure out that as long as they keep away from organized convoys that nobody will bother them.
On the other hand, keeping the military sharp is a reward in itsself- with the added bonus of making them appear as heroes to the public.
I suspect the USN can get plenty of practice limiting its activities to supporting ships that pay for their services (one way or another). However, if it has a good return-on-investment I have no objection to getting more involved. I suspect that this is often not the case.
There are lots of other options beyond tarriffs/etc. You could charge a registration tax on US ships, and then not assist anybody not flying a US flag, or the flag of a nation that provides effective reciprocal services/etc.
My problem with what is going on off the coast of Somolia is that merchants operate in a way that shifts a lot of cost to the USN, while not sharing in those costs. This is an economic externality and like all externalities it creates large expenses for those who bear the cost.
Yeah, loss of hostages has never really been something to deter Russian action. They certainly try to minimize loss of life, but not at the cost of not resolving the situation quickly. The main concern is punishing the guilty and deterring future crime. When people realize the Russians aren't deterred by hostage-taking, they stop taking hostages.
While nobody really likes having the Russians in town as a result, that applies to the pirates even more than the civilians.
Of the stuff you listed, only the ammo has any real resale value. The fast boats are probably zodiacs/etc, but if they have anything more sturdy there might be a market. The better manpower is worthless to a privateer unless you legalize slavery. (Impressment on the high seas again?)
The bounty is the obvious market solution, but I'm leary of that one. "Fast ship at 175 degrees, aye, must be a pirate. Great, fire a missile at it, mark it as a kill, and send a bill to the Navy." Suffice it to say I won't be yachting in that area.
I think that patrolling the ocean is a job rightly suited to the Navy, but it should be treated as a military endeavor. Require merchants in the area to be part of convoys or they will receive no protection, and charge ships in the convoy for the cost of the operation. If local nations want to retain the services of the US Navy/etc for general security to promote commerce that is also fine, but they'll have to pay for it. If the US Navy wants to use pirates for target practice/etc they are of course welcome to do that as well - we pay them to exercise whether they're shooting at decoys or pirates.
My point wasn't to get rid of human interaction. My point was to get rid of the 95% of stuff that ISN'T human interaction. 500 people sitting in rows listening to somebody speak is zero interaction - at best it is a systematic method to socially exclude anybody who doesn't look like they're paying attention.
Try reading the Bible on your phone instead of using a paper one and count the dirty looks.:)
We certainly need interaction for education, and most theologians would agree that we need interaction in Church. The problem is that we spend all of 5-10 minutes doing that per hour in those settings, and doing things differently could let you move to spending all but 5-10 minutes doing that per hour.
I presume you are an adult so you don't have to go if you don't want, but it does seem like you have missed the point of church, or maybe it is just a dull one you attend.
My point is that churches have missed the point of church. The point of church is to be together, not to be in the same room, at least, that is how I see it.
I'm all for Christians spending time together. However, the average churchgoer spends 60-90 minutes sitting in a seat consuming content, and 5 minutes talking to people on the way in/out. It is that kind of experience that I see as completely pointless.
And yes, nobody forces me to go to church. I'd just like to attend one that spends almost all of its time focused on things that aren't better-done in other ways. If I'm paying somebody to come up with teaching, I'd rather see them spend six months on one lecture that is better than anything else that anybody has ever done, and play videos of others who have done the same the rest of the time. Instead, we pay everybody to come up with original teaching on a weekly basis, and tolerate mediocrity.
Take your favorite TV show. Chances are 500 people run through millions of dollars to make one season of it. Imagine instead that you simply hired a bunch of local actors to write their own scripts and perform the show just for 500 people in your local area. Most likely just your city alone would spend more than the budget it takes to do it on TV for the whole planet, and you'd end up with 50 bazillion lackluster productions.
My point wasn't to whine about church - it was to point out that we're doing it wrong...
Slashdot Mirror
Often counterfeit goods are made by running the real production lines for an extra shift or whatever. If you give some factory the plans for an iPhone and pay them to make a million of them for you, how do you know that they aren't running off a million more?
