Any market with a large barrier to entry will not exhibit competitive behavior in the long run. The presence of a big network effect is one of the more common causes of high barriers to entry. Regardless of the cause, incumbents corporations go on to become "natural monopolies"* and are able to charge monopoly prices higher than would otherwise be possible. The excess profit is called economic rent and causes an inefficient allocation of resources, effectively impoverishing us all.
In the past, we'd take a sober look at these situations and either regulate these markets or outright nationalize them. Today, we've been so thoroughly swayed by Laissez-faire economic ideas that we're reluctant to remedy an obvious injustice in an environment we intellectually know is not amenable to free competition.
In short, the big credit card processors have no effective competition because small players can't really enter the market, and as a society, we can choose between regulating them for the benefit of all or allowing them to skim a disproportionate amount of wealth from the rest of society. I would prefer to outright nationalize the entire financial system and run it as a public utility for the benefit of the real economy, but barring that, regulation helps.
* or oligarchies, which are indistinguishable from an economic perspective from monopolies
We just gave an $800 billion tax breaks to millionaires, and even before that, our tax rates were some of the lowest in the industrialized world. We can certainly afford these programs. We merely need to decide what's more important: millions for a few, or safety, comfort, and happiness for millions. Personally, I'm on the side of humanity.
Automobile cooling system work just fine and don't consume fluid when operating properly. An open-loop system (where you lose the coolant) is cheaper and easier to build, but closed-loop systems work perfectly well.
Bullshit. EROEI isn't everything, or even the dominant factor in extraction.
EROEI > 1 makes perfect sense when you think about it. Petroleum is even more useful as a chemical feedstock than it is as a fuel, and even as a fuel, petroleum products are portable and convenient in a way unmatched by any alternative. We'll see extraction continue far past EROEI > 1, with the excess made up by nuclear, wind, solar, and so on.
Don't bother. It's practically an article of faith around here that Windows is badly-made, that Microsoft is a malicious, profiteering drag on innovation, and that Windows OS security is responsible for the spread of malware. This view might have been partially accurate 15 years ago, but in 2011, the worm has turned. Companies are made up of people, and people change and mature. Microsoft is trying to be a good corporate citizen these days, and frankly, I'd be far more worried about Apple, both from a technical-security perspective and from a market lock-in perspective.
First of all, kudos to Google for finally going with MSI. It's like providing an RPM and makes everyone's life easier.
Now, that said, the situation with respect to delayed updates is fundamentally different because Chrome hasn't provide security updates for older versions. You're essentially running snapshots all the time. Any IT department would have be bonkers to follow that model.
In my experience, biologists write the best software; they love Python. The physicist-written software I've seen is full of single-letter variable names, complex functions, and tightly-coupled special-purpose code, almost as if written by someone more comfortable with mathematical notation.:-)
The GOP is a monstrosity. As Brad Delong says, they "lie about everything all the time." More than that, though, every single Republican initiative exacerbates inequality, smashes our dignity, and adds to the sum of human misery. There are no exceptions. There are no moderates left in the Republican party. What remains is an organization dedicated to aristocracy, superstition, and the snuffing out of curiosity. This party is a scourge, and to see its members elected against and against forces one to doubt the fundamental goodness of human nature.
There's an embarrassing set of experiments that simply won't go away that imply physics isn't as local as relativity would suggest.
Superdeterminism seems to be the most parsimonous way out of Bell's theorem. It's a depressing result, in a way, but it's the one that requires the least "spooky action at a distance" in the universe. Modern physics just dashes all our dreams.
That's why space colonization is important. If we can't hold it together here on earth, having settlers elsewhere will ensure that humanity continues to exist somewhere, and that the cultural contributions of everyone who's lived won't be forgotten.
The article presupposes that we'll be limited to our present thin-walled spacecraft propelled by chemical rockets. There are other options: we don't even need new technology per se. Something like Project Orion would permit the construction of a craft heavy enough to have effective shielding.
I'm reminded of this famous quip from Napoleon:
"You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? Excuse me, I have no time to listen to such nonsense."
The quality of the articles really has been in the toilet lately, and Slashdot's editorializing is more sensational than ever. Just look at another one of today's headlines: "Two Huge Holes In the Sun Spotted".
This nonsense is ridiculous, immature, and intellectually insulting. It's getting to the point where I only check the site out of habit, and because it has a decent rank on my awesomebar. This can't last.
This situation is a textbook example of a tragedy of the commons. Each PC manufacturer stands to gain from including bloatware. Consumers generally don't decide between different PC makers based on the amount of bloatware installed (because they all have it), so the cost is practically nothing, while the direct, short-term financial benefit is substantial.
However, consumers *do* consider subjective frustration when choosing a computing platform, and bloatware increases the frustration consumers feel toward the PC platform as a whole, reducing its market share. In short, bloatware is like pollution: nobody pays to dump sewage in the river, but everyone gets sick.
There are two common solutions to the commons problem: regulation, which isn't really feasible in a private market like that for PCs, or property rights that give actors an incentive to maintain the commons. The latter tactic explains why walled gardens have grown so explosively: their "owners" (Apple, Google, and to some extent, mobile carriers) have a strong incentive to not pollute the market.
