This is getting a lot more hype than it should: Several other sites, as well as genetic studies, have pointed to the existence of pre-Clovis human habitation in North America, and it had long been a working hypothesis for a lot of archaeologists who had been studying early American habitation.
The only really interesting question is what these tools most resemble: If they look like they're related to a culture not from Siberia, that would be a much bigger deal, since it would suggest migration from Africa or Europe or Polynesia.
(If they were musicians, they would create their own original music)
That's not really true though. For starters, the line between "original" and "unoriginal" music isn't very clear. Which of these groups is creating original music? - The Boston Symphony Orchestra playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with a fantastic new interpretation - A group playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on kazoos - A disco group who took Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and rewrote it with a dance beat - A DJ who took the BSO's recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and made a great dance beat with it - An MC who took the DJ's great dance beat and busted some rhymes to it. - A folk singer who goes to some obscure area of Hungary, learns a popular folk song from that area, translates the lyrics, and records and popularizes it in the US - A second folk singer who adds 10 new verses to that same folk song
All of them took a musical legacy, added some twists or nuances to it, and made something new. But in the RIAA's worldview, the DJ, MC, and second folk singer did something thoroughly horrible.
RIAA boss: We'll hold Limewire ransom for... ONE MILLION DOLLARS! Number 2: Ah-hem... Don't you think we should ask for *more* than a million dollars? A million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days. Why, EMI's music division alone makes over 75 million dollars a year. RIAA boss: Ok then, we'll hold Limewire ransom for... SEVENTY-FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS!
That's only partially true (and I say this as someone who's never been seriously overweight).
There's evidence of genetic and medical components. There's also a strong argument that childhood obesity is not so much the kid's fault as it is their adult caretakers' fault, since kids generally aren't considered capable of making those sorts of decisions. There's also an economic component, because in some areas of the country the only food that's available within a poor person's price range is horribly fattening.
Still, got to give the guy props for a great performance in Star Trek 2.
As Futurama put it:
Leonard Nimoy: Melllvar, you have to respect your actors. When I directed Star Trek IV, I got a magnificent performance out of Bill because I respected him so much. William Shatner: And when I directed Star Trek V, I got a magnificent performance out of me, because I respected me so much!
If they don't know the difference, how did they get on the front page of Slashdot?
My best guess, given that I've never been through this process: 1. Write your post on your company's website. 2. Use your own/. account to submit a story that happens to link back to your post. Represent your article as addressing some sort of real controversy, even if it's just an advert for your product. 3. Write a script to vote the thing up in the Firehose like crazy, spoofing IP addresses as needed. 4. Trust that the editors won't actually read your advert through, just check that it vaguely matches what you submitted. 5. Use the artificially increased traffic to convince your investors that there's a market out there for your product. 6. PROFIT!!!
Fun fact: According to surveys, the happiest marriages are childless.
And when you think about it, that makes sense, because all the time, energy, and money that parents spend on their children can instead be directed towards one's spouse.
You're right it's not magic, but it has nothing to do with government interference.
In the case of plumbers, although there have been attempts at big plumbing companies, they tend to lose in management costs more than they gained in more efficient processing of paperwork and the like. Whereas in the case of cell carriers, you could cut your number of tower setups and fiber lines and accountants etc etc dramatically by reducing the number of companies. Hence the different market behavior in different markets.
Some markets do lend themselves to consolidation like this. If you were a hypothetical omnipotent and benevolent Grand Pooh-bah of the cell phone market right now, you could cut costs of cell service significantly by reducing things to a single carrier, and then sell the service at cost. But instead, we have profit-driven corporations, who want to cut the costs but keep the prices at their current higher (and thus inefficient) price.
Other markets don't consolidate as easily, which is why, say, plumbers aren't all working for a handful of big conglomerates.
Or as the wonderful Canadian documentary The Corporation pointed out, if a corporation is legally a person, then it is a sociopathic person. It's not that they're actively trying to do bad things, it's just that they don't care if they do evil, so long as it benefits them.
The new Took had gotten a lot of campaign support from the Arnorian Rifle Association, so even a clearly "cracked" hobbit like Bilbo Baggins could get a gun.
The laws of supply and demand still operate: If you want great STEM workers, then you need to pay for them. If you aren't getting as many as you'd like, increase the amount you're willing to pay them, or improve working conditions, until you get them.
