Current top story on Google news right now (11:52 EDT) is US and Russia sign nuclear pact, with a link to "all 6,108 news articles". The second story about the West Virginia mine disaster/rescue has more than 10,000 news articles. In what economic system can such redundancy survive (or would you want it to survive)? Even if 99% are syndicated wire stories, that still leaves 60 to 100 different original versions that are substitutable.
The technology has eliminated local news monopolies. Just because I live in NYC doesn't mean I have to get my news from the NY Times or any other local newspaper for that matter. The Washington Post, LA Times, even BBC news are direct competitors and perfectly acceptable substitutes. What this means is that they can't all survive, nor should they.
The fallacy in the Parent's argument is that market pressure on all news organizations doesn't mean all of them will go under (which would obviously be horrible). Market pressure usually means a culling with fewer competitors emerging. That's not a bad outcome for the reader. It's more efficient, and it's how markets are supposed to work!
In all your replies, you're confusing economic change due to technological innovation with change forced by regulation/taxation. The former is voluntarily adopted and is a net benefit to the economy, while the latter always comes at a net economic cost.
Of course there are exceptions. In particular, voluntary market behavior can sometimes lead to inefficient outcomes and pollution is a good textbook example of this - look up 'externalities'. You can argue that global warming is the result of a similar externality, and therefore it's worth incurring the cost of taxation/regulation now so we can reap the benefits of less warming later. But you can't argue (as you seem to do) that regulation in and of itself is a net economic benefit - that's just false.
Great, except that you need to classify carbon as "pollution" for your argument to make sense. And carbon is "pollution" only if it significantly contributes to global warming, so your argument has to assume its conclusion!
Limiting carbon emissions is expensive - that's why there is a legitimate argument about how much human contribution to emissions matters and whether incurring those costs now is the best way to respond to the risks of global warming in the future.
Funny you should use the 'vulture' analogy, because it implies the company taken over is already 'dead'. Even 'vultures' serve an important function in the 'ecosystem', movies like "Pretty Woman" not withstanding!
It's not so much the cost to run their own fiber (marginal cost), which could be very low. The relevant cost here is opportunity cost; they could be charging other content providers to use that fiber and the revenue they're giving up is the real cost of using it for their own content.
There's a reason the concepts of scarcity and opportunity cost are introduced in the first lecture of every Econ 101 course that I know of. Too bad the concepts don't stick!
Good summary, but I call bullshit on the article. Most of the problems you mention and the others in the article are common popular misinterpretations of statistical results, but that doesn't mean they're common mistakes made by researchers in the studies themselves. Any rookie peer-reviewer would spot them immediately if they ever make it into a manuscript.
This doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of bad statistics-based studies out there, especially in medicine. But the problems are usually much more subtle than the article implies. Standard statistical methods require many regularity and sampling assumptions to be valid, and a lot of times researchers take these assumptions for granted when even a little probing would show that they're violated. A lot of advances in recent econometrics have been in the development of robust methods (valid when standard assumptions are violated), and those advances unfortunately take a long time to filter down to the 'applied researcher' level. If you're an applied researcher, it's generally unlikely you'll use statistical advances you didn't learn as a grad student.
And frankly, I have no idea what the Frequentist/Bayesian debate has to do with any of this. To suggest that using Bayesian methods is some sort of solution for the problems listed in the article is ridiculous.
Apparently, Apple considered Google's Android a stab in the back. So now Google's CEO (Eric Schmidt) is off Apple's board of directors and Apple is suing HTC for patent infringement (Google is not named, but is the indirect target).
I'm surprised this whole fight hasn't gotten more coverage on Slashdot. In any case, I'm squarely in Google's corner on this issue. We need Android to succeed to preserve competition and openness in the smart phone and tablet/e-reader markets.
Given the errors in my 'basic profile', the most useful info about me on that page is the profile of my neighborhood. But that's always been available from my zip code, something I freely give to anyone who asks (including checkout clerks).
