Yes, you are correct. When I worked for a bank as a programmer in the early 90's I had to go through the same thing. We were also all "officers of the bank" mostly meaning that any potential wrongdoing on our part was covered by insurance.
I'll have to be quick here. Combinatorics exam at 8:30am.
The reason I used a looser terminology was because I was writing with the/. audience in mind. I didn't think it would make any difference to my audience which perspective I chose. But you're right: there is very much a difference between "supply" and "quantity supplied" ("supply" refers to the range in the supply curve covering all possible prices, whereas "quantity supplied" refers to the specific amount of supply actually supplied at a particular price point).
I have a pet peeve about people wrapping up nonsensical analysis in the language of economics. That's pretty much why I went off on the original poster. Using loose terminology is forgivable if the rest isn't complete BS.
I'm also probably among the biggest fans of Milton Friedman (my political and political-economy views seem to match his about 95% of the time; I have (and have read) both of his most-popular books on my bookshelf; I remember studying his permanent-income hypothesis in my Monetary Policy course and finding it a sensible theory).
If you haven't seen it, watch the commanding heights. It's available on the internet but *DO NOT* watch it there. A lot of folks thought that Friedman was an Ogre because of his involvement with Pinochet. I happen to think he was brilliant. But there's a bit where they show the protests at his Nobel acceptance and other demonstrations against him. You can see it on his face just how much that hurt even to that day. I dare anybody to watch it and still come away feeling that Friedman was heartless quite the contrary, I suspect. That footage is ommitted from the version that's on the internet.
So the economic policies of Reagan and Thatcher hardly fill me with rage.:-) (Quick: what was Milton Friedman's California license plate value? "MV PT":) ) I am quite saddened by his Nov. 19 death too...
Good. I, like you, don't like the deficit spending (I think it just hastened the soviet collapse at best). However, many of the other changes I liked. However, I think the real unsung hero in all that is Paul Volcker (appointed by Carter but wisely kept on by Reagan).
BTW, we had a midterm the day his death was announced. It just hit me that Freidman and Pinochet died very close together.
What made you go change?
There were 3 reasons.
1) I got tired of "lumping data around". Most of the stuff that I've worked on basically involved moving data from one place to another while transforming it. To be clear, that's a wide range of stuff. I've worked on compilers, query languages, UI, IDE's (I've been an Eclipse contributor), transactional storage engines,... At it's heart, it's pretty much been all lumping data around. I wanted to do something a little different.
2) If I decided to stay in computers, I wanted to "raise my game". Hence the math part. I felt like I need to do something hard -- really hard. So I'm taking the roughest undergrad math degree that my school has. A little quote from fight club: "A guy came to fight club for the first time, his ass was a wad of cookie dough. After a few weeks, he was carved out of wood." I wanted to come out carved out of wood -- although it seems to have had the opposite effect on my ass.
3) I wanted to understand what was going on with outsourcing. Hence the econ part.
I'm currently gathering info about going back and doing a master's in CS, with an emphasis on artificial intelligence (maybe AI isn't so practical at the moment, but as robots creep into daily life (as the Roomba is doing), I imagine it could be a useful field).
I would urge you to take a look at "Understanding Computers and Cognition" by Winnograd and Flores. My personal opinion after reading that book is that a constructed solution to the hard AI problem is probably out of our reach. That doesn't mean that there aren't good A
You may be right in claiming that the easily accessible highly trained workforces are already in the game. I think the last big unknown is China: They have lots of population and at least some high tech industry, so there may be a considerable untapped workforce left. On the other hand, English is not as ubiquitous there as in India, so the organizational part will be harder. I worked for a company in 2002 that was setting up shop in China. The infrastructure is there. The question is how fast will China produce acceptable (including language skills) workers. I suspect that the number of workers is going to be large but their entry won't be precipitous like India's entry was. (At least I perceive India's entry a precipitous but I really have nothing besides anecdotal evidence.)
The question is, what are the relative rates of change. I know which way I'm betting.
I certainly am. Let me explain why. Economics is a life and death issue. Bad economic reasoning was probably the primary cause of WWII. Communism killed millions. Many died due to "shock therapy" in Central America. However, a great deal of the economic reasoning out there is done with almost zero knowledge of economics and often leads to bad conclusions. Those bad conclusions get turned into votes and votes into policy. So, anybody who puts out an economic argument that is crap is going to get an earful from me.
