> If I wait for the best tickets to drop in price, > they may sell out before they reach the pricelevel > I'm willing to pay, so I need to buy the second best > tickets, but these sold out at $100 even earlier.
This is easily solved, and along with it the problem that some people might rank the seats differently than others (e.g., one guy wants to be right in front of the speakers, and somebody else would rather be near the center of the stage).
The solution is simple: all the tickets are the same price on any given day. Let's say you start selling the tickets 100 days before the event, at ludicrously obscene prices (say, a million bucks a seat). You wait, because you don't have a million bucks, and if you did you wouldn't spend it on tickets for a single concert, because you're at least partially sane. So you wait. Each day the price goes down. After a week or so, it's down to eighty grand per seat, which you still can't afford, but only four tickets have sold, to some billionaire who just had to be next to the center aisle in the front row no matter what. When the price comes down to twenty grand per seat, a couple of CEOs snap up the private VIP booth, and a lunatic-fringe extreme fan from Ann Arbor sells his truck and buys a front-row seat. But there are still seats available in the front row, and the price is coming down...
Furthermore, this system and the current system aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. They could split up the seats in a predetermined way and sell some of them at fixed prices and others in the manner described above. The proportions (how many tickets are sold each way) would be up to the organizers of the concert, I suppose (though it might also be a negotiating point when you're trying to book popular performers).
For simplicity, we'll say you divide the seats in half down the middle of the center aisle. All the seats left of center are sold for the same low price of $150/seat (or whatever) until they're gone, but the seats to the right of the center aisle are priced obscenely high at first, and then the price gradually drops until they're all sold out (probably somewhere in the $250-$500 range, though of course the exact price is going to depend on the popularity of the performers and various other factors).
> > Sellers could cut them out by raising their > > prices so that demand matches supply. > > Of course, for the millions of people attending > events, they'd be spending a lot more than they were
Nobody's holding a gun to your head and making you buy a ticket. People would only be spending what the tickets are worth to them.
> or able to attend fewer events,
On the contrary, if ticket prices went up until market equilibrium was reached, people who are willing to spend a bit more for the tickets would be able to attend as many events as they want, because there would *be* tickets available to buy (legitimately, not from scalpers), and they'd be easy to find. The artificial scarcity makes it *harder* to attend. With fixed-price ticket sales, if an event is even a little bit popular then you just can't go, unless your time is worth absolutely nothing and you can afford to go on a multi-week fanboy quest to hunt down the last remaining ticket from a scalper in Kansas.
> especially if they want to sit in anything remotely > resembling a good seat. And front row seats would > only be affordable by billionaires and the five richest
There aren't enough billionaires and kings to fill up the whole front row, so presumably the prices wouldn't be *quite* that high. Ordinary CEOs, even of medium-sized companies, would probably be able to afford front-row tickets to most events.
Hey, if the good seats aren't more expensive than the cheap seats, something is wrong. It's not like a normal mortal can ever buy a front-row ticket to anything anyway. They're always sold out already, even if you're the first one in line the first day tickets go on sale. I think the groupies must snap them up and scalp them, or something.
> But hey, people who were already making a healthy > profit would make even more! Hurrah!
Oh, yes, I forgot that it's automatically evil anytime anyone makes any money for any reason, ever. It doesn't matter that it would make things better for everyone. If somebody's going to make money, it's obviously a bad thing.
Yeah, my edits generally stick too, and almost all of them are anon/IP, not because I haven't created an account, but because Wikipedia's session-timeout policy is so short that logging in seldom does any good. You can log in, but by the time you're ready to commit an edit, you're typically not logged in any more. I can't imagine what possessed them to make it so short. I've got better things to do than log in *again* each and every time I want to make an edit. So I usually don't bother. And it doesn't seem to matter.
As for the type of edits I make, there's a lot of variety. I frequently fix punctuation, grammar, or syntax, but I've also done much more substantial editing when I thought it was warranted. I've even done a couple of wholesale rewrites, including one for an inherently somewhat controversial article (Abraham); it's seen a great deal of editing since, but the overall flow and outline of the article is much closer to what I instituted than to anything it had before. I've created stubs and redirects, removed unsourced content, added citations, added new sections, combined sections, added external links, removed obviously excessive requests for citation where they were clearly unnecessary, removed requests for cleanup when the cleanup seemed to have already been done,... basically, whatever seems to be needed. I'm usually not logged in, but almost all of my edits stick. To my knowledge, I've never been reverted by a bot or administrator. In fact, the only instance I know about where I was reverted quickly was probably not deliberate. (The other editor in that case appeared to be using the whole-page edit button instead of section editing and apparently did not want to merge his own rather substantial edits with my spelling corrections, even though they were in an entirely different section.)
> When there is something* bigger than 4.4 at any point > of Brazil, all the press freaks about it for at least > a week, nationwide.
Makes sense. Brasil is on the Atlantic side, with the western border falling a few hundred miles shy of the quake zones. So, its quake profile would be pretty similar to the eastern three quarters of the US.
The difference up here is that California and Alaska, on the Pacific side, are part of the same country. Consequently, our national news doesn't freak out over a 4.5, because they have them all the time over there. Only the local and regional news go nuts, and only if it happens in a seismically tame part of the country (i.e., not on the west coast). Nobody cares if there's a 4.5 in southern California, just like the news services in Brazil probably don't freak out when there's a 5.0 in western Peru.
> While that original limit might be a little short, for > some things I believe that there should be additional > limits, especially for things like video games
Software in general, I would say. Ten-year-old software is of purely historical interest.
I should clarify that by "ten-year-old software", I don't mean software that started being developed more than ten years ago. I mean software that was released ten years ago or more. New versions should still be protected, since they contain new work. Only the old version should fall into the public domain.
With a span of ten years, this means Windows Me, for example, would fall into the public domain this fall. I'm sure that would generate a lot of excitement. Woo, free Windows! Only caveat is, it would be Windows Me.