That said, the reason that many US employers prefer foreign labor over US labor have nothing to do with the costs, and everything to do with foreign labor having less ability to go find another job when they get mistreated.
For instance, a large website where the primary goal is public commenting on interesting tech stories, or a public online encyclopedia - the whole point is that it's public, so encrypting it makes no sense.
And SSL encryption has a non-zero cost: it takes cycles to encrypt and decrypt on each end, and costs something to get a certificate.
In other words, the real problem of programming is usually not the language.
The real problem tends to be that computers have to get information that's far more specific than humans do. For instance, pretend you're moving to a new apartment, and you tell your buddies who are helping you to "put the dresser over there in that corner." Simple, clear, instruction, right? But your buddies will figure out for you that they can't put it right up against the wall because there's a radiator there, that the drawers need to be facing away from the wall, that the placement of this window means that it makes more sense for the drawers to be facing west rather than north, etc etc. Even a 12-year-old with cerebral palsy is far better at understanding a situation and adapting to new information than the best computer can manage right now.
the people that bitch when a company merges or buys out another company.
When was the last time that a major corporate merger benefited ordinary people in any way? What you can generally expect is a combination of: 1. Firing a lot of people that worked for whichever company isn't managing the new merged corporation. 2. Higher prices due to reduced competition.
Why would any reasonable person who doesn't work for the winning company support this?
The wrong part of bleh-of-the-huns's argument was that there needed to be collusion for the price alignment. We agree on that part.
Your mistake was assuming that all economically rational behavior is competitive behavior. If they were competing, they'd be trying to gain market share at the expense of the other players. Under these market conditions though, all of the big 4 are able to get higher profits (at customer expense) without competing, so that's what they do.
Oligopolies naturally produce a market with somewhat artificially inflated prices. The barriers to entry into the cell phone market are ridiculously high, so the big 4 don't need to be worried about new competitors showing up. Also, society has more-or-less collectively decided that cell phone use is a necessity for nearly everyone, and most of the potential substitutes have been effectively shut down, so the big 4 don't need to be too worried about consumers deciding to do without.
That means that each of the big 4 has only 1 incentive not to completely gouge their customers, namely competition from the other 3 of the big 4. But they have 2 ways of dealing with that while still trying to increase their profits. They could: A) Try to steal market share from their competitors with better service and/or lower prices. This will in the long run increase profits, but in the short run will be costly. B) Increase prices, but either do it in a way that the customers don't notice, or ensure that their competitors "catch up" to their pricing changes.
If they all pick option A, laissez-faire paradise ensues with great value to customers, but not so great value to investors. If they all pick option B, it will look an awful lot like they're colluding, even though they are in fact each making the same rational decision. From what I can tell, they went with option A when the market was still pretty volatile, but nowadays stick with option B most of the time.
Hey now, you're giving such short shrift to Odin and friends slaying a giant and making the world out of his blood and guts, or Gaia getting it on with Uranus and giving birth to everything, or all the other thoroughly wonderful creation stories out there.
There is just some natural cultural antagonism, particually with the more strictly Islamic countries.
Not really.
For instance, watch Jason Jones's reporting on Iran in his Behind the Veil series (yes, I realize this was done for the Daily Show, but it was some pretty good serious reporting, just done in a semi-silly way). You find out pretty quickly that average Iranian likes Americans, and like and use many American products. What they're not so keen on is American military forces building up on both sides of their country with American political leaders regularly threatening to bomb their country into oblivion.
Or you can watch some of Al Jazeera's reports from Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. The mostly younger leaders of the pro-democracy movements are happy to talk about their online friends in the US, or their use of US-based Facebook to help organize. Again, they like Americans, they like a lot of American products. But what they don't like are tear gas canisters or grenades with "Made in the USA" written on them getting shot at them by a US-backed dictator.
Even in the more conservative areas, the vast majority would be perfectly content to basically agree "you leave us alone, we'll leave you alone".
Slashdot Mirror
Ahh, but that will never pass, because it will be opposed heavily by the trucking and bus industries, who can outspend the freight rail companies.
This is getting a lot more hype than it should: Several other sites, as well as genetic studies, have pointed to the existence of pre-Clovis human habitation in North America, and it had long been a working hypothesis for a lot of archaeologists who had been studying early American habitation.
The only really interesting question is what these tools most resemble: If they look like they're related to a culture not from Siberia, that would be a much bigger deal, since it would suggest migration from Africa or Europe or Polynesia.