The post to which you replied is clearly describing intersection of curves and how each curve compares against each other once the intersection takes place. The original was not.
To everybody sane and that knows a minimum of economics, the statemnt was clear and simple, qualities some people that have learnt a bit more than most in some fields should take as their own. A decent analogy in the computer world is having confusion between physical memory Vs. virtual memory. Yeah, the both store bits. However, if you start trying to reason about computer systems without understanding the difference, you'll probably be right most of the time but when you're not it's going to be painful. The difference between economics and computers is that not everybody thinks they can reason effectively on computers but somehow because people think that all they need to know about economics is "If the demand goes up, so does the price."
BTW, I've been called insane before but this is the first time for something econ related.
The problem is the "interesting" interval always contains the intersection and there's only one intersection. The interesting interval being where a market equilibrium is being discussed. In particular, demand is (in all the models of which I'm aware) a strictly decreasing function of price and supply is a strictly increasing function of price.
You can obviously put some metric on the functions like (since you're a math major) letting f, g be two functions from X into some metric space, S with distance funct d_s. Then d(f, g) = sup {d_s(f(x), g(x)) | x in X}. Is a metric on functions. So, with this metric you can say one function is larger than another. I can't think of a single metric besides "on average" that's in common usage but even that metric is not very useful in this discussion.
This is certainly true for a large part of economics. However, as you get out of the more intro-level courses there's less "draw a line sloping down and draw a line sloping up" sort of reasoning. I would call the graphs an aid to intuition and like most of those sorts of tools they can lead you astray.
A case in point. There's a significant amount of debate on the effect of minimum wage. In most econ courses (at all levels) supply and demand curves are many times carelessly drawn as lines. That sort of model leads to one conclusion where a different set of assumptions leads to another.
The problem is the classic confusion between demand and quantity demanded. Demand is the entire demand curve and supply is the entire supply curves.
I know it seems a little pedantic to quibble over terminology but when you start thinking like this you can end up with all sorts of nonsensical conclusions. This is a case in point. Since we are talking about curves that intersect curves, talking about one as being higher than the other makes no sense.
This terminology and the difference between demand and quantity demanded is one of the points that's driven home in any decent intro microeconomics course. Hence, we have someone trying to hold forth on Economics, a subject in which he obviously has no training. Being a proto-Economist myself, it drives me nuts when people who have no training try to do Economics because everyone seems to think they are qualified but few people have had even a single course.
For a better explanation than I'm managing at this point check out this and take a look at the section "A Shift versus a Movement Along a Demand Curve".
You can have an available supply of IT workers exceeding the demand for IT workers. And, of course, when this happens, the price -- the wage rate -- of IT workers falls; too many workers chase too few jobs. Think of shifts in the curves. You also have to consider short-run Vs. medium run elasticities. You are correct, in a sense, in the short run, labor supply is relatively inelastic. Meaning that shift in demand causes fairly large changes in salary. But, in the long run people head off to other industries and the elasticity is greater and the change in salary moderates. At this point the wage rate is probably somewhere between the original wage rate and the "shock" wage rate.
Now, in practice the wage rate of employed workers doesn't fall (usually, though the end of the dotcom boom was an exception) - their pay is generally regular. But unemployment for that worker group rises, so the *mean* wage rate of *all* workers - the unemployed plus the employed - decreases. What you are talking about here is known as "wage stickiness". There's recent work on wage stickiness in labor markets but frankly, I'm not up on it. If I weren't in the middle of prepping for finals (and procrastinating on slashdot) I'd read this
And to quote you out of order:
I did a minor in Economics at university (major in CS. I'm a developer too), with pretty good marks, particularly in the introductory courses, where econo-jargon is defined. I don't see anything wrong with his statement. Since you did a minor in Economics, I'd recommend a PBS series called "The Commanding Heights". It's not particularly germane to this discussion just really interesting. I'd wager that you're Canadian or British (because everybody in the US calls university "college"). So I suspect it will make your blood boil a little bit because it's flattering of Reagan and Thatcher.
As an aside, I'm an older developer (about 18 years of experience) who went back to do a math/econ degree.
I think that the amount of software to be developed is positively correlated to the computer-using population. As that population increases, there will be far more work for smart developers of any nationality than we can handle.
Relax.
The major cause for the big outsourcing boom was that some countries (like India) had large, highly educated workforces that couldn't get at the work due to high transaction costs.
