"Right now, we're just about at the point where demand will exceed capacity. Demand is still climbing, mostly due to China's industrialization."
Uh, did you ever take a class on economics. The point of supply and demand is that either one of two things will happen the supply mined will increase to make up for the extra demand (and cause higher prices because to increase supply means extracting oil from less profitable places) or that the price will increase, and the amount bought will decrease.
When china industrializes further, what will happen is that the demand function becomes steaper, and people become more willing to pay more money for less oil. This will happen. The only time supply doesn't balance off to meet demand (to my knowledge) is when the government steps in to set prices, or occasionally during short term emergencies (even then if gas stations could charge what they wanted during hurricanes etc, the supply available would match the demand given it, and people would be paying $10+ for a gallon of gas, which would likely result in people filling there cars up less than halfway, so they only had enough gas to get to the next city where the price will likely be a bit cheaper, as opposed to filling it all the way and then one of the later cars can't get gas at all even though the next city up might still have gas). In the 1970s there was no oil "shortage". It was artificial. The government set prices, and they were low enough that people would buy more then they otherwise would.
For example, if Ford tried selling a new souped up Mustang for $1000, there would be inadequate supply for it. Does this mean that the demand for Mustangs increased? If anything the demand for mustangs would actually decrease because people would place less value on the "status symbol" appeal of a mustang. So the demand decreases, but the number bought would be hundreds of times higher than it currently is!!!
As china demands more oil, the price will increase. Alternatives to oil use will look better. For now most of the alternatives are a waste of money. Buying a hybrid car isn't worth it for most people because in the 10-15 year life of the car they may not drive enough miles to make up the cost difference. Or even if they do, had they invested that extra money they spent they may have made up the difference. Of course if gas prices continue to increase, and say 10 years from now gas is $5/gallon those hybrids are looking like a much better deal. So is public transportation for that matter. So is anything that doesn't involve driving for many people.
If only 10 gallons of gas were left on the earth the price would likely not be very high,a s no one can do much with it. By the time there is so little oil left prices will have risen high enough that alternative fuel sources (that today may cost 3 times as much as oil) become economic. And surprise, they'll be used.
It all depends on so many factors on what makes it better. If I had enough money, I'd buy a much nicer car that handles better, is more comfortable, etc. One that doesn't rattle on the highway or any of that stuff. Right now I drive a '94 Saturn, and it fits my needs, and my price range. As a grad student I may drive once a week to get groceries, and occasionally just to get out of the city and go . ..anywhere I can.
As far as my computer usage goes though, I use a mac for my laptop, and linux on most of my machines, and a single windows xp box that I use as a single user terminal server. To specify, my laptop is my primary machine, and I want to get another mac . . . Just because. My experience with my mac is that things "just work". I have a gorgeous interface, itunes(!!!), a dock with icons that bounce to alert me, expose (which makes a 1024x768 screen entirely usable), office, etc. Oh also, most every linux app I used previously works alright. If it doesn't work I just ssh into the linux box on my network and run it remotely. If I need to use a windows only app I login to my windows machine to use it. But for most of my work OSX once customized just works. All the command line power I need, but I don't have to worry about getting my hardware to work, if the wireless has a chance in hell of working, and many other things. Of course, I wish something like apt existed for the open source cocoa apps like adium, xchat, etc. Oh well.
I'd say the BMW still applies... Just because it's PC hardware doesn't mean it's crap. The professional mac hardware lines have always been high end hardware. Dual processor powermacs when it was mostly only the/. crowd that knew what dual processors could do.
Now that apples will be on PC hardware, is it still fair to say that they're BMWs? Well for one they're using the newest and fastest processors out there. Oh also these chips burn far less power. They're not 32 bit, but who cares for the mobile/imac crowd, I've yet to see a compelling reason to switch unless you're using tons of ram. On top of this apple has some of the sleekest looking computers out there. There are few x86 PC makers who can distinguish themselves like that. . . Alienware has to the gamer class, but they're also not known as the ford of PCs, but rather the dodge viper or something. What apple has is performance oriented hardware that feels luxurious. I say luxurious for the little things apple does. The ring lights on their power adapters, the new magnetic power adapter, the glowing apples.. . It's the little things that make it feel more luxurious. It also costs a hell of a lot more, and costs more to fix when problems occur. Of course the problems don't occur as often as the parts are high quality.
Saying that you can't be the BMW of computers because you're using x86 hardware is just stupid. powerPC is a slightly better ISA as there isn't all the cruft from backwards compatibility.. However the ISA of a processor no longer matters. It's all about the microarchitecture, and more so today then ever: performance per watt. A processor is a processor, a means to an end. It's the end product that matters, and I doubt the new apples feel like a PC.
Depends on your view. Under my view workers choose to take a job at $X/hour, and won't work it if it's not a "fair-market value". It would take a lot to convince me to work for $8/hour, but I already have an MS in Computer Engineering, and my time is too valuable for doing labor only worth $8/hour. Of course I'm currently a grad student, so depending on how many hours I worked that particular week, my salary might be absolute crap. Of course what I'm paid doesn't include free tuition or the essentially free health insurance. Either way, I could be making a lot more money if I wanted to, but I value freedom in my job enough to be willing to goto grad school. I make enough to live on, and that's good enough for me.
It all depends on what you value most. I'm about as capitalist and pro free market as you can get (note: being a capitalist and pro free market is not the same as being pro big business as many businesses don't want a free market). I believe a company has the rights to pay it's workers whatever it wants to. If walmart wanted to start paying all new hires (note: If they decided to lower peoples salaries to new levels overnight I wouldn't not think the action was justifiable) $3/hour that is their right. Of course if Walmart is only willing to pay people $3/hour who is going to work there? The only people who would are the people who no one else would hire at $6/hour or whatever the other companies are offering them). Of course people would complain that walmart is exploiting this man at $3/hour, but had walmart not hired him he'd be making even less! People don't seem to understand that companies don't arbitrarily choose what to pay people, they choose what the market will accept (or sometimes more because there have been studies showing workers paid above their fair-market value are often more productive, and less likely to quit which saves the company money).
Walmart has done some evil actions. For instance walmart has lobbyists trying to increase the minimum wage and force companies to give better benefits.
How this is evil you might ask, well the obvious answer is that they're trying to legislate some of their competitors out of existance. Basically, they want everyone to pay their workers as well as they already do. By doing this their competitors make less profits, or lose money, and walmart wins. Of course none of this is any help to the poor guy who was earning minimum wage previously and was fired because the store could only afford to keep two thirds of their workforce due to having to pay more.
What are you talking about? It's the activist judges who are rewriting laws, and the constitution. It is the activist judges who are ruling that the government has the right to use emininent domain to take land from private citizens and give it to a corporation for "fair compensation". Activist judges can do little in this case to help anyways.
If it can be shown that the lady violated the law on the books, it is the judges duty to uphold those laws. I'm pretty sure enough copyright cases have been handled that the precedents show the laws to be constitutional. The only way the judge could ignore the wrong doing then is to declare either A the law is unconstitutional or B say that the RIAA illegally obtained evidence that is not permissable in case.
