$11.5G is for all of it, the C spectrum is only part of that. But according to TFA it has reached $4.3G, which is only 300M off the reserve price. If Google is forced to buy it for the reserve price presumably they could resell it to the second-highest bidder for $4.3G (or at least, negotiate with them for an acceptable price) and they wouldn't lose the whole amount.
Yeah, they should release a special Occupied Europe themed Lego set featuring cars with blacked-out headlights, posters saying 'VERBOTEN' and a little Lego-man Hitler with tiny plastic moustache.
No mention from the article summary of whether this is supported by ATI's recent decision to release driver source code. If you buy this card can you use it with free software?
(Extra points if anyone pedantically takes the subject line and suggests targetting gcc to run the Linux kernel on your GPU... but you know what I mean...)
I'm running Ubuntu 4+3i right now, the real part works pretty smoothly but the imaginary part has some strange interactions with virtualization. I think it's just too complex for most desktop users.
The true significance of Netscape's decision to make its browser free software was that it was the first story I ever read on Slashdot. I've read the site almost daily since then and dagnammit, it's made me the man I am today. I kinda miss the old style of articles, even the endless Linux 2.1.x point releases.
Taco - what happened to all the comments on the old articles? I can't believe none were posted for this story.
Hmm, for a valuable resource a lottery system is unlikely to work well. If the market price is $1000 and the minimum application fee is $1, then if there are less than 1000 bidders it makes sense for a speculator to put in an application just in the hope of winning, and reselling the resource at its market price if it wins. And once you reach 1000 bidders, you have in effect reached the market price (pay p/1000 for a 1/1000 chance of getting the resource worth p). It seems saner to me just to let people bid for it upfront.
One difference is that while water is water and there is no substitute, there are other frequency bands than 700MHz. It's not as if companies are being invited to bid for total control over all electromagnetic spectrum at once. And yes, don't you have water meters and water bills?
Our public land and airwaves for sale to the highest bidder.
How else do you propose to allocate it? By handing it out to political cronies? By giving it to whichever special interest group squeals the loudest? By letting wireless spectrum be another kind of pork that representatives can fight over? Or you could just leave it unregulated, and give the spectrum to whoever wins the war to have the most powerful transmitter.
0.63% doesn't sound like much, but when you consider that their opponents the Ninjaparty received only 0.14%, you can see that the pirates have a clear electoral mandate.
Have you tried the viewers under Wine? If you pay attention to EULAs, then you are not allowed to use the accompanying fonts on non-Microsoft systems, but you are allowed to use the viewer.
There's more to making an electronic device than just the cost of parts and assembly, you've left out the cost of design and development too.
True, but the cost of design doesn't factor into the costs in quite the way you'd expect. Once you have designed your chip and built the factory, your job is now to make as much money as possible. You hope that you'll recoup the design costs (certainly that's what you had in mind when you first decided to create a new product) but you'd be foolish to price your product so low that you only just recoup the costs, when there is the chance to make more money. Similarly, if it costs $100 to manufacture each chip and you could sell a thousand chips at $110 but only ten chips at $200, then the lower price makes you more profit even though arguably it doesn't reflect the cost of design. You just set the price at the most profitable level right now.
prices in a competitive market are based on the consumer's willingness to pay, and nothing else.
They are set based on the consumer's willingness to pay and the producer's willingness to supply. I am willing to pay ten cents for a gold watch, and so are many others, but the price is not ten cents because nobody is willing to supply it at that price. Similarly, many people are willing to supply lumps of coal at a thousand dollars each, but the price is not at that level because nobody is willing to pay that. Prices are set by the interaction of both supply and demand.
In mainframes you have pretty much a single vendor (IBM). Even in the days of Amdahl and Hitachi, once you were committed to a single vendor they had a lot of market power over you. So the vendor can set its own price, and squeeze as much money out of each customer as possible by making variable prices that relate to your ability and willingness to pay, rather than to the cost of manufacturing the equipment.
In a competitive market where 100-core processors cost $100 to produce, a company selling 50-core crippled ones for $101 and 100-core processors for $200 would quickly be pushed out of business by a company making the 100-core processors for $100 and selling them, uncrippled, for $101. I expect the Intel-AMD duopoly leaves Intel some scope to cripple its processors to maintain price differentials (arguably they already do that by selling chips clocked at a lower rate than they are capable of). But they couldn't indulge in this game too much because customers would buy AMD instead (unless AMD agreed to also cripple its multicore chips in the same way, which would probably be illegal collusion).
Compare software where you have arbitrary limits on the number of seats, incoming connections, or even the maximum file size that can be handled. It costs the vendor nothing more to compile the program with MAX_SEATS = 100 instead of 10, but they charge more for the 'enterprise' version because they can. But only for programs that don't have effective competition willing to give the customer what he wants. Certainly any attempt to apply this kind of crippling to Linux has failed in the market because you can easily change to a different vendor (see Caldera).
