Based on your own argument I'd guess the average the GP was referring to ($1009) was a median...
Of course! Clearly your opinion is naturally overriding what people do in the real world. How else? Based on a lovingly hand-crafted strawman standing in place of my argument no less. Burning too.
It's difficult to reply to this as you appear to be referring to a 1960s movie. However your argument was that the arithmetic mean is used by "no respectable economist". I was wondering where the GP got the arithmetic mean from, if no economists would ever use it.
I normally try not to use arguments to authority but this contrast is just too bizarre.
no respectable economist
Random Slashdot Doofus #574715 named Dilaudid Hmm I spot an incongruity here. Thanks for getting back to me though!
That is why no sane economist ever uses averages. They use median income.
If Bill Gates walks into a bar full of out-of-work drunk bums, the "average" income in that bar is suddenly into tens of millions.
This is crap. If bill gates walks into a bar with 20 people in it the mean is suddenly $2bn. Very clever, but it's a spurious example. In any population, if you pick the highest number and add it to your sample, you get a skewed sample. What you miss is that the chance of Bill Gates walking into that bar is 1 in 200 million. Hence it's a stupid example, although has been used by Nassim Taleb and Benoit Mandelbrot so you're in good company.
Secondly - average can means either arithmetic mean, or median. Based on your own argument I'd guess the average the GP was referring to ($1009) was a median - and it is substantially more than a copy of Windows in China. So the GP is right on both counts.
The slam was from the dollar decreasing by 1% on the day - all foreign imports just went up by 1%, the value of your business just fell by 1%. Bush can continue to demand things that China cannot supply if he chooses to - as he does ASEAN will continue to gain importance, and Europe can continue to make bilateral trade agreements without US involvement.
It's also worth bearing in mind that the US owes about $3 trn to China - the dollar will fall a lot further if the Chinese start asking for it back.
Your opinion on government sponsored hacking is a dumb joke. I'll reprint it here for others to laugh at your paranoia, coward:
Oh yea, let not forget those port scans that we get all day long. Where do they come from ? China and North Korea. What do you think they are looking for ? Some are spambots, ect, but a lot are Chinese regime sponsored hacking attempts looking for anything of value, especially intellectual property. Screw them.
Quoting sourcewatch doesn't help your argument much. From the wikipedia article:
Alan Caruba, a corporate public relations campaigner and vocal global warming skeptic, writes "Source Watch is a project of the Center of Media & Democracy, a left-wing organization that devotes a lot of time to attacking the public relations profession in general and conservative writers in particular."[2] You said:
I have no problem with you expressing your myopic political fantasy, but I do object to your pseudo-skepticisim, misinformation and attempts to pass off the pontifications of politcal hacks as credible science. I don't mean to be rude, but - are you mental?
Dear AC, I wonder how you just happened upon these pictures from "ukdirtypanties.com"? Do you have a large collection of links to use on these occasions?
lol Glad one person laughed at your joke:)
On topic - 226 days is amazing. Can't believe journalists aren't protected...
Good point. I guess it doesn't sound so clever to say "we're going to charge you an extra 30 cents a song for removing something".
Thing is 256kbps isn't supposed to sound any better than 192, from what I've heard 192 or 160 vbr is supposed to be about optimal. Since 256kbps mp3s take up an extra 33% over 192kbps (by my maths) - maybe Jobs is just looking to ship more 80Gb iPods:)
Yeah. What a draw - 256Kbps. Strange that they don't offer the higher bitrate without the no-DRM option - almost like Jobs is trying to muddy the waters, draw attention from this... err... frank admission that "Fairplay" is not a benefit to the consumer, it's actually just crippling a product so it can't be used properly, and customers will pay to do without it.
This is pretty smart though - if this is Jobs manouvering to destroy the record companies case for DRM, it's a very nicely calculated move, taking EMI who are in financial difficulty and using them as a wedge to split the industry... I wonder if he would have done this without the intervention of Norway and the EU?
Money is not just an incentive. It's a means of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account (i.e. it tells us what things are worth). Corporations are valuable to us because they produce things we want - first and foremost. Secondly because they employ people and make profits for shareholders, and lots of other reasons like them doing R&D.
In short, I'd say if you don't like corporations, and Microsoft specifically, don't use its products. The reason you are walking into the barrel of a gun, to use your metaphor, is because you chose to install a Microsoft product on your computer. And there are alternatives.
So you've been watching The Corporation, like so many before you. The Corporation is a film that spouts some guff about how Corporations (which are made of people) are given some rights in the court - as if they were actually a person.