Glib but largely irrelevant reply. The question is whether, analogously, PF should be able to prevent radio stations from playing single songs from their albums on grounds of "artistic integrity". Or perhaps PF should be able to prevent me from hitting FF on my music player to skip what I consider a boring song on their album.
Actually, the analogies above are somewhat misleading, but they at least tell you that there's a serious question about how far artist control should extend. And as someone pointed out, the only reason they have any control at all is because of copyright law, so it's not some natural right we are obviously supposed to defend!
Also, journalists do not reveal their sources. We didn't know the identity of 'deep throat' for close to 40 years despite intense speculation. More recently, journalists went to jail for not revealing the identity of their sources in the Valerie Plame case.
My apologies for the curt response and congratulations on your baby!
This is not a leak. It's a standard way of releasing information to the public without having to make an official statement/accusation. And the New York Times doesn't pay for information, period. Don't you (and your moderators) read any newspapers?!
The latest free Divx codec decodes h.264 quite nicely and I'm almost certain it's multithreaded. K-Lite codec pack includes the free Divx decoder as an option for decoding h.264, so that's another way to get it on your system besides downloading the Divx bundle.
What's this got to do with privacy?! Do you complain about privacy when you hire an accountant to do your taxes and you give him every piece of financial information about you in a given year? Do you complain about privacy when you hire a financial planner and he not only learns everything about your current finances, but also your future intentions?
Half the comments are thinking about this in a knee-jerk and incorrect way. This is simply the concept of "professional advisor" automated and extended to apply to other aspects beyond tax or financial planning. Who knows - its recommendations may be actually quite useful.
"Credibility of your article nullified" - ad-hominem is irrelevant here.
To my mind, the article's main argument is that Google in the search market today is in the same position Microsoft was in the OS market in the 1990s (near monopoly of a critical technology). This by itself is not sufficient grounds for regulation, but if Google starts to leverage this monopoly to choke competition in related areas (as Microsoft did), then we have a problem. The article lists a couple of examples where Google might be doing this (mapping, real estate).
I don't think the evidence is sufficient to start talking about regulation, but the parallels to Microsoft aren't obviously false.
Since Apple also sells (and marks up) its own hardware, they get to distribute their margins however they like between hardware and software. Microsoft doesn't have that degree of freedom.
I think this is the wrong way to think about cable service pricing. The marginal cost of providing you with an additional channel of cable is essentially zero. The pricing here is completely demand-driven and is about segmenting the market (price discrimination). In this, cable service tier pricing is closer to pricing different versions of Windows (Home, Business, Premium, etc, which all have the same marginal cost) than it is to bundling discrete goods.
Once you see it that way, you'll see that what you're asking for is like asking for a cheaper version of Windows without wordpad or paint because you don't use those programs and you shouldn't subsidize all those wordpad and paint users. In fact, cable companies would love to do that since it allows them to price discriminate more finely, but they won't do it because people will complain about complexity the same way they complain about multiple versions of Windows. Tier-pricing is a happy medium.
This is the paradox of Linux: development occurs in a diverse, open 'bazaar' environment, but the user experience is very much 'cathedral'-like. Want to install an app? Must go through the 'one true source' (repository). Sure you can search through Freshmeat or even Sourceforge, but who has the patience (or the know-how) to mess around with tarballs and text config files?
Windows actually has a much more diverse, dynamic, even open user experience when it comes to installing software. A significant proportion of open-source apps are available for Windows, certainly big ones like Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. And the universe of closed-source Windows freeware is gigantic and varied, and dwarfs anything available for Linux through Freshmeat, etc.
I don't really know the actual explanation, and I certainly don't discount sheer stupidity when it comes to the actions of the Egyptian government, but I suspect it has something to do with those vast deserts you mention. I think there's a fair amount of cross-border smuggling of weapons/contraband at the Libyan and Sudanese borders, and a cheap/portable GPS device like the iPhone 3G could give smugglers a huge technology advantage (or eliminate a disadvantage) relative to the border patrols.