In a well-functioning market for a limited resource that a lot of people have access to, what is the result that pure capitalism creates? A race to the bottom competition in prices,
It's a bizarre system that charges an uneconomic price for energy and then wants to compensate for that by controlling the thermostat in your home. When there is a shortage of power the wholesale price of energy rises. Charge households the true cost of the electricity they use (which will sometimes be more than the current rate, sometimes less) and if you want to install a thermostat that automatically reduces its power consumption when power is expensive, that's up to you. It would depend on your own individual preferences - perhaps most of the time you're not prepared to spend more than $0.20 per hour to keep your room cool, but if you feel unwell or you have guests staying (or you are making pastry) you could program your thermostat to spend more money. Then the scare electricity is allocated to those who are most prepared to pay for it.
I don't mean that power companies should be able to gouge consumers for whatever they can get. Obviously the retail price should be regulated to not exceed the wholesale price by more than a small fixed amount.
In general, having larger, multi-seat constituencies is a halfway house between one-member constituencies (where as you say, a minority party might win no seats at all, even if it has 5% of the nationwide vote) and a national vote based on some proportional or party list system (which is representative of people's first choices, but breaks the link between a candidate and his constituency). The Electoral Reform Society in Britain recommends multi-seat constituencies for STV, for example.
You're right that ordinary Condorcet wouldn't work well for multi-seat constituencies because voters would have to rank sets of candidates. I hadn't considered that.
You seem to be ignoring my main point that representativeness is precisely what people desire out of a multi-seat election and monotonicity is desirable in a single-seat election.
I think in a multi-seat election people desire both. Plain proportional representation counting the number of votes for each party, for example, is both representative of first choices and monotone.
In Plurality, you vote for somebody, and the more electable guy loses, and that's who you would have ranked second! Plurality lacks that information, and thus it's unable to convey a vote that would have ended up for the more electable person.
Absolutely right.
That's a non-monotonic property if you convert a rank to just a plurality vote.
Uhh... it's certainly some kind of property, but 'monotonicity' specifically means that what you _do_ put down on the ballot paper can only positively affect your chosen candidate, never hurt them. It doesn't cover what you would have liked to express but couldn't.
We both know that no electoral system can have all the properties you might want (Arrow's incompleteness theorem). Whether monotonicity is less important than 'representativeness' is a matter of opinion. You would however need to mathematically define what you mean by 'representative', since the word means many different things to different people.
Often there's an implicit assumption that 'representative' means 'proportionally representative of first-choice votes cast'. So if 10% of voters pick the green party as their first choice then greens should win roughly 10% of seats. Of course, this ignores second and lower preferences; perhaps the other 90% of voters all put green as their second choice and so the greens deserve to win more than 10%.
A repeat of Condorcet among 100 seats would ensure 100 "general support" candidates get elected, with nobody ensured to represent ANY minority.
For 100 single-seat constituencies this might happen. You can mitigate it a little by having larger, multi-seat constituencies.
Why not? A bank could take deposits of 100 virtual groats and make interest-paying loans of 90 virtual groats, keeping 10 virtual groats in the vault for cash withdrawals. As long as not all the savers want to withdraw their money at once, the bank can keep running and has created 90 virtual groats of money. If the savers are in a delayed access account (e.g. 60 days notice) then the bank can call in loans if needed and so will always be able to meet its obligations provided not too many of its loans go bad.
However I don't know if there are bailiffs, debtors' prisons and so on in Second Life, so getting repayment of a loan could be tricky.
Indeed, you can never be completely certain that code is free of security holes - you can prove one exists, but you can't prove one doesn't exist. At least not using an automated scanner. So the ZDNet article is nonsense: 'its first list of open-source projects that have been certified as free of security defects'.
Slashdot Mirror
$11.5G is for all of it, the C spectrum is only part of that. But according to TFA it has reached $4.3G, which is only 300M off the reserve price. If Google is forced to buy it for the reserve price presumably they could resell it to the second-highest bidder for $4.3G (or at least, negotiate with them for an acceptable price) and they wouldn't lose the whole amount.
Yeah, they should release a special Occupied Europe themed Lego set featuring cars with blacked-out headlights, posters saying 'VERBOTEN' and a little Lego-man Hitler with tiny plastic moustache.
No mention from the article summary of whether this is supported by ATI's recent decision to release driver source code. If you buy this card can you use it with free software?
(Extra points if anyone pedantically takes the subject line and suggests targetting gcc to run the Linux kernel on your GPU... but you know what I mean...)
I'm running Ubuntu 4+3i right now, the real part works pretty smoothly but the imaginary part has some strange interactions with virtualization. I think it's just too complex for most desktop users.
The true significance of Netscape's decision to make its browser free software was that it was the first story I ever read on Slashdot. I've read the site almost daily since then and dagnammit, it's made me the man I am today. I kinda miss the old style of articles, even the endless Linux 2.1.x point releases.
Taco - what happened to all the comments on the old articles? I can't believe none were posted for this story.