Windows XP will be ten years old in 2011, but ONLY the original release of Windows XP, which absolutely nobody is still using, for very good reasons. If you wanted to use SP1, with the ten-year rule, you'd still need a license from Microsoft until 2012. For SP2, the oldest version that ANYONE is still using at this point, you'd need a license until 2014; for 2b until 2016; for 2c until 2017. For Windows XP SP3, the oldest version I would recommend under any circumstances at this point, you'd need a license until 2018, and more recent updates would be protected for even longer.
So like I said, ten-year-old software is of purely historical interest. Nobody uses it in the real world. If it were public domain and therefore totally free... still nobody would use it in the real world. Ten-year-old software has no significant commercial potential left in it.
So for software, I would like to see the copyright term be ten years. That would be long enough.
For music and books, however, it should be longer. At least twenty years, IMO, and I can see arguments for forty or fifty. That should be from date of publication, though, or date of copyright registration, or the date on the copyright notice on the work, whichever is soonest. The "death of the author" thing, quite aside from belying the ostensible purpose of copyright, also places an unreasonable research burden on people trying to figure out whether a given work is public domain yet or not. The date of the author's death is not always readily ascertainable. Date of publication is much easier to determine.
> We have a right to free speech, and free press. This > encompasses not only a right to our own original speech, > but to repeat the speech of other people.
Free speech means that you are free to repeat and argue in favor of or against the political ideas of other people, but copyright law, even with the much reviled DMCA, does not in any way curtail this.
> The NHS here in the UK has many problems, but > it's still nowhere near as screwed up as a system > without any national healthcare, in my opinion.
We actually have pretty good healthcare in the US. The main complaints are that it's not entirely unlimited (although, the limits are higher than in most countries with socialized healthcare) and not free of charge. Our health care would NOT be improved by letting the federal government take over. Quite the contrary. It wouldn't improve the level of care people receive, and it *certainly* wouldn't make anything cheaper.
You must have been significantly closer to the epicenter. Where I was (attending school in Massillon), only a percentage of the people who were seated indoors claimed to have felt it. Nobody who was standing noticed anything. My class was out on the playground at the time, so we only heard about it after we came in from recess. We were pretty disappointed that we'd missed it, because an earthquake large enough to feel is pretty much a once-in-a-lifetime proposition in Ohio.
> Only in Chile would a 7.75 earthquake be considered 'moderate.'
I think there are a couple of other places too, most of which are on one edge or another of the Pacific. But yeah, Chile is one of the major earthquake zones.
On the other end of the spectrum you have places like Ohio. Anything over 3.0 dominates the news for days. I still remember where I was when we had a 4.something in the mid eighties, which a few people even claimed they *felt*. People didn't stop talking about that one for weeks.
> I wish there was more money for space, but for heaven's > sake - if it really was a choice between socialised > healthcare for people, or socialised manned space travel, > I'd still put the former first.
I disagree, strongly. The government doesn't have a long history of screwing up space exploration extremely badly. Arguably they've paid too much for some things, but other than that NASA hasn't done a bad job. And even if they DO a bad job with space exploration, it's not that big a deal.
Health care, on the other hand, is far too important to let the government run it. I'm pretty sure they'll run socialized health care with approximately the same level of competence and skill they've displayed running Medicare and Social Security. Do Not Want.
> Random defined as "any given result is as likely as any other". > If you are applying that to a sequence of values that has > already been produced, that would be called a uniform > distribution, not randomness.
On the contrary, uniformity is an additional constraint on the distribution that makes some sequences artificially more or less likely than others. If a given distribution is guaranteed to be uniform, then it is NOT random, in the statistical/mathematical sense. (However, a uniform distribution is likely to be described as "random" by normal people who have never had a statistics class.)
> Likelihood of an event occurring is not objective, even > without taking into quantum physics into account. > It depends on how much information you have about the > process that will generate the event.
In a nutshell, yes. Well, mostly yes, for practical purposes.
Strictly speaking, if somebody has information that can be used to predict the outcome, then ipso facto the process is deterministic and thus by definition not random. Incidentally, some theologians (in particular, a pretty good percentage of Calvinists) hold that absolutely everything is 100% deterministic right down to the particle level, including human behavior and everything; if they're right, NOTHING is strictly random in the mathematical sense.
Which is why cryptographers talk about "cryptographically secure pseudorandom" number generation, which generally involves collecting entropy from some source that an attacker presumably doesn't have access to and can't predict, and using that to reseed a PRNG algorithm with sufficient frequency that no pattern could become detectable. This kind of number generation is NOT random in the mathematical sense, but it's good enough for many purposes because it's very difficult to predict without access to information that the attacker doesn't have. On the other hand, *you* do have the information, and the calculation could be duplicated, if you had any reason to do so, because it's totally deterministic. Because it's deterministic, cryptographers consistently avoid calling it "random". They use the word "pseudorandom" instead.
It's interesting that you brought up quantum physics, because particle-level events, such as radioactive decay, are widely considered to be the best available source of entropy, since even the top particle-physics experts haven't got the slightest idea how to predict them in detail, and so presumably neither does the guy trying to break into your server or read your encrypted email or whatever.
So yeah, if no outcome can be reliably *determined* to be more likely than any other outcome, given the information available to the relevant parties, then it just about may as well be random, for practical purposes. And that's actually fairly similar to what you said, more or less. (Except for that first part about "uniform". I disagree entirely with that part.)
> It arrives as a properly configured and fully > functional bundle of hardware and software
Wait, we're talking about a Windows system here, right?
It arrives as no such thing. It arrives as a horribly misconfigured near-useless paperweight.
It takes *hours* to get a new Windows system (or a fresh install) configured properly and ready for actual use. Among other things, you have to create a proper user account, password-protect the Administrator account, turn off Welcome Center, spend about four hours installing service packs and security updates, install Antivirus software and get that up to date, turn off the "offer to erase my desktop icons every five minutes" wizard, turn off Aero and set the theme back to Classic so the users will recognize and know how to use it, install whatever software you need because Windows doesn't *come* with such basic things as a decent word processor (with such advanced state-of-the-art 1985 features as spellcheck), and go systematically through the Control Panel and change about half the settings, because the defaults are beyond horrible and get worse with every passing version. The defaults for the Folder Settings have gotten so bad you can't really even use Windows Explorer until you fix it.
