No, but they are paid per ad click, which is directly correlated with page views. How do you increase page views? Get people to comment. How do you get them to comment? Post "OMG abortion is teh wrong" type stories and sit back and enjoy the ensuing shit-storm as your users compete to view as many ads as possible^W^W^W^W^W^W discuss civilly the issues raised by the fine post.
Actually, I have. I have a couple of acquaintances whose knowledge of such things as their default search engine is, well, light. They're happily googling away on Bing.
Because such systems end up very easy to use if your workflow corresponds to what the designers decided. If it's not, it's a major pain in the bahookey. I can't for the life of me figure out how to configure SoundJuicer to rip CDs at 128kbps CBR, and I struggle to make it save the resulting files the way I want it to. I ended up running abcde, a command line script, to carry out what should be a very simple task. We can make systems powerful without reducing their simplicity - the example you cite, Gmail, is a good one. I'd love to see a filesystem on similar lines. But we risk destroying the beauty of having a Turing machine on our desktops - the ability to compute any damned thing we want - for the sake of letting people not learn a few basic concepts. Sure, easy things should be easy, but hard things should be possible too.
People have learnt to live with the idea that when they step off a high cliff, they don't get a second chance. They would learn to live with the harsh realities of rm if we gave them the chance. Yes, it will involve a generation of tedious whining, but for a truly powerful interface paradigm, it will be worth it.
I don't agree with this. I'm very uncomfortable with the idea that truth is ever not a defense with regard to something you have published. If their identities need to be kept secret, change their names, issue them new passports, and ship them off to some other part of the country.
In the UK, get together a respected group of people in your target group, form a not-for-profit association, develop a set of rules and criteria for professional membership, and apply for a Royal Charter from HM. Congratulations, you are now a profession.
The main criteria for something to be a profession is that it benefits society above and beyond the individual members and can have an impact on public discourse. In this day and age, such a test should not be hard to meet.
Update your graphics card drivers. Presuming your system is handling the load OK, which it should be these days, the fault lies with your card and driver. Not much Youtube can do about it.
I'm yet to be convinced that that is the correct approach. Users should learn to save their god-damned files somewhere sensible so they can actually find them again, and close windows when they're done with them. This isn't a technical user, this is a user with a clue, for goodness sakes. If you're so dumb you can't learn the concepts behind these tasks, I really do wonder whether you are suited to the operation of a Turing machine.
Impulse products in marketing don't depend specifically on price: a set of alloy wheels for your new car is often an impulse product, despite the crazy mark-up. It becomes an impulse buy when you buy a console, a couple of games, and ooh, what's this? A shiny that is lots of fun? And I've already spent $300 on this...
Do you frequently permit unauthorised third parties access to your wallet? Personally speaking, if it's good enough for Scheier, it's good enough for me;)
It's not exactly going to run out. Yes, there's a finite amount in the ground, but as it runs out it will become asymptotic: another poster used the analogy of a room full of peanuts: it starts off very easy to find peanuts, and gets harder and harder, but it's pretty difficult to be certain you've actually run out (also this sentence has two colons, go grammar:p ).
But your objection *is* the entire point of a futures contract: instead of having to buy something to day and stockpile, I make an agreement with you to buy a certain quantity in five, ten, twenty years time at a certain price, and I pay a certain amount for that right. You can trade these contracts on a system similar to a stock exchange, and so the price of these futures tells you what the market believes oil will be worth in the future. It's not a guarantee, but it does maximise the information available.
The other issue is that although we know oil is finite, we do not know what other pre-cursor energy sources will become available over the next fifty years. Suppose the breakthrough in nuclear fusion happens tomorrow and we effectively end up with cheap, unlimited electricity for the foreseeable future: no-one will bother pumping oil out the ground at any price any more. Over a significant time horizon, that's a pretty reasonable risk to factor in.
In short, they provide services that people once didn't need or want. Online dating, for example (yes, singles ads have always existed, but the market for them now is of a totally different order). It's also worth bearing in mind that many countries are going to develop from third-world status directly into a knowledge economy without an industrial phase as we have seen in the past. Look at the infotech boom in Bangalore, for example. This means that manufacturing will not become a race to the bottom like we would traditionally expect.
Someone else has already made the point that OPEC is simply optimising their efficiency. It's also worth noting that they are not actually market movers like they were in the seventies, due to other sources of oil around the world (North Sea, Venezuela, Russia, even Canda). OPEC nowadays has to make massive shifts in production to get our attention and they can't actually do it due to political difficulties (most OPEC countries treat quota as a guideline to be bent rather than a rule to be followed anyway).
You're probably right that oil will never be as cheap as it once was, but to suggest that it will never be possible to extract it economically is pushing it a wee bit. And energy consumption is not proportional to economic growth: a company full of employees at computers uses rather less energy than a steel mill, for (a crude) example...
The thing is, if you *really* believe we're sticking our collective heads in the sand, borrow a couple of billion dollars and buy oil on a long dated future. If the peak oil doom-mongers are right, in a few years we'll be paying a thousand dollars a barrel. The fact that the price of future-dated oil doesn't reflect this suggests that the smart money doesn't believe peak oil is as imminent as the heralds of doom suggest.
But money doesn't represent value. That is where you make your mistake. Money is just something you can use to satisfy a government debt without any legal obstruction. Its utility stems from that.
You're confusing learning and education. You can learn certain things through repeated trial and error: this is how I learnt to cook[1]. However, if I attempted to learn quantum mechanics by the same general approach, I would not get very far. Education is the process of teaching people things that they are unlikely to figure out by themselves, and it is necessary because we don't have time in our lives to figure it out on our own. And genuine education is mentally hard work: that brain ache that you get when you feel something doesn't make sense? That's education at work. It's like lifting heavy objects, albeit you need less protein.
