This Lynds seems to just be restating the theory with some fancy terms. I wouldn't be surprised if this were another Alan Sokal or, even worse for the realm of physics, Bogdanov brothers type of work.
Hey, don't pick on Sokal; he's a high school chum of mine:-). The serious difference: Alan is an extremely smart, qualified scientist who set out quite deliberately to spoof the Social Text clowns. Lynds is just another loser who thinks he can out-think everyone else without the slightest training or understanding of any science. We can expect his paper on a functioning perpetual motion machine any day now. Remember, there's a whole class of people out there who firmly believe the laws of physics come into being as we conceive them, and that the universe would not exist if our consciousness hadn't come up with it. Lynds is close to that class.
Show me, the consumer, how price discrimination as it would be practiced by businesses (you know, entities looking to increase their profit, because that's what they do) actually has any net benefit for me.
Well, the original article mentions college tuition pricing (very high, w/ lots of scholarships for the poorer folk). What he didn't mention, but I read in a couple newspaper articles last year, is that some schools are willing to negotiate prices. Some parents called up and basically got a lower tuition price -- NOT a scholarship or loan -- by haggling w/ the admissions department. A similar example in retail sales applies to most furniture or high-end electronics stores. If you are willing to push the salesman a bit, he may offer goods well below list price. But the people who don't ask don't get the discount.
That's price discrimination, albeit not based on the seller's previous knowledge of the buyer.
But I recall reading an article prior to the war about their military network for controlling their AA batteries - which was the very top of top notch. Not that it did them much good, I'm sure it was the very first thing taken out.
Goes to show.... they should have stuck with D batteries.:-)
Sorry, but this guy made his choice - tough for him if he didn't read the EULA before plonking down the cash.
I don't argue that this thing stinks, and that Apple oughtta at least have a way for the poor slob to reverify his purchases regardless of where he lives, but:
Remember DVDs? You buy one in the USA and good luck playing that disk when you go overseas and stick the disk into your friend's DVD player and its country code doesn't match.
So there are lots of bad things related to DRM and this Apple iTunes is just the latest.
You need less maple syrup to cover kansas than the equivilent sized pancake????
Not necessarily. Remember that cute problem in your calc course, where the volume of a certain function rotated about the X-axis is finite, but its surface area is infinite, so you can put a finite amount of paint into it but it takes an infinite amount of paint to cover it?
That's why I always dissolve my old paper in concentrated sulfuric acid.
You may laugh, but that's basically what at least one defense contractor did with their shredded documents. Left one stinky pile of sludge out back.
My Algebra 2/Precalculus teacher did it right. He made us make sure we knew how to do it without first (multiply rows by columns, a logarithm is an exponent, etc), then show us how to use the calculator.
The funniest part was his example always failed somehow and one of us had to figure it out.
You had an excellent teacher. As one prof. told us back in my TA days, "If you haven't made a mistake by the 3rd class, make one on purpose." Nothing like getting the kids to be observant and to demonstrate their understanding like putting mistakes on the board & hoping they'll notice.
You need to change the oil in your car every 3k miles or 3 months else it starts to bog down and sooner or later breaks.
Same with a computer. Gotta keep the virus programs up to date else it will break. (for windowz users that is) FWIW, let me extend that analogy. In fact, as Consumers Union has shown, changing the oil every 7500 miles will not lead to premature failure. So all the folks who blindly follow a rule given them by a (greedy) company that sells oil and oil changes are being taken advantage of. And further, the car you buy comes with a drain plug and an oil dipstick. If it were like a computer, you'd have to buy a third-party drainplug kit and then buy oil fill kits from that same third party (try installing MacaFee virusdefs into Virex:-) ). And finally, oil is maintenance. It's more like running system diagnostics. Virii are deliberate vandalous attacks. You may choose to buy LoJack, but you expect the locks that came with the car to keep out the scriptkiddies if not the pros.
Yes, no argument about the limitations of Bussard. I just wanted to slide in a ref. to a pretty cool (given its publication date) sci fi yarn. Sorry for the misdirection.
True, but it should be pointed out that for decades after that, most scientists thought it was physically impossible to break the speed of sound in an aircraft. There was no physics that allowed > Mach 1 speeds to be achieved. With time, that theory was also proven wrong.