Several ways, but probably the most important, for Microsoft, is that it makes the sales numbers for Vista, and now Seven, look vaguely respectable. This is very important to the stockholders.
> It's a lot easier to make the case that the end user > benefits for actually recieving two (non-concurrent) > licenses for the price of a single license
Except that nobody actually needs or wants that.
> I don't think the OEM price for Vista or Win7 is any different from XP
You don't know that. None of the big OEMs will say what they pay for Windows. You're *guessing* that it's the same for Vista and Seven as it was for XP.
> You don't see Apple offering a free downgrade > option from Leopard to Tiger, do you?
You don't see Apple users steadfastly refusing to touch Leopard with a ten foot pole and holding onto Tiger for dear life, either. The last time you saw anything like that was with the transition from OS 9 to OS X, and at that time Apple shipped dual-boot setups for a couple of years and continued selling OS 9 for a while longer after that.
Granted, Apple didn't ship OS9-only systems after a certain point, but since there were never any third-party OEMs, they weren't really telling other companies what configurations they could and couldn't sell, so it's a little different than Microsoft's situation.
We've got a rotary phone that we got from the phone company back when that was the only place you could get them. It's beige, which proves it's one of the newer models; a few years earlier phones were only available in black. We've moved seven times since we got it, three times long-distance, so it's been mounted and unmounted and thrown in boxes with assorted other junk and carted around and remounted, repeatedly. The receiver has been dropped from head-height to the floor WAY too many times to count or even estimate, and on several occasions the whole phone has come off its mounting (it's a wall-mount phone) and clattered to the kitchen floor (usually linoleum). I won't even try to describe the amount of abuse the cord has taken. We never bother to unplug it when there's an electrical storm (remember, wallphone: unplugging means unmounting), so it has taken the kinds of line surges that kill a modem dead, any number of times.
For all that, it's in perfect working order.
Now if I could just get the jack to stay on the wall in our current house... (some idiot mounted the jack onto plaster where there's no stud).
> There needs to be a slashdot poll to see > how many people still wear watches.
I wore a watch when I was a kid, in the eighties. It was a black all-plastic job that had "water resistant" printed on it and actually _meant_ it. (I wore it in the municipal swimming pool routinely.) I don't know what it cost, probably less than $15 in today's money, adjusted for inflation. I wore that thing for years.
But when I was in junior high, the battery wore out, and then I realized something. Whenever I need to know the time, I'm always in a room that has a clock. This is still true today. When I need to know the time, I'm generally either at home (clock on the microwave, clock on the computer, clocks on the walls in half of the rooms including the bathroom...) or at work (clocks on all the computers and phones, plus analog clocks on the walls).
When I'm someplace that doesn't have a clock on the wall, such as at church or at the store, I generally don't need to check what time it is. I mean, I know approximately, and that's good enough. I don't have anywhere important to be right after church (certainly not anywhere _more_ important), and I'm not going to change the length of the meeting by worrying about the time anyway. (Actually, I now keep a portable clock at church, because a year or so ago I got roped into teaching an adult Sunday School class, and I like to know how much time we've got left before people from the other classes start coming in for the worship service. But I just keep the clock in the cabinet and get it out when I teach. It's easier than wearing a watch everywhere all the time.)
As for the store, I wouldn't have _gone_ if I didn't have time to do what I needed before I had to be anywhere; I'd wait and go when I actually have enough time.
If I'm taking the dog for a walk around town, it's because I have plenty of time right now (it's probably my day off), and it doesn't matter what time it's getting to be.
I don't GO to places that don't have clocks when I'm pressed for time.
> There's a clock on my celphone, there was a clock on my pager
I am pleased to report that I have never owned either of these kinds of devices, and I sincerely hope I never will. Like with checking the time, I've found that whenever I need to make a call... I'm always in a place that has a phone -- a real phone, which you can actually hear, and which has a receiver large enough that you can position the speaker by your ear and the mic in front of your mouth at the same time, and a dialing interface large enough that it's convenient to use with adult fingers. And when somebody needs to reach me and I'm in a place where I don't mind being reached... I'm either at home, or at work. There are phones (again, _real_ phones) in both places. When I'm anywhere else, as a rule, I'm generally occupied and wouldn't *want* people calling me and would probably leave the phone at home anyway, or turn it off. If I ever take a cellphone with me into a grocery store (much less to church), you officially have my permission to use deadly force to put me out of my misery. I would be much better off dead than living like that.
It depends on whose definition of "random" you use.
Mathematicians and computer scientists generally (and statisticians always) define random as "any given result is as likely as any other", which is not entirely the same thing as merely "unpredictable". For example, in cryptography, mere unpredictability is adequate for most purposes, but such series are not considered to be truly (mathematically) random, hence the term "pseudorandom".
Normal people on the street (i.e., laypersons when it comes to mathematics) generally define "random" in a way that is closer to what a statistician would call an _even_ distribution, but with additional constraints. For example, if a series of thirty integers between 1 and 10 starts with 1, it's not fully "random". If it ends with 10, it's not fully "random". If it contains an ascending sequence of three adjascent numbers anywhere within it, most people would say that it is "not very random".
Similarly, if the "random" option on a "show my photos" screensaver picks the same picture twice in five minutes when there are fifteen minutes' worth of photos, it's "not random enough", and the software should be programmed to avoid this so as to keep the selection "random". The same logic applies to "random" playlist generation. Mathematically speaking, constraining a sequence in these kinds of ways makes it _less_ random (since it makes some outcomes much more unlikely than others, if not outright impossible), but most people will perceive the result as _more_ random, because they're not using the mathematicians' definition of "random".