The ladys best bet is to argue that she is not responsible for the material downloaded, and has no knowledge of it, and force the RIAA to prove that she knowingly pirated the music. Then the burden of proof is on the RIAA, and they have to show evidence that was legally obtained etc etc. They also have to prove that their "evidence" is valid. It's hard to prove a few lines of text on their computers show what she did, and haven't been modified
Your comments about republicans being out to make her fry are completely without basis, and a huge troll. Either way this lawsuit is bad news for the RIAA. Even if they win, and win a large settlement against this lady there will be a public backlash. There will also be a demand for new laws to stop some of these efforts. Look at the limitations of DRM that came out real fast when Sony's rootkit was revealed. It was less than a week before we had officials working for the president criticizing Sony over their actions! That of course was an example of Republicans protesting, and the attorney general siding on the side of large corporations because all republicans (and no democrats) are controlled by the big corporations.
Think before you write. You come off as a moron with statements like yours.
While the first order effects of what you say true, is it really? I don't know how far you are into the music scene, but I know there are many active message boards for bands out there. From small to large bands, althoug the smaller to medium sized boards are the best (where people get to know most people on their, and reading all the new posts is manageable). There are also larger boards and mailing lists out there that some people prefer (such as the postcard mailing list). What these boards have done to music is amazing. Now you can easily meet with other people who like the same bands you like.
Where this comes into the P2P equation is that one these boards the discussion regularly veers off the subject of the band involved. Ofter it discusses bands that other board members like, album reviews, concert reviews, and links to articles about bands that the original band in question supported. Now I love discussing new albums with people, and when one of my friends on a board suggests listening to band XYZ, I'll think about it. If that band has a website I might go there and check out songs there. If not I will often go check p2p sites. I generally won't pay $13 for a CD ofa band i've never heard (however I have been known to pay $6 or $7 for one). I generally buy 2-5 CDs a month so I definately am a big spender on CDs. I also rarely use p2p networks for them, and get mad when I talk to people who refuse to buy music and only use p2p networks.
Like many things there are excesses on each side of the issue.
"I think we should just all sit down with mosquitos and have a good long chat, I'm sure we could work out our differences and learn to live together in peace and harmony."
Yeah... Tell that to the hundreds of thousands who die from malaria in the third world every year...
Sounds like a great idea. Jimmy Carter did something similar. Met with groups who'd never agree, and some that wouldn't think rationally if their lives depended on it. All in the name of peace. While north korea, israel/palestine, etc may be as unpeaceful as ever, he got a nobel peace prize out of it.
So I say form a peaceful organization that agrees to stop the current war on mosquitos. Give the larva a chance to grow up, and while you may do nothing to stop the mosquitos, you will have a nobel peace prize at the end of the day. And since when did accomplishing anything real matter.
Uh, they have some of it. . . And it would work for a SoC... Just a couple problems with it mainly what processor are you going to use? An in-order RISC processor? Oh yeah, and the core is written in VHDL. Sounds like a winning processor for a laptop. . . Even assuming you pay the money to get the core produced on a 120nm ASIC (about $1M for a set of masks) you're still at a huge disadvantage. First off most of the cores there are designed around the MIPS processor. While still a perfectly usable instruction set, it's pretty much been relegated to the embedded world. Second of all they have nothing more advanced than scalar processors. All in order etc. They might manage an IPC of.6 if they're lucky. On top of that being implemented on an ASIC and not having custom logic will probably limit their speed to most likely under 500MHz. Of course a custom core could be laid out using CAD tools etc, but of course that would take much much longer to do. Don't get me wrong, opencores work great for embedded systems, and can work well for mid to low volume SoC applications, but they're not intended for high speed microprocessor performance.
Compare that to using an already made x86 core. It's compatible with most applications, and it's much faster (both in clock speed and likely to be superscalar). That and the price is probably not much more.
Think before you speak. If you think clearchannel did that because they disapproved of what the Dixie Chicks said, you're an idiot. They pulled it because many of the consumers of country music are highly patriotic and were very upset about the dixie chicks statements. I imagine many local music country music stations did the same thing because their consumers were pissed off. Likewise if a rock band said something bad about the war no one would care. Or at least not enough people to make a difference.
IANAL, but I will say this, if it can be shown that Sony bought this software and knowingly used it despite the implications of what the software does, they should be forced to pay. I'm not talking about some petty fines, or suing, I'm talking far more. While multi-millions of dollars of fines for trespassing and intentional invasion of privacy without the consumers consent etc are just the starts. I could imagine if it's proven that some of the business managers or CEOs knew what the software does, and can be shown that they willingly invaded their customers privacy, and violated their computers, I think jailtime might be in order. It is illegal to enable a company to commit a crime with gross violations like this.
I'm sure this could drag on for years, but lets hope someone attacks them for this and hits them where it hurts. No media company has the rights to do this. Even if there was mention of it in the EULA, it's legality would be questionable, but without even that, this is a dangerous place for them to go.
If they want to use mafia tactics to stop them, lets use ant-mafia tactics to catch them. That involves not just stopping their intimidation of people, and stopping their illegal activities, but hitting their leaders, and stopping them.
First a couple flaws in your math. The government gives a tax break of $2000 . . . That doesn't equate to $2000 in your pocket. That means that if after other credits you "earned" $50,000 the goverenment is only going to tax you on $48,000. Unless you're in the 100% tax bracket that doesn't work into a $2000 savings. Plus this savings is only for this year.
Assuming the person is paying 30% in taxes that works into a in hand cash savings of about $600.
$4540-$600=3940, over 7 years thats a difference of $563/year. This equates to need to save 225 gallons of gas per year by using the hybrid.
so miles/40=miles/50+225 so that requires driving 45,000 highway miles in a single year!!!
if your doing pure city driving miles/30=miles/49+225 here you only have to drive 17,408 miles in a year. While more reasonable, this is still a faily high number. With a more reasonable mix of highway and city driving it would likely require driving between 25,000 and 30,000 miles a year to break even.
Looking over your math I didn't get the same numbers you did even if the government discount was $2,000 and not.3*2000, think you confused a yearly and 7 year value.
Also on top of it after 7 years your standard civic is worth a lot more than the hybrid. Once the batteries on the hybrids die the car is essenitally a junker. Just not worth the $10,000 or whatever it costs to replace them.
One of the biggest flaws with my arguments is the safety factor of smaller cars. This isn't an issue of hybrid vs non hybrid here, just smaller more fuel economic cars versus larger less efficient cars. Basically it comes down to the fact that human life is highly valuable, and there's no way around the fact that materials being the same, if you get hit by a large truck in a massive SUV you've got a much better chance of surviving than if you drive a small little car. small cars can get crushed easily. When a family buys a car they look into the safety of their kids. To many of them it's worth the extra money spent in gas for their childrens safety.
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Reading this I don't see how promoting more fuel efficient cars effects any of this. An incentive to ride a bike to work or something can make sense from what your saying, but as my math just showed someone who rides a bike to work saves less by having a hybrid car than someone who has lots of commutes. Saving parking spaces makes sense, but driving a hybrid doesn't accomplish any of this.
Basically everything comes down to simple economics.