Well, the melamine wasn't actually a substitute for the milk. Water was the substitute for milk, but melamine was used to get the resulting substance to past the quality tests (watered down milk would test low for protein). The problem with most compendial quality tests is that they are designed to control normal manufacturing variances, not detect outright tampering. If your process could contaminate a product with arsenic then you test for it. If your process doesn't involve cyanide at any point, then chances are the quality testing isn't set up to detect it.
Wow - I'm surprised they didn't just give the guys running that operation jobs. After all, they were coordinating everything from supply chain to R&D and marketing. They're probably more effective than the real NEC executives. If they're willing to work for less than the current CEO the board would be crazy not to hire them... :)
Yup - I wish there were some decent mobile RPGs out there. All I care is that I can walk away instantly without losing my place. I don't care if it takes 15 years to complete.
Ok, so on either platform you can find good stuff in the top 100, and lots of garbage after that. What benefit does Apple bring?
This sounds like complaining that you ran a Google search and hit the next button to get to page 185, and you found a lot of irrelevant stuff.
I don't look at the garbage in the Android market, just like you don't look at the garbage in the App Store. The difference is that if I want I can install an alternative Email client or browser....
Everybody benefiting is not a tragedy.
If the people paying for the research receive benefits that outweigh the costs, there isn't even any loss to bother accounting for, just crying about fairness.
The point is that pretty soon the people doing the paying figure, "gee, why spend all this money when if we don't discover the cure for AIDS somebody else will?" Having a commons isn't a tragedy, but it inevitably leads to tragedy when everybody has incentive to neglect it.
Imagine you have a communal coffee pot at work. You pool your money and buy coffee in bulk, and everybody gets to drink coffee for less than it would cost them all to make or buy their own. Pretty soon people start figuring out that you can still drink the coffee without paying for it. Pretty soon there is no coffee. Paying for the coffee had benefits that outweighed the costs from the start, and yet people will still try to get out of it. And yes, I realize that when the commune is small enough it can work.
I'd extend this to a number of areas.
The problem with most research is the tragedy of the commons. Once you discover something, everybody benefits (unless it is something like a military secret that you keep close control of for a few decades). What nation discovered the last antibiotic you took? Do you even care? Patents can give a company incentive to discover as long as most nations respect them, and they can also inhibit progress when they get out of control. Patents usually don't help with blue-sky research since it is too far from market. They also don't work if many nations choose to ignore them (again, the tragedy of the commons).
I think that we need to look at research on more of a global scale. Instead of every nation funding its own R&D and hoarding their own data while trying to exploit data discovered elsewhere without contributing, we should manage research as a common resource. Essentially treat it like Airbus or whatever - everybody puts something in, and everybody gets something out.
This won't work for areas with military applications since there are competing interests. However, it seems like this is not an area that is ever hurting for cash.
Hence the reason I mentioned an e-book reader, and not an android phone...
An e-book reader (that uses an e-ink display - not the fancy "color" ones) is going to go weeks without a charge.
In any case, buy all the paper you want, but don't be surprised when brick and mortar stores can't afford to stock it. I love buying enthusiast motherboards and cello strings every few years, but I know I'll never find a brick and mortar store within 50 miles that will stock a good supply of either. If blockbuster can't stay in business, then bookstores are doomed...
Well, I guess the point would be to leave it on a charger when not using it. Especially since they can go a month or two without a recharge...
Good thing that e-book readers can go a month or two between chargers. Oh, and they do make these things called batteries that are portable. :)
The only way electricity is going to cause you to permanently lose your ebooks is the downfall of civilization.
Stop and think - what circumstances would result in a complete loss of electrical power for an extended period of time? About the only thing I can think of would be a complete collapse of civilization - ie another round of dark ages. How common do you think books were during the dark ages?
I'm not saying that it is impossible to create a book without electricity. I'm saying that if a society didn't have the ability to create electricity, I doubt that preserving books is going to be high on their list of priorities. A society capable of printing books is probably capable of generating electricity - it just happens in the past that they lacked the knowledge to do so, but that is clearly no longer the case.