This is one reason why the option is often called "shuffle" instead of "random". Programmers are uncomfortable using the word "random" to describe the kind of randomness users want. Personally, I wrote my own playlist generation algorithm, and it is extensively non-random. It goes out of its way to switch between genres as often as possible (after every track isn't possible, because more than half of my collection is baroque; but it switches genres as often as it can), and to mix up each genre so that the next track from the same genre will be by a different artist or composer, and to mix up each artist or composer so that the next track by the same guy will be a different song, preferably from a different album. Additionally, it plays any given track significantly more often if I've given it a higher rating. I know that the algorithm is very deterministic and entirely non-random, because I wrote it. There isn't a single call to rand() in there anywhere. My family, however, would certainly describe the resulting playlist as "random", because the songs are all mixed up. It never plays the same kind of thing twice in a row, ever. In other words, it fits the layman's definition of "random".
So yeah, there are different ideas about what "random" means.
Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the word "random", without further qualification, is too ambiguous and unclear to be very useful, and so I have begun to make an effort to substitute other words and phrases whenever possible. If I mean that a given value was chosen for no particular reason other than that one needed to be chosen, I say "arbitrary". If I mean "cryptographically secure", I say that. (Of course, there are different levels of cryptographic security. But at least you know exactly what _kind_ of randomness I'm talking about.)
There's an additional complicating factor nobody has yet mentioned here: the difference between exchange rates and purchasing power parity. This is always a factor when you're comparing prices across international borders, and *particularly* between countries with drastically different economies, and in this case it's further complicated by the fact that the exchange rates for the Renminbi (i.e., the Chinese Yuan) do not float as naturally as those for most currencies, due to the Chinese government's as-yet incomplete adoption of free-market economic policies.
Exactly how much impact this has on relative prices of DVDs in each country could make an interesting paper, at the very least.
This is untrue. SCSI was on the *decline* when Apple adopted it (not because the computer systems that used it were abandoning it, but because people were abandoning the computer systems that used it in favor of microcomputers). When Apple adopted SCSI it picked back up a little, because Apple ships a lot more hardware than anyone else who ever used the technology. But SCSI was a minicomputer technology for years before Apple ever touched it, and was on the way out as minicomputers became the laughingstock of the industry. ("You're still using WHAT? Dude, we've had IBM Compatibles for years.") Eventually, Apple realized that SCSI was dead and finally adopted IDE (what the kids these days are calling PATA), but by then it was the mid *nineties*, and every other microcomputer manufacturer on the planet had been using IDE for about a decade.
> USB,
I'll give you that one. A lot of PC makers included USB ports on their computers, but nobody ever other than Apple ever *used* them for anything, until USB 2.0 came along with its Mass Storage Device usefulness.
Apple, on the other hand, was behind USB all the way, completely dropping ADB and printer and serial ports from model after model (starting with the original iMac), thereby forcing peripheral manufacturers to support USB if they wanted to be compatible with Macs. This had limited effectiveness, because only about 10% of peripherals supported Macs anyway in that era, because prior to USB their ports were different from the ports on other computers. (This meant that supporting Apple increased the per-unit cost of your peripheral and made you less competitive. Unlike drivers, which can be developed once and then used infinitely, putting actual additional hardware in your peripheral added user-noticeable amounts to your unit cost.) So a lot of peripherals still didn't support USB for a while. But Apple pushed it as hard as they could. They could not have done more to support the technology. Nobody else was behind USB like Apple was.
> FireWire,
For this one I think "led the charge" is disingenuous wording. It would be more reasonable to say that Apple *tried* to lead a charge, and ended up charging alone. Apple thought this technology was just eleven different kinds of awesome, and... nobody else ever cared. To this day, I have still never seen, in person, an actual peripheral device that uses 1394. I've seen devices that use a lot of interfaces. Just off the top of my head, I've seen hardware that uses serial (RS232 of course, but also Mac serial and DEC serial (CAT4 cable and MMJ connectors, anyone?)), parallel (with an impressive variety of connector types), SCSI (I think I even have a SCSI terminator sitting in a drawer at work), ST506, IDE/ATA/ATAPI, SATA, USB, thinnet (ethernet with thin coax and BNC), standard ethernet with UTP and RJ45 connectors (including peripherals, notably printers, that use ethernet directly), PS/2, ISA, EISA, PCI, AGP, PCIe, PC-MCIA,... but I've never seen anything that uses 1394. I've seen a lot of computers that have the port, and I even have a couple of the cables, but I've never seen anything that would plug into the other end.
> Bluetooth, integrated webcams,
Yeah, okay.
> multitouch,
Umm, that's just a marketing buzzword Apple invented. The underlying technology had been around for a long time, although it was mostly used in devices that weren't intended for most people to own (like, say, kiosks).
> WiFi, sudden motion sensors, new battery technologies, > unibody construction, DVD burners...
Now you've been drinking too much reality-distortion Kool-Aid.
Can we be glad they did a certain thing, without liking them in general?
I mean, I'm also extremely glad they released IE8, because it's a lot easier to support than earlier versions. That doesn't mean I don't hate them with every fiber of my being for making IE6 in the first place.
> Besides which, doesn't the right to face their > accuser only apply if the defendants are US citizens?
Not to my knowledge. (I'm only going on the constitution itself, though; I don't know the case law. And IANAL.) However, to the best of my knowledge (with the same caveats), the right to face your accuser only applies in criminal cases. The seventh amendment, regarding civil suits, does not mention facing your accuser (unless the phrase "common law" implies this, but if so that's news to me).
But yeah, I'm pretty sure unwillingness to show up in court effectively defenestrates a lot of rights the defendant might otherwise have in a civil suit.
Slashdot Mirror
> If I wait for the best tickets to drop in price,
> they may sell out before they reach the pricelevel
> I'm willing to pay, so I need to buy the second best
> tickets, but these sold out at $100 even earlier.
This is easily solved, and along with it the problem that some people might rank the seats differently than others (e.g., one guy wants to be right in front of the speakers, and somebody else would rather be near the center of the stage).