The auto companies have no incentive to make their SUVs more fuel efficient? Are you retarded? With gas between $2.50 and $3 a gallon the auto manufacturers are starting to see the incentive. SUV's have sold poorly since gas rose in price. The reason is obvious, consumers don't like paying so much in fuel costs, and when gas is $2.50 a gallon they start to think more about getting something that is more fuel efficient.
If you want the majority of cars sold to be extremely fuel efficient the easiest way would be to artificially increase the costs of gas through taxation. If gas were $10/gallon with no chance of lowering people would A: Drive a lot less, and B: when they purchase a new car the fuel economy would be much more important to them.
The thing is the cost of ownership of a new car is kind of hard to judge, and depends how long people will be driving it. Assuming a 7 year ownership (beyond that it gets much more complex due to the car breaking down etc) we get a yearly cost of about (Purchase cost)/7 + yearly insurance cost + (Miles Driven/year)*(Cost of a gallon of gas)/(MPG). For many people if they actually did the math it works out that even with gas being $2.50/gallon it's cheaper not to buy a hybrid car! Wasn't there a study not too long ago showing that?
Of course people don't really use these equations when buying a car, but many rough estimates are considered, and it's probably remarkably accurate. Of course than the category of car (how fancy, status symbol, etc) come into play as well. But even than gas prices will likely factor into the purchase (unless the person is wealthy enough that they wouldn't bat an eyelash at paying $20/gallon).
That being said I'm completely against the whole idea of the government getting that involved with the affair. As far as companies giving incentives to employees. . . WHY the hell would they? If Walmart gave employees credits for buying hybrids they'd either have to pay their employees less, or raise prices or profits. Does that make any sense to them? I don't know what world/. thinks we're living on, but without an incentive to do this there's no reason a company would. Maybe some small operation who's owners are willing to lose profit (or their employees are willing to lose some pay) will follow this, but I can't forsee the major company's doing this. Of course the government could do this, but this essentially works into pay cuts for everybody and a benefit to those who buy the hybrids. Of course who gets helped the most by the deal.. . those who drive THE MOST!!! Those are the ones with the most incentive to get a more fuel efficient car.
I agree. I never had any respect for Britney (and still don't), but I do think Richard Thompson did a great version of the song. Although it does seem to be partially done as a joke. Also, I don't think it matters how the song was originally, if Richard Thompson is playing it is going to sound great . . . I don't think he's capable of playing a bad song.
These ideas will solve soooo much. We'll magically get qualified teachers because they're paid more. Oh wait... whats this, current teachers have tenure and can't be fired... didn't know this. Also reachers have never been held accountable the same way most people are, so paying them more won't help. Teachers have never gotten raises because they're good at it. They get paid based on how many years they've been in the district and how many degrees they have.
If you try to change the system you get complaints that it's unfair. All it takes is one teacher from a minority who's been there as long as someone else and doesn't get the pay raise. The other teachers could be the best teachers in the world, but the minority teacher was passed up based on race. You can't tell me such a situation wouldn't happen, as similar things happen all the time.
Teachers learning more over break? Some choose to, some don't. Teachers want to have lives too. It's a stressful job, and they need breaks. Also many teachers want to spend time with their own children, that's why they chose it.
As far as local communities vs national debate. I generally find it a load of crap. Just what we want, the federal government indoctrinating our kids in..I mean teaching our kids how to be good people. Of course they'd neglect that not every state is the same. For instance in the south kids are more likely to need to learn spanish. Or the industries want more people to do XYZ. Also, having one national education system would give it nothing else in the country to compare itself against. If every local school district tries there own thing, it becomes easier to see what methods work and what dont. Region X produces smarter people than region Y even though all other socioeconomic factors are similar. Maybe they're doing something better... Just maybe. Competition is a good thing.
Sure in a perfect world we'd know whats the perfect curriculum is and whats the best course of study, but no one will agree on it, and we DON'T LIVE IN A PERFECT WORLD!
As far as coke machines... Eh I don't know if it matters. From my perspective I'd have been highly pissed off if I couldn't get my caffeine intake in my college classes. It helps, and some of us are tired.
For banning religion. . . Who really cares? Does it make a difference. . . I'm not saying it should be stressed, I don't think it should be, but should it be treated as taboo or non existant? I honestly don't know and don't care enough.
For colleges needing better engineering "teachers" . . . What do people expect? Do they expect that experts in a science field are also going tobe experts at teaching? Some people are better at teaching than others, and some professors are really good at it.
Of course even the best teachers in most engineering colleges have to avoid teaching too much. If you're a young tenure-track professor, research has to be your priority. Every extra hour spent preparing for class is an hour less spent on research. If you want tenure it doesn't matter if you can teach well, it only matters that you can teach. Research, however, matters a lot and has to be stressed.
As much as I disliked the system at first, I realized it does have its advantages. It encourages the sciences, and academia has never been about teaching so much as it has been about doing science. Most of the students survive somehow. I have, and I'm now a grad student who will further push the status quo.
If there's anything that needs to be changed it's the tenure system. Of course no one will go there, and all the experts (who ironically have tenure) will argue against any changes in the system.
I know I don't know the retail vs wholesale prices, but I do know that the difference in prices is not that massive. I might be off some, but I know I'm not off by an order of magnitude. I doubt most resellers of electronics are marking products up more than 10-15%. Especially when you are only looking at the lowest price. Companies are competing to sell for the lowest price for products like these, and can't make 100% profits on this stuff.
If you want to tell me the raw goods in a 60GB ipod only cost $20 go for it, but I won't believe it for a second.
Well looking at a priod link with Intel's financial statement it looks like they have 5.2 Billion dollars earmarked for research next year, and 5.9Billion dollars for building new fabs. Of course for only one chip you only need a single fab, so lets just say 7 billion dollars between R&D and fab production for that first chip.
$20 to make an ipod? Get real, while the number might not be what they charge, it's nowhere near that low. I paid $400 for a 60GB ipod a few months ago, and don't feel I paid the majority to apples profits.
Lets consider the costs. A 2.5" 60GB hard drive costs over $70 on pricewatch. However a 2.5" hard drive is not in an ipod because it's much too big. The ipods use 1.8" hard drives, a quick search on froogle shows that a 60GB hdd such as the MK6006GAH costs over $200. Lets assume apple gets a large discount for buying so many drives. Maybe as low as $150 (which I doubt). Lets add a processor and a DSP for it (maybe ~$50) an LCD display and controller for it (another $50). Manufacturing and shipping costs another 30-40. Warranty coverage cost averaging maybe $10/ipod. Oh and a good Li ion battery which even in mass are expensive. Maybe another $40. Add in marketing costs, R&D costs, etc etc, it makes sense.
On top of that as a student my cost was only $370 (of course it cost more due to taxes). Given these costs the profits are maybe $50-$100 if that. So yeah, the cost to make an ipod is obviously close to the $20 you quoted. Plus there's lots of competition in the digital music player market. However examining the market I didn't see a competing player that held 60GB of music that was considerably less. Also considering the ipod was probably smaller, easier to use, and can communicate with my car stereo the response was simple.