The Corporation, of course, was made by a corporation, the Big Picture Media Corporation, which the Canadian Film Board created in order to distribute it. I guess they must have found the "religion" you speak of to be quite convincing. It also popularised the views that you are espousing, while making a healthy profit for the Canadian Film Board. Milton Friedman would say this goes to show how capitalism fosters freedom - it gives a voice to those who seek to attack it.
Is it any more malicious than apple not releasing iTunes for Linux?. Apple is the 68th largest corporation in the world, larger than Schlumberger, Credit Suisse, 3m, Rio Tinto, Newscorp, American Express. They may claim to have better ethics than their peers, but do you believe them?
What is over now with Apple is people thinking that buying apple makes them different and special. I don't think they feel the same way when they buy their post-its from 3M.
avant-garde mathematicians Come on you must be pulling my leg.
We have a name for you people: switcheurs. We have a name for people like you. Our target audience. Corporate America is glad for your custom.
From the (highly amusing) website:
Artists, fashion mavens, scientists, and other creative personalities can sit down with a 12-inch PowerBook running Tiger and comprehend its sensitive, tasteful aesthetic. Buy our product and you can be cool too... So either this is viral marketing schlock, or a pastiche of viral marketing schlock. I particularly like the way they managed to reference "maven" - a favourite term of Malcolm Gladwell, viral marketing demagogue. I also liked the way they used 12 inch and tasteful in the same sentence. Cool uhuhuhhuh.
musicians, control your own back catalog, get it back from the pigopolists now Amusing. You are calling an industry that is fairly evenly split between 4 major labels a monopoly, to defend apple, who run 90% of the market for mp3 players. Apple invented "fairplay" drm - they can get rid of it any time they want to, especially since they can afford to buy all of the music labels 6 times over.
Unfortunately Jobs can't buy, or threaten the Norwegian government, which is why he made his "it's not me guv" plea. I think these music label guys are showing remarkable balls standing up to Jobs, especially since he controls their only legal distribution channel.
So maybe the companies are trading at a discount to the assets they hold - how does that prevent a takeover?
That's why companies get taken over. While the catalogs may be worth a few hundred million, apple is worth two or three orders of magnitude more - anti-trust legislation is the only thing that could keep these companies out of the hands of apple, if Jobs wanted them.
Maybe the agreement with Apple Corp was preventing him before now, or maybe the status quo suits him - he's not feeling threatened by the music companies though. He owns the technology that they require for their products to be listened to and he owns the only legal distribution channel that is available to them.
He also, coincidentally, can buy them all for stock, or for cash using one year's revenue, and have change left over. The open letter was a gimmick.
Thus the only thing keeping the status quo which we all like ($1 songs and ability to buy singles) is apple's exclusive control of it's DRM. The moment that vanishes the Music INdustry has us in its claws Apple is worth $75bn > EMI's music arm ($1.4bn) + Warner Music ($2.9bn) + Sony's music arm ($2.1bn) + Vivendi ($5.5bn). This isn't a case of the big music companies putting the squeeze on some gentle artisan. This is a case of one of America's biggest corporations negotiating with its minnow-like suppliers. If Jobs wants the music companies to relax restrictions on their music, I'm sure their shareholders would welcome a takeover bid. Since Jobs is both CEO and Chairman of Apple, it's his decision.
Since the article STILL doesn't define what a mock theta func is, what is, and how can it be applied? Yeah the journo told me he left that at home with his one-line explanation of string theory.
Not flawless but pretty accurate. Out of the non-factory installs of windows out there, what percentage do you think were bought off Microsoft and what percentage came on a black market CD? I'm guessing - including second hand PCs - 5% vs 95%? I think maybe the man's logic was - if this woman isn't willing to spend $200 on a PC which is better than this, why would she spend $100 on a piece of software that doesn't work on it.
Coincidentally I had a friend from Brazil who worked for Microsoft's PR group. Apparently they told her they at that time (I guess around 2000-2001) they had no interest in pursuing illegal home installers - they were just interested in following up businesses. I think that Microsoft's strategy was to dominate the home market by making their product effectively free, and that would encourage businesses to use the software since everyone can use it anyway. That's why the current DRMed status of Vista and XP is a great opening for Linux distros - Windows isn't free and it doesn't work, while linux is both.
It seems there are lots of people who are just plain scared that Vista will be a success. They are worried it will end up being a good OS and lots of people will use it. I envy the man who's biggest fear is that Vista will be a success. I pity the poor fool that imagines that lots of people won't use it.
Why would a clientservices-phone jockey need to hook up their USB memory stick? What right does the IT department have to grade employees by their status? Do you understand the role of every single person in the organisation and every possible use that they could make of technology? This doesn't increase security at all if the same bureacracy lets the head of sales write the entire client database to a DVD and FedEx it to their next employer.