Hmm, for a valuable resource a lottery system is unlikely to work well. If the market price is $1000 and the minimum application fee is $1, then if there are less than 1000 bidders it makes sense for a speculator to put in an application just in the hope of winning, and reselling the resource at its market price if it wins. And once you reach 1000 bidders, you have in effect reached the market price (pay p/1000 for a 1/1000 chance of getting the resource worth p). It seems saner to me just to let people bid for it upfront.
One difference is that while water is water and there is no substitute, there are other frequency bands than 700MHz. It's not as if companies are being invited to bid for total control over all electromagnetic spectrum at once. And yes, don't you have water meters and water bills?
Please feel free to suggest another way of allocating the spectrum that isn't one of the five options. That is what I asked.
"Everything you know is wrong, including this statement."
It's on rails? Why on earth haven't there been fifty Slashdot stories already?
Yes, I would have expected them to buy EnterpriseDB which is an Oracle clone built on Postgres.
0.63% doesn't sound like much, but when you consider that their opponents the Ninjaparty received only 0.14%, you can see that the pirates have a clear electoral mandate.
Why should the download be 450 megs? Surely you can just download the source code, make sure Blender is installed, and type 'make'?
Have you tried the viewers under Wine? If you pay attention to EULAs, then you are not allowed to use the accompanying fonts on non-Microsoft systems, but you are allowed to use the viewer.
In mainframes you have pretty much a single vendor (IBM). Even in the days of Amdahl and Hitachi, once you were committed to a single vendor they had a lot of market power over you. So the vendor can set its own price, and squeeze as much money out of each customer as possible by making variable prices that relate to your ability and willingness to pay, rather than to the cost of manufacturing the equipment.
In a competitive market where 100-core processors cost $100 to produce, a company selling 50-core crippled ones for $101 and 100-core processors for $200 would quickly be pushed out of business by a company making the 100-core processors for $100 and selling them, uncrippled, for $101. I expect the Intel-AMD duopoly leaves Intel some scope to cripple its processors to maintain price differentials (arguably they already do that by selling chips clocked at a lower rate than they are capable of). But they couldn't indulge in this game too much because customers would buy AMD instead (unless AMD agreed to also cripple its multicore chips in the same way, which would probably be illegal collusion).
Compare software where you have arbitrary limits on the number of seats, incoming connections, or even the maximum file size that can be handled. It costs the vendor nothing more to compile the program with MAX_SEATS = 100 instead of 10, but they charge more for the 'enterprise' version because they can. But only for programs that don't have effective competition willing to give the customer what he wants. Certainly any attempt to apply this kind of crippling to Linux has failed in the market because you can easily change to a different vendor (see Caldera).
It's a bizarre system that charges an uneconomic price for energy and then wants to compensate for that by controlling the thermostat in your home. When there is a shortage of power the wholesale price of energy rises. Charge households the true cost of the electricity they use (which will sometimes be more than the current rate, sometimes less) and if you want to install a thermostat that automatically reduces its power consumption when power is expensive, that's up to you. It would depend on your own individual preferences - perhaps most of the time you're not prepared to spend more than $0.20 per hour to keep your room cool, but if you feel unwell or you have guests staying (or you are making pastry) you could program your thermostat to spend more money. Then the scare electricity is allocated to those who are most prepared to pay for it.
I don't mean that power companies should be able to gouge consumers for whatever they can get. Obviously the retail price should be regulated to not exceed the wholesale price by more than a small fixed amount.
You're right that ordinary Condorcet wouldn't work well for multi-seat constituencies because voters would have to rank sets of candidates. I hadn't considered that.I think in a multi-seat election people desire both. Plain proportional representation counting the number of votes for each party, for example, is both representative of first choices and monotone.
We both know that no electoral system can have all the properties you might want (Arrow's incompleteness theorem). Whether monotonicity is less important than 'representativeness' is a matter of opinion. You would however need to mathematically define what you mean by 'representative', since the word means many different things to different people.
Often there's an implicit assumption that 'representative' means 'proportionally representative of first-choice votes cast'. So if 10% of voters pick the green party as their first choice then greens should win roughly 10% of seats. Of course, this ignores second and lower preferences; perhaps the other 90% of voters all put green as their second choice and so the greens deserve to win more than 10%.For 100 single-seat constituencies this might happen. You can mitigate it a little by having larger, multi-seat constituencies.
Why not? A bank could take deposits of 100 virtual groats and make interest-paying loans of 90 virtual groats, keeping 10 virtual groats in the vault for cash withdrawals. As long as not all the savers want to withdraw their money at once, the bank can keep running and has created 90 virtual groats of money. If the savers are in a delayed access account (e.g. 60 days notice) then the bank can call in loans if needed and so will always be able to meet its obligations provided not too many of its loans go bad.
However I don't know if there are bailiffs, debtors' prisons and so on in Second Life, so getting repayment of a loan could be tricky.
Indeed, you can never be completely certain that code is free of security holes - you can prove one exists, but you can't prove one doesn't exist. At least not using an automated scanner. So the ZDNet article is nonsense: 'its first list of open-source projects that have been certified as free of security defects'.