Phil
Uh, the $40/chip value doesn't include R&D in it. You're values of $1.50 for cost of labor and $1.50 for R&D are way off. Are you familiar with how fabs work? I don't know much about them, but have learned some in a VLSI course I'm taking, and it is an extremely intensive process. It takes weeks to make just a single chip (granted the process is pipelined, and many chips are in the pipe at the same time). There are countless tons of chemicals involved in making your little ounce or two of silicon.
I could see $40 as a decent cost to pay for the refined silicon, the chemicals involved, the masks (I assume the cost to create a mask is ammoritized over the run of chips it creates, but each mask costs millions for new technologies), the testing facilities, etc etc. It's just a really expensive process.
Once you add in the billions it costs to build a fab, and the billions it costs to design a new processor (not too mention the costs to create a new microarchitecture). The price we pay for chips seems very fair. If you told someone 10 years ago that you could sell them a dual core 3.2 GHz chip for only $600 they'd scoop them up by the millions. Of course that's not really fair to compare in an industry governed by moores law.
Phil
Wow, Slashdot has moved so far to the left it's sick. Posts like this are disgusting. Conspiracy theorists throwing off crackpot ideas about how Bush did XYZ and failed to do ABC. I'm sure the relief effort could have been better and faster. Thats always the case. Nothing goes through perfectly, and things could always be better.
Blaming the administration for the failure is absurd. If anyone is to blame for most of the problems it's the looters. You know how much more difficult it is to bring aid to people when you have to worry about thugs on the street etc.
As far as the levee. I agree with the reply saying that the local and state taxes should be paying for it. Besides which, what are the odds that a new levee would have simply been a great big waste of money. I could imagine a year or two ago they start fixing it. About now its maybe a quarter to half way finished, 40million dollars are spent, the hurricane comes, and not only does the levee still break, but than 40 million dollars or whatever had already been spent is likely washed away. I'm not saying it didn't need to be fixed up, but to believe it would have been finished being fixed already to make a difference. Do you know the speed of a beauracracy?
For getting trucks to location, that takes times. Trucks don't instantly appear where you want them. And your comments on the national guard, please. Stop the fucking political bullshit. You don't like the war, you think the arab nations should stay totalitarian terrorists who hate the US, and thats fine. But don't blame the war for every thing that happens in the us.
Uh.... You haven't even touched the point of my post. I wasn't saying evidence wasn't there to point to XYZ, I was saying that it wasn't repeatable.
The original post I responded to attacked ID because it wasn't repeatable. I was just stating evolution wasn't either.
As far as what you say, it just shows changes occured, whether or not those changes were guided by an outside force or not, I do not know, and whether they even occured can only be speculated based on fossil record. Work on such fields can never have conclusive theories that will be readily agreed upon. While Newtonian physics was later shown to not be correct under every circumstance much of it was readily agreed upon because it was an observable behavior that we were watching.
If an outside being lived billions of years and could observe the earth growing up in real time they could make readily agreed upon conclusions about evolution.
As the topic is such, it will always be a target of much debate. Honestly, does it make a difference? Who really cares, and how does it impact my life? I'll stick to studying a science that actually has an impact and matters (computer engineering)
There's a slight problem with these ideas. Many areas of research do not have large active communities. In some fields having 5-10 professors (each with 2 or 3 grad students) is considered quite a lot. For many papers if they're read by 20 people across the world, the author feels glad that someone actually read them.
All these papers are advancing science, but having an online peer review would be a waste. No one would voluntarily judge many of the papers. Do you realize that most scientists are working on a million different things, and generally don't want to do more work unrelated to their research. Many review papers because it's expected. It is part of the process, if you want others to review your work, you must review others work.
Allowing online comments like you suggest would be horrible. Part of the reason for having blind reviews is so that one scientist doesn't have to feel the pressure of giving a friend in the fields work a bad review. Sometimes it needs to be done. Such is the method of science. Also these ideas to publishing papers would likely result in poorer papers overall. While there might be more papers, they'd likely be less well written. They'd basically be a shell with added on comments other people wanted to hear etc etc. While this is true to some extent with current work, this would likely lead to longer scientific papers as well, that would be harder to read if you were not involved in the review process originally.
While your ideas seem nice, I doubt they'd work in practice. After involving myself with the submission process I've learned quite a bit, and some of it involves papers being partially randomly accepted (it depends who's assigned to read it, and which of their grad students actually does read it).
While not a proponent of Intelligent design or of evolution (there is not enough evidence either way, and honestly I don't know enough about it or care enough about it because it's not an important issue to everything dealing with my day to day life), I find your statement invalid.
You claim that ID can't be tested by repeatable experiments. Well that is true, but can evolution be tested by repeatable experiments? Maybe some of the smaller claims of evolution such as bacteria growing more resilient etc etc, but those claims can fit in with ID as well.
If you can show me one repeatable experiment showing that humans evolved from apes, I'd like to see it.
it's not that ID is without its flaws, its just this comment of yours does not examine the fact that there's no simple way to test most any of these theories.
Your assumption of AllOfMp3 competing with iTunes is just wrong. The only legality AllOfMp3 has is that it might fit through a loophole in the copyright laws. I honestly hope this is not the case.
If such a loophole exists in the copyright laws, congress will have no choice but to pass a law that will change the copyright laws for the RIAA. And I'd have to support the RIAA in changing the law as well. However, knowing the history of the RIAA and of our congress, do you honestly believe in closing the loophole they wouldn't make the law much stricter, and stop many of the definitions of fair use.
The law would be written by the RIAA's lawyers most likely, and congressmen would see it as to close the clause in copyright law that allows some third company to sell people music they don't own.
God, I really hope AllOfMp3 is considered illegal. It just seems a much better alternative. While the RIAA will still try and push legislation down congress' throat, without some compelling reason it becomes much harder for congress to approve it.
AllOfMp3 is a load of crap. What is the point? I don't care if the site is technically within the law or not, you're still getting the music and giving money to some random third party who gives none of it to the people who actually own it.
Honestly the owners of AllOfMp3 are even worse scum than the record labels. At least the record labels are profitting off something they own. AllOfMp3 is like the guy who steals your car stereo and sells it at a pawn shop. I'd rather see someone use p2p and save their money then give their money to these criminals.
Does using AllOfMp3 make you feel better? Do you now get to gloat at how cheap you stole something? Are you special now that you paid someone to steal a song for you rather than just going out and stealing it yourself?
I am no fan of the record labels, and think that the increase in prices on itunes would be bad for their business. The idea that piracy shouldn't effect supply and demand is a bad policy for the labels to have. They can't eradicate piracy. However I'll continute to purchase my music the old fashioned way, on CD. At least than I own something, and can rerip it later if my needs change. And I'll even admit that I'll use p2p music services. I download songs illegally. Although I'd laugh if the RIAA ever tried going after me. Considering how much money I spend a year on cds (I generally buy 2 or 3 CDs a month, although mostly used) they'd be crazy to think I'm capable of buying more music on my income.
It's an amusing game the labels are playing. I just can't wait for the artists to take back more control through independent labels, or releasing stuff on their own over the net, as producing your own CDs has become relatively cheap.