(If they were musicians, they would create their own original music)
That's not really true though. For starters, the line between "original" and "unoriginal" music isn't very clear. Which of these groups is creating original music?
- The Boston Symphony Orchestra playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony with a fantastic new interpretation
- A group playing Beethoven's Ninth Symphony on kazoos
- A disco group who took Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and rewrote it with a dance beat
- A DJ who took the BSO's recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony and made a great dance beat with it
- An MC who took the DJ's great dance beat and busted some rhymes to it.
- A folk singer who goes to some obscure area of Hungary, learns a popular folk song from that area, translates the lyrics, and records and popularizes it in the US
- A second folk singer who adds 10 new verses to that same folk song
All of them took a musical legacy, added some twists or nuances to it, and made something new. But in the RIAA's worldview, the DJ, MC, and second folk singer did something thoroughly horrible.
RIAA boss: We'll hold Limewire ransom for ... ONE MILLION DOLLARS! ... Don't you think we should ask for *more* than a million dollars? A million dollars isn't exactly a lot of money these days. Why, EMI's music division alone makes over 75 million dollars a year. ... SEVENTY-FIVE TRILLION DOLLARS!
Number 2: Ah-hem
RIAA boss: Ok then, we'll hold Limewire ransom for
Being overweight is the result of poor choices.
That's only partially true (and I say this as someone who's never been seriously overweight).
There's evidence of genetic and medical components. There's also a strong argument that childhood obesity is not so much the kid's fault as it is their adult caretakers' fault, since kids generally aren't considered capable of making those sorts of decisions. There's also an economic component, because in some areas of the country the only food that's available within a poor person's price range is horribly fattening.
That's nothing, we're all doing a great job of forgetting TJ Hooker.
Still, got to give the guy props for a great performance in Star Trek 2.
As Futurama put it:
Leonard Nimoy: Melllvar, you have to respect your actors. When I directed Star Trek IV, I got a magnificent performance out of Bill because I respected him so much.
William Shatner: And when I directed Star Trek V, I got a magnificent performance out of me, because I respected me so much!
If they don't know the difference, how did they get on the front page of Slashdot?
My best guess, given that I've never been through this process: /. account to submit a story that happens to link back to your post. Represent your article as addressing some sort of real controversy, even if it's just an advert for your product.
1. Write your post on your company's website.
2. Use your own
3. Write a script to vote the thing up in the Firehose like crazy, spoofing IP addresses as needed.
4. Trust that the editors won't actually read your advert through, just check that it vaguely matches what you submitted.
5. Use the artificially increased traffic to convince your investors that there's a market out there for your product.
6. PROFIT!!!
Grazing meat: good, for all the reasons you mentioned.
Feedlot meat: Pretty stupid, and currently much more common in the US.
I'm willing to not breed.
Fun fact: According to surveys, the happiest marriages are childless.
And when you think about it, that makes sense, because all the time, energy, and money that parents spend on their children can instead be directed towards one's spouse.
You're right it's not magic, but it has nothing to do with government interference.
In the case of plumbers, although there have been attempts at big plumbing companies, they tend to lose in management costs more than they gained in more efficient processing of paperwork and the like. Whereas in the case of cell carriers, you could cut your number of tower setups and fiber lines and accountants etc etc dramatically by reducing the number of companies. Hence the different market behavior in different markets.
You're overstating your case a bit.
Some markets do lend themselves to consolidation like this. If you were a hypothetical omnipotent and benevolent Grand Pooh-bah of the cell phone market right now, you could cut costs of cell service significantly by reducing things to a single carrier, and then sell the service at cost. But instead, we have profit-driven corporations, who want to cut the costs but keep the prices at their current higher (and thus inefficient) price.
Other markets don't consolidate as easily, which is why, say, plumbers aren't all working for a handful of big conglomerates.
Or as the wonderful Canadian documentary The Corporation pointed out, if a corporation is legally a person, then it is a sociopathic person. It's not that they're actively trying to do bad things, it's just that they don't care if they do evil, so long as it benefits them.
The new Took had gotten a lot of campaign support from the Arnorian Rifle Association, so even a clearly "cracked" hobbit like Bilbo Baggins could get a gun.
The laws of supply and demand still operate: If you want great STEM workers, then you need to pay for them. If you aren't getting as many as you'd like, increase the amount you're willing to pay them, or improve working conditions, until you get them.