Can you document this? I'm aware of engineering studies showing what the difficulties would be in exceeding Mach1, and the valid concern that vibrations from the shock wave could damage improperly designed craft, but have never read an accepted (for its time) study that said Mach1+ was impossible. My guess would be that this is similar to the incorrect claim that scientists "proved" bumblebees can't fly, when what was proved was that they couldn't fly if their wings were rigid (and they are not rigid).
I am SOOO glad I was born in Canada. Why don't you folks hurry up and conquer us? I for one could use a new gov't, not to mention a little more respect for hockey.
It's either that or my kids'll have to emigrate just to 1) avoid the draft, 2) get access to reproductive health care, 3) escape Ashcroft, 4) marry whomever they want.
Yes it's a copyright violation -- IF the seller is selling copies he created. For example, you can sell the issues of SI or Saturday Evening Post covers you bought. You just can't make your own copies and sell them (for that matter you can't make copies...I doubt anyone's going to go for the "backup archive" excuse here:-) ). As to stating BillGates' connection is irrelevant: well, a number of years ago Gates and/or M$oft started buying up video, photo, and other image collections. People warned at the time that he was heading for some sort of market control. It may be completely legal but this *is* what he's doing.
Surprised nobody's suggested this yet: Use a portable RFID scanner to determine with complete accuracy the style and measurements of certain undergarments worn by people in your vicinity. (Assuming all undergarments have been chipped by the manufacturer)
Is it really such a BAD thing to put filters on a library computer accessible by kids? I hate them as much as the next guy, but doesn't a publicly funded institution have a responsibility to protect children from offensive and degrading material? Perhaps they should just have filters on the computers in the kids section and leave the others clean. OK, what about the following: * Piss Christ * Dejuner sur l'Herbe * Rape of the Sabine Women * The Kiss (Rodin) * The Satanic Verses * Harry Potter * Huck Finn There are people who wish to ban any or all of those items. Remember, YOU are not the person who determines what is or is not objectionable.
You know, people got by just fine long before the Internet came along. Here goes my first/. flame and with it whatever creds I had. You unthinkably moronic twit! Try substituting "antibiotics," "telephones," "electricity," or "Sherman AntiTrust Act" for "Internet" in your dipshitted response. Now what do you think about living the way people lived "long before" ?
Internet filters, like the DMCA, the Disney copyright law, and the new FCC ownership regs, serve only to concentrate information, and thus power, in the hands of a few well-connected people. You don't have to be a Socialist or an Orwell fan to think this is a really bad idea.
It's even easier than that. Simply have a restricted area in the library with unfiltered computers. You need a restricted access card to get to it.
Thus increasing the cost (number of computers) and decreasing the utilization rate. Not to mention: what if I want to work with my 9-yr old? Am I allowed to take him into the "Adult Room"?
What if they accidently create an earth-eating black-hole or something? I remember hearing how sloppy they used to be with nuclear research when it was new. First of all, "they" were never sloppy. Commercial mfrs of watches were sloppy: they painted radium on watch faces and got the goo all over themselves. The nuclear researchers took all precautions they could think of, and those in the Curie timeframe simply didn't imagine radiation was going to whack them. Now, on to the black hole question: there were some articles in the last month or two (sorry, I can't recall the source) in which researchers pointed out that micro-black holes are not "ravenous," i.e. they cannot grow. While it's always possible current quantum physics theory is in error, not only is an error of this magnitude unlikely, but consider what would be left of the universe if black holes in general grew at some mad rate. We'd already all be eaten:-).
If it's so dense, why doesn't the matter just fuse together? I mean, the whole point of the "nuclear" part in thermonuclear reactions is to get the hydrogen atoms hot enough and dense enough to fuse. Disclaimer: I've been out of grad school way too long. So... hydrogen fusion occurs at "relatively" lower temperatures and pressures than in this quark experiment. The H-bomb uses heat and pressure (usually from a 'wrap' of fission bomb) to force protons and neutrons thru the repulsive barrier and create Helium nuclei. Knowing next to nothing about quark plasmas, I'd suspect the ridiculously short lifetime of these particles means the plasma re-coagulates into various elementary particles.
Re:"Actively searching for new suppliers"?
on
iBox Episode 2
·
· Score: 1
It was obtaining Apple parts illegally.
