Don't know why this is modded "troll". Poster is talking about a Pigouvian tax, raising prices to reflect external costs not captured in the market price.
Collusion may be explicit or implicit but antitrust laws should be written and enforced so that no one firm has the market power to lead or lower prices.
It's about learning, using science as a technique that has most bearing on the physical world, and using other tools (including religion, social science, literature, and art) on the non-physical world.
(Yes, for any being with senescence, a non-physical world exists).
Less Right Wing homeschooling alternatives might crop up in response to this Texas schoolbook foolishness. I'm getting worried for my (not yet school-aged) child.
Aside from the session being only 4 months old, just the threat of a filibuster keeps some legislation from being considered. The ability to filibustering is like having nuclear weapons, just because you could use it means people will pay more attention to you than if you didn't have the threat at all.
You Sci-Fi fanboys should climb out of your refrigerator cartons with "Death Star" painted on the side, and realize that there is no fundamental NEED to have a permanent base, or a moon-shot at all, to accomplish space science, exploration, or exploitation. Many of the problems of space are vastly simplified if you don't need the mass, complexity, and messiness of a life support system.
On the other hand, who are you to denigrate the potential for next smart phone? It may have applications yet unimagined; potentially useful for people on EARTH, where the rest of us live, remember?
Nobody used to own the airwaves, just like nobody owns the air we breathe, but once it became technologically possible to exploit electromagnetic radiation for broadcasting, governments (not just the US) passed laws that turned the electromagnetic spectrum into property. But the property being regulated isn't the airwaves, exactly, the property is a license to use the airwaves to transmit TV, radio, WiFi, etc. If air was being used for something besides breathing, people would try to treat it as property as well, and you'd have a whole legal structure set up around buying and selling air.
You might be right in saying we can only expect government jobs to be done poorly, but I think most people would prefer government did a few jobs very well. If government had done its job well in 2001, we wouldn't have a had a 9/11, and none of the consequences of that day, including the DHS, would have occurred.
Apparently the Liberals are the only ones with the guts to complain publically.
Why aren't Conservatives complaining about government abuse of power? I thought conservatism was about small government.
Just because the law permits something, doesn't make it right to take advantage of it, when it's a stupid law. The law allowed slavery and slaveholders got rich off the sweat of other human beings, until time, circumstances, and war finally put a stop to it. All the slaveholders had to do was free his slaves to avoid the consequences of war.
The law currently allows ridiculously long period of copyright protection, while technology allows individuals to undermine the stupidity of current law. All copyright holders have to do is to put their works into the public domain (or a Creative Commons license).
Like those who misread the 2nd Amendment by not reading the whole thing, you're skipping the important words: To Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts. If current copyright law isn't doing that, it needs to be amended until it does.
Copyright attempts to place a legal restriction on what is technologically feasible, but what is technologically feasible will occur regardless. Our sad experiments with Prohibition and drug policy should teach us that. If obeying copyright is onerous compared with the ease of copying, copyright has no chance. If copyright terms were modest constraints with a reasonable and finite limit, society could put up with them for the relative benefit of enticing greater output. But the relative benefits ought to be measured against the real cost of attempting to stop the tide of improving ability to produce and transmit information.
I fully agree the default ought to be maximum public access to use, copy, and modify, with the proviso that, in point of fact, technology is giving us the tools to assert public access despite restrictions.
IANA exobiologist, but one guess would be the chaotic currents in a gas giant take away many chances of self-organization and replication. Some life-related organic chemical reactions take time, and the probabilities of those occurring diminish vanishingly as the subject molecules are disturbed by electrical/gravitational/radiation disturbances.
You like people who think? You'll find plenty of company at the faculty lounge. Just ask for Bruce:
"Immanuel Kant was a real pissant Who was very rarely stable. Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar Who could think you under the table. David Hume could out-consume Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel, And Wittgenstein was a beery swine Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel. There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya' 'Bout the raising of the wrist. Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed. "
Ocean going ships are traveling in an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere at 1 G. All you need are sufficient provisions, and if you want a change in diet, throw a net or line over the side for some fish. Space ships are in Space (near vacuum, no gravity, nothing).
Grow up, future space cadets. Space travel is not Star Trek.
Good point. Some people talk about price and cost as if they were the same thing, and they're not.
