I agree from the manufacturer's perspective, but an enduring large gap between production cost and sales price is at least surprising from an economics perspective. Classical economic theory would predict that such gaps can't survive for long, because a competitor will move into the space, offering lower prices that are still above cost.
His argument seems to pretty grossly overestimate the extent to which international law and institutions are really law and institutions in the sense they are within countries, versus looser arrangements that, when push comes to shove, get overriden by realpolitik.
For example, he assumes that a single country (or, presumably, group of countries) can't just go and deflect an asteroid using nuclear weapons, because of the Partial Test Ban Treaty. Really? If it seemed like the best option, everyone would just stop and not do it for fear of violating the Test Ban Treaty? Surely someone, the US or China or Russia or whoever had the capacity to do so, would simply ignore the treaty. And it probably wouldn't even come to that, because a handful of powerful countries would hash out a backroom deal. This sort of thing happens all the time already. It violated international law to invade Kosovo, for example, but hey look, Kosovo got invaded, and now is de-facto independent of Serbia. Didn't seem to stop anyone.
Then he suggests something about bringing options to the UN General Assembly. Well, yes, if the General Assembly is your idea of international cooperation, then we're doomed, because nothing will get done. Fortunately, however, the General Assembly has no power, and doesn't really matter. Real decisions get made at the Security Council, which is more or less a formalization of the de-facto handful of powerful countries hashing out a backroom deal.
Mostly, it seems like he thinks that a major obstacle to deflecting asteroids is some sort of international apparatus that has never in practice been an obstacle to anything.
Well, it's only important to look for "an untapped resource of potentially excellent computer scientists and/or IT personnel" if we have a shortage of them. If there's a surplus, there's no real need to dig up untapped resources.
Are there really? I don't know of many well-paying tech jobs with "sane work hours", at least the way most fields define the term (40-hour weeks, only weekend/overtime work when there's emergencies, and emergencies don't happen every month).
A woman named Jeanna Bryner wrote the original article, entitled "Geeks Drive Girls Out of Computer Science" (1st link), which is arguing the fairly standard point, that women are turned away from CS due to a male-dominated geek culture. The reply, from a male blogger named Cameron Laird (2nd link), argues the opposite, that women are too smart to go into computing.
This search is limited to only the person arrested and the area immediately surrounding the person in which the person may gain possession of a weapon, in some way effect an escape, or destroy or hide evidence.
I may have misremembered that part--- don't recall what the Supreme Court decision establishing the search-incident-to-arrest doctrine was and haven't read it recently, so it might well have only had weapons as a justification.
If I recall correctly, the original rationale for concluding that warrantless searches incident to arrest are "reasonable" is that: 1) the arresting officer needs to be able to ensure that the suspect is unarmed and not carrying recording devices; and 2) the police need to be able to inventory the subject's possessions in case a future dispute arises over their proper return.
I don't see either of those rationales making sense for searching electronic devices. Unlike with a physical container, where the suspect might be concealing a weapon (point 1), a suspect cannot conceal weapons within the data contained on electronic devices (at least for definitions of "weapon" relevant to ensuring a police officer's safety). An arrestee might, I suppose, later claim that the police stole a valuable item that was never in fact there (point 2), but I think this is considerably more far-fetched than with physical containers--- we're not talking about stealing gold coins out of a purse or something, but maybe destroying data that the arrestee claims is valuable and irreplaceable. Is that concern sufficient to allow police to routinely inventory all data on arrestees' devices? And how would they even inventory it?
It is, but the 4th amendment only prohibits "unreasonable" searches. In the general case, a "reasonable" search is one authorized by a warrant, but the courts have held that some kinds of warrantless searches are presumptively reasonable. Search of an arrestee incident to arrest is one of them.
Did you forget half of classical economics? Prices are set by an intersection on the supply/demand curve, not by the demand curve alone. And if there is a large profit margin (gap between production cost and market price), it ought to attract more supply, driving down price (the vaunted "invisible hand").
That assumes fixed supply, which doesn't make much sense in a free market. If consumers are currently willing to pay a much higher cost than the cost of production (i.e. quite large profit margin), it should attract new suppliers to undercut them, driving the price down. You know, "invisible hand" and all that.
I'm aware there's a Chinese blogosphere. What I was curious is whether there was a part of the Chinese blogosphere that focuses on criticizing Chinese society and government, rather than promoting it.
Much of the vociferous criticism of the USA and its people comes from other Americans, so it doesn't seem like a particularly apt analogy. I'm admittedly not as familiar with the Chinese blogosphere as with the American one, but are there really Chinese equivalents to, say, DailyKos, that spend extensive time excoriating their own country's culture and government?