Compare the whole game to the automotive industry. You can buy OEM parts or you can buy (for the most part) third-party knockoffs. In theory you could build an entire care from parts. And in the custom car market lots of cars are Frankenstein monsters, w/ parts from several different companies, let alone models. Why should any computer software or hardware company be allowed to stop someone from doing these same things to produce computers?
I'm not sure of the details, but from my reading it appears that every shareholder who holds more than 20 shares (approx AU$32) has exactly one vote in both the takeover bid and for the Board of Directors.
It looks good on paper. I have similar voting rights with my few shares of United Technologies Corp. stock (NYSE:UTX). However, even if I got all my friends together and we all withheld votes for one of the Board candidates, our votes would be lost in the noise. And my main point was that it's essentially impossible to nominate and elect an opposing candidate to the Board. At the risk of getting mega-modded down as lame:-), it's like the old Soviet Union: you can vote for Stalin or you can vote for Stalin.
Any corporation, no matter how large or small has a Board of Directors. The board is made up of people that are voted into positions, by the shareholders.
Uh-huh. Name me one company w/ over 50 million gross sales whose shareholders actually have a say in the Board of Directors. Typically a commanding percentage of the stock is held by a very few players and they hand-pick the board. Even trying to mount a proxy vote for an alternate candidate is beyond the financialand organizational means of the small shareholders.
I can disable the SW if I Suspect? Hmmm, I think I shall become a vendor and suspect only people I don't like... The Florida Republican party owns the copyright to this scam. Worked like a charm to keep minorities off the voter roles.
The series would be better if Robert England would have an identity crisis and confuse his alien role with his Fredie Kruger role. I was watching the beginning of a clearly trashy movie trailer a couple weeks ago, so I announced to the whole theatre, "And now.... Freddie vs. Jason!" Imagine my surprise (and disgust) when it turned out that's EXACTLY what the movie is about!
Back to V: I think we should just grab the aliens and shove them through the Stargate. They'd get along fine with the Gou'a'ulds.
Or does everyone here blasting this report really think that software piracy is near 0%. Personally (with nothing to back me up) the 24% rate attributed to North America doesn't seem outrageous to me.
What about the opposite: people forced to "buy" software they don't want? Remember that cute story a few years ago: some bloke in Australia who bought a laptop and did NOT want the WinXX OS, and tried to "return" it in accordance w/ the EULA. It took him months of emails to get a little cash from the laptop manufacturer (then he installed Linux). So how about the BSA goes out and busts Microsoft for its predatory sales tactics, which for decades (more or less) included forcing hardware houses to pay a OS licence for every unit regardless of whether a Msoft OS was installed on the unit?
And in any case, piracy is a smokescreen. Heck, do you really think Ballmer didn't know how much piracy was going on when he set retail prices for Office in the first place? Piracy is not and has never reduced corporate profits. Piracy may increase retail prices but it doesn't hurt corporations.
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, don't pick on Sokal; he's a high school chum of mine
Remember, there's a whole class of people out there who firmly believe the laws of physics come into being as we conceive them, and that the universe would not exist if our consciousness hadn't come up with it. Lynds is close to that class.
Well, the original article mentions college tuition pricing (very high, w/ lots of scholarships for the poorer folk). What he didn't mention, but I read in a couple newspaper articles last year, is that some schools are willing to negotiate prices. Some parents called up and basically got a lower tuition price -- NOT a scholarship or loan -- by haggling w/ the admissions department. A similar example in retail sales applies to most furniture or high-end electronics stores. If you are willing to push the salesman a bit, he may offer goods well below list price. But the people who don't ask don't get the discount. That's price discrimination, albeit not based on the seller's previous knowledge of the buyer.
Goes to show.... they should have stuck with D batteries. :-)
I don't argue that this thing stinks, and that Apple oughtta at least have a way for the poor slob to reverify his purchases regardless of where he lives, but: Remember DVDs? You buy one in the USA and good luck playing that disk when you go overseas and stick the disk into your friend's DVD player and its country code doesn't match. So there are lots of bad things related to DRM and this Apple iTunes is just the latest.
