Except where functionality is actually removed. E.g. Stallman insists that man pages are obsolete and refuses to support them, which is incredibly wrongheaded.
I'll second that.
Info always was a pain in the butt - especially for those who don't use emacs as their preferred editor. And now that HTML (and its augmentations) is here and browsers are essentially universally available, info (which never achieved the user penetration of man) is itself at least as "obsolete". Considerably more so, in fact, precicely due to that lack of penetration.
Sometimes an adequate standard is better than a "better" multi-standard solution. Books, for instance, are not obsolete (even if clay tablets have been depreciated for a while.) Man is just a convenient online set of loose-leaf notebooks (suitable for hardcopying for those times a spare square-yard of screen isn't handy).
Needing a mix of tools to read the minimal subset of manuals is so broken it hurts my head just to think about it. The "man is obsolete and gnu won't support it" case of Not Invented Here is one of the biggest impediments to general conversion from proprietary software to Gnu offerings.
Fortunately there are info-to-HTML translators. Unfortunately, I have yet to meet one that conveniently ports all the info functionality into the browser environment - which is a problem, since the "info" manuals were written assuming it and pretty much require it for effective use.
I recall the "ANSI Standard Trojan Horse" (though it was misnamed). It became quite common after ANSI standardized a cross between the VT100 and Ann Arbor Terminals escape sequences.
Simplest form was to send a "talk" mesage to a root user containing an escape sequence that programmed a hotkey with your command-to-be-run-as-root and then "hit the key" by remote control. (You could even bury it invisibly in an otherwise innocuous-looking message.)
It's just stupid to think that it is fair to allow an artificial monopoly on important discoveries because it is an incentive to develop more.
Which would you rather have?
1) A cure for AIDS (or drug-resistant staph, or whatever fatal nastiness) that costs $500,000, and a lot of aids patients cured.
2) No cure for AIDS (or drug-resistant staph, or whatever fatal nastiness), and all of those patients dead.
You only get one. Because it costs many millions of dollars to hunt up a cure for anything. And once it's found, another $13 million (and rising) to get it approved by a bureaucracy that gets dinged big-time for approving a drug that harms a few people through side-effects but not for withholding one that would save 100,000 lives a year (example: Beta blockers for preventing second-and-fatal heart attacks.)
The bright side is that they're going to try to get as much money as possible from their drug once they have it. So they won't price it so high that only five patients can afford it. Fast nickles are better than slow dimes - so (as soon as a few rich ones have been soaked to get it early), they'll drop the price and sell it to a few thousand well-to-do, then again to get the insurance companies to declare it no longer experimental, then again to sell as much as they can to the people without insurance. And they'll sell 'em cheaper in poor countries (as soon as they've sold some to any rich rulers that need curing.) Meanwhile they'll donate some to charity clinics for a tax deduction based on the high price, and hand out physician samples (to physicians who will save 'em for the people who can't afford 'em because there aren't enough samples to cure everybody). (And there's a rare-disease special approval for drugs that don't have enough market to pay for the bureacuracy's regular approval process.)
And that makes sense even to compensated psychopaths in the executive suite. But I'll tell you a dirty little secret: Not ALL the decision-makers in drug companies are money-grubbing psychopaths. Some of 'em are there because they really want to help people. But (unlike some bleeding-hearts) they're smart enough to know that, after researching ten thousand compounds to get a cure (or "treatment" - make it better without ending it, if that's all you can manage) for ONE disease, you need to make enough money to pay off the cost, and the investors, to have enough left over (or enough profit to attract more from investors) to find cures or treatments for the next two, or ten, or fifty diseases.
Most of these patents are for these which nature has spent millions of years perfecting. The first person who comes along and notices it does not deserve an artificial monopoly on a natural drug.
This system was perfected back when the way to find a new antibiotic was to hunt up plants and molds, extract their funny compounds, identify any that did something useful, figure out how to make it in bulk, and productize it. (Think "penicillin" and "{whatever}mycin".) That's exactly the financial case above, and exacty what we're talking about with this new compound. They DAMNED WELL deserve a return for the millions they spent finding this - and the other millions they spent going down blind alleys while hunting for it.
I must have missed something, however... What was "the secret" that Mussolini (and later Carpentier) knew that allowed them to move freely about Hell?
I thought that was made explicit near the end - that hell was a post-life chance to repent, renounce your sins, redeem yourself (through pennance), and achieve heaven. (And also to get stuck again in a different hellish object-lesson by embracing some other sin.)
(Of course IAJAR (I Am Just A Reader). Maybe I didn't get the point either.)
In the so-called "Golden Age" of science fiction sex was not commonly dealt with, probably as a result of the mores and values during that time.