A police department asking a telecom company to turn over transcripts of messages is a somewhat different position, though. Does a telecom company really treat those requests exactly as any other customer asking for transcripts of messages? Or does it treat it like a police request for transcripts?
It's a fairly small proportion of Microsoft's business overall to begin with, so it's odd that people would attribute either successes or problems at Microsoft as a whole to its Entertainment and Devices division. Microsoft has annual revenues just under $60 billion, while its the Entertainment and Devices division has revenues just under $2 billion--- it's about 3% of the company's business. If Microsoft is doing better or worse one year vs. another, it's much more likely to be due to something going on with Windows or Office than with the XBox.
I don't think it's really GPL partisans here, but rather people around Monty worried about the non-GPL, commercial-licensing angle. Note that in the article linked under "still not enough for some", one of the main complaints they keep harping on is that Sun only agreed to guarantee existing commercial licenses for 5 years. That has nothing to do with the GPL version.
I suspect the kvetching has more to do with business and profit than with free software, because I don't really see any pro-free-software complaints there.
The authorities learned of the murder-for-hire plot, charged him with it and transferred him to a different jail facility, There he approach[ed] yet another individual and proposed that he kill both the original witness and the person Valkovich had attempted to hire for the first hit.
A minor setback, really--- clearly he's now just in need of a fourth person willing to commit three murders for hire...
I wouldn't get too strong into claims about what it's "amazingly effective" for. As you point out, Abilify is prescribed for a lot of things, and the vast majority of them are "off-label" uses for which there has been no real demonstration of effectiveness.
Getting a drug approved in the first place requires a fairly rigorous process of double-blind, peer-reviewed studies. But once it's approved for a particular use, there is no similar level of rigorous screening before it can be prescribed off-label for other, unapproved uses.
That's not actually in line with most of the studies that have come out over the past 10-15 years. Sure, there are a lot of quack methodologies, but following an accepted, mainstream program of counseling for a disorder for which the program is recommended by a mainstream body like the APA, carried out by properly accredited specialists, is generally associated with better-than-control outcomes (and better than informal counseling by a primary-care physician). Here and here are two recent systematic meta-analyses of the results for depression (the best-studied disorder).
Whether counseling is better or worse than drugs is more up in the air, and seems to depend pretty heavily on the demographics, the specific disorder, the type of counseling, the type of drugs, and the time period of which you're looking (and even within all those, there are huge variances among studies). This survey is typical of the generally mixed/inconclusive results such comparisons come up with. (In addition, most disorders are much less well studied than depression, and sample sizes, especially within demographically comparable groups, are much smaller.)
In any case, I'm not aware of much in the way of peer-reviewed research that supports a hardline "pills are effective, and counseling is not" claim.
The study found an effect even among poor v. wealthy children with the same diagnosis, though, which none of 1/2/3 could explain. 1/2/3 could plausibly lead to more psychotic diagnoses among poor children, but not to more prescription of drugs within the same diagnosis.
The article is actually normalized for one of your claimed possible confounds, the variance of psychological problems by socioeconomic position. The finding isn't just that the poor get more antipsychotics full stop, but that the poor with the same diagnosis as a wealthy person are more likely to be treated with antipsychotics for that condition.
You don't need a Ph.D., but there is a certain set of cultural norms and barriers you have to cross, quite apart from the technical aspects. It took me a few years as a Ph.D. student to figure out how to write papers that "sounded like" someone in my field, after which getting stuff accepted got much easier. Even in blind-review systems, that authenticating as "this sounds like it was written by 'one of us'" can make a bigger difference than you might think.
As a reviewer, I actively try not to do that, but it's really tempting, because honestly, a large proportion of the papers that don't sound like they were written by someone in the field aren't actually good. But it does mean that good stuff by outsiders is more likely to get rejected just because the reviewer noticed it was from an outsider who failed to blend in well enough, and didn't really give it a chance. Doubly so if it makes any even remotely controversial claims.
Re:Can we please stop with the "denialist" crap?
on
The Limits To Skepticism
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I think the consensus is at quite different orders of magnitude. The Holocaust is a historical event that happened, and happened so recently and at such a large scale that there ample physical evidence, large numbers of photographs, and testimony from participants, and even thousands of eye witnesses still alive.
Anthropogenic global warming is orders of magnitude trickier. In its strongest form, it's a prediction about what is likely to happen in the future, to an extremely complicated dynamical system with millions of variables. Even in the purely backwards-looking form, it's an attempt to reconstruct a temperature record from heterogenous and often problematic sources, factor out confounding factors, and attribute a portion of the observed data to human activity. It doesn't take skepticism in general to realize that no matter how well done an endeavor like that is, it can hardly hope to be as certain as the knowledge that a particular widely observed and well-documented historical event happened 55 years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree from the manufacturer's perspective, but an enduring large gap between production cost and sales price is at least surprising from an economics perspective. Classical economic theory would predict that such gaps can't survive for long, because a competitor will move into the space, offering lower prices that are still above cost.