The internet drastically lowered the transaction costs and we say these workers flood into the market. However, the portion of the transaction costs which remain are the really hard stuff -- clutural and organizational issues.
Further, almost evey place that had such an under-utilized workforce is now in the game.
So, don't worry, there's plenty of work to go around in the future. In the short-term there will be little fads (china might get hot) etc. but the fundamentals, I think, are strong.
There's will come a time when the supply of IT workers will match or exceed the demand.
Take an econ class. You don't even know how to use the terminology right.
And as technology improves, the run of the mill business programming will become so easy (adding, updating, deleting data from RDMSs, biz logic, etc...) that the only need for real programmers will be for systems and development software (reason why MS Office is soooo popular! You wouldn't believe how many VBA apps I've seen on Excel!!! And all you need is the office developers to support ALL of those biz "programmers".). And that will be a much smaller labor market (hence plenty of supply) for programmers.
In my experience, the number of professionals who want to learn anything about IT besides "type it in here and press this button." is exceedingly small.
Even now, the number of people who are capable of doing IT work, let's say 70th percentile of the population, means there are over a billion people on this planet with the brains to do the run of the mill programming.
There's about 3 Million people in the US and about 800,000 people working as software developers. That means, in the US. about 0.267% of the population is a software developer. I doubt that we'll see drastically higher worldwide programmer/population rates any time soon.
However, I do thing that the vast majority of human activities can be made more efficient through software. So as the world's population becomes more computer-using I'd expect the market for software to expand greatly.
I say there's plenty of supply and salaries will always get lower - overall - regional differences may apply.
There were certain countries that had a waiting, highly-trained work force but they couldn't get the work because of high transaction costs. The internet drastically lowered the transaction costs but did not eliminate them. During the time when those costs were plummeting, we saw a massive influx of new developers into the market. So, the countries that had highly trained workforces sitting on the sidelines are all now pretty much in the game, So, I wouldn't expect to see another influx like that unless there's another radical change in the transaction costs.
The problem is that the remaining transaction costs are pretty hard -- mostly organization and physical.
In other words, the "damage" is pretty much done. Frankly, I think the world as a whole is better off due to outsourcing.
Here's hoping that developers and publishers will be equally accommodating in releasing XP / Vista compatible games in the same box.
Let's see. WoW still supports Windows 2000. Eve-Online just stopped supporting Win98. I think, if this is any indication, that we'll be okay if we don't upgrade rights away.
A. You have no sense of humor. Please review the moderation tag. There's some subjects I don't find funny. Besides, if I let slashdot tell me what was funny and not, I'd have an awfully strange sense of humor.
B. In most states, there is no duty to retreat. I realistically question whether firing a shotgun with a less-than-lethal shell would be considered self-defense using lethal force, but otherwise this attorney calls bullsh*t. I've got three years of law school, 5 years of practice, and two state bars. You'd better have at least a website. Stand-your-ground laws wikipedia article. From the wikipedia article, "Since the enactment of the Florida legislation, South Dakota, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Michigan, and Indiana have adopted similar statutes..."
IANAL but I'm not completely ignorant of the law. I did put my wife through law school and help her study for her tests. Certainly weaker credentials that you. However, I'm a math guy and we're not so up for "Appeal to authority" arguments. Anyway, I think I'm pretty sure that I'm on solid ground here.
C. You have no sense of humor, and you're posting your humorless reply NINE AND A HALF DAYS later. See A. Sorry I didn't see the story earlier.
In most jurisdictions, this would land the shooter in jail for quite a while. In most jurisdictions, there's still a duty to retreat and you must be in eminent danger to qualify for a self-defense argument. Unlikely, if you shoot somebody for walking into your yard with a hammer from the safety of your house.
I like EVE online for this very reason. You can play it intensly, battling all the time or you can play it in such a way that you still make progress but touch it for 30 seconds every 2-3 hours. Sometimes I'm active, sometimes, I do homework.
Yep. Using the reviewer's logic, those 1200DPI laser printers must be a real pain to read. I mean, how are you ever going to see all those little dots!