[1] - My wife informs me this is not actually true.
Slashdot Mirror
No, but they are paid per ad click, which is directly correlated with page views. How do you increase page views? Get people to comment. How do you get them to comment? Post "OMG abortion is teh wrong" type stories and sit back and enjoy the ensuing shit-storm as your users compete to view as many ads as possible^W^W^W^W^W^W discuss civilly the issues raised by the fine post.
Seriously, we've all tried this once...haven't we? Anybody?
Actually, I have. I have a couple of acquaintances whose knowledge of such things as their default search engine is, well, light. They're happily googling away on Bing.
Though if you know of a man with a vibrating penis, I can probably put you in touch with some very interested girls...
Because such systems end up very easy to use if your workflow corresponds to what the designers decided. If it's not, it's a major pain in the bahookey. I can't for the life of me figure out how to configure SoundJuicer to rip CDs at 128kbps CBR, and I struggle to make it save the resulting files the way I want it to. I ended up running abcde, a command line script, to carry out what should be a very simple task. We can make systems powerful without reducing their simplicity - the example you cite, Gmail, is a good one. I'd love to see a filesystem on similar lines. But we risk destroying the beauty of having a Turing machine on our desktops - the ability to compute any damned thing we want - for the sake of letting people not learn a few basic concepts. Sure, easy things should be easy, but hard things should be possible too.
People have learnt to live with the idea that when they step off a high cliff, they don't get a second chance. They would learn to live with the harsh realities of rm if we gave them the chance. Yes, it will involve a generation of tedious whining, but for a truly powerful interface paradigm, it will be worth it.
I don't agree with this. I'm very uncomfortable with the idea that truth is ever not a defense with regard to something you have published. If their identities need to be kept secret, change their names, issue them new passports, and ship them off to some other part of the country.
Something I've always wondered. What happens when a greenhorn flips out on day three of a three-month deployment on a nuke?
The main criteria for something to be a profession is that it benefits society above and beyond the individual members and can have an impact on public discourse. In this day and age, such a test should not be hard to meet.
Update your graphics card drivers. Presuming your system is handling the load OK, which it should be these days, the fault lies with your card and driver. Not much Youtube can do about it.
I'm yet to be convinced that that is the correct approach. Users should learn to save their god-damned files somewhere sensible so they can actually find them again, and close windows when they're done with them. This isn't a technical user, this is a user with a clue, for goodness sakes. If you're so dumb you can't learn the concepts behind these tasks, I really do wonder whether you are suited to the operation of a Turing machine.
Impulse products in marketing don't depend specifically on price: a set of alloy wheels for your new car is often an impulse product, despite the crazy mark-up. It becomes an impulse buy when you buy a console, a couple of games, and ooh, what's this? A shiny that is lots of fun? And I've already spent $300 on this...
You must be new here.
Fan-boys, creating stuff just because it doesn't exist...
Do you frequently permit unauthorised third parties access to your wallet? Personally speaking, if it's good enough for Scheier, it's good enough for me ;)
But your objection *is* the entire point of a futures contract: instead of having to buy something to day and stockpile, I make an agreement with you to buy a certain quantity in five, ten, twenty years time at a certain price, and I pay a certain amount for that right. You can trade these contracts on a system similar to a stock exchange, and so the price of these futures tells you what the market believes oil will be worth in the future. It's not a guarantee, but it does maximise the information available.
The other issue is that although we know oil is finite, we do not know what other pre-cursor energy sources will become available over the next fifty years. Suppose the breakthrough in nuclear fusion happens tomorrow and we effectively end up with cheap, unlimited electricity for the foreseeable future: no-one will bother pumping oil out the ground at any price any more. Over a significant time horizon, that's a pretty reasonable risk to factor in.
In short, they provide services that people once didn't need or want. Online dating, for example (yes, singles ads have always existed, but the market for them now is of a totally different order). It's also worth bearing in mind that many countries are going to develop from third-world status directly into a knowledge economy without an industrial phase as we have seen in the past. Look at the infotech boom in Bangalore, for example. This means that manufacturing will not become a race to the bottom like we would traditionally expect.
Someone else has already made the point that OPEC is simply optimising their efficiency. It's also worth noting that they are not actually market movers like they were in the seventies, due to other sources of oil around the world (North Sea, Venezuela, Russia, even Canda). OPEC nowadays has to make massive shifts in production to get our attention and they can't actually do it due to political difficulties (most OPEC countries treat quota as a guideline to be bent rather than a rule to be followed anyway).
How did that work out last time we tried it?
You're probably right that oil will never be as cheap as it once was, but to suggest that it will never be possible to extract it economically is pushing it a wee bit. And energy consumption is not proportional to economic growth: a company full of employees at computers uses rather less energy than a steel mill, for (a crude) example...
That's why it's a rule of thumb ;)
The thing is, if you *really* believe we're sticking our collective heads in the sand, borrow a couple of billion dollars and buy oil on a long dated future. If the peak oil doom-mongers are right, in a few years we'll be paying a thousand dollars a barrel. The fact that the price of future-dated oil doesn't reflect this suggests that the smart money doesn't believe peak oil is as imminent as the heralds of doom suggest.
But money doesn't represent value. That is where you make your mistake. Money is just something you can use to satisfy a government debt without any legal obstruction. Its utility stems from that.
[1] - My wife informs me this is not actually true.
I think you underestimate the typical college level teacher's knowledge of group psychology there. Though some are indeed oblivious.