*IF* however, you have federal and or state guidelines you MUST follow with regards to protecting identity and health information, then sorry pals... This attitude can kill companies and IT departments. Really valuable IT employees find ways of getting around the timewasting rules that government and (worse) senior management put in the way of employees. Of course all of this is easy to say and difficult to do, especially if you're under resourced - and agreed, 99% of requests, especially from sales, are crap - but don't write everyone off.
It's difficult to say what the serious questions with the study are, since it hasn't been peer-reviewed, it's published by an employee of Greenpeace based on 8-year old data, and it will probably be impossible to reproduce its results since half of the rats in the study were excluded.
I think the point is that this is FUD - no-one knows what it means, but it scares people. If you look at Microsoft press releases about Linux you might spot a similar pattern.
Raising questions won't change the fact that such foods do have very harmful effects. Would any amount of evidence change your opinion that these foods have harmful effects, or is it more of a faith thing?
What stinks? The Independent is publishing an article about Greenpeace, who have published some research published by a contractor employed by them, based on 8-year old Russian research, and translated into English.
The Independent is currently loss-making and is seeking to carve out a section of Britain's left wing newspaper readership by being highly critical of the government and agressively pursuing an environmental agenda.
Greenpeace is a widely criticised environmental lobby group, who have made famously unfounded attacks on Shell and Apple among others
The new leaf potato which the fuss was put in production 8 years ago, eaten by many people, was found not to be profitable and is now defunct.
Articles like this are the reason that people are skeptical of global warming. I do not take advice from people like Greenpeace or the Independent, because they are self-serving scare-mongers.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course! Clearly your opinion is naturally overriding what people do in the real world. How else? Based on a lovingly hand-crafted strawman standing in place of my argument no less. Burning too.
It's difficult to reply to this as you appear to be referring to a 1960s movie. However your argument was that the arithmetic mean is used by "no respectable economist". I was wondering where the GP got the arithmetic mean from, if no economists would ever use it. I normally try not to use arguments to authority but this contrast is just too bizarre. no respectable economist Random Slashdot Doofus #574715 named Dilaudid Hmm I spot an incongruity here. Thanks for getting back to me though!That is why no sane economist ever uses averages. They use median income.
If Bill Gates walks into a bar full of out-of-work drunk bums, the "average" income in that bar is suddenly into tens of millions.
This is crap. If bill gates walks into a bar with 20 people in it the mean is suddenly $2bn. Very clever, but it's a spurious example. In any population, if you pick the highest number and add it to your sample, you get a skewed sample. What you miss is that the chance of Bill Gates walking into that bar is 1 in 200 million. Hence it's a stupid example, although has been used by Nassim Taleb and Benoit Mandelbrot so you're in good company.Secondly - average can means either arithmetic mean, or median. Based on your own argument I'd guess the average the GP was referring to ($1009) was a median - and it is substantially more than a copy of Windows in China. So the GP is right on both counts.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average
http://econophysics.blogspot.com/2006/07/tyranny-
It's also worth bearing in mind that the US owes about $3 trn to China - the dollar will fall a lot further if the Chinese start asking for it back.
Your opinion on government sponsored hacking is a dumb joke. I'll reprint it here for others to laugh at your paranoia, coward: Oh yea, let not forget those port scans that we get all day long. Where do they come from ? China and North Korea. What do you think they are looking for ? Some are spambots, ect, but a lot are Chinese regime sponsored hacking attempts looking for anything of value, especially intellectual property. Screw them.
On topic - 226 days is amazing. Can't believe journalists aren't protected...
Good point. I guess it doesn't sound so clever to say "we're going to charge you an extra 30 cents a song for removing something".
:)
Thing is 256kbps isn't supposed to sound any better than 192, from what I've heard 192 or 160 vbr is supposed to be about optimal. Since 256kbps mp3s take up an extra 33% over 192kbps (by my maths) - maybe Jobs is just looking to ship more 80Gb iPods
The sad thing is I never even thought that. I just thought - "head -n 1000000 /dev/random > Windows.com"? - what a horrible waste of entropy...
Yeah. What a draw - 256Kbps. Strange that they don't offer the higher bitrate without the no-DRM option - almost like Jobs is trying to muddy the waters, draw attention from this... err... frank admission that "Fairplay" is not a benefit to the consumer, it's actually just crippling a product so it can't be used properly, and customers will pay to do without it.
This is pretty smart though - if this is Jobs manouvering to destroy the record companies case for DRM, it's a very nicely calculated move, taking EMI who are in financial difficulty and using them as a wedge to split the industry... I wonder if he would have done this without the intervention of Norway and the EU?
Crikey I didn't realise Che Guevara was working in open source now. Bill must be quaking in his boots.