Slashdot Mirror
"Right now, we're just about at the point where demand will exceed capacity. Demand is still climbing, mostly due to China's industrialization."
Uh, did you ever take a class on economics. The point of supply and demand is that either one of two things will happen the supply mined will increase to make up for the extra demand (and cause higher prices because to increase supply means extracting oil from less profitable places) or that the price will increase, and the amount bought will decrease.
When china industrializes further, what will happen is that the demand function becomes steaper, and people become more willing to pay more money for less oil. This will happen. The only time supply doesn't balance off to meet demand (to my knowledge) is when the government steps in to set prices, or occasionally during short term emergencies (even then if gas stations could charge what they wanted during hurricanes etc, the supply available would match the demand given it, and people would be paying $10+ for a gallon of gas, which would likely result in people filling there cars up less than halfway, so they only had enough gas to get to the next city where the price will likely be a bit cheaper, as opposed to filling it all the way and then one of the later cars can't get gas at all even though the next city up might still have gas). In the 1970s there was no oil "shortage". It was artificial. The government set prices, and they were low enough that people would buy more then they otherwise would.
For example, if Ford tried selling a new souped up Mustang for $1000, there would be inadequate supply for it. Does this mean that the demand for Mustangs increased? If anything the demand for mustangs would actually decrease because people would place less value on the "status symbol" appeal of a mustang. So the demand decreases, but the number bought would be hundreds of times higher than it currently is!!!
As china demands more oil, the price will increase. Alternatives to oil use will look better. For now most of the alternatives are a waste of money. Buying a hybrid car isn't worth it for most people because in the 10-15 year life of the car they may not drive enough miles to make up the cost difference. Or even if they do, had they invested that extra money they spent they may have made up the difference. Of course if gas prices continue to increase, and say 10 years from now gas is $5/gallon those hybrids are looking like a much better deal. So is public transportation for that matter. So is anything that doesn't involve driving for many people.
If only 10 gallons of gas were left on the earth the price would likely not be very high,a s no one can do much with it. By the time there is so little oil left prices will have risen high enough that alternative fuel sources (that today may cost 3 times as much as oil) become economic. And surprise, they'll be used.
Phil
It all depends on so many factors on what makes it better. If I had enough money, I'd buy a much nicer car that handles better, is more comfortable, etc. One that doesn't rattle on the highway or any of that stuff. Right now I drive a '94 Saturn, and it fits my needs, and my price range. As a grad student I may drive once a week to get groceries, and occasionally just to get out of the city and go . . .anywhere I can.
As far as my computer usage goes though, I use a mac for my laptop, and linux on most of my machines, and a single windows xp box that I use as a single user terminal server. To specify, my laptop is my primary machine, and I want to get another mac . . . Just because. My experience with my mac is that things "just work". I have a gorgeous interface, itunes(!!!), a dock with icons that bounce to alert me, expose (which makes a 1024x768 screen entirely usable), office, etc. Oh also, most every linux app I used previously works alright. If it doesn't work I just ssh into the linux box on my network and run it remotely. If I need to use a windows only app I login to my windows machine to use it. But for most of my work OSX once customized just works. All the command line power I need, but I don't have to worry about getting my hardware to work, if the wireless has a chance in hell of working, and many other things. Of course, I wish something like apt existed for the open source cocoa apps like adium, xchat, etc. Oh well.
Phil
I'd say the BMW still applies... Just because it's PC hardware doesn't mean it's crap. The professional mac hardware lines have always been high end hardware. Dual processor powermacs when it was mostly only the /. crowd that knew what dual processors could do.
Now that apples will be on PC hardware, is it still fair to say that they're BMWs? Well for one they're using the newest and fastest processors out there. Oh also these chips burn far less power. They're not 32 bit, but who cares for the mobile/imac crowd, I've yet to see a compelling reason to switch unless you're using tons of ram. On top of this apple has some of the sleekest looking computers out there. There are few x86 PC makers who can distinguish themselves like that. . . Alienware has to the gamer class, but they're also not known as the ford of PCs, but rather the dodge viper or something. What apple has is performance oriented hardware that feels luxurious. I say luxurious for the little things apple does. The ring lights on their power adapters, the new magnetic power adapter, the glowing apples.. . It's the little things that make it feel more luxurious. It also costs a hell of a lot more, and costs more to fix when problems occur. Of course the problems don't occur as often as the parts are high quality.
Saying that you can't be the BMW of computers because you're using x86 hardware is just stupid. powerPC is a slightly better ISA as there isn't all the cruft from backwards compatibility.. However the ISA of a processor no longer matters. It's all about the microarchitecture, and more so today then ever: performance per watt. A processor is a processor, a means to an end. It's the end product that matters, and I doubt the new apples feel like a PC.
Phil
Depends on your view. Under my view workers choose to take a job at $X/hour, and won't work it if it's not a "fair-market value". It would take a lot to convince me to work for $8/hour, but I already have an MS in Computer Engineering, and my time is too valuable for doing labor only worth $8/hour. Of course I'm currently a grad student, so depending on how many hours I worked that particular week, my salary might be absolute crap. Of course what I'm paid doesn't include free tuition or the essentially free health insurance. Either way, I could be making a lot more money if I wanted to, but I value freedom in my job enough to be willing to goto grad school. I make enough to live on, and that's good enough for me.
It all depends on what you value most. I'm about as capitalist and pro free market as you can get (note: being a capitalist and pro free market is not the same as being pro big business as many businesses don't want a free market). I believe a company has the rights to pay it's workers whatever it wants to. If walmart wanted to start paying all new hires (note: If they decided to lower peoples salaries to new levels overnight I wouldn't not think the action was justifiable) $3/hour that is their right. Of course if Walmart is only willing to pay people $3/hour who is going to work there? The only people who would are the people who no one else would hire at $6/hour or whatever the other companies are offering them). Of course people would complain that walmart is exploiting this man at $3/hour, but had walmart not hired him he'd be making even less! People don't seem to understand that companies don't arbitrarily choose what to pay people, they choose what the market will accept (or sometimes more because there have been studies showing workers paid above their fair-market value are often more productive, and less likely to quit which saves the company money).
Phil
Walmart has done some evil actions. For instance walmart has lobbyists trying to increase the minimum wage and force companies to give better benefits.
How this is evil you might ask, well the obvious answer is that they're trying to legislate some of their competitors out of existance. Basically, they want everyone to pay their workers as well as they already do. By doing this their competitors make less profits, or lose money, and walmart wins. Of course none of this is any help to the poor guy who was earning minimum wage previously and was fired because the store could only afford to keep two thirds of their workforce due to having to pay more.
Phil
What are you talking about? It's the activist judges who are rewriting laws, and the constitution. It is the activist judges who are ruling that the government has the right to use emininent domain to take land from private citizens and give it to a corporation for "fair compensation". Activist judges can do little in this case to help anyways.
If it can be shown that the lady violated the law on the books, it is the judges duty to uphold those laws. I'm pretty sure enough copyright cases have been handled that the precedents show the laws to be constitutional. The only way the judge could ignore the wrong doing then is to declare either A the law is unconstitutional or B say that the RIAA illegally obtained evidence that is not permissable in case.