From m-w.com: Main Entry: ingress Pronunciation: 'in-"gres Function: noun Etymology: Middle English, from Latin ingressus, from ingredi 1 : the act of entering : ENTRANCE
Main Entry: egress Pronunciation: 'E-"gres Function: noun Etymology: Latin egressus, from egressus, past participle of egredi to go out, from e- + gradi to go -- more at GRADE 1 : the action or right of going or coming out
So, technically the initial dilation happens on ingress. Then, followed by the customary egress, ingress, egress,... cycle.
I would think that it would be a massive selling point with the current administration.
I agree that not occupying foreign countries is a much better idea, though. However, I think it was the parent poster who missed the point not the patent holder. The patent holder's point is to make money off of continued violence. Sadly, even the appearance of doing something about IED's is worth a lot of money to a government like mine. Just like the appearance of avoiding civilian casualties with "smart bombs" is worth a lot of money, morality be damned.
BTW, this is one of the reasons why I think tactical nukes are much more dangerous than the old-style ICBMs. Ironically, making nukes less destructive makes them more likely to be used.
How about this. You happen to be a large military force that is shipping large amounts of munitions to a foreign country where the opposition is steal/finding/buying unspent munitions to make roadside bombs. If you can make it harder to for people to cause a round to fire, then you make it harder to have an insurgency.
Sure, there are ways to get the explosives out, hack around the encryption, etc. But you've just raised the cost of insurgency.
Absolutely, my point was that just because you have more than one firm doesn't mean that you get away from the monopoly price point, which seemed to be what the parent poster was arguing for.
Sorry, didn't mean to touch a nerve. Nope, I'm not an econ professor (not yet) but I am an economics major, and we didn't cover Nash reversion strategies and oligopoly pricing in "Econ 101". It was covered in a 300-level micro class.
I used the term basic because it is pretty basic. However, I concede I may hang around economists to much.
As for this: But for those of us who aren't in Econ 101 I'd say that "colusive prices/practies" ARE colusion (or even collusion). Outside of technical terminology this is just a distinction without a difference.
There is an important difference. Explicit collusion is illegal where the sort of "tacit collusion" that is represented by strategies such as Nash reversion are not. So, most of the econ instructors I've had go out of their way to distinguish between the two and not mash them together as you have since people get taken out behind the woodshed by the FTC for one but not the other.
My point is that you can't rule out collusive outcomes just because there's no direct collusion. In fact, the collusive outcome is the expected outcome in many cases even in the absence of any direct communication between the players.
Now everyone knows that not only are you the master of elemental economic game theory - but you're probably steeped in the regular - nay, the advanced game theory as well!
Nope, that's winter quarter this year. But, not everyone who comments on economic matters stopped their education in economics after Econ 101.
BTW, sorry for misspellings -- it's what you get when posting something short right before you run out the door.
Slashdot Mirror
No, we're just 'sposed to come out of our hidey-holes to wave our low UID's in everyone else's face.
Yes, you are correct. When I worked for a bank as a programmer in the early 90's I had to go through the same thing. We were also all "officers of the bank" mostly meaning that any potential wrongdoing on our part was covered by insurance.
And stay upwind.
http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
Maybe a math or applied math degree?
The reason I used a looser terminology was because I was writing with the /. audience in mind. I didn't think it would make any difference to my audience which perspective I chose. But you're right: there is very much a difference between "supply" and "quantity supplied" ("supply" refers to the range in the supply curve covering all possible prices, whereas "quantity supplied" refers to the specific amount of supply actually supplied at a particular price point).
I have a pet peeve about people wrapping up nonsensical analysis in the language of economics. That's pretty much why I went off on the original poster. Using loose terminology is forgivable if the rest isn't complete BS.
I'm also probably among the biggest fans of Milton Friedman (my political and political-economy views seem to match his about 95% of the time; I have (and have read) both of his most-popular books on my bookshelf; I remember studying his permanent-income hypothesis in my Monetary Policy course and finding it a sensible theory).
If you haven't seen it, watch the commanding heights. It's available on the internet but *DO NOT* watch it there. A lot of folks thought that Friedman was an Ogre because of his involvement with Pinochet. I happen to think he was brilliant. But there's a bit where they show the protests at his Nobel acceptance and other demonstrations against him. You can see it on his face just how much that hurt even to that day. I dare anybody to watch it and still come away feeling that Friedman was heartless quite the contrary, I suspect. That footage is ommitted from the version that's on the internet.
So the economic policies of Reagan and Thatcher hardly fill me with rage. :-) (Quick: what was Milton Friedman's California license plate value? "MV PT" :) ) I am quite saddened by his Nov. 19 death too...