Most readers with e-ink display could handle two weeks without a recharge fairly easily.
Hmm, the Google Translate of that website has the first feature described as:
Baidu powerful platform integrating the use of force, as you integrate thousands of popular applications, give you a key touch of the Chaokuaigan experience.
The third is described as:
Safe Browsing mode combines sandbox technology and the advantages of protected mode IE will completely isolate your horse with the virus, but also your "Internet sterile environment."
Well, I guess integrated use of force and a sterile Internet environment are definitely well in keeping with modern China.
(And yes, I realize these are almost certainly butchered translations...
Yup, my workplace is IE6. Didn't really cause problems until maybe a year ago when they started rolling out very Javascript-heavy websites all over the place. So, I use Chrome as much as I can (doesn't cause conflicts and navigates everything quickly), and then when I get to a URL that won't work without ActiveX I copy/paste it into IE6 and go take a bathroom break while the page loads. In IE6 the workflow is more like click link, go grab a cup of water, click link, go type up a document, click link, and so on...
Yeah, but it is a botnet on the wrong side of the Great Firewall - unless your goal is to take down some server in China. Plus, chances are the Chinese government already has half of those PCs in its own Botnets, and they might not take kindly to anybody borrowing their CPU resources. It isn't like you can send spam, since 80% of all the mail servers already block traffic from China.
They could have accomplished the same thing with a web interface and distributing their content in any number of standard formats working on any media player. The only thing that made the iPlayer successful is that a big media company decided to actually start streaming media.
This would be like calling MeeGo the most successful tablet PC because the NY Times decided to send one for free to all its subscribers so that they could move to online distribution. This isn't something winning out in the market - it is simply the case of some executives in an entrenched industry picking something.
With ebooks, you are at the whim of the ebook publisher, DRM, the ebook reader manufacturer and of course electricity.
Dude, if you get to the point where availability of electricity is preventing you from reading, you're going to be using your paper books for firewood or toilet paper. Either that, or somebody else will be stealing them from you for those purposes.
Sounds a lot like Plan 9.
In fact, I'd really like to see more effort going into porting plan 9 features to Linux. That's what got us /proc, for starters.
The trick is to just do it in a way that maintains the old APIs until everybody migrates. The problem with Plan 9 is that nothing runs on it, since it is just so different. Create Plan 9 APIs on Linux, and eventually that is how all the software will be written, for most of the reasons that you stated.
It's not a missing MIME type. The Chromebook file browser can't browse files. The only file types it understands, that I can see, are JPEG, PNG, MP3, MP4, and OGG. AVI is not supported.
Actually, it supports quite a few file formats (not sure exactly which). The problem is that it only supports a few file EXTENSIONS. As long as you rename your media files to have an extension that for some bizarre reason Google likes, it works fine most of the time.
So yes, it is lame, but not for the reason you think.
Clearly Chrome has a way to go. However, I do find mine fairly useful. Not sure I'd pay $500 for it unless I had a small business that was largely based on Google Apps.
If local nations want to retain the services [..]
'Local' nations? Try 'all naval nations'. Piracy is at an international choke point, very busy with traffic. Every large vessel that does international trading will pass near there at some point or another- this elevates it into an international issue, certainly not local.
Yes and no. Patrolling the waters in general shouldn't really be a matter of US concern. Whether specific ships of interest to the US get through might be. However, simply taxing those ships and putting them in convoys is a simple solution.
[..] but they'll have to pay for it.
I do not think that people keen enough to make a fortune out of trade (I am talking about the legitimate ones here) are not aware of this option; a plausible explanation is that it is cheaper to just pay the ransom every now and then- depending on cargo etc. And who knows what arrangements they have with their insurance companies.
Certainly no objections if they want to do it this way, but they should receive no support at all from US warships if they don't pay for the service in some way. I suspect that paying ransoms will become prohibitively expensive once pirates figure out that as long as they keep away from organized convoys that nobody will bother them.