The ladys best bet is to argue that she is not responsible for the material downloaded, and has no knowledge of it, and force the RIAA to prove that she knowingly pirated the music. Then the burden of proof is on the RIAA, and they have to show evidence that was legally obtained etc etc. They also have to prove that their "evidence" is valid. It's hard to prove a few lines of text on their computers show what she did, and haven't been modified
Your comments about republicans being out to make her fry are completely without basis, and a huge troll. Either way this lawsuit is bad news for the RIAA. Even if they win, and win a large settlement against this lady there will be a public backlash. There will also be a demand for new laws to stop some of these efforts. Look at the limitations of DRM that came out real fast when Sony's rootkit was revealed. It was less than a week before we had officials working for the president criticizing Sony over their actions! That of course was an example of Republicans protesting, and the attorney general siding on the side of large corporations because all republicans (and no democrats) are controlled by the big corporations.
Think before you write. You come off as a moron with statements like yours.
Phil
While the first order effects of what you say true, is it really? I don't know how far you are into the music scene, but I know there are many active message boards for bands out there. From small to large bands, althoug the smaller to medium sized boards are the best (where people get to know most people on their, and reading all the new posts is manageable). There are also larger boards and mailing lists out there that some people prefer (such as the postcard mailing list). What these boards have done to music is amazing. Now you can easily meet with other people who like the same bands you like.
Where this comes into the P2P equation is that one these boards the discussion regularly veers off the subject of the band involved. Ofter it discusses bands that other board members like, album reviews, concert reviews, and links to articles about bands that the original band in question supported. Now I love discussing new albums with people, and when one of my friends on a board suggests listening to band XYZ, I'll think about it. If that band has a website I might go there and check out songs there. If not I will often go check p2p sites. I generally won't pay $13 for a CD ofa band i've never heard (however I have been known to pay $6 or $7 for one). I generally buy 2-5 CDs a month so I definately am a big spender on CDs. I also rarely use p2p networks for them, and get mad when I talk to people who refuse to buy music and only use p2p networks.
Like many things there are excesses on each side of the issue.
Phil
Sounds like a great idea. Jimmy Carter did something similar. Met with groups who'd never agree, and some that wouldn't think rationally if their lives depended on it. All in the name of peace. While north korea, israel/palestine, etc may be as unpeaceful as ever, he got a nobel peace prize out of it.
So I say form a peaceful organization that agrees to stop the current war on mosquitos. Give the larva a chance to grow up, and while you may do nothing to stop the mosquitos, you will have a nobel peace prize at the end of the day. And since when did accomplishing anything real matter.
Phil
Uh, they have some of it. . . And it would work for a SoC... Just a couple problems with it mainly what processor are you going to use? An in-order RISC processor? Oh yeah, and the core is written in VHDL. Sounds like a winning processor for a laptop. . . Even assuming you pay the money to get the core produced on a 120nm ASIC (about $1M for a set of masks) you're still at a huge disadvantage. First off most of the cores there are designed around the MIPS processor. While still a perfectly usable instruction set, it's pretty much been relegated to the embedded world. Second of all they have nothing more advanced than scalar processors. All in order etc. They might manage an IPC of .6 if they're lucky. On top of that being implemented on an ASIC and not having custom logic will probably limit their speed to most likely under 500MHz. Of course a custom core could be laid out using CAD tools etc, but of course that would take much much longer to do. Don't get me wrong, opencores work great for embedded systems, and can work well for mid to low volume SoC applications, but they're not intended for high speed microprocessor performance.
Compare that to using an already made x86 core. It's compatible with most applications, and it's much faster (both in clock speed and likely to be superscalar). That and the price is probably not much more.
Phil
>
Think before you speak. If you think clearchannel did that because they disapproved of what the Dixie Chicks said, you're an idiot. They pulled it because many of the consumers of country music are highly patriotic and were very upset about the dixie chicks statements. I imagine many local music country music stations did the same thing because their consumers were pissed off. Likewise if a rock band said something bad about the war no one would care. Or at least not enough people to make a difference.
IANAL, but I will say this, if it can be shown that Sony bought this software and knowingly used it despite the implications of what the software does, they should be forced to pay. I'm not talking about some petty fines, or suing, I'm talking far more. While multi-millions of dollars of fines for trespassing and intentional invasion of privacy without the consumers consent etc are just the starts. I could imagine if it's proven that some of the business managers or CEOs knew what the software does, and can be shown that they willingly invaded their customers privacy, and violated their computers, I think jailtime might be in order. It is illegal to enable a company to commit a crime with gross violations like this.
I'm sure this could drag on for years, but lets hope someone attacks them for this and hits them where it hurts. No media company has the rights to do this. Even if there was mention of it in the EULA, it's legality would be questionable, but without even that, this is a dangerous place for them to go.
If they want to use mafia tactics to stop them, lets use ant-mafia tactics to catch them. That involves not just stopping their intimidation of people, and stopping their illegal activities, but hitting their leaders, and stopping them.
Phil
First a couple flaws in your math. The government gives a tax break of $2000 . . . That doesn't equate to $2000 in your pocket. That means that if after other credits you "earned" $50,000 the goverenment is only going to tax you on $48,000. Unless you're in the 100% tax bracket that doesn't work into a $2000 savings. Plus this savings is only for this year.
.3*2000, think you confused a yearly and 7 year value.
Assuming the person is paying 30% in taxes that works into a in hand cash savings of about $600.
$4540-$600=3940, over 7 years thats a difference of $563/year. This equates to need to save 225 gallons of gas per year by using the hybrid.
so miles/40=miles/50+225
so that requires driving 45,000 highway miles in a single year!!!
if your doing pure city driving
miles/30=miles/49+225
here you only have to drive 17,408 miles in a year. While more reasonable, this is still a faily high number.
With a more reasonable mix of highway and city driving it would likely require driving between 25,000 and 30,000 miles a year to break even.
Looking over your math I didn't get the same numbers you did even if the government discount was $2,000 and not
Also on top of it after 7 years your standard civic is worth a lot more than the hybrid. Once the batteries on the hybrids die the car is essenitally a junker. Just not worth the $10,000 or whatever it costs to replace them.
One of the biggest flaws with my arguments is the safety factor of smaller cars. This isn't an issue of hybrid vs non hybrid here, just smaller more fuel economic cars versus larger less efficient cars. Basically it comes down to the fact that human life is highly valuable, and there's no way around the fact that materials being the same, if you get hit by a large truck in a massive SUV you've got a much better chance of surviving than if you drive a small little car. small cars can get crushed easily. When a family buys a car they look into the safety of their kids. To many of them it's worth the extra money spent in gas for their childrens safety.
>
Reading this I don't see how promoting more fuel efficient cars effects any of this. An incentive to ride a bike to work or something can make sense from what your saying, but as my math just showed someone who rides a bike to work saves less by having a hybrid car than someone who has lots of commutes. Saving parking spaces makes sense, but driving a hybrid doesn't accomplish any of this.
Basically everything comes down to simple economics.