Good. I, like you, don't like the deficit spending (I think it just hastened the soviet collapse at best). However, many of the other changes I liked. However, I think the real unsung hero in all that is Paul Volcker (appointed by Carter but wisely kept on by Reagan).
BTW, we had a midterm the day his death was announced. It just hit me that Freidman and Pinochet died very close together.
What made you go change?
There were 3 reasons.
1) I got tired of "lumping data around". Most of the stuff that I've worked on basically involved moving data from one place to another while transforming it. To be clear, that's a wide range of stuff. I've worked on compilers, query languages, UI, IDE's (I've been an Eclipse contributor), transactional storage engines,... At it's heart, it's pretty much been all lumping data around. I wanted to do something a little different.
2) If I decided to stay in computers, I wanted to "raise my game". Hence the math part. I felt like I need to do something hard -- really hard. So I'm taking the roughest undergrad math degree that my school has. A little quote from fight club: "A guy came to fight club for the first time, his ass was a wad of cookie dough. After a few weeks, he was carved out of wood." I wanted to come out carved out of wood -- although it seems to have had the opposite effect on my ass.
3) I wanted to understand what was going on with outsourcing. Hence the econ part.
I'm currently gathering info about going back and doing a master's in CS, with an emphasis on artificial intelligence (maybe AI isn't so practical at the moment, but as robots creep into daily life (as the Roomba is doing), I imagine it could be a useful field).
I would urge you to take a look at "Understanding Computers and Cognition" by Winnograd and Flores. My personal opinion after reading that book is that a constructed solution to the hard AI problem is probably out of our reach. That doesn't mean that there aren't good A
They have lots of population and at least some high tech industry, so there may be a considerable untapped workforce left. On the other hand, English is not as ubiquitous there as in India, so the organizational part will be harder. I worked for a company in 2002 that was setting up shop in China. The infrastructure is there. The question is how fast will China produce acceptable (including language skills) workers. I suspect that the number of workers is going to be large but their entry won't be precipitous like India's entry was. (At least I perceive India's entry a precipitous but I really have nothing besides anecdotal evidence.)
The question is, what are the relative rates of change. I know which way I'm betting.
BTW, I've been called insane before but this is the first time for something econ related.
The problem is the "interesting" interval always contains the intersection and there's only one intersection. The interesting interval being where a market equilibrium is being discussed. In particular, demand is (in all the models of which I'm aware) a strictly decreasing function of price and supply is a strictly increasing function of price.
You can obviously put some metric on the functions like (since you're a math major) letting f, g be two functions from X into some metric space, S with distance funct d_s. Then d(f, g) = sup {d_s(f(x), g(x)) | x in X}. Is a metric on functions. So, with this metric you can say one function is larger than another. I can't think of a single metric besides "on average" that's in common usage but even that metric is not very useful in this discussion.
This is certainly true for a large part of economics. However, as you get out of the more intro-level courses there's less "draw a line sloping down and draw a line sloping up" sort of reasoning. I would call the graphs an aid to intuition and like most of those sorts of tools they can lead you astray.
A case in point. There's a significant amount of debate on the effect of minimum wage. In most econ courses (at all levels) supply and demand curves are many times carelessly drawn as lines. That sort of model leads to one conclusion where a different set of assumptions leads to another.
I know it seems a little pedantic to quibble over terminology but when you start thinking like this you can end up with all sorts of nonsensical conclusions. This is a case in point. Since we are talking about curves that intersect curves, talking about one as being higher than the other makes no sense.
This terminology and the difference between demand and quantity demanded is one of the points that's driven home in any decent intro microeconomics course. Hence, we have someone trying to hold forth on Economics, a subject in which he obviously has no training. Being a proto-Economist myself, it drives me nuts when people who have no training try to do Economics because everyone seems to think they are qualified but few people have had even a single course.