In the golden age sex was not commonly dealt with because the publishing houses censored the pulp magazines. Yes, an explicit censor, who could override the editor's decisions.
Campbell and some of his authors often played a game of "get something past the censor". One item I recall was a reference to a "ball bearing rat trap" (which, it develops a couple pages later, is a tomcat). She completely missed it.
(I have occasionally wondered how much of the cluelessness of baby-boom male nerds about the female gender resulted from the dearth of realistic male/female interaction in golden-age science fiction, along with other censorship-derivd distortions of interpersonal relations and behavioral consequenses prevalent in fiction of the time. B-( )
According to the DoJ *rolling papers* are also now considered "drug paraphenalia" and a federal offense to possess, which will surprise the hell out of a lot of "roll your own" tobacco smokers I know.
So is aluminum foil. Since the '60s.
It was used to make hashish pipes - by lining the bowl of any pipe-like object (or a hole punched near one end of a toilet-paper roll), then puncturin the foil a few times with the point of a pin.
This made it interesting when you bought some to wrap a sandwich or meat for your freezer. B-) So of course the law was selectively enforced.
Since you've brought up economic theory, you might also have mentioned that Keynes
Keynes had some significant insights - many of which can be expressed as "if you screw around with the negative feedback loop you can make the output jump wildly". (Unfortunately, only temporarily, while it both makes the system unstable, unresponsive to real signals, and susceptable to long-term saturation in the direction opposite that you tried to drive it.)
The long run iddn't matter to him - he's the one who said "In the long run we're all dead." Perhaps appropriate for someone (like Keynes) who neigher had nor desired children. But leaving the later generations holding the bag is not my preferred economic policy - especially when I, and you, are the later generations. B-)
I prefer the Chicago School. Their models seem to work a lot better than those of the Keynesians. They take into account decision-making with less than perfect information (due to the cost of information, the time cost of processing it, errors, and the cost of correcting errors). This seems especially appropriate for swarm modeling. And their bias is toward spreading the wealth by making so much more of it (through technological improvement and exponential growth) that necessities and the fancy toys get cheap - even if it means more toys in the hands of nerds like us who invent or make them (or Bill, who DOES satisfy a lot of peoples' wants even if non-ideally B-) ) than in the hands of those with the fewest.
[Keynes] showed that the end result of swarm behaviour can be distinctly sub-optimal [...] The general point is that while the swarm will do surprising things given the limitations of their interactions, what they do could often be improved upon.
No argument there. The trick is to set up the rules for interaction so the individual biases of the swarm members (which are mostly hard-wired and not subject to gross adjustment, no matter how hard socialists try) drive the swarm to prosperity.
it's quite possible (indeed normal) for the economy to reach equilibrium without full employment.
"Full employment" is optimal? Without euthenizing the unemployable and untrainable? No, thanks. Body-beautiful utopias are right out for me - especially since I'm no Aryian Superman, while my wife has significant medical problems.
I'll settle for a significant fraction living lives of leisure on previous earnings, temporarily unemployed while switching jobs or hunting (but not starving and homeless meanwhile), charity due to truly incurable issues, or incarcerated for chosing to steal other people's stuff when they could have taken charity.
It's already being used in financial models. Explains everything from the dot-bomb crash to "tomorrow will, 2 out of 3 times, be like today"
Not just that:
Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" was exactly swarm intelligence emergent behavior: A large number of humans applying simple rules of self-interest organize large movements of capital goods into the production of more-desirable products by sending each other simple price signals.
Simiar comparisons might be made to the success of voluntary vs. totalitarian governmental systems, the free software movement, the explosion of network applications, and a number of other "less control gives better results" situations.
I think Dr. Bonabeau might find it useful, when trying to sell his ideas to administrators, to bring up these comparisons. Successful administrators and decision-makers already have a solid understanding of these concepts, so speaking in these terms should be immediately accessable.
Imagine going to a non-pointy-haired business exec or a conservative politician: Will he more quickly grasp an argument couched in terms of ants, or in terms of free markets?
Heck: Even central-control systems (such as bureaucracies and military staff command) work by giving only broad directions and letting the subordinates use their own intelligence (and local incentive structures) to work out the details. A fundamental lesson in officer training works as follows:
- Instructor gives the new second louies a platoon, a sergant, and a tent. Tells 'em to try to direct the men to pitch the tent.
- Each second louie tries to micro-manage the tent-pitching, with disastrous results.
- Then the instructor shows 'em how it's done:
"Sergant! (points to spot on ground) I want that tent pitched HERE!"
Then he goes away and lets the sergant handle it.
(Of course the sergant, in turn, passes the order on with only slight elaboration, maybe assigning labor division or providing feedback if somebody's slacking or screwing up. But mostly he lets the men, in turn, apply their own brains and brawn to doing their own pieces of the tent-raising.)