Phil
The auto companies have no incentive to make their SUVs more fuel efficient? Are you retarded? With gas between $2.50 and $3 a gallon the auto manufacturers are starting to see the incentive. SUV's have sold poorly since gas rose in price. The reason is obvious, consumers don't like paying so much in fuel costs, and when gas is $2.50 a gallon they start to think more about getting something that is more fuel efficient.
/. thinks we're living on, but without an incentive to do this there's no reason a company would. Maybe some small operation who's owners are willing to lose profit (or their employees are willing to lose some pay) will follow this, but I can't forsee the major company's doing this. Of course the government could do this, but this essentially works into pay cuts for everybody and a benefit to those who buy the hybrids. Of course who gets helped the most by the deal .. . those who drive THE MOST!!! Those are the ones with the most incentive to get a more fuel efficient car.
If you want the majority of cars sold to be extremely fuel efficient the easiest way would be to artificially increase the costs of gas through taxation. If gas were $10/gallon with no chance of lowering people would A: Drive a lot less, and B: when they purchase a new car the fuel economy would be much more important to them.
The thing is the cost of ownership of a new car is kind of hard to judge, and depends how long people will be driving it. Assuming a 7 year ownership (beyond that it gets much more complex due to the car breaking down etc) we get a yearly cost of about (Purchase cost)/7 + yearly insurance cost + (Miles Driven/year)*(Cost of a gallon of gas)/(MPG). For many people if they actually did the math it works out that even with gas being $2.50/gallon it's cheaper not to buy a hybrid car! Wasn't there a study not too long ago showing that?
Of course people don't really use these equations when buying a car, but many rough estimates are considered, and it's probably remarkably accurate. Of course than the category of car (how fancy, status symbol, etc) come into play as well. But even than gas prices will likely factor into the purchase (unless the person is wealthy enough that they wouldn't bat an eyelash at paying $20/gallon).
That being said I'm completely against the whole idea of the government getting that involved with the affair. As far as companies giving incentives to employees. . . WHY the hell would they? If Walmart gave employees credits for buying hybrids they'd either have to pay their employees less, or raise prices or profits. Does that make any sense to them? I don't know what world
Phil
I agree. I never had any respect for Britney (and still don't), but I do think Richard Thompson did a great version of the song. Although it does seem to be partially done as a joke. Also, I don't think it matters how the song was originally, if Richard Thompson is playing it is going to sound great . . . I don't think he's capable of playing a bad song.
Phil
These ideas will solve soooo much. We'll magically get qualified teachers because they're paid more. Oh wait... whats this, current teachers have tenure and can't be fired... didn't know this. Also reachers have never been held accountable the same way most people are, so paying them more won't help. Teachers have never gotten raises because they're good at it. They get paid based on how many years they've been in the district and how many degrees they have.
..I mean teaching our kids how to be good people. Of course they'd neglect that not every state is the same. For instance in the south kids are more likely to need to learn spanish. Or the industries want more people to do XYZ. Also, having one national education system would give it nothing else in the country to compare itself against. If every local school district tries there own thing, it becomes easier to see what methods work and what dont. Region X produces smarter people than region Y even though all other socioeconomic factors are similar. Maybe they're doing something better... Just maybe. Competition is a good thing.
If you try to change the system you get complaints that it's unfair. All it takes is one teacher from a minority who's been there as long as someone else and doesn't get the pay raise. The other teachers could be the best teachers in the world, but the minority teacher was passed up based on race. You can't tell me such a situation wouldn't happen, as similar things happen all the time.
Teachers learning more over break? Some choose to, some don't. Teachers want to have lives too. It's a stressful job, and they need breaks. Also many teachers want to spend time with their own children, that's why they chose it.
As far as local communities vs national debate. I generally find it a load of crap. Just what we want, the federal government indoctrinating our kids in
Sure in a perfect world we'd know whats the perfect curriculum is and whats the best course of study, but no one will agree on it, and we DON'T LIVE IN A PERFECT WORLD!
As far as coke machines... Eh I don't know if it matters. From my perspective I'd have been highly pissed off if I couldn't get my caffeine intake in my college classes. It helps, and some of us are tired.
For banning religion. . . Who really cares? Does it make a difference. . . I'm not saying it should be stressed, I don't think it should be, but should it be treated as taboo or non existant? I honestly don't know and don't care enough.
For colleges needing better engineering "teachers" . . . What do people expect? Do they expect that experts in a science field are also going tobe experts at teaching? Some people are better at teaching than others, and some professors are really good at it.
Of course even the best teachers in most engineering colleges have to avoid teaching too much. If you're a young tenure-track professor, research has to be your priority. Every extra hour spent preparing for class is an hour less spent on research. If you want tenure it doesn't matter if you can teach well, it only matters that you can teach. Research, however, matters a lot and has to be stressed.
As much as I disliked the system at first, I realized it does have its advantages. It encourages the sciences, and academia has never been about teaching so much as it has been about doing science. Most of the students survive somehow. I have, and I'm now a grad student who will further push the status quo.
If there's anything that needs to be changed it's the tenure system. Of course no one will go there, and all the experts (who ironically have tenure) will argue against any changes in the system.
Phil
I know I don't know the retail vs wholesale prices, but I do know that the difference in prices is not that massive. I might be off some, but I know I'm not off by an order of magnitude. I doubt most resellers of electronics are marking products up more than 10-15%. Especially when you are only looking at the lowest price. Companies are competing to sell for the lowest price for products like these, and can't make 100% profits on this stuff.
If you want to tell me the raw goods in a 60GB ipod only cost $20 go for it, but I won't believe it for a second.
Phil
Well looking at a priod link with Intel's financial statement it looks like they have 5.2 Billion dollars earmarked for research next year, and 5.9Billion dollars for building new fabs. Of course for only one chip you only need a single fab, so lets just say 7 billion dollars between R&D and fab production for that first chip.
Phil
$20 to make an ipod? Get real, while the number might not be what they charge, it's nowhere near that low. I paid $400 for a 60GB ipod a few months ago, and don't feel I paid the majority to apples profits. Lets consider the costs. A 2.5" 60GB hard drive costs over $70 on pricewatch. However a 2.5" hard drive is not in an ipod because it's much too big. The ipods use 1.8" hard drives, a quick search on froogle shows that a 60GB hdd such as the MK6006GAH costs over $200. Lets assume apple gets a large discount for buying so many drives. Maybe as low as $150 (which I doubt). Lets add a processor and a DSP for it (maybe ~$50) an LCD display and controller for it (another $50). Manufacturing and shipping costs another 30-40. Warranty coverage cost averaging maybe $10/ipod. Oh and a good Li ion battery which even in mass are expensive. Maybe another $40. Add in marketing costs, R&D costs, etc etc, it makes sense. On top of that as a student my cost was only $370 (of course it cost more due to taxes). Given these costs the profits are maybe $50-$100 if that. So yeah, the cost to make an ipod is obviously close to the $20 you quoted. Plus there's lots of competition in the digital music player market. However examining the market I didn't see a competing player that held 60GB of music that was considerably less. Also considering the ipod was probably smaller, easier to use, and can communicate with my car stereo the response was simple. Phil
Uh, the $40/chip value doesn't include R&D in it. You're values of $1.50 for cost of labor and $1.50 for R&D are way off. Are you familiar with how fabs work? I don't know much about them, but have learned some in a VLSI course I'm taking, and it is an extremely intensive process. It takes weeks to make just a single chip (granted the process is pipelined, and many chips are in the pipe at the same time). There are countless tons of chemicals involved in making your little ounce or two of silicon. I could see $40 as a decent cost to pay for the refined silicon, the chemicals involved, the masks (I assume the cost to create a mask is ammoritized over the run of chips it creates, but each mask costs millions for new technologies), the testing facilities, etc etc. It's just a really expensive process. Once you add in the billions it costs to build a fab, and the billions it costs to design a new processor (not too mention the costs to create a new microarchitecture). The price we pay for chips seems very fair. If you told someone 10 years ago that you could sell them a dual core 3.2 GHz chip for only $600 they'd scoop them up by the millions. Of course that's not really fair to compare in an industry governed by moores law. Phil
Wow,
Slashdot has moved so far to the left it's sick. Posts like this are disgusting. Conspiracy theorists throwing off crackpot ideas about how Bush did XYZ and failed to do ABC. I'm sure the relief effort could have been better and faster. Thats always the case. Nothing goes through perfectly, and things could always be better.