That said, the reason that many US employers prefer foreign labor over US labor have nothing to do with the costs, and everything to do with foreign labor having less ability to go find another job when they get mistreated.
For instance, a large website where the primary goal is public commenting on interesting tech stories, or a public online encyclopedia - the whole point is that it's public, so encrypting it makes no sense.
And SSL encryption has a non-zero cost: it takes cycles to encrypt and decrypt on each end, and costs something to get a certificate.
Well... why not. The Supreme Court already made it legal to bribe officials domestically.
I bet they got bribed to do it.
Very likely, actually, particularly in the case of Clarence Thomas
In other words, the real problem of programming is usually not the language.
The real problem tends to be that computers have to get information that's far more specific than humans do. For instance, pretend you're moving to a new apartment, and you tell your buddies who are helping you to "put the dresser over there in that corner." Simple, clear, instruction, right? But your buddies will figure out for you that they can't put it right up against the wall because there's a radiator there, that the drawers need to be facing away from the wall, that the placement of this window means that it makes more sense for the drawers to be facing west rather than north, etc etc. Even a 12-year-old with cerebral palsy is far better at understanding a situation and adapting to new information than the best computer can manage right now.
the people that bitch when a company merges or buys out another company.
When was the last time that a major corporate merger benefited ordinary people in any way? What you can generally expect is a combination of:
1. Firing a lot of people that worked for whichever company isn't managing the new merged corporation.
2. Higher prices due to reduced competition.
Why would any reasonable person who doesn't work for the winning company support this?
It might not happen... right?
Oh yes it will:
http://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/index.php
(Actually, until quite recently, they were the #1 campaign contributor, but #2 means they still will get what they want)
obligatory xkcd that points out the basic problem: It works for 1 guy, it doesn't work for everybody.
The wrong part of bleh-of-the-huns's argument was that there needed to be collusion for the price alignment. We agree on that part.
Your mistake was assuming that all economically rational behavior is competitive behavior. If they were competing, they'd be trying to gain market share at the expense of the other players. Under these market conditions though, all of the big 4 are able to get higher profits (at customer expense) without competing, so that's what they do.
Both you and GP are wrong.
Oligopolies naturally produce a market with somewhat artificially inflated prices. The barriers to entry into the cell phone market are ridiculously high, so the big 4 don't need to be worried about new competitors showing up. Also, society has more-or-less collectively decided that cell phone use is a necessity for nearly everyone, and most of the potential substitutes have been effectively shut down, so the big 4 don't need to be too worried about consumers deciding to do without.
That means that each of the big 4 has only 1 incentive not to completely gouge their customers, namely competition from the other 3 of the big 4. But they have 2 ways of dealing with that while still trying to increase their profits. They could:
A) Try to steal market share from their competitors with better service and/or lower prices. This will in the long run increase profits, but in the short run will be costly.
B) Increase prices, but either do it in a way that the customers don't notice, or ensure that their competitors "catch up" to their pricing changes.
If they all pick option A, laissez-faire paradise ensues with great value to customers, but not so great value to investors. If they all pick option B, it will look an awful lot like they're colluding, even though they are in fact each making the same rational decision. From what I can tell, they went with option A when the market was still pretty volatile, but nowadays stick with option B most of the time.
Hey now, you're giving such short shrift to Odin and friends slaying a giant and making the world out of his blood and guts, or Gaia getting it on with Uranus and giving birth to everything, or all the other thoroughly wonderful creation stories out there.
There is just some natural cultural antagonism, particually with the more strictly Islamic countries.
Not really.
For instance, watch Jason Jones's reporting on Iran in his Behind the Veil series (yes, I realize this was done for the Daily Show, but it was some pretty good serious reporting, just done in a semi-silly way). You find out pretty quickly that average Iranian likes Americans, and like and use many American products. What they're not so keen on is American military forces building up on both sides of their country with American political leaders regularly threatening to bomb their country into oblivion.
Or you can watch some of Al Jazeera's reports from Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya. The mostly younger leaders of the pro-democracy movements are happy to talk about their online friends in the US, or their use of US-based Facebook to help organize. Again, they like Americans, they like a lot of American products. But what they don't like are tear gas canisters or grenades with "Made in the USA" written on them getting shot at them by a US-backed dictator.
Even in the more conservative areas, the vast majority would be perfectly content to basically agree "you leave us alone, we'll leave you alone".