Can't see anything to disagree with here. Good point.
Money is not just an incentive. It's a means of exchange, a store of value and a unit of account (i.e. it tells us what things are worth). Corporations are valuable to us because they produce things we want - first and foremost. Secondly because they employ people and make profits for shareholders, and lots of other reasons like them doing R&D.
In short, I'd say if you don't like corporations, and Microsoft specifically, don't use its products. The reason you are walking into the barrel of a gun, to use your metaphor, is because you chose to install a Microsoft product on your computer. And there are alternatives.
So you've been watching The Corporation, like so many before you. The Corporation is a film that spouts some guff about how Corporations (which are made of people) are given some rights in the court - as if they were actually a person.
The Corporation, of course, was made by a corporation, the Big Picture Media Corporation, which the Canadian Film Board created in order to distribute it. I guess they must have found the "religion" you speak of to be quite convincing. It also popularised the views that you are espousing, while making a healthy profit for the Canadian Film Board. Milton Friedman would say this goes to show how capitalism fosters freedom - it gives a voice to those who seek to attack it.
Is it any more malicious than apple not releasing iTunes for Linux?. Apple is the 68th largest corporation in the world, larger than Schlumberger, Credit Suisse, 3m, Rio Tinto, Newscorp, American Express. They may claim to have better ethics than their peers, but do you believe them?
What is over now with Apple is people thinking that buying apple makes them different and special. I don't think they feel the same way when they buy their post-its from 3M.
From the (highly amusing) website: Artists, fashion mavens, scientists, and other creative personalities can sit down with a 12-inch PowerBook running Tiger and comprehend its sensitive, tasteful aesthetic. Buy our product and you can be cool too... So either this is viral marketing schlock, or a pastiche of viral marketing schlock. I particularly like the way they managed to reference "maven" - a favourite term of Malcolm Gladwell, viral marketing demagogue. I also liked the way they used 12 inch and tasteful in the same sentence. Cool uhuhuhhuh.
Unfortunately Jobs can't buy, or threaten the Norwegian government, which is why he made his "it's not me guv" plea. I think these music label guys are showing remarkable balls standing up to Jobs, especially since he controls their only legal distribution channel.
So maybe the companies are trading at a discount to the assets they hold - how does that prevent a takeover?
That's why companies get taken over. While the catalogs may be worth a few hundred million, apple is worth two or three orders of magnitude more - anti-trust legislation is the only thing that could keep these companies out of the hands of apple, if Jobs wanted them.
Maybe the agreement with Apple Corp was preventing him before now, or maybe the status quo suits him - he's not feeling threatened by the music companies though. He owns the technology that they require for their products to be listened to and he owns the only legal distribution channel that is available to them.
He also, coincidentally, can buy them all for stock, or for cash using one year's revenue, and have change left over. The open letter was a gimmick.
Not flawless but pretty accurate. Out of the non-factory installs of windows out there, what percentage do you think were bought off Microsoft and what percentage came on a black market CD? I'm guessing - including second hand PCs - 5% vs 95%? I think maybe the man's logic was - if this woman isn't willing to spend $200 on a PC which is better than this, why would she spend $100 on a piece of software that doesn't work on it.
Coincidentally I had a friend from Brazil who worked for Microsoft's PR group. Apparently they told her they at that time (I guess around 2000-2001) they had no interest in pursuing illegal home installers - they were just interested in following up businesses. I think that Microsoft's strategy was to dominate the home market by making their product effectively free, and that would encourage businesses to use the software since everyone can use it anyway. That's why the current DRMed status of Vista and XP is a great opening for Linux distros - Windows isn't free and it doesn't work, while linux is both.
Next they'll be saying that Dali's clocks weren't actually melting at all - it was just a special effect generated by brushing oil on canvas.
I think the point is that this is FUD - no-one knows what it means, but it scares people. If you look at Microsoft press releases about Linux you might spot a similar pattern. Raising questions won't change the fact that such foods do have very harmful effects. Would any amount of evidence change your opinion that these foods have harmful effects, or is it more of a faith thing?
What stinks? The Independent is publishing an article about Greenpeace, who have published some research published by a contractor employed by them, based on 8-year old Russian research, and translated into English.
The Independent is currently loss-making and is seeking to carve out a section of Britain's left wing newspaper readership by being highly critical of the government and agressively pursuing an environmental agenda.
Greenpeace is a widely criticised environmental lobby group, who have made famously unfounded attacks on Shell and Apple among others
The new leaf potato which the fuss was put in production 8 years ago, eaten by many people, was found not to be profitable and is now defunct.
Articles like this are the reason that people are skeptical of global warming. I do not take advice from people like Greenpeace or the Independent, because they are self-serving scare-mongers.