Are you daft? Two normal distributions can have different means, yet overlap significantly in the tails. The overlap does not eliminate the difference.
Zener and tunnel diodes depend on silicon doping for their operation. Semiconductors do not appear in biological systems. The diodes themselves may be macroscopic, but the junctions inside are on the Angstrom scale.
Quantum effects such as tunneling may indeed have a significant impact on neural activity, and it's not the size of the proteins that would impact such selection, but the distances between synapses and the the possible effect that astrocytes and their proximity to neurons may have on various neural activity.
I remain skeptical. I'm open to the idea, but I need evidence --- or more specifically, a neural phenomenon that can't be explained using classical physicals, and for which there is a compelling explanation invoking QM. To be best of my knowledge, such a scenario does not presently exist. Until one does, I'll hang on to my notion of the purely classical mind.
The human mind is rich, fascinating, and complex enough as it is. There's no need to drag QM into it.
Consider a typical PC. On one level, a great deal of functionality is built into the hardware, including DRAM refreshes, PCI-bus DMA, clock-signal generation, hard drive head seeking, instruction decoding, and in-process arithmetic. At a higher level, however, the entire machine can be directed along lines provided by a dynamic series of instructions, and is completely general purpose.
Why would we be any different? At low levels of abstraction, behavior is autonomous, but together these facilities provide a platform for truly general-purpose information processing, as evidenced by the great variety and creativity in our thoughts, speech, and actions. Sure, the neocortex exhibits FPGA-like plasticity (a very neat feature for people with head injuries), but that's not the substrate for consciousness --- that's all "software".
As a general rule, one should use the simplest possible explanation that fits the data. Current physics is certainly sufficient to describe the operation of the brain, and there is no reason to postulate a more complex mechanism absent without evidence. Gaps in our understanding of the brain do not in themselves count as evidence. We don't fully understand turbulence either, but have no reason to believe it's caused by evil fluid gremlins.
Anything that can encode for a difference and can interact with the environment is a potetial evolutionary substrate.
Your intuition is not a data source.
Nature does not produce all possible phenotypes, and she would have no tools to take advantage of these "quantum effects" in any case because biology is built on proteins far too large and hot to have "quantum" behavior. It's not even a given that "quantum" effects would actually be more evolutionarily fit.
Slashdot Mirror
Any market with a large barrier to entry will not exhibit competitive behavior in the long run. The presence of a big network effect is one of the more common causes of high barriers to entry. Regardless of the cause, incumbents corporations go on to become "natural monopolies"* and are able to charge monopoly prices higher than would otherwise be possible. The excess profit is called economic rent and causes an inefficient allocation of resources, effectively impoverishing us all.
In the past, we'd take a sober look at these situations and either regulate these markets or outright nationalize them. Today, we've been so thoroughly swayed by Laissez-faire economic ideas that we're reluctant to remedy an obvious injustice in an environment we intellectually know is not amenable to free competition.
In short, the big credit card processors have no effective competition because small players can't really enter the market, and as a society, we can choose between regulating them for the benefit of all or allowing them to skim a disproportionate amount of wealth from the rest of society. I would prefer to outright nationalize the entire financial system and run it as a public utility for the benefit of the real economy, but barring that, regulation helps.
* or oligarchies, which are indistinguishable from an economic perspective from monopolies
So how exactly does your theory distinguish between "shills" and people who hold less hostile views of Microsoft of their own volition?
We just gave an $800 billion tax breaks to millionaires, and even before that, our tax rates were some of the lowest in the industrialized world. We can certainly afford these programs. We merely need to decide what's more important: millions for a few, or safety, comfort, and happiness for millions. Personally, I'm on the side of humanity.
Closed with respect to the water, not the energy.
Automobile cooling system work just fine and don't consume fluid when operating properly. An open-loop system (where you lose the coolant) is cheaper and easier to build, but closed-loop systems work perfectly well.
Bullshit. EROEI isn't everything, or even the dominant factor in extraction.
EROEI > 1 makes perfect sense when you think about it. Petroleum is even more useful as a chemical feedstock than it is as a fuel, and even as a fuel, petroleum products are portable and convenient in a way unmatched by any alternative. We'll see extraction continue far past EROEI > 1, with the excess made up by nuclear, wind, solar, and so on.
I'm not sure whether you should be so quick to dismiss the proposal. Rampant copyright lawsuits hurt everyone, not just those who download.
Don't bother. It's practically an article of faith around here that Windows is badly-made, that Microsoft is a malicious, profiteering drag on innovation, and that Windows OS security is responsible for the spread of malware. This view might have been partially accurate 15 years ago, but in 2011, the worm has turned. Companies are made up of people, and people change and mature. Microsoft is trying to be a good corporate citizen these days, and frankly, I'd be far more worried about Apple, both from a technical-security perspective and from a market lock-in perspective.
First of all, kudos to Google for finally going with MSI. It's like providing an RPM and makes everyone's life easier.