The solution is simple: all the tickets are the same price on any given day. Let's say you start selling the tickets 100 days before the event, at ludicrously obscene prices (say, a million bucks a seat). You wait, because you don't have a million bucks, and if you did you wouldn't spend it on tickets for a single concert, because you're at least partially sane. So you wait. Each day the price goes down. After a week or so, it's down to eighty grand per seat, which you still can't afford, but only four tickets have sold, to some billionaire who just had to be next to the center aisle in the front row no matter what. When the price comes down to twenty grand per seat, a couple of CEOs snap up the private VIP booth, and a lunatic-fringe extreme fan from Ann Arbor sells his truck and buys a front-row seat. But there are still seats available in the front row, and the price is coming down...
Furthermore, this system and the current system aren't necessarily mutually exclusive. They could split up the seats in a predetermined way and sell some of them at fixed prices and others in the manner described above. The proportions (how many tickets are sold each way) would be up to the organizers of the concert, I suppose (though it might also be a negotiating point when you're trying to book popular performers).
For simplicity, we'll say you divide the seats in half down the middle of the center aisle. All the seats left of center are sold for the same low price of $150/seat (or whatever) until they're gone, but the seats to the right of the center aisle are priced obscenely high at first, and then the price gradually drops until they're all sold out (probably somewhere in the $250-$500 range, though of course the exact price is going to depend on the popularity of the performers and various other factors).
> > Sellers could cut them out by raising their
> > prices so that demand matches supply.
>
> Of course, for the millions of people attending
> events, they'd be spending a lot more than they were
Nobody's holding a gun to your head and making you buy a ticket. People would only be spending what the tickets are worth to them.
> or able to attend fewer events,
On the contrary, if ticket prices went up until market equilibrium was reached, people who are willing to spend a bit more for the tickets would be able to attend as many events as they want, because there would *be* tickets available to buy (legitimately, not from scalpers), and they'd be easy to find. The artificial scarcity makes it *harder* to attend. With fixed-price ticket sales, if an event is even a little bit popular then you just can't go, unless your time is worth absolutely nothing and you can afford to go on a multi-week fanboy quest to hunt down the last remaining ticket from a scalper in Kansas.
> especially if they want to sit in anything remotely
> resembling a good seat. And front row seats would
> only be affordable by billionaires and the five richest
There aren't enough billionaires and kings to fill up the whole front row, so presumably the prices wouldn't be *quite* that high. Ordinary CEOs, even of medium-sized companies, would probably be able to afford front-row tickets to most events.
Hey, if the good seats aren't more expensive than the cheap seats, something is wrong. It's not like a normal mortal can ever buy a front-row ticket to anything anyway. They're always sold out already, even if you're the first one in line the first day tickets go on sale. I think the groupies must snap them up and scalp them, or something.
> But hey, people who were already making a healthy
> profit would make even more! Hurrah!
Oh, yes, I forgot that it's automatically evil anytime anyone makes any money for any reason, ever. It doesn't matter that it would make things better for everyone. If somebody's going to make money, it's obviously a bad thing.
> More people die in car accidents every
> single day than died in this earthquake.
Oh, sure, *worldwide*, but the earth is a big place. The earthquake killed a whole bunch of people in a *small area*, all at once.
> So what happens if instead of 100 8.3 eartquakes we have 10 @ 10.1?
How about 1 at 11.9?
Hey, it would give a seismologist something interesting to study, right?
> I actually liked the ACLU
Wow. *There* are some words I've not heard before. How do you *like* an organization made entirely of bureaucrats and lawyers?
Don't get me wrong: the ACLU serves a purpose, which is arguably very important, and every once in a great while they do something useful.
But man, O man, they sure can make an unholy nuisance of themselves the rest of the time.
Yeah, my edits generally stick too, and almost all of them are anon/IP, not because I haven't created an account, but because Wikipedia's session-timeout policy is so short that logging in seldom does any good. You can log in, but by the time you're ready to commit an edit, you're typically not logged in any more. I can't imagine what possessed them to make it so short. I've got better things to do than log in *again* each and every time I want to make an edit. So I usually don't bother. And it doesn't seem to matter.
... basically, whatever seems to be needed. I'm usually not logged in, but almost all of my edits stick. To my knowledge, I've never been reverted by a bot or administrator. In fact, the only instance I know about where I was reverted quickly was probably not deliberate. (The other editor in that case appeared to be using the whole-page edit button instead of section editing and apparently did not want to merge his own rather substantial edits with my spelling corrections, even though they were in an entirely different section.)
As for the type of edits I make, there's a lot of variety. I frequently fix punctuation, grammar, or syntax, but I've also done much more substantial editing when I thought it was warranted. I've even done a couple of wholesale rewrites, including one for an inherently somewhat controversial article (Abraham); it's seen a great deal of editing since, but the overall flow and outline of the article is much closer to what I instituted than to anything it had before. I've created stubs and redirects, removed unsourced content, added citations, added new sections, combined sections, added external links, removed obviously excessive requests for citation where they were clearly unnecessary, removed requests for cleanup when the cleanup seemed to have already been done,
I don't know. I was busy playing Zork -- the copyright to which, incidentally, is also held by Activision at this point.
> When there is something* bigger than 4.4 at any point
> of Brazil, all the press freaks about it for at least
> a week, nationwide.
Makes sense. Brasil is on the Atlantic side, with the western border falling a few hundred miles shy of the quake zones. So, its quake profile would be pretty similar to the eastern three quarters of the US.
The difference up here is that California and Alaska, on the Pacific side, are part of the same country. Consequently, our national news doesn't freak out over a 4.5, because they have them all the time over there. Only the local and regional news go nuts, and only if it happens in a seismically tame part of the country (i.e., not on the west coast). Nobody cares if there's a 4.5 in southern California, just like the news services in Brazil probably don't freak out when there's a 5.0 in western Peru.
> While that original limit might be a little short, for
> some things I believe that there should be additional
> limits, especially for things like video games
Software in general, I would say. Ten-year-old software is of purely historical interest.
I should clarify that by "ten-year-old software", I don't mean software that started being developed more than ten years ago. I mean software that was released ten years ago or more. New versions should still be protected, since they contain new work. Only the old version should fall into the public domain.
