The iPod was introduced in 2001; the iTunes Music Store was introduced in 2003. Clearly the latter was not the impetus for the former: The iPod started out as an mp3 player, and Apple later realized that they could make even more money by selling you the mp3s to put on it.
I would be interesting, though, to see some sort of study on the proportion of iPod users who primarily use it for musical purchased on iTunes Music Store or a competitor, versus music downloaded from P2P or ripped from a CD.
The music industry didn't initially kill off singles to boost album sales, because singles were actually pretty good profit-makers. They ended up overreaching though---singles prices kept going up. This was partly supposed to be justified by adding more tracks---a 7" single had 2 tracks on it, while "maxi-singles" on CD could have like 12 remixes of the song. The problem is that nobody wanted to pay $10 for a maxi-single with 12 remixes of the same song, so singles stopped selling enough copies to really be worthwhile.
Tycho's writing style is a bit thesaurus-heavy. He gives the impression that he's going about things backwards: Rather than trying to say something, and then finding the appropriate words to say it, instead he has words he wants to use, and finds ways to work them in. He's much better at it than most would-be internet intellectuals, but it still falls flat more often than not.
I agree the concepts are distinct, but most people who value freedom are wary of "big brother" style governments that perform far too much surveillance on their own citizens, because that puts them in a dangerously powerful position to later use that information to restrict freedoms.
The people who use an office suite to write scientific papers are the same sorts of people who use Windows anyway. Linux-using scientists almost exclusively use LaTeX, either directly, or through a semi-WYSIWG frontend like LyX.
This is making a fairly strong claim---that it is definitionally impossible to choose to commit suicide without being mentall ill. I think there are some existentialists who would like to have a word with you over that...
These sorts of confiscations must be understood to be only for extraordinary and rare circumstances, if they are not to negatively impact the market. If people thought there was a good chance of having their property confiscated, they would be reluctant to invest much effort in developing it. Similarly, drug companies will be reluctant to develop new cures if they are routinely confiscated without payment.
If it happens once in a great while in extraordinary cases, that's one thing, but it would be very bad if it became expected behavior.
"Just compensation" does not mean simply paying for expenses. By that argument, if the government confiscated your house to build a freeway, they'd only have to pay you either your exact purchase price (if you bought it existing), or the amount it cost you to build it (if you're the one that built it). However, they cannot do this: They have to pay you the going market rate for the property, which in many cases involves you profiting, if the value has gone up since you bought it.
If the US didn't go along with it, any European who wanted their website to be accessible by Americans would have to either convince individual American ISPs to use their root servers, or would have to continue using the U.S. root servers for their site (perhaps in addition to the new European ones).
Progressives have been for state control of morality for as long as progressivism has existed as a political philosophy. Many of the prominent campaigners for women's suffrage, for example, were also campaigners for prohibition of alcohol.
To take only one of the more notable examples, there's her husband, Bill Clinton, who signed the unconstitutional Communications Decency Act (CDA) into law in 1996, and then when that was struck down, followed it up with the also unconstitutional Child Online Protection Act (COPA) in 1998, most of which has since also been struck down.
Incidentally, most of the Democratic Party's Senators and Congressmen voted for those laws.
CoS stuff is good in Germany because Germany banned the CoS as a "dangerous cult", so they don't get any legal protections there. But in general Germany's laws aren't that friendly, and there is basically no fair-use provision.
Barring any country with a specific advantage for your specific content, I'd say the U.S. is probably the best, despite its numerous drawbacks. The First Amendment provides a very strong presumption in favor of people publishing content. This means you don't have to worry about all sorts of weird stuff that could befall you elsewhere, like being sued for offending religious sensibilities (France, Italy, etc.). It's also much harder to get a libel judgment in the US than it is in places like the UK, and the fair-use provision is stronger than it is in other countries (despite the best efforts of the media lobby).
Modern ports are no longer restricted to the very edge of the ocean. This is why Galveston, Texas is no longer the major port in the region, having been replaced by a canal that goes to Houston, Texas, about 30 miles inland (and much safer).
New Orleans, too, is no longer itself a major port: Most of the port facilities are now 20-50 miles upriver. There's no reason the people could's also live 20-50 miles upriver.