Of course, smugglers should be able to get their hands on iPhones regardless of a ban, but it may have to do with how easy it is to get your hands on one.
What's 'inherently impossible' about either outcome of creating the 'big rock'? I can either 'create' a rock that's too heavy for me to lift, or my lifting abilities exceed my 'heavy rock creation' abilities. Both outcomes are perfectly possible - there are no logical contradictions.
What the paradox likely demonstrates is that the concept of 'omnipotence' as we typically understand the word is internally inconsistent.
This wasn't the case a year ago when the iPhone first got on the market. My wife got one the first day it was available and soon after spent about a month in Egypt. While she was careful not use the phone too much (being aware of int'l roaming charges), she didn't realize that the phone downloaded email message AND attachments in the background, racking up about 100 Megs and $4000 of data roaming usage.
There was a rash of similar stories in the media at the time (at least one was on slashdot), and AT&T was nice enough to cut the bill down to about $400 by treating us as if we were on the best int'l roaming plan they had. Eventually Apple updated their firmware to change the default behavior of the phone.
I suspect the incident in this story will result in changing default behavior of the aircard and I doubt AT&T will make this family cough up the $20K.
When the government, which legislates what is legal and what is not, tells the telcos to do something that might be illegal under current law, is it not fair to expect the government to legislate immunity?
Telcos are not exactly popular around here, but they were really being squeezed between a rock (the government, which controls their destiny through legislation and regulation, demanding actions in the name of national security) and a hard place (the possible illegality of the action demanded by the government).
I think the fault lies wholly with the government that demanded the action in the first place. Giving telcos immunity is only fair in this case.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a more likely explanation:
Current top story on Google news right now (11:52 EDT) is US and Russia sign nuclear pact, with a link to "all 6,108 news articles". The second story about the West Virginia mine disaster/rescue has more than 10,000 news articles. In what economic system can such redundancy survive (or would you want it to survive)? Even if 99% are syndicated wire stories, that still leaves 60 to 100 different original versions that are substitutable.
The technology has eliminated local news monopolies. Just because I live in NYC doesn't mean I have to get my news from the NY Times or any other local newspaper for that matter. The Washington Post, LA Times, even BBC news are direct competitors and perfectly acceptable substitutes. What this means is that they can't all survive, nor should they.
The fallacy in the Parent's argument is that market pressure on all news organizations doesn't mean all of them will go under (which would obviously be horrible). Market pressure usually means a culling with fewer competitors emerging. That's not a bad outcome for the reader. It's more efficient, and it's how markets are supposed to work!
In all your replies, you're confusing economic change due to technological innovation with change forced by regulation/taxation. The former is voluntarily adopted and is a net benefit to the economy, while the latter always comes at a net economic cost.
Of course there are exceptions. In particular, voluntary market behavior can sometimes lead to inefficient outcomes and pollution is a good textbook example of this - look up 'externalities'. You can argue that global warming is the result of a similar externality, and therefore it's worth incurring the cost of taxation/regulation now so we can reap the benefits of less warming later. But you can't argue (as you seem to do) that regulation in and of itself is a net economic benefit - that's just false.
Great, except that you need to classify carbon as "pollution" for your argument to make sense. And carbon is "pollution" only if it significantly contributes to global warming, so your argument has to assume its conclusion!
Limiting carbon emissions is expensive - that's why there is a legitimate argument about how much human contribution to emissions matters and whether incurring those costs now is the best way to respond to the risks of global warming in the future.
Funny you should use the 'vulture' analogy, because it implies the company taken over is already 'dead'. Even 'vultures' serve an important function in the 'ecosystem', movies like "Pretty Woman" not withstanding!
The market disagrees with both of you - market cap is 1.96B.
http://www.google.com/finance?q=novl
Of course, a takeover bid usually involves a significant premium, so offering 2B seems low.
It's not so much the cost to run their own fiber (marginal cost), which could be very low. The relevant cost here is opportunity cost; they could be charging other content providers to use that fiber and the revenue they're giving up is the real cost of using it for their own content.