Google wants [...] high page rank that can drive advertising income
Does Google really need to buy a company to improve their ranking in search engines?
His argument seems to pretty grossly overestimate the extent to which international law and institutions are really law and institutions in the sense they are within countries, versus looser arrangements that, when push comes to shove, get overriden by realpolitik.
For example, he assumes that a single country (or, presumably, group of countries) can't just go and deflect an asteroid using nuclear weapons, because of the Partial Test Ban Treaty. Really? If it seemed like the best option, everyone would just stop and not do it for fear of violating the Test Ban Treaty? Surely someone, the US or China or Russia or whoever had the capacity to do so, would simply ignore the treaty. And it probably wouldn't even come to that, because a handful of powerful countries would hash out a backroom deal. This sort of thing happens all the time already. It violated international law to invade Kosovo, for example, but hey look, Kosovo got invaded, and now is de-facto independent of Serbia. Didn't seem to stop anyone.
Then he suggests something about bringing options to the UN General Assembly. Well, yes, if the General Assembly is your idea of international cooperation, then we're doomed, because nothing will get done. Fortunately, however, the General Assembly has no power, and doesn't really matter. Real decisions get made at the Security Council, which is more or less a formalization of the de-facto handful of powerful countries hashing out a backroom deal.
Mostly, it seems like he thinks that a major obstacle to deflecting asteroids is some sort of international apparatus that has never in practice been an obstacle to anything.
Well, it's only important to look for "an untapped resource of potentially excellent computer scientists and/or IT personnel" if we have a shortage of them. If there's a surplus, there's no real need to dig up untapped resources.
Are there really? I don't know of many well-paying tech jobs with "sane work hours", at least the way most fields define the term (40-hour weeks, only weekend/overtime work when there's emergencies, and emergencies don't happen every month).
A woman named Jeanna Bryner wrote the original article, entitled "Geeks Drive Girls Out of Computer Science" (1st link), which is arguing the fairly standard point, that women are turned away from CS due to a male-dominated geek culture. The reply, from a male blogger named Cameron Laird (2nd link), argues the opposite, that women are too smart to go into computing.
Ah, found it, from Wikipedia:
I may have misremembered that part--- don't recall what the Supreme Court decision establishing the search-incident-to-arrest doctrine was and haven't read it recently, so it might well have only had weapons as a justification.
If I recall correctly, the original rationale for concluding that warrantless searches incident to arrest are "reasonable" is that: 1) the arresting officer needs to be able to ensure that the suspect is unarmed and not carrying recording devices; and 2) the police need to be able to inventory the subject's possessions in case a future dispute arises over their proper return.
I don't see either of those rationales making sense for searching electronic devices. Unlike with a physical container, where the suspect might be concealing a weapon (point 1), a suspect cannot conceal weapons within the data contained on electronic devices (at least for definitions of "weapon" relevant to ensuring a police officer's safety). An arrestee might, I suppose, later claim that the police stole a valuable item that was never in fact there (point 2), but I think this is considerably more far-fetched than with physical containers--- we're not talking about stealing gold coins out of a purse or something, but maybe destroying data that the arrestee claims is valuable and irreplaceable. Is that concern sufficient to allow police to routinely inventory all data on arrestees' devices? And how would they even inventory it?
It is, but the 4th amendment only prohibits "unreasonable" searches. In the general case, a "reasonable" search is one authorized by a warrant, but the courts have held that some kinds of warrantless searches are presumptively reasonable. Search of an arrestee incident to arrest is one of them.
Did you forget half of classical economics? Prices are set by an intersection on the supply/demand curve, not by the demand curve alone. And if there is a large profit margin (gap between production cost and market price), it ought to attract more supply, driving down price (the vaunted "invisible hand").
That assumes fixed supply, which doesn't make much sense in a free market. If consumers are currently willing to pay a much higher cost than the cost of production (i.e. quite large profit margin), it should attract new suppliers to undercut them, driving the price down. You know, "invisible hand" and all that.
I'm aware there's a Chinese blogosphere. What I was curious is whether there was a part of the Chinese blogosphere that focuses on criticizing Chinese society and government, rather than promoting it.
Much of the vociferous criticism of the USA and its people comes from other Americans, so it doesn't seem like a particularly apt analogy. I'm admittedly not as familiar with the Chinese blogosphere as with the American one, but are there really Chinese equivalents to, say, DailyKos, that spend extensive time excoriating their own country's culture and government?