Price is what people are willing to pay. Price - Cost equals profit, but if the price people are willing to pay is less than cost you have losses not profit.
The problem is that now that there are more alternative sources of music the price people are willing to pay for CDs has gone down, but record companies want to maintain the prices at the same (or higher) level. Meanwhile other people have explained the reasons for thinking the cost of making CDs has gone down, so by keeping the prices high the companies want to try to capture the profits on both ends, and they just can't.
For $5.00 a CD in a nice sturdy package with a little booklet about the band and the songs seems to me like a pretty good deal. At $13-14 it's not.
That said, I can vouch for a cell phone surviving going through a washing-machine cycle. (I forgot is was in my cargo pants pocket). The numeric keypad still worked OK; the directional keypad for the menu was a little funky but usable.
Lowering the cost of PV
on
ISS Goes Solar
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Interesting article here talks about how the costs for silicon for solar panels are higher than they need to be, because although it doesn't have to be as pure as semiconductor silicon, there's no process for making it at that lower grade of purity.
"The problem for the PV customers for silicon is that they are a fast grower sandwiched between two mature sectors growing roughly in line with the economy. Bulk silicon is used in old-economy alloys and sealants; and while demand for semiconductors grows rapidly in value, their extra capability is crammed onto roughly the same physical volume of raw material. ..People are of course working on finding a specific route to medium-grade silicon at $20 or so a kilo. Whoever gets there first will make a fortune and save the planet like Superman, so it's an attractive opportunity. "
http://www.samefacts.com/archives/climate_change_/ 2007/06/to_repairing_used_planet_99928.php
Yes, but a logistic regression is better suited to modeling a discrete choice outcome (like war or no war). A linear regression can model a predicted value of a continuous variable, but that prediction will have a confidence interval associated with it. In other words, a linear regression will predict a range of outcomes with some predefined probability of occurring (by convention, 95% is usually used as the confidence interval with some exceptions according to application).
Slashdot Mirror
Genes, being a part of a species' DNA, ought to be considered 'prior art' and unpatentable.
Don't know why this is modded "troll". Poster is talking about a Pigouvian tax, raising prices to reflect external costs not captured in the market price.
Collusion may be explicit or implicit but antitrust laws should be written and enforced so that no one firm has the market power to lead or lower prices.
It's about learning, using science as a technique that has most bearing on the physical world, and using other tools (including religion, social science, literature, and art) on the non-physical world.
(Yes, for any being with senescence, a non-physical world exists).
Less Right Wing homeschooling alternatives might crop up in response to this Texas schoolbook foolishness. I'm getting worried for my (not yet school-aged) child.
Aside from the session being only 4 months old, just the threat of a filibuster keeps some legislation from being considered. The ability to filibustering is like having nuclear weapons, just because you could use it means people will pay more attention to you than if you didn't have the threat at all.
You Sci-Fi fanboys should climb out of your refrigerator cartons with "Death Star" painted on the side, and realize that there is no fundamental NEED to have a permanent base, or a moon-shot at all, to accomplish space science, exploration, or exploitation. Many of the problems of space are vastly simplified if you don't need the mass, complexity, and messiness of a life support system. On the other hand, who are you to denigrate the potential for next smart phone? It may have applications yet unimagined; potentially useful for people on EARTH, where the rest of us live, remember?
For adults, maybe, but at an earlier age autism isn't necessarily hard-wired:
http://blog.qsac.com/2008/01/neuro-behavioral-model-autism-brain.html?
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?aid=1928680
Since intervening very early in child development seems to be helpful, why couldn't we one day find a way to regenerate/rewire those pathways?
Nobody used to own the airwaves, just like nobody owns the air we breathe, but once it became technologically possible to exploit electromagnetic radiation for broadcasting, governments (not just the US) passed laws that turned the electromagnetic spectrum into property. But the property being regulated isn't the airwaves, exactly, the property is a license to use the airwaves to transmit TV, radio, WiFi, etc. If air was being used for something besides breathing, people would try to treat it as property as well, and you'd have a whole legal structure set up around buying and selling air.
You might be right in saying we can only expect government jobs to be done poorly, but I think most people would prefer government did a few jobs very well. If government had done its job well in 2001, we wouldn't have a had a 9/11, and none of the consequences of that day, including the DHS, would have occurred.