There's a reason the concepts of scarcity and opportunity cost are introduced in the first lecture of every Econ 101 course that I know of. Too bad the concepts don't stick!
Good summary, but I call bullshit on the article. Most of the problems you mention and the others in the article are common popular misinterpretations of statistical results, but that doesn't mean they're common mistakes made by researchers in the studies themselves. Any rookie peer-reviewer would spot them immediately if they ever make it into a manuscript.
This doesn't mean that there aren't a lot of bad statistics-based studies out there, especially in medicine. But the problems are usually much more subtle than the article implies. Standard statistical methods require many regularity and sampling assumptions to be valid, and a lot of times researchers take these assumptions for granted when even a little probing would show that they're violated. A lot of advances in recent econometrics have been in the development of robust methods (valid when standard assumptions are violated), and those advances unfortunately take a long time to filter down to the 'applied researcher' level. If you're an applied researcher, it's generally unlikely you'll use statistical advances you didn't learn as a grad student.
And frankly, I have no idea what the Frequentist/Bayesian debate has to do with any of this. To suggest that using Bayesian methods is some sort of solution for the problems listed in the article is ridiculous.
You're missing context. See here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/technology/14brawl.html
Apparently, Apple considered Google's Android a stab in the back. So now Google's CEO (Eric Schmidt) is off Apple's board of directors and Apple is suing HTC for patent infringement (Google is not named, but is the indirect target).
I'm surprised this whole fight hasn't gotten more coverage on Slashdot. In any case, I'm squarely in Google's corner on this issue. We need Android to succeed to preserve competition and openness in the smart phone and tablet/e-reader markets.
Given the errors in my 'basic profile', the most useful info about me on that page is the profile of my neighborhood. But that's always been available from my zip code, something I freely give to anyone who asks (including checkout clerks).
Glib but largely irrelevant reply. The question is whether, analogously, PF should be able to prevent radio stations from playing single songs from their albums on grounds of "artistic integrity". Or perhaps PF should be able to prevent me from hitting FF on my music player to skip what I consider a boring song on their album.
Actually, the analogies above are somewhat misleading, but they at least tell you that there's a serious question about how far artist control should extend. And as someone pointed out, the only reason they have any control at all is because of copyright law, so it's not some natural right we are obviously supposed to defend!
The New York Times ethical standards are here:
http://www.nytco.com/press/ethics.html
In particular see rule 21.
Also, journalists do not reveal their sources. We didn't know the identity of 'deep throat' for close to 40 years despite intense speculation. More recently, journalists went to jail for not revealing the identity of their sources in the Valerie Plame case.
My apologies for the curt response and congratulations on your baby!
This is not a leak. It's a standard way of releasing information to the public without having to make an official statement/accusation. And the New York Times doesn't pay for information, period. Don't you (and your moderators) read any newspapers?!
The latest free Divx codec decodes h.264 quite nicely and I'm almost certain it's multithreaded. K-Lite codec pack includes the free Divx decoder as an option for decoding h.264, so that's another way to get it on your system besides downloading the Divx bundle.
What's this got to do with privacy?! Do you complain about privacy when you hire an accountant to do your taxes and you give him every piece of financial information about you in a given year? Do you complain about privacy when you hire a financial planner and he not only learns everything about your current finances, but also your future intentions?
Half the comments are thinking about this in a knee-jerk and incorrect way. This is simply the concept of "professional advisor" automated and extended to apply to other aspects beyond tax or financial planning. Who knows - its recommendations may be actually quite useful.
"Credibility of your article nullified" - ad-hominem is irrelevant here.
To my mind, the article's main argument is that Google in the search market today is in the same position Microsoft was in the OS market in the 1990s (near monopoly of a critical technology). This by itself is not sufficient grounds for regulation, but if Google starts to leverage this monopoly to choke competition in related areas (as Microsoft did), then we have a problem. The article lists a couple of examples where Google might be doing this (mapping, real estate).