A police department asking a telecom company to turn over transcripts of messages is a somewhat different position, though. Does a telecom company really treat those requests exactly as any other customer asking for transcripts of messages? Or does it treat it like a police request for transcripts?
It's a fairly small proportion of Microsoft's business overall to begin with, so it's odd that people would attribute either successes or problems at Microsoft as a whole to its Entertainment and Devices division. Microsoft has annual revenues just under $60 billion, while its the Entertainment and Devices division has revenues just under $2 billion--- it's about 3% of the company's business. If Microsoft is doing better or worse one year vs. another, it's much more likely to be due to something going on with Windows or Office than with the XBox.
I don't think it's really GPL partisans here, but rather people around Monty worried about the non-GPL, commercial-licensing angle. Note that in the article linked under "still not enough for some", one of the main complaints they keep harping on is that Sun only agreed to guarantee existing commercial licenses for 5 years. That has nothing to do with the GPL version.
I suspect the kvetching has more to do with business and profit than with free software, because I don't really see any pro-free-software complaints there.
A minor setback, really--- clearly he's now just in need of a fourth person willing to commit three murders for hire...
More like Microsoft RMS.
I wouldn't get too strong into claims about what it's "amazingly effective" for. As you point out, Abilify is prescribed for a lot of things, and the vast majority of them are "off-label" uses for which there has been no real demonstration of effectiveness.
Getting a drug approved in the first place requires a fairly rigorous process of double-blind, peer-reviewed studies. But once it's approved for a particular use, there is no similar level of rigorous screening before it can be prescribed off-label for other, unapproved uses.
That's not actually in line with most of the studies that have come out over the past 10-15 years. Sure, there are a lot of quack methodologies, but following an accepted, mainstream program of counseling for a disorder for which the program is recommended by a mainstream body like the APA, carried out by properly accredited specialists, is generally associated with better-than-control outcomes (and better than informal counseling by a primary-care physician). Here and here are two recent systematic meta-analyses of the results for depression (the best-studied disorder).
Whether counseling is better or worse than drugs is more up in the air, and seems to depend pretty heavily on the demographics, the specific disorder, the type of counseling, the type of drugs, and the time period of which you're looking (and even within all those, there are huge variances among studies). This survey is typical of the generally mixed/inconclusive results such comparisons come up with. (In addition, most disorders are much less well studied than depression, and sample sizes, especially within demographically comparable groups, are much smaller.)
In any case, I'm not aware of much in the way of peer-reviewed research that supports a hardline "pills are effective, and counseling is not" claim.
The study found an effect even among poor v. wealthy children with the same diagnosis, though, which none of 1/2/3 could explain. 1/2/3 could plausibly lead to more psychotic diagnoses among poor children, but not to more prescription of drugs within the same diagnosis.
The article is actually normalized for one of your claimed possible confounds, the variance of psychological problems by socioeconomic position. The finding isn't just that the poor get more antipsychotics full stop, but that the poor with the same diagnosis as a wealthy person are more likely to be treated with antipsychotics for that condition.
You don't need a Ph.D., but there is a certain set of cultural norms and barriers you have to cross, quite apart from the technical aspects. It took me a few years as a Ph.D. student to figure out how to write papers that "sounded like" someone in my field, after which getting stuff accepted got much easier. Even in blind-review systems, that authenticating as "this sounds like it was written by 'one of us'" can make a bigger difference than you might think.
As a reviewer, I actively try not to do that, but it's really tempting, because honestly, a large proportion of the papers that don't sound like they were written by someone in the field aren't actually good. But it does mean that good stuff by outsiders is more likely to get rejected just because the reviewer noticed it was from an outsider who failed to blend in well enough, and didn't really give it a chance. Doubly so if it makes any even remotely controversial claims.
I think the consensus is at quite different orders of magnitude. The Holocaust is a historical event that happened, and happened so recently and at such a large scale that there ample physical evidence, large numbers of photographs, and testimony from participants, and even thousands of eye witnesses still alive.
Anthropogenic global warming is orders of magnitude trickier. In its strongest form, it's a prediction about what is likely to happen in the future, to an extremely complicated dynamical system with millions of variables. Even in the purely backwards-looking form, it's an attempt to reconstruct a temperature record from heterogenous and often problematic sources, factor out confounding factors, and attribute a portion of the observed data to human activity. It doesn't take skepticism in general to realize that no matter how well done an endeavor like that is, it can hardly hope to be as certain as the knowledge that a particular widely observed and well-documented historical event happened 55 years ago.