Now, that said, the situation with respect to delayed updates is fundamentally different because Chrome hasn't provide security updates for older versions. You're essentially running snapshots all the time. Any IT department would have be bonkers to follow that model.
In my experience, biologists write the best software; they love Python. The physicist-written software I've seen is full of single-letter variable names, complex functions, and tightly-coupled special-purpose code, almost as if written by someone more comfortable with mathematical notation. :-)
The word "dweeb" is telling. It confirms my theory that the GOP mindset is just aged and distilled schoolyard bullying.
The GOP is a monstrosity. As Brad Delong says, they "lie about everything all the time." More than that, though, every single Republican initiative exacerbates inequality, smashes our dignity, and adds to the sum of human misery. There are no exceptions. There are no moderates left in the Republican party. What remains is an organization dedicated to aristocracy, superstition, and the snuffing out of curiosity. This party is a scourge, and to see its members elected against and against forces one to doubt the fundamental goodness of human nature.
If you can design an antibody to selectively attach to cancer cells, can't you then use the body's normal immune mechanisms to destroy the cancer?
Superdeterminism seems to be the most parsimonous way out of Bell's theorem. It's a depressing result, in a way, but it's the one that requires the least "spooky action at a distance" in the universe. Modern physics just dashes all our dreams.
That's why space colonization is important. If we can't hold it together here on earth, having settlers elsewhere will ensure that humanity continues to exist somewhere, and that the cultural contributions of everyone who's lived won't be forgotten.
The article presupposes that we'll be limited to our present thin-walled spacecraft propelled by chemical rockets. There are other options: we don't even need new technology per se. Something like Project Orion would permit the construction of a craft heavy enough to have effective shielding.
I'm reminded of this famous quip from Napoleon:
"You would make a ship sail against the winds and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? Excuse me, I have no time to listen to such nonsense."
The quality of the articles really has been in the toilet lately, and Slashdot's editorializing is more sensational than ever. Just look at another one of today's headlines: "Two Huge Holes In the Sun Spotted".
This nonsense is ridiculous, immature, and intellectually insulting. It's getting to the point where I only check the site out of habit, and because it has a decent rank on my awesomebar. This can't last.
Canvas.globalCompositeOperation works now!
This situation is a textbook example of a tragedy of the commons. Each PC manufacturer stands to gain from including bloatware. Consumers generally don't decide between different PC makers based on the amount of bloatware installed (because they all have it), so the cost is practically nothing, while the direct, short-term financial benefit is substantial.
However, consumers *do* consider subjective frustration when choosing a computing platform, and bloatware increases the frustration consumers feel toward the PC platform as a whole, reducing its market share. In short, bloatware is like pollution: nobody pays to dump sewage in the river, but everyone gets sick.
There are two common solutions to the commons problem: regulation, which isn't really feasible in a private market like that for PCs, or property rights that give actors an incentive to maintain the commons. The latter tactic explains why walled gardens have grown so explosively: their "owners" (Apple, Google, and to some extent, mobile carriers) have a strong incentive to not pollute the market.
Are you daft? Two normal distributions can have different means, yet overlap significantly in the tails. The overlap does not eliminate the difference.
Zener and tunnel diodes depend on silicon doping for their operation. Semiconductors do not appear in biological systems. The diodes themselves may be macroscopic, but the junctions inside are on the Angstrom scale.
Care to offer an explanation, or would you rather just be obliquely smug?
I remain skeptical. I'm open to the idea, but I need evidence --- or more specifically, a neural phenomenon that can't be explained using classical physicals, and for which there is a compelling explanation invoking QM. To be best of my knowledge, such a scenario does not presently exist. Until one does, I'll hang on to my notion of the purely classical mind.
The human mind is rich, fascinating, and complex enough as it is. There's no need to drag QM into it.
Consider a typical PC. On one level, a great deal of functionality is built into the hardware, including DRAM refreshes, PCI-bus DMA, clock-signal generation, hard drive head seeking, instruction decoding, and in-process arithmetic. At a higher level, however, the entire machine can be directed along lines provided by a dynamic series of instructions, and is completely general purpose.
Why would we be any different? At low levels of abstraction, behavior is autonomous, but together these facilities provide a platform for truly general-purpose information processing, as evidenced by the great variety and creativity in our thoughts, speech, and actions. Sure, the neocortex exhibits FPGA-like plasticity (a very neat feature for people with head injuries), but that's not the substrate for consciousness --- that's all "software".
As a general rule, one should use the simplest possible explanation that fits the data. Current physics is certainly sufficient to describe the operation of the brain, and there is no reason to postulate a more complex mechanism absent without evidence. Gaps in our understanding of the brain do not in themselves count as evidence. We don't fully understand turbulence either, but have no reason to believe it's caused by evil fluid gremlins.
Your intuition is not a data source.
Nature does not produce all possible phenotypes, and she would have no tools to take advantage of these "quantum effects" in any case because biology is built on proteins far too large and hot to have "quantum" behavior. It's not even a given that "quantum" effects would actually be more evolutionarily fit.