For a better explanation than I'm managing at this point check out this and take a look at the section "A Shift versus a Movement Along a Demand Curve". You can have an available supply of IT workers exceeding the demand for IT workers. And, of course, when this happens, the price -- the wage rate -- of IT workers falls; too many workers chase too few jobs. Think of shifts in the curves. You also have to consider short-run Vs. medium run elasticities. You are correct, in a sense, in the short run, labor supply is relatively inelastic. Meaning that shift in demand causes fairly large changes in salary. But, in the long run people head off to other industries and the elasticity is greater and the change in salary moderates. At this point the wage rate is probably somewhere between the original wage rate and the "shock" wage rate. Now, in practice the wage rate of employed workers doesn't fall (usually, though the end of the dotcom boom was an exception) - their pay is generally regular. But unemployment for that worker group rises, so the *mean* wage rate of *all* workers - the unemployed plus the employed - decreases. What you are talking about here is known as "wage stickiness". There's recent work on wage stickiness in labor markets but frankly, I'm not up on it. If I weren't in the middle of prepping for finals (and procrastinating on slashdot) I'd read this
And to quote you out of order: I did a minor in Economics at university (major in CS. I'm a developer too), with pretty good marks, particularly in the introductory courses, where econo-jargon is defined. I don't see anything wrong with his statement. Since you did a minor in Economics, I'd recommend a PBS series called "The Commanding Heights". It's not particularly germane to this discussion just really interesting. I'd wager that you're Canadian or British (because everybody in the US calls university "college"). So I suspect it will make your blood boil a little bit because it's flattering of Reagan and Thatcher.
As an aside, I'm an older developer (about 18 years of experience) who went back to do a math/econ degree.
Sorry. Typo. I think the rest is correct, though.
I think that the amount of software to be developed is positively correlated to the computer-using population. As that population increases, there will be far more work for smart developers of any nationality than we can handle.
Relax.
The major cause for the big outsourcing boom was that some countries (like India) had large, highly educated workforces that couldn't get at the work due to high transaction costs.
The internet drastically lowered the transaction costs and we say these workers flood into the market. However, the portion of the transaction costs which remain are the really hard stuff -- clutural and organizational issues.
Further, almost evey place that had such an under-utilized workforce is now in the game.
So, don't worry, there's plenty of work to go around in the future. In the short-term there will be little fads (china might get hot) etc. but the fundamentals, I think, are strong.
There's will come a time when the supply of IT workers will match or exceed the demand.
Take an econ class. You don't even know how to use the terminology right.
And as technology improves, the run of the mill business programming will become so easy (adding, updating, deleting data from RDMSs, biz logic, etc...) that the only need for real programmers will be for systems and development software (reason why MS Office is soooo popular! You wouldn't believe how many VBA apps I've seen on Excel!!! And all you need is the office developers to support ALL of those biz "programmers".). And that will be a much smaller labor market (hence plenty of supply) for programmers.
In my experience, the number of professionals who want to learn anything about IT besides "type it in here and press this button." is exceedingly small.
Even now, the number of people who are capable of doing IT work, let's say 70th percentile of the population, means there are over a billion people on this planet with the brains to do the run of the mill programming.
There's about 3 Million people in the US and about 800,000 people working as software developers. That means, in the US. about 0.267% of the population is a software developer. I doubt that we'll see drastically higher worldwide programmer/population rates any time soon.
However, I do thing that the vast majority of human activities can be made more efficient through software. So as the world's population becomes more computer-using I'd expect the market for software to expand greatly.
I say there's plenty of supply and salaries will always get lower - overall - regional differences may apply.
There were certain countries that had a waiting, highly-trained work force but they couldn't get the work because of high transaction costs. The internet drastically lowered the transaction costs but did not eliminate them. During the time when those costs were plummeting, we saw a massive influx of new developers into the market. So, the countries that had highly trained workforces sitting on the sidelines are all now pretty much in the game, So, I wouldn't expect to see another influx like that unless there's another radical change in the transaction costs.
The problem is that the remaining transaction costs are pretty hard -- mostly organization and physical.
In other words, the "damage" is pretty much done. Frankly, I think the world as a whole is better off due to outsourcing.
Here's hoping that developers and publishers will be equally accommodating in releasing XP / Vista compatible games in the same box.
Let's see. WoW still supports Windows 2000. Eve-Online just stopped supporting Win98. I think, if this is any indication, that we'll be okay if we don't upgrade rights away.
If the message size is not digested then it can be changed without detection.
A. You have no sense of humor. Please review the moderation tag.
There's some subjects I don't find funny. Besides, if I let slashdot tell me what was funny and not, I'd have an awfully strange sense of humor.
B. In most states, there is no duty to retreat. I realistically question whether firing a shotgun with a less-than-lethal shell would be considered self-defense using lethal force, but otherwise this attorney calls bullsh*t. I've got three years of law school, 5 years of practice, and two state bars. You'd better have at least a website.