On the other hand, keeping the military sharp is a reward in itsself- with the added bonus of making them appear as heroes to the public.
I suspect the USN can get plenty of practice limiting its activities to supporting ships that pay for their services (one way or another). However, if it has a good return-on-investment I have no objection to getting more involved. I suspect that this is often not the case.
There are lots of other options beyond tarriffs/etc. You could charge a registration tax on US ships, and then not assist anybody not flying a US flag, or the flag of a nation that provides effective reciprocal services/etc.
My problem with what is going on off the coast of Somolia is that merchants operate in a way that shifts a lot of cost to the USN, while not sharing in those costs. This is an economic externality and like all externalities it creates large expenses for those who bear the cost.
Yeah, loss of hostages has never really been something to deter Russian action. They certainly try to minimize loss of life, but not at the cost of not resolving the situation quickly. The main concern is punishing the guilty and deterring future crime. When people realize the Russians aren't deterred by hostage-taking, they stop taking hostages.
While nobody really likes having the Russians in town as a result, that applies to the pirates even more than the civilians.
Yup - a few yards of rope in a public place will save you a lot of planks.
While I don't consider this necessary in the modern era, there is a reason that the old Soviet Bloc was rarely the target of terrorism.
Of the stuff you listed, only the ammo has any real resale value. The fast boats are probably zodiacs/etc, but if they have anything more sturdy there might be a market. The better manpower is worthless to a privateer unless you legalize slavery. (Impressment on the high seas again?)
The bounty is the obvious market solution, but I'm leary of that one. "Fast ship at 175 degrees, aye, must be a pirate. Great, fire a missile at it, mark it as a kill, and send a bill to the Navy." Suffice it to say I won't be yachting in that area.
I think that patrolling the ocean is a job rightly suited to the Navy, but it should be treated as a military endeavor. Require merchants in the area to be part of convoys or they will receive no protection, and charge ships in the convoy for the cost of the operation. If local nations want to retain the services of the US Navy/etc for general security to promote commerce that is also fine, but they'll have to pay for it. If the US Navy wants to use pirates for target practice/etc they are of course welcome to do that as well - we pay them to exercise whether they're shooting at decoys or pirates.
My point wasn't to get rid of human interaction. My point was to get rid of the 95% of stuff that ISN'T human interaction. 500 people sitting in rows listening to somebody speak is zero interaction - at best it is a systematic method to socially exclude anybody who doesn't look like they're paying attention.
Try reading the Bible on your phone instead of using a paper one and count the dirty looks. :)
We certainly need interaction for education, and most theologians would agree that we need interaction in Church. The problem is that we spend all of 5-10 minutes doing that per hour in those settings, and doing things differently could let you move to spending all but 5-10 minutes doing that per hour.
I presume you are an adult so you don't have to go if you don't want, but it does seem like you have missed the point of church, or maybe it is just a dull one you attend.
My point is that churches have missed the point of church. The point of church is to be together, not to be in the same room, at least, that is how I see it.
I'm all for Christians spending time together. However, the average churchgoer spends 60-90 minutes sitting in a seat consuming content, and 5 minutes talking to people on the way in/out. It is that kind of experience that I see as completely pointless.
And yes, nobody forces me to go to church. I'd just like to attend one that spends almost all of its time focused on things that aren't better-done in other ways. If I'm paying somebody to come up with teaching, I'd rather see them spend six months on one lecture that is better than anything else that anybody has ever done, and play videos of others who have done the same the rest of the time. Instead, we pay everybody to come up with original teaching on a weekly basis, and tolerate mediocrity.
Take your favorite TV show. Chances are 500 people run through millions of dollars to make one season of it. Imagine instead that you simply hired a bunch of local actors to write their own scripts and perform the show just for 500 people in your local area. Most likely just your city alone would spend more than the budget it takes to do it on TV for the whole planet, and you'd end up with 50 bazillion lackluster productions.
My point wasn't to whine about church - it was to point out that we're doing it wrong...