Blaming the administration for the failure is absurd. If anyone is to blame for most of the problems it's the looters. You know how much more difficult it is to bring aid to people when you have to worry about thugs on the street etc.
As far as the levee. I agree with the reply saying that the local and state taxes should be paying for it. Besides which, what are the odds that a new levee would have simply been a great big waste of money. I could imagine a year or two ago they start fixing it. About now its maybe a quarter to half way finished, 40million dollars are spent, the hurricane comes, and not only does the levee still break, but than 40 million dollars or whatever had already been spent is likely washed away. I'm not saying it didn't need to be fixed up, but to believe it would have been finished being fixed already to make a difference. Do you know the speed of a beauracracy?
For getting trucks to location, that takes times. Trucks don't instantly appear where you want them. And your comments on the national guard, please. Stop the fucking political bullshit. You don't like the war, you think the arab nations should stay totalitarian terrorists who hate the US, and thats fine. But don't blame the war for every thing that happens in the us.
get a clue,
Phil
Uh.... You haven't even touched the point of my post. I wasn't saying evidence wasn't there to point to XYZ, I was saying that it wasn't repeatable.
The original post I responded to attacked ID because it wasn't repeatable. I was just stating evolution wasn't either.
As far as what you say, it just shows changes occured, whether or not those changes were guided by an outside force or not, I do not know, and whether they even occured can only be speculated based on fossil record. Work on such fields can never have conclusive theories that will be readily agreed upon. While Newtonian physics was later shown to not be correct under every circumstance much of it was readily agreed upon because it was an observable behavior that we were watching.
If an outside being lived billions of years and could observe the earth growing up in real time they could make readily agreed upon conclusions about evolution.
As the topic is such, it will always be a target of much debate. Honestly, does it make a difference? Who really cares, and how does it impact my life? I'll stick to studying a science that actually has an impact and matters (computer engineering)
Phil
There's a slight problem with these ideas. Many areas of research do not have large active communities. In some fields having 5-10 professors (each with 2 or 3 grad students) is considered quite a lot. For many papers if they're read by 20 people across the world, the author feels glad that someone actually read them.
All these papers are advancing science, but having an online peer review would be a waste. No one would voluntarily judge many of the papers. Do you realize that most scientists are working on a million different things, and generally don't want to do more work unrelated to their research. Many review papers because it's expected. It is part of the process, if you want others to review your work, you must review others work.
Allowing online comments like you suggest would be horrible. Part of the reason for having blind reviews is so that one scientist doesn't have to feel the pressure of giving a friend in the fields work a bad review. Sometimes it needs to be done. Such is the method of science. Also these ideas to publishing papers would likely result in poorer papers overall. While there might be more papers, they'd likely be less well written. They'd basically be a shell with added on comments other people wanted to hear etc etc. While this is true to some extent with current work, this would likely lead to longer scientific papers as well, that would be harder to read if you were not involved in the review process originally.
While your ideas seem nice, I doubt they'd work in practice. After involving myself with the submission process I've learned quite a bit, and some of it involves papers being partially randomly accepted (it depends who's assigned to read it, and which of their grad students actually does read it).
Phil
While not a proponent of Intelligent design or of evolution (there is not enough evidence either way, and honestly I don't know enough about it or care enough about it because it's not an important issue to everything dealing with my day to day life), I find your statement invalid.
You claim that ID can't be tested by repeatable experiments. Well that is true, but can evolution be tested by repeatable experiments? Maybe some of the smaller claims of evolution such as bacteria growing more resilient etc etc, but those claims can fit in with ID as well.
If you can show me one repeatable experiment showing that humans evolved from apes, I'd like to see it.
it's not that ID is without its flaws, its just this comment of yours does not examine the fact that there's no simple way to test most any of these theories.
Phil
Your assumption of AllOfMp3 competing with iTunes is just wrong. The only legality AllOfMp3 has is that it might fit through a loophole in the copyright laws. I honestly hope this is not the case.
If such a loophole exists in the copyright laws, congress will have no choice but to pass a law that will change the copyright laws for the RIAA. And I'd have to support the RIAA in changing the law as well. However, knowing the history of the RIAA and of our congress, do you honestly believe in closing the loophole they wouldn't make the law much stricter, and stop many of the definitions of fair use.
The law would be written by the RIAA's lawyers most likely, and congressmen would see it as to close the clause in copyright law that allows some third company to sell people music they don't own.
God, I really hope AllOfMp3 is considered illegal. It just seems a much better alternative. While the RIAA will still try and push legislation down congress' throat, without some compelling reason it becomes much harder for congress to approve it.
Phil
AllOfMp3 is a load of crap. What is the point? I don't care if the site is technically within the law or not, you're still getting the music and giving money to some random third party who gives none of it to the people who actually own it.
Honestly the owners of AllOfMp3 are even worse scum than the record labels. At least the record labels are profitting off something they own. AllOfMp3 is like the guy who steals your car stereo and sells it at a pawn shop. I'd rather see someone use p2p and save their money then give their money to these criminals.
Does using AllOfMp3 make you feel better? Do you now get to gloat at how cheap you stole something? Are you special now that you paid someone to steal a song for you rather than just going out and stealing it yourself?
I am no fan of the record labels, and think that the increase in prices on itunes would be bad for their business. The idea that piracy shouldn't effect supply and demand is a bad policy for the labels to have. They can't eradicate piracy. However I'll continute to purchase my music the old fashioned way, on CD. At least than I own something, and can rerip it later if my needs change. And I'll even admit that I'll use p2p music services. I download songs illegally. Although I'd laugh if the RIAA ever tried going after me. Considering how much money I spend a year on cds (I generally buy 2 or 3 CDs a month, although mostly used) they'd be crazy to think I'm capable of buying more music on my income.
It's an amusing game the labels are playing. I just can't wait for the artists to take back more control through independent labels, or releasing stuff on their own over the net, as producing your own CDs has become relatively cheap.
Phil