Not necessarily. Remember that cute problem in your calc course, where the volume of a certain function rotated about the X-axis is finite, but its surface area is infinite, so you can put a finite amount of paint into it but it takes an infinite amount of paint to cover it?
That's why I always dissolve my old paper in concentrated sulfuric acid. You may laugh, but that's basically what at least one defense contractor did with their shredded documents. Left one stinky pile of sludge out back.
The funniest part was his example always failed somehow and one of us had to figure it out.
You had an excellent teacher. As one prof. told us back in my TA days, "If you haven't made a mistake by the 3rd class, make one on purpose." Nothing like getting the kids to be observant and to demonstrate their understanding like putting mistakes on the board & hoping they'll notice.
You need to change the oil in your car every 3k miles or 3 months else it starts to bog down and sooner or later breaks.
:-) ).
Same with a computer. Gotta keep the virus programs up to date else it will break. (for windowz users that is)
FWIW, let me extend that analogy. In fact, as Consumers Union has shown, changing the oil every 7500 miles will not lead to premature failure. So all the folks who blindly follow a rule given them by a (greedy) company that sells oil and oil changes are being taken advantage of. And further, the car you buy comes with a drain plug and an oil dipstick. If it were like a computer, you'd have to buy a third-party drainplug kit and then buy oil fill kits from that same third party (try installing MacaFee virusdefs into Virex
And finally, oil is maintenance. It's more like running system diagnostics. Virii are deliberate vandalous attacks. You may choose to buy LoJack, but you expect the locks that came with the car to keep out the scriptkiddies if not the pros.
Yes, no argument about the limitations of Bussard. I just wanted to slide in a ref. to a pretty cool (given its publication date) sci fi yarn.
Sorry for the misdirection.
So far as the question of fuel capacity vs terminal velocity, two words: "Tau Zero", by Poul Anderson.
True, but it should be pointed out that for decades after that, most scientists thought it was physically impossible to break the speed of sound in an aircraft. There was no physics that allowed > Mach 1 speeds to be achieved. With time, that theory was also proven wrong.
Can you document this? I'm aware of engineering studies showing what the difficulties would be in exceeding Mach1, and the valid concern that vibrations from the shock wave could damage improperly designed craft, but have never read an accepted (for its time) study that said Mach1+ was impossible.
My guess would be that this is similar to the incorrect claim that scientists "proved" bumblebees can't fly, when what was proved was that they couldn't fly if their wings were rigid (and they are not rigid).
I am SOOO glad I was born in Canada.
Why don't you folks hurry up and conquer us? I for one could use a new gov't, not to mention a little more respect for hockey.
It's either that or my kids'll have to emigrate just to 1) avoid the draft, 2) get access to reproductive health care, 3) escape Ashcroft, 4) marry whomever they want.
Yes it's a copyright violation -- IF the seller is selling copies he created. For example, you can sell the issues of SI or Saturday Evening Post covers you bought. You just can't make your own copies and sell them (for that matter you can't make copies...I doubt anyone's going to go for the "backup archive" excuse here :-) ).
As to stating BillGates' connection is irrelevant: well, a number of years ago Gates and/or M$oft started buying up video, photo, and other image collections. People warned at the time that he was heading for some sort of market control. It may be completely legal but this *is* what he's doing.
Surprised nobody's suggested this yet:
Use a portable RFID scanner to determine with complete accuracy the style and measurements of certain undergarments worn by people in your vicinity. (Assuming all undergarments have been chipped by the manufacturer)
Is it really such a BAD thing to put filters on a library computer accessible by kids? I hate them as much as the next guy, but doesn't a publicly funded institution have a responsibility to protect children from offensive and degrading material? Perhaps they should just have filters on the computers in the kids section and leave the others clean.
OK, what about the following:
* Piss Christ
* Dejuner sur l'Herbe
* Rape of the Sabine Women
* The Kiss (Rodin)
* The Satanic Verses
* Harry Potter
* Huck Finn
There are people who wish to ban any or all of those items. Remember, YOU are not the person who determines what is or is not objectionable.
You know, people got by just fine long before the Internet came along. /. flame and with it whatever creds I had.
Here goes my first
You unthinkably moronic twit! Try substituting "antibiotics," "telephones," "electricity," or "Sherman AntiTrust Act" for "Internet" in your dipshitted response. Now what do you think about living the way people lived "long before" ?