With a span of ten years, this means Windows Me, for example, would fall into the public domain this fall. I'm sure that would generate a lot of excitement. Woo, free Windows! Only caveat is, it would be Windows Me.
Windows XP will be ten years old in 2011, but ONLY the original release of Windows XP, which absolutely nobody is still using, for very good reasons. If you wanted to use SP1, with the ten-year rule, you'd still need a license from Microsoft until 2012. For SP2, the oldest version that ANYONE is still using at this point, you'd need a license until 2014; for 2b until 2016; for 2c until 2017. For Windows XP SP3, the oldest version I would recommend under any circumstances at this point, you'd need a license until 2018, and more recent updates would be protected for even longer.
So like I said, ten-year-old software is of purely historical interest. Nobody uses it in the real world. If it were public domain and therefore totally free... still nobody would use it in the real world. Ten-year-old software has no significant commercial potential left in it.
So for software, I would like to see the copyright term be ten years. That would be long enough.
For music and books, however, it should be longer. At least twenty years, IMO, and I can see arguments for forty or fifty. That should be from date of publication, though, or date of copyright registration, or the date on the copyright notice on the work, whichever is soonest. The "death of the author" thing, quite aside from belying the ostensible purpose of copyright, also places an unreasonable research burden on people trying to figure out whether a given work is public domain yet or not. The date of the author's death is not always readily ascertainable. Date of publication is much easier to determine.
> We have a right to free speech, and free press. This
> encompasses not only a right to our own original speech,
> but to repeat the speech of other people.
Free speech means that you are free to repeat and argue in favor of or against the political ideas of other people, but copyright law, even with the much reviled DMCA, does not in any way curtail this.
> The NHS here in the UK has many problems, but
> it's still nowhere near as screwed up as a system
> without any national healthcare, in my opinion.
We actually have pretty good healthcare in the US. The main complaints are that it's not entirely unlimited (although, the limits are higher than in most countries with socialized healthcare) and not free of charge. Our health care would NOT be improved by letting the federal government take over. Quite the contrary. It wouldn't improve the level of care people receive, and it *certainly* wouldn't make anything cheaper.
You must have been significantly closer to the epicenter. Where I was (attending school in Massillon), only a percentage of the people who were seated indoors claimed to have felt it. Nobody who was standing noticed anything. My class was out on the playground at the time, so we only heard about it after we came in from recess. We were pretty disappointed that we'd missed it, because an earthquake large enough to feel is pretty much a once-in-a-lifetime proposition in Ohio.
> Only in Chile would a 7.75 earthquake be considered 'moderate.'
I think there are a couple of other places too, most of which are on one edge or another of the Pacific. But yeah, Chile is one of the major earthquake zones.
On the other end of the spectrum you have places like Ohio. Anything over 3.0 dominates the news for days. I still remember where I was when we had a 4.something in the mid eighties, which a few people even claimed they *felt*. People didn't stop talking about that one for weeks.
> I wish there was more money for space, but for heaven's
> sake - if it really was a choice between socialised
> healthcare for people, or socialised manned space travel,
> I'd still put the former first.
I disagree, strongly. The government doesn't have a long history of screwing up space exploration extremely badly. Arguably they've paid too much for some things, but other than that NASA hasn't done a bad job. And even if they DO a bad job with space exploration, it's not that big a deal.
Health care, on the other hand, is far too important to let the government run it. I'm pretty sure they'll run socialized health care with approximately the same level of competence and skill they've displayed running Medicare and Social Security. Do Not Want.
> Random defined as "any given result is as likely as any other".
> If you are applying that to a sequence of values that has
> already been produced, that would be called a uniform
> distribution, not randomness.
On the contrary, uniformity is an additional constraint on the distribution that makes some sequences artificially more or less likely than others. If a given distribution is guaranteed to be uniform, then it is NOT random, in the statistical/mathematical sense. (However, a uniform distribution is likely to be described as "random" by normal people who have never had a statistics class.)
> Likelihood of an event occurring is not objective, even
> without taking into quantum physics into account.
> It depends on how much information you have about the
> process that will generate the event.
In a nutshell, yes. Well, mostly yes, for practical purposes.
Strictly speaking, if somebody has information that can be used to predict the outcome, then ipso facto the process is deterministic and thus by definition not random. Incidentally, some theologians (in particular, a pretty good percentage of Calvinists) hold that absolutely everything is 100% deterministic right down to the particle level, including human behavior and everything; if they're right, NOTHING is strictly random in the mathematical sense.
Which is why cryptographers talk about "cryptographically secure pseudorandom" number generation, which generally involves collecting entropy from some source that an attacker presumably doesn't have access to and can't predict, and using that to reseed a PRNG algorithm with sufficient frequency that no pattern could become detectable. This kind of number generation is NOT random in the mathematical sense, but it's good enough for many purposes because it's very difficult to predict without access to information that the attacker doesn't have. On the other hand, *you* do have the information, and the calculation could be duplicated, if you had any reason to do so, because it's totally deterministic. Because it's deterministic, cryptographers consistently avoid calling it "random". They use the word "pseudorandom" instead.
It's interesting that you brought up quantum physics, because particle-level events, such as radioactive decay, are widely considered to be the best available source of entropy, since even the top particle-physics experts haven't got the slightest idea how to predict them in detail, and so presumably neither does the guy trying to break into your server or read your encrypted email or whatever.
So yeah, if no outcome can be reliably *determined* to be more likely than any other outcome, given the information available to the relevant parties, then it just about may as well be random, for practical purposes. And that's actually fairly similar to what you said, more or less. (Except for that first part about "uniform". I disagree entirely with that part.)
> It arrives as a properly configured and fully
> functional bundle of hardware and software
Wait, we're talking about a Windows system here, right?
It arrives as no such thing. It arrives as a horribly misconfigured near-useless paperweight.