Stand-your-ground laws wikipedia article. From the wikipedia article, "Since the enactment of the Florida legislation, South Dakota, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, Michigan, and Indiana have adopted similar statutes..."
IANAL but I'm not completely ignorant of the law. I did put my wife through law school and help her study for her tests. Certainly weaker credentials that you. However, I'm a math guy and we're not so up for "Appeal to authority" arguments. Anyway, I think I'm pretty sure that I'm on solid ground here.
C. You have no sense of humor, and you're posting your humorless reply NINE AND A HALF DAYS later.
See A. Sorry I didn't see the story earlier.
In most jurisdictions, this would land the shooter in jail for quite a while. In most jurisdictions, there's still a duty to retreat and you must be in eminent danger to qualify for a self-defense argument. Unlikely, if you shoot somebody for walking into your yard with a hammer from the safety of your house.
I like EVE online for this very reason. You can play it intensly, battling all the time or you can play it in such a way that you still make progress but touch it for 30 seconds every 2-3 hours. Sometimes I'm active, sometimes, I do homework.
Yep. Using the reviewer's logic, those 1200DPI laser printers must be a real pain to read. I mean, how are you ever going to see all those little dots!
From m-w.com:
Main Entry: ingress
Pronunciation: 'in-"gres
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English, from Latin ingressus, from ingredi
1 : the act of entering : ENTRANCE
Main Entry: egress
Pronunciation: 'E-"gres
Function: noun
Etymology: Latin egressus, from egressus, past participle of egredi to go out, from e- + gradi to go -- more at GRADE
1 : the action or right of going or coming out
So, technically the initial dilation happens on ingress. Then, followed by the customary egress, ingress, egress,... cycle.
I would think that it would be a massive selling point with the current administration.
I agree that not occupying foreign countries is a much better idea, though. However, I think it was the parent poster who missed the point not the patent holder. The patent holder's point is to make money off of continued violence. Sadly, even the appearance of doing something about IED's is worth a lot of money to a government like mine. Just like the appearance of avoiding civilian casualties with "smart bombs" is worth a lot of money, morality be damned.
BTW, this is one of the reasons why I think tactical nukes are much more dangerous than the old-style ICBMs. Ironically, making nukes less destructive makes them more likely to be used.
How about this. You happen to be a large military force that is shipping large amounts of munitions to a foreign country where the opposition is steal/finding/buying unspent munitions to make roadside bombs. If you can make it harder to for people to cause a round to fire, then you make it harder to have an insurgency.
Sure, there are ways to get the explosives out, hack around the encryption, etc. But you've just raised the cost of insurgency.
Absolutely, my point was that just because you have more than one firm doesn't mean that you get away from the monopoly price point, which seemed to be what the parent poster was arguing for.
Sorry, didn't mean to touch a nerve. Nope, I'm not an econ professor (not yet) but I am an economics major, and we didn't cover Nash reversion strategies and oligopoly pricing in "Econ 101". It was covered in a 300-level micro class.
I used the term basic because it is pretty basic. However, I concede I may hang around economists to much.
As for this:
But for those of us who aren't in Econ 101 I'd say that "colusive prices/practies" ARE colusion (or even collusion). Outside of technical terminology this is just a distinction without a difference.
There is an important difference. Explicit collusion is illegal where the sort of "tacit collusion" that is represented by strategies such as Nash reversion are not. So, most of the econ instructors I've had go out of their way to distinguish between the two and not mash them together as you have since people get taken out behind the woodshed by the FTC for one but not the other.
My point is that you can't rule out collusive outcomes just because there's no direct collusion. In fact, the collusive outcome is the expected outcome in many cases even in the absence of any direct communication between the players.
Now everyone knows that not only are you the master of elemental economic game theory - but you're probably steeped in the regular - nay, the advanced game theory as well!
Nope, that's winter quarter this year. But, not everyone who comments on economic matters stopped their education in economics after Econ 101.
BTW, sorry for misspellings -- it's what you get when posting something short right before you run out the door.
You can maintain colusive prices/practices without colusion. Basic economic game theory.
genius/nutball (you decide)
;)
That's not how slashdot works. You're supposed to decide for me then spell a bunch of stuff wrong. Jeeze, who lets these n00bs in here anyway?