I don't think the evidence is sufficient to start talking about regulation, but the parallels to Microsoft aren't obviously false.
Defaults matter.
Since Apple also sells (and marks up) its own hardware, they get to distribute their margins however they like between hardware and software. Microsoft doesn't have that degree of freedom.
I think this is the wrong way to think about cable service pricing. The marginal cost of providing you with an additional channel of cable is essentially zero. The pricing here is completely demand-driven and is about segmenting the market (price discrimination). In this, cable service tier pricing is closer to pricing different versions of Windows (Home, Business, Premium, etc, which all have the same marginal cost) than it is to bundling discrete goods.
Once you see it that way, you'll see that what you're asking for is like asking for a cheaper version of Windows without wordpad or paint because you don't use those programs and you shouldn't subsidize all those wordpad and paint users. In fact, cable companies would love to do that since it allows them to price discriminate more finely, but they won't do it because people will complain about complexity the same way they complain about multiple versions of Windows. Tier-pricing is a happy medium.
What a ridiculous position! Everybody on Slashdot who's not a Google employee should be rooting for Microsoft to succeed. Competition is good, people!
This is the paradox of Linux: development occurs in a diverse, open 'bazaar' environment, but the user experience is very much 'cathedral'-like. Want to install an app? Must go through the 'one true source' (repository). Sure you can search through Freshmeat or even Sourceforge, but who has the patience (or the know-how) to mess around with tarballs and text config files?
Windows actually has a much more diverse, dynamic, even open user experience when it comes to installing software. A significant proportion of open-source apps are available for Windows, certainly big ones like Firefox, OpenOffice, etc. And the universe of closed-source Windows freeware is gigantic and varied, and dwarfs anything available for Linux through Freshmeat, etc.
Econ 101:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination
In short, it allows you to charge a higher price to those willing to pay more without sacrificing sales to those only willing to pay less.
I don't really know the actual explanation, and I certainly don't discount sheer stupidity when it comes to the actions of the Egyptian government, but I suspect it has something to do with those vast deserts you mention. I think there's a fair amount of cross-border smuggling of weapons/contraband at the Libyan and Sudanese borders, and a cheap/portable GPS device like the iPhone 3G could give smugglers a huge technology advantage (or eliminate a disadvantage) relative to the border patrols.
Of course, smugglers should be able to get their hands on iPhones regardless of a ban, but it may have to do with how easy it is to get your hands on one.
What's 'inherently impossible' about either outcome of creating the 'big rock'? I can either 'create' a rock that's too heavy for me to lift, or my lifting abilities exceed my 'heavy rock creation' abilities. Both outcomes are perfectly possible - there are no logical contradictions.
What the paradox likely demonstrates is that the concept of 'omnipotence' as we typically understand the word is internally inconsistent.
This wasn't the case a year ago when the iPhone first got on the market. My wife got one the first day it was available and soon after spent about a month in Egypt. While she was careful not use the phone too much (being aware of int'l roaming charges), she didn't realize that the phone downloaded email message AND attachments in the background, racking up about 100 Megs and $4000 of data roaming usage.
There was a rash of similar stories in the media at the time (at least one was on slashdot), and AT&T was nice enough to cut the bill down to about $400 by treating us as if we were on the best int'l roaming plan they had. Eventually Apple updated their firmware to change the default behavior of the phone.
I suspect the incident in this story will result in changing default behavior of the aircard and I doubt AT&T will make this family cough up the $20K.
When the government, which legislates what is legal and what is not, tells the telcos to do something that might be illegal under current law, is it not fair to expect the government to legislate immunity?
Telcos are not exactly popular around here, but they were really being squeezed between a rock (the government, which controls their destiny through legislation and regulation, demanding actions in the name of national security) and a hard place (the possible illegality of the action demanded by the government).
I think the fault lies wholly with the government that demanded the action in the first place. Giving telcos immunity is only fair in this case.