It takes *hours* to get a new Windows system (or a fresh install) configured properly and ready for actual use. Among other things, you have to create a proper user account, password-protect the Administrator account, turn off Welcome Center, spend about four hours installing service packs and security updates, install Antivirus software and get that up to date, turn off the "offer to erase my desktop icons every five minutes" wizard, turn off Aero and set the theme back to Classic so the users will recognize and know how to use it, install whatever software you need because Windows doesn't *come* with such basic things as a decent word processor (with such advanced state-of-the-art 1985 features as spellcheck), and go systematically through the Control Panel and change about half the settings, because the defaults are beyond horrible and get worse with every passing version. The defaults for the Folder Settings have gotten so bad you can't really even use Windows Explorer until you fix it.
> How did they benefit?
Several ways, but probably the most important, for Microsoft, is that it makes the sales numbers for Vista, and now Seven, look vaguely respectable. This is very important to the stockholders.
> It's a lot easier to make the case that the end user
> benefits for actually recieving two (non-concurrent)
> licenses for the price of a single license
Except that nobody actually needs or wants that.
> I don't think the OEM price for Vista or Win7 is any different from XP
You don't know that. None of the big OEMs will say what they pay for Windows. You're *guessing* that it's the same for Vista and Seven as it was for XP.
> You don't see Apple offering a free downgrade
> option from Leopard to Tiger, do you?
You don't see Apple users steadfastly refusing to touch Leopard with a ten foot pole and holding onto Tiger for dear life, either. The last time you saw anything like that was with the transition from OS 9 to OS X, and at that time Apple shipped dual-boot setups for a couple of years and continued selling OS 9 for a while longer after that.
Granted, Apple didn't ship OS9-only systems after a certain point, but since there were never any third-party OEMs, they weren't really telling other companies what configurations they could and couldn't sell, so it's a little different than Microsoft's situation.
We've got a rotary phone that we got from the phone company back when that was the only place you could get them. It's beige, which proves it's one of the newer models; a few years earlier phones were only available in black. We've moved seven times since we got it, three times long-distance, so it's been mounted and unmounted and thrown in boxes with assorted other junk and carted around and remounted, repeatedly. The receiver has been dropped from head-height to the floor WAY too many times to count or even estimate, and on several occasions the whole phone has come off its mounting (it's a wall-mount phone) and clattered to the kitchen floor (usually linoleum). I won't even try to describe the amount of abuse the cord has taken. We never bother to unplug it when there's an electrical storm (remember, wallphone: unplugging means unmounting), so it has taken the kinds of line surges that kill a modem dead, any number of times.
For all that, it's in perfect working order.
Now if I could just get the jack to stay on the wall in our current house... (some idiot mounted the jack onto plaster where there's no stud).
> There needs to be a slashdot poll to see
> how many people still wear watches.
I wore a watch when I was a kid, in the eighties. It was a black all-plastic job that had "water resistant" printed on it and actually _meant_ it. (I wore it in the municipal swimming pool routinely.) I don't know what it cost, probably less than $15 in today's money, adjusted for inflation. I wore that thing for years.
But when I was in junior high, the battery wore out, and then I realized something. Whenever I need to know the time, I'm always in a room that has a clock. This is still true today. When I need to know the time, I'm generally either at home (clock on the microwave, clock on the computer, clocks on the walls in half of the rooms including the bathroom...) or at work (clocks on all the computers and phones, plus analog clocks on the walls).
When I'm someplace that doesn't have a clock on the wall, such as at church or at the store, I generally don't need to check what time it is. I mean, I know approximately, and that's good enough. I don't have anywhere important to be right after church (certainly not anywhere _more_ important), and I'm not going to change the length of the meeting by worrying about the time anyway. (Actually, I now keep a portable clock at church, because a year or so ago I got roped into teaching an adult Sunday School class, and I like to know how much time we've got left before people from the other classes start coming in for the worship service. But I just keep the clock in the cabinet and get it out when I teach. It's easier than wearing a watch everywhere all the time.)
As for the store, I wouldn't have _gone_ if I didn't have time to do what I needed before I had to be anywhere; I'd wait and go when I actually have enough time.
If I'm taking the dog for a walk around town, it's because I have plenty of time right now (it's probably my day off), and it doesn't matter what time it's getting to be.
I don't GO to places that don't have clocks when I'm pressed for time.
> There's a clock on my celphone, there was a clock on my pager
I am pleased to report that I have never owned either of these kinds of devices, and I sincerely hope I never will. Like with checking the time, I've found that whenever I need to make a call... I'm always in a place that has a phone -- a real phone, which you can actually hear, and which has a receiver large enough that you can position the speaker by your ear and the mic in front of your mouth at the same time, and a dialing interface large enough that it's convenient to use with adult fingers. And when somebody needs to reach me and I'm in a place where I don't mind being reached... I'm either at home, or at work. There are phones (again, _real_ phones) in both places. When I'm anywhere else, as a rule, I'm generally occupied and wouldn't *want* people calling me and would probably leave the phone at home anyway, or turn it off. If I ever take a cellphone with me into a grocery store (much less to church), you officially have my permission to use deadly force to put me out of my misery. I would be much better off dead than living like that.
It depends on whose definition of "random" you use.
Mathematicians and computer scientists generally (and statisticians always) define random as "any given result is as likely as any other", which is not entirely the same thing as merely "unpredictable". For example, in cryptography, mere unpredictability is adequate for most purposes, but such series are not considered to be truly (mathematically) random, hence the term "pseudorandom".
Normal people on the street (i.e., laypersons when it comes to mathematics) generally define "random" in a way that is closer to what a statistician would call an _even_ distribution, but with additional constraints. For example, if a series of thirty integers between 1 and 10 starts with 1, it's not fully "random". If it ends with 10, it's not fully "random". If it contains an ascending sequence of three adjascent numbers anywhere within it, most people would say that it is "not very random".
Similarly, if the "random" option on a "show my photos" screensaver picks the same picture twice in five minutes when there are fifteen minutes' worth of photos, it's "not random enough", and the software should be programmed to avoid this so as to keep the selection "random". The same logic applies to "random" playlist generation. Mathematically speaking, constraining a sequence in these kinds of ways makes it _less_ random (since it makes some outcomes much more unlikely than others, if not outright impossible), but most people will perceive the result as _more_ random, because they're not using the mathematicians' definition of "random".