At least as I've heard it used "genetic drift" does contribute to evolution; it's essentially the "sampling error" factor in the stochastic process. That is, if you have 5 individuals each of A and B, and the ideal result due to selection is that the next generation ought to have 5.5 individuals of A and 4.5 of B, getting 4 of A and 6 of B just due to random chance is not that unlikely.
The OP is wrong in that this is generally the phenomenon that dominates though; that's only true in small population groups, where the variation from sampling dominates most selection pressures, which tend to be relatively modest. In large population groups even small selection pressures tend to dominate.
What you describe is what happens in very small populations. In more moderately-sized populations changes are driven by a more even mixtue of drift and selection. In very large populations genetic drift is all but negligible, and selection predominates.
It'd still be safer: one of New Orleans's major problems is that it's surrounded by water. Lake Pontchartrain in particular is a perennial threat. If the city only had to contend with the Mississippi River, it would be a lot easier to protect it properly. Were it 30-40 miles further inland, hurricanes would also be substantially weaker by the time they reached it.
What you're talking about is the Port of Southern Louisiana, which is located along a 50-mile stretch of the Mississippi river. Most shipping is not actually in the city of New Orleans (at least not for the past few decades). This sprawling port does not require the city of New Orleans in order to operate, although some debris will indeed have to be cleared out of the river.
It's true that it does require people in the vicinity to operate the various facilities, but there is no reason they can't be located further inland. New Orleans is in just about the worst possible spot in the region, located below sea level, in a bowl, in a swamp, between a river, lake, other lake, and the gulf.
If New Orleans were rebuilt 30-40 miles upriver, the port could continue to operate just fine, and the residents would be in a safer and more sustainable location. There is absolutely no reason to continue to maintain a city that is an average of 10 feet below sea level, when there is perfectly good above-sea-level land not very far away.
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You might be right, but you may well be shown to be foolish 10 or 50 years from now. I'd bet on the latter.
The iPod was introduced in 2001; the iTunes Music Store was introduced in 2003. Clearly the latter was not the impetus for the former: The iPod started out as an mp3 player, and Apple later realized that they could make even more money by selling you the mp3s to put on it.
I would be interesting, though, to see some sort of study on the proportion of iPod users who primarily use it for musical purchased on iTunes Music Store or a competitor, versus music downloaded from P2P or ripped from a CD.
Since the classic OS had cooperative multitasking, any app crash brought down the system.
The music industry didn't initially kill off singles to boost album sales, because singles were actually pretty good profit-makers. They ended up overreaching though---singles prices kept going up. This was partly supposed to be justified by adding more tracks---a 7" single had 2 tracks on it, while "maxi-singles" on CD could have like 12 remixes of the song. The problem is that nobody wanted to pay $10 for a maxi-single with 12 remixes of the same song, so singles stopped selling enough copies to really be worthwhile.
Tycho's writing style is a bit thesaurus-heavy. He gives the impression that he's going about things backwards: Rather than trying to say something, and then finding the appropriate words to say it, instead he has words he wants to use, and finds ways to work them in. He's much better at it than most would-be internet intellectuals, but it still falls flat more often than not.
But I can't count the number of times I've cursed that goddamned bomb symbol popping up on the Mac OS.
I agree the concepts are distinct, but most people who value freedom are wary of "big brother" style governments that perform far too much surveillance on their own citizens, because that puts them in a dangerously powerful position to later use that information to restrict freedoms.
The people who use an office suite to write scientific papers are the same sorts of people who use Windows anyway. Linux-using scientists almost exclusively use LaTeX, either directly, or through a semi-WYSIWG frontend like LyX.
This is making a fairly strong claim---that it is definitionally impossible to choose to commit suicide without being mentall ill. I think there are some existentialists who would like to have a word with you over that...
These sorts of confiscations must be understood to be only for extraordinary and rare circumstances, if they are not to negatively impact the market. If people thought there was a good chance of having their property confiscated, they would be reluctant to invest much effort in developing it. Similarly, drug companies will be reluctant to develop new cures if they are routinely confiscated without payment.
If it happens once in a great while in extraordinary cases, that's one thing, but it would be very bad if it became expected behavior.