Apparently the Liberals are the only ones with the guts to complain publically. Why aren't Conservatives complaining about government abuse of power? I thought conservatism was about small government.
C'est la même merde; mais la journée est differente.
Just because the law permits something, doesn't make it right to take advantage of it, when it's a stupid law. The law allowed slavery and slaveholders got rich off the sweat of other human beings, until time, circumstances, and war finally put a stop to it. All the slaveholders had to do was free his slaves to avoid the consequences of war.
The law currently allows ridiculously long period of copyright protection, while technology allows individuals to undermine the stupidity of current law. All copyright holders have to do is to put their works into the public domain (or a Creative Commons license).
See the analogy?
What's the point of being a capitalist, if you can't buy and sell everything?
Like those who misread the 2nd Amendment by not reading the whole thing, you're skipping the important words: To Promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts. If current copyright law isn't doing that, it needs to be amended until it does.
Copyright attempts to place a legal restriction on what is technologically feasible, but what is technologically feasible will occur regardless. Our sad experiments with Prohibition and drug policy should teach us that. If obeying copyright is onerous compared with the ease of copying, copyright has no chance. If copyright terms were modest constraints with a reasonable and finite limit, society could put up with them for the relative benefit of enticing greater output. But the relative benefits ought to be measured against the real cost of attempting to stop the tide of improving ability to produce and transmit information.
I fully agree the default ought to be maximum public access to use, copy, and modify, with the proviso that, in point of fact, technology is giving us the tools to assert public access despite restrictions.
IANA exobiologist, but one guess would be the chaotic currents in a gas giant take away many chances of self-organization and replication. Some life-related organic chemical reactions take time, and the probabilities of those occurring diminish vanishingly as the subject molecules are disturbed by electrical/gravitational/radiation disturbances.
You like people who think?
You'll find plenty of company at the faculty lounge.
Just ask for Bruce:
"Immanuel Kant was a real pissant
Who was very rarely stable.
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar
Who could think you under the table.
David Hume could out-consume
Wilhelm Freidrich Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine
Who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya'
'Bout the raising of the wrist.
Socrates, himself, was permanently pissed. "
Ocean going ships are traveling in an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere at 1 G. All you need are sufficient provisions, and if you want a change in diet, throw a net or line over the side for some fish. Space ships are in Space (near vacuum, no gravity, nothing).
Grow up, future space cadets. Space travel is not Star Trek.
http://idlewords.com/2007/04/the_alameda-weehawken_burrito_tunnel.htm
Good point. Some people talk about price and cost as if they were the same thing, and they're not. Price is what people are willing to pay. Price - Cost equals profit, but if the price people are willing to pay is less than cost you have losses not profit. The problem is that now that there are more alternative sources of music the price people are willing to pay for CDs has gone down, but record companies want to maintain the prices at the same (or higher) level. Meanwhile other people have explained the reasons for thinking the cost of making CDs has gone down, so by keeping the prices high the companies want to try to capture the profits on both ends, and they just can't. For $5.00 a CD in a nice sturdy package with a little booklet about the band and the songs seems to me like a pretty good deal. At $13-14 it's not.
Poor IT security predated Strickland; the question is will he put people in place to fix it?
That said, I can vouch for a cell phone surviving going through a washing-machine cycle. (I forgot is was in my cargo pants pocket). The numeric keypad still worked OK; the directional keypad for the menu was a little funky but usable.
"The problem for the PV customers for silicon is that they are a fast grower sandwiched between two mature sectors growing roughly in line with the economy. Bulk silicon is used in old-economy alloys and sealants; and while demand for semiconductors grows rapidly in value, their extra capability is crammed onto roughly the same physical volume of raw material. . .People are of course working on finding a specific route to medium-grade silicon at $20 or so a kilo. Whoever gets there first will make a fortune and save the planet like Superman, so it's an attractive opportunity. "
http://www.samefacts.com/archives/climate_change_/ 2007/06/to_repairing_used_planet_99928.php
Yes, but a logistic regression is better suited to modeling a discrete choice outcome (like war or no war). A linear regression can model a predicted value of a continuous variable, but that prediction will have a confidence interval associated with it. In other words, a linear regression will predict a range of outcomes with some predefined probability of occurring (by convention, 95% is usually used as the confidence interval with some exceptions according to application).