Internet filters, like the DMCA, the Disney copyright law, and the new FCC ownership regs, serve only to concentrate information, and thus power, in the hands of a few well-connected people. You don't have to be a Socialist or an Orwell fan to think this is a really bad idea.
Thus increasing the cost (number of computers) and decreasing the utilization rate.
Not to mention: what if I want to work with my 9-yr old? Am I allowed to take him into the "Adult Room"?
What if they accidently create an earth-eating black-hole or something? I remember hearing how sloppy they used to be with nuclear research when it was new. :-).
First of all, "they" were never sloppy. Commercial mfrs of watches were sloppy: they painted radium on watch faces and got the goo all over themselves. The nuclear researchers took all precautions they could think of, and those in the Curie timeframe simply didn't imagine radiation was going to whack them.
Now, on to the black hole question: there were some articles in the last month or two (sorry, I can't recall the source) in which researchers pointed out that micro-black holes are not "ravenous," i.e. they cannot grow. While it's always possible current quantum physics theory is in error, not only is an error of this magnitude unlikely, but consider what would be left of the universe if black holes in general grew at some mad rate. We'd already all be eaten
If it's so dense, why doesn't the matter just fuse together? I mean, the whole point of the "nuclear" part in thermonuclear reactions is to get the hydrogen atoms hot enough and dense enough to fuse.
Disclaimer: I've been out of grad school way too long. So... hydrogen fusion occurs at "relatively" lower temperatures and pressures than in this quark experiment. The H-bomb uses heat and pressure (usually from a 'wrap' of fission bomb) to force protons and neutrons thru the repulsive barrier and create Helium nuclei.
Knowing next to nothing about quark plasmas, I'd suspect the ridiculously short lifetime of these particles means the plasma re-coagulates into various elementary particles.
It was obtaining Apple parts illegally.
Compare the whole game to the automotive industry. You can buy OEM parts or you can buy (for the most part) third-party knockoffs. In theory you could build an entire care from parts. And in the custom car market lots of cars are Frankenstein monsters, w/ parts from several different companies, let alone models. Why should any computer software or hardware company
be allowed to stop someone from doing these same things to produce computers?
It looks good on paper. I have similar voting rights with my few shares of United Technologies Corp. stock (NYSE:UTX). However, even if I got all my friends together and we all withheld votes for one of the Board candidates, our votes would be lost in the noise. And my main point was that it's essentially impossible to nominate and elect an opposing candidate to the Board. At the risk of getting mega-modded down as lame
Uh-huh. Name me one company w/ over 50 million gross sales whose shareholders actually have a say in the Board of Directors. Typically a commanding percentage of the stock is held by a very few players and they hand-pick the board. Even trying to mount a proxy vote for an alternate candidate is beyond the financialand organizational means of the small shareholders.
I can disable the SW if I Suspect? Hmmm, I think I shall become a vendor and suspect only people I don't like...
The Florida Republican party owns the copyright to this scam. Worked like a charm to keep minorities off the voter roles.
The series would be better if Robert England would have an identity crisis and confuse his alien role with his Fredie Kruger role.
I was watching the beginning of a clearly trashy movie trailer a couple weeks ago, so I announced to the whole theatre, "And now.... Freddie vs. Jason!" Imagine my surprise (and disgust) when it turned out that's EXACTLY what the movie is about!
Back to V: I think we should just grab the aliens and shove them through the Stargate. They'd get along fine with the Gou'a'ulds.
What about the opposite: people forced to "buy" software they don't want? Remember that cute story a few years ago: some bloke in Australia who bought a laptop and did NOT want the WinXX OS, and tried to "return" it in accordance w/ the EULA. It took him months of emails to get a little cash from the laptop manufacturer (then he installed Linux).
So how about the BSA goes out and busts Microsoft for its predatory sales tactics, which for decades (more or less) included forcing hardware houses to pay a OS licence for every unit regardless of whether a Msoft OS was installed on the unit?
And in any case, piracy is a smokescreen. Heck, do you really think Ballmer didn't know how much piracy was going on when he set retail prices for Office in the first place? Piracy is not and has never reduced corporate profits. Piracy may increase retail prices but it doesn't hurt corporations.