This is one reason why the option is often called "shuffle" instead of "random". Programmers are uncomfortable using the word "random" to describe the kind of randomness users want. Personally, I wrote my own playlist generation algorithm, and it is extensively non-random. It goes out of its way to switch between genres as often as possible (after every track isn't possible, because more than half of my collection is baroque; but it switches genres as often as it can), and to mix up each genre so that the next track from the same genre will be by a different artist or composer, and to mix up each artist or composer so that the next track by the same guy will be a different song, preferably from a different album. Additionally, it plays any given track significantly more often if I've given it a higher rating. I know that the algorithm is very deterministic and entirely non-random, because I wrote it. There isn't a single call to rand() in there anywhere. My family, however, would certainly describe the resulting playlist as "random", because the songs are all mixed up. It never plays the same kind of thing twice in a row, ever. In other words, it fits the layman's definition of "random".
So yeah, there are different ideas about what "random" means.
Personally, I have come to the conclusion that the word "random", without further qualification, is too ambiguous and unclear to be very useful, and so I have begun to make an effort to substitute other words and phrases whenever possible. If I mean that a given value was chosen for no particular reason other than that one needed to be chosen, I say "arbitrary". If I mean "cryptographically secure", I say that. (Of course, there are different levels of cryptographic security. But at least you know exactly what _kind_ of randomness I'm talking about.)
There's an additional complicating factor nobody has yet mentioned here: the difference between exchange rates and purchasing power parity. This is always a factor when you're comparing prices across international borders, and *particularly* between countries with drastically different economies, and in this case it's further complicated by the fact that the exchange rates for the Renminbi (i.e., the Chinese Yuan) do not float as naturally as those for most currencies, due to the Chinese government's as-yet incomplete adoption of free-market economic policies.
Exactly how much impact this has on relative prices of DVDs in each country could make an interesting paper, at the very least.
> What does [not random and not predictable] mean?
It means that while some outcomes are more likely than others, the stock market still surprises even the experts sometimes.
> Apple led the charge of SCSI,
... nobody else ever cared. To this day, I have still never seen, in person, an actual peripheral device that uses 1394. I've seen devices that use a lot of interfaces. Just off the top of my head, I've seen hardware that uses serial (RS232 of course, but also Mac serial and DEC serial (CAT4 cable and MMJ connectors, anyone?)), parallel (with an impressive variety of connector types), SCSI (I think I even have a SCSI terminator sitting in a drawer at work), ST506, IDE/ATA/ATAPI, SATA, USB, thinnet (ethernet with thin coax and BNC), standard ethernet with UTP and RJ45 connectors (including peripherals, notably printers, that use ethernet directly), PS/2, ISA, EISA, PCI, AGP, PCIe, PC-MCIA, ... but I've never seen anything that uses 1394. I've seen a lot of computers that have the port, and I even have a couple of the cables, but I've never seen anything that would plug into the other end.
This is untrue. SCSI was on the *decline* when Apple adopted it (not because the computer systems that used it were abandoning it, but because people were abandoning the computer systems that used it in favor of microcomputers). When Apple adopted SCSI it picked back up a little, because Apple ships a lot more hardware than anyone else who ever used the technology. But SCSI was a minicomputer technology for years before Apple ever touched it, and was on the way out as minicomputers became the laughingstock of the industry. ("You're still using WHAT? Dude, we've had IBM Compatibles for years.") Eventually, Apple realized that SCSI was dead and finally adopted IDE (what the kids these days are calling PATA), but by then it was the mid *nineties*, and every other microcomputer manufacturer on the planet had been using IDE for about a decade.
> USB,
I'll give you that one. A lot of PC makers included USB ports on their computers, but nobody ever other than Apple ever *used* them for anything, until USB 2.0 came along with its Mass Storage Device usefulness.
Apple, on the other hand, was behind USB all the way, completely dropping ADB and printer and serial ports from model after model (starting with the original iMac), thereby forcing peripheral manufacturers to support USB if they wanted to be compatible with Macs. This had limited effectiveness, because only about 10% of peripherals supported Macs anyway in that era, because prior to USB their ports were different from the ports on other computers. (This meant that supporting Apple increased the per-unit cost of your peripheral and made you less competitive. Unlike drivers, which can be developed once and then used infinitely, putting actual additional hardware in your peripheral added user-noticeable amounts to your unit cost.) So a lot of peripherals still didn't support USB for a while. But Apple pushed it as hard as they could. They could not have done more to support the technology. Nobody else was behind USB like Apple was.
> FireWire,
For this one I think "led the charge" is disingenuous wording. It would be more reasonable to say that Apple *tried* to lead a charge, and ended up charging alone. Apple thought this technology was just eleven different kinds of awesome, and
> Bluetooth, integrated webcams,
Yeah, okay.
> multitouch,
Umm, that's just a marketing buzzword Apple invented. The underlying technology had been around for a long time, although it was mostly used in devices that weren't intended for most people to own (like, say, kiosks).
> WiFi, sudden motion sensors, new battery technologies,
> unibody construction, DVD burners...
Now you've been drinking too much reality-distortion Kool-Aid.
> Is today the day we like Microsoft?
Can we be glad they did a certain thing, without liking them in general?
I mean, I'm also extremely glad they released IE8, because it's a lot easier to support than earlier versions. That doesn't mean I don't hate them with every fiber of my being for making IE6 in the first place.
> Besides which, doesn't the right to face their
> accuser only apply if the defendants are US citizens?
Not to my knowledge. (I'm only going on the constitution itself, though; I don't know the case law. And IANAL.) However, to the best of my knowledge (with the same caveats), the right to face your accuser only applies in criminal cases. The seventh amendment, regarding civil suits, does not mention facing your accuser (unless the phrase "common law" implies this, but if so that's news to me).
But yeah, I'm pretty sure unwillingness to show up in court effectively defenestrates a lot of rights the defendant might otherwise have in a civil suit.