"Just compensation" does not mean simply paying for expenses. By that argument, if the government confiscated your house to build a freeway, they'd only have to pay you either your exact purchase price (if you bought it existing), or the amount it cost you to build it (if you're the one that built it). However, they cannot do this: They have to pay you the going market rate for the property, which in many cases involves you profiting, if the value has gone up since you bought it.
Where we let any jackass vote, even if he can't read and doesn't know who the current president is.
If the US didn't go along with it, any European who wanted their website to be accessible by Americans would have to either convince individual American ISPs to use their root servers, or would have to continue using the U.S. root servers for their site (perhaps in addition to the new European ones).
Progressives have been for state control of morality for as long as progressivism has existed as a political philosophy. Many of the prominent campaigners for women's suffrage, for example, were also campaigners for prohibition of alcohol.
To take only one of the more notable examples, there's her husband, Bill Clinton, who signed the unconstitutional Communications Decency Act (CDA) into law in 1996, and then when that was struck down, followed it up with the also unconstitutional Child Online Protection Act (COPA) in 1998, most of which has since also been struck down.
Incidentally, most of the Democratic Party's Senators and Congressmen voted for those laws.
CoS stuff is good in Germany because Germany banned the CoS as a "dangerous cult", so they don't get any legal protections there. But in general Germany's laws aren't that friendly, and there is basically no fair-use provision.
Barring any country with a specific advantage for your specific content, I'd say the U.S. is probably the best, despite its numerous drawbacks. The First Amendment provides a very strong presumption in favor of people publishing content. This means you don't have to worry about all sorts of weird stuff that could befall you elsewhere, like being sued for offending religious sensibilities (France, Italy, etc.). It's also much harder to get a libel judgment in the US than it is in places like the UK, and the fair-use provision is stronger than it is in other countries (despite the best efforts of the media lobby).
Modern ports are no longer restricted to the very edge of the ocean. This is why Galveston, Texas is no longer the major port in the region, having been replaced by a canal that goes to Houston, Texas, about 30 miles inland (and much safer).
New Orleans, too, is no longer itself a major port: Most of the port facilities are now 20-50 miles upriver. There's no reason the people could's also live 20-50 miles upriver.
It's the way you typically model bacteria populations, for example. Or even, on a slightly smaller scale, insects.
At least as I've heard it used "genetic drift" does contribute to evolution; it's essentially the "sampling error" factor in the stochastic process. That is, if you have 5 individuals each of A and B, and the ideal result due to selection is that the next generation ought to have 5.5 individuals of A and 4.5 of B, getting 4 of A and 6 of B just due to random chance is not that unlikely.
The OP is wrong in that this is generally the phenomenon that dominates though; that's only true in small population groups, where the variation from sampling dominates most selection pressures, which tend to be relatively modest. In large population groups even small selection pressures tend to dominate.
What you describe is what happens in very small populations. In more moderately-sized populations changes are driven by a more even mixtue of drift and selection. In very large populations genetic drift is all but negligible, and selection predominates.
The most relevant difference is that Pat Robertson isn't in charge of any country, and therefore is no serious threat to anyone.
Were he in danger of becoming U.S. President, I'd be more worried about him, but that isn't going to happen.
I don't recall Robertson leading a coup attempt, arresting his opponents, or arming his own private militia.
It'd still be safer: one of New Orleans's major problems is that it's surrounded by water. Lake Pontchartrain in particular is a perennial threat. If the city only had to contend with the Mississippi River, it would be a lot easier to protect it properly. Were it 30-40 miles further inland, hurricanes would also be substantially weaker by the time they reached it.
What you're talking about is the Port of Southern Louisiana, which is located along a 50-mile stretch of the Mississippi river. Most shipping is not actually in the city of New Orleans (at least not for the past few decades). This sprawling port does not require the city of New Orleans in order to operate, although some debris will indeed have to be cleared out of the river.
It's true that it does require people in the vicinity to operate the various facilities, but there is no reason they can't be located further inland. New Orleans is in just about the worst possible spot in the region, located below sea level, in a bowl, in a swamp, between a river, lake, other lake, and the gulf.
If New Orleans were rebuilt 30-40 miles upriver, the port could continue to operate just fine, and the residents would be in a safer and more sustainable location. There is absolutely no reason to continue to maintain a city that is an average of 10 feet below sea level, when there is perfectly good above-sea-level land not very far away.