If the GPL rejected the concept of intellectual property it would called "public domain."
If I understand it correctly, GPL attempts to overcome a problem with releasing software in the public domain:
With public domain software, someone can take a hunk of code, fix a few bugs, and copyright the fixes. Then nobody else can fix the code the same way, including the original author. Under existing law the working code is now proprietary and the creator is out in the cold.
So with GPL the authors retain the copyright (which they might transfer to others such as FSF) but license everybody with terms that require them to similarly license their fixed or improve versions.
After a few fixes the total work cosists of many fragments wose copyrights are distributed among many owners, so there's no effective way to get them all to agree to release the same version under a different license.
GPL, unfortunately, also bans incorporating the GPLed code into certain closed products, making it hard to use it in proprietary software. Maybe that's an unfortunate side-effect or maybe it was the GPL authors' attepmt to cripple proprietary software efforts. Take your pick.
To a large extent the other open-source licenses (including the LGPL) exist mainly to try to mitigate this side-effect in various ways.
I'd have preferred one that required the user of the software to allow reverse-engineering. Let 'em keep the source - but make things like DMCA moot. The time lag for reverse engineering would let them profit from a first-mover advantage and establish a market position, after which they'd have to compete with upstarts on merit. That should provide more than adequate return to stimulate investment in new software.
There is a valid question of whether you should be able to sue somebody out of state in small claims court for $500. Think about it -- it costs $500 at least to come and defend yourself in an out of state case, so how can you win, even if you are totally innocent?
That's why most small claims court laws require you to sue in a court near where the defendant lives or works.
As the plantif you get to bear the cost of going to a place near him. (And if you win, try to get your travel expenses reimbursed, too, as "reasonable costs". B-) )
was *your* e-mail stamped with the originating phone number at the top of each page?
If you can convince a judge that an email is a fax, you can convince one that an email address is a phone number.
Or, as the plantif, you can just stipulate that YOU will accept a WORKING email address as equivalent to a phone number. Then if he forged his headers (and also didn't include a working phone number) you can say that he also violated the self-identification requirement of the statute.
And as a defendant you can also argue that an email address is "the phone number of your fax machine" - because it serves to uniquely identify your email account to the sender and provides him a means to contact you - by sending a message to your email account where you can read or print it on your workstation, which is a "fax machine" by the definition in the law.
Lex Talionis, the principle of an eye for an eye, is a morally bankrupt code of law we've been moving away from for the past few thousand years, thankfully.
Wrong. Lex Talionis was the principle that you take NO MORE than an eye for an eye - promulgated as an "improvement" in an era where the response to losing an eye (or a purse) might be to do in the alleged perpetrator and confiscate all his worldly goods.
It's morally bankrupt, all right. But only to the extent that if the theif only loses what he stole, and has a nonzero chance of getting away with it, thevery remains a profitmaking enterprise despite full enforcement of the law. So it becomes an endorsement of theft as a lifestyle. This is why there are "puntitive damages" - extra penalties to punish the perpetrator (thus making continued misbehavior a losing proposition even in with imperfect law enforcement).
None of which applies here. Applying "Lex Talionis" to the spammer would mean spamming him, rather than seeking compensatory and puntitive damages.
... if the lament wasn't coming out of the mouths of the SAME DAMNED MEDIA CONGLOMERATES.
Look down the article a bit and you find it's mostly quoting Warner and EMI. A press release perhaps? And who owns and operates the International Herald Tribune, in which it was published? The New York Times, as of January 2, 2003.
Oh, dear! Piracy is so rampant that we - I mean the artists - can't make any money on royalties. So they have to sign up with us - I mean the media conglomerates - who run their tours and take a percentage of everything else they make in their entire carreers.
Sorry. But you guys already fed me so much baloney that the taste is stuck in my mouth, and I can't tell if there's any trace of truth in this latest helping.
... the two folks I know at Covad are saying that it can't be VOIP or VoDSL, it has to be traditional voice service.
So install a POTS/VoIP bridge box next to the DSLAM (or on its linecard) and hot up the lines' baseband with POTS that's carried as VoIP to your switching/bridging center. B-)
It wasn't government granted monopoly either. Bell & AT&T existed because they were the biggest, and existed long before anti-trust laws.
That's partly right. But the AC had the bulk of it right, too.
Early in the history of telephony -when it was still local - there was competition. And the competing companies refused to interconnect and complete each other's calls. (In particular, Bell, the big gorilla, refused.) So businesses (like hotels, banks, legal firms, newspapers, telegraph offices, and cab companies) had to have phones from two or three companies to be sure all their customers could get to them.
Bell used their own reluctance to aid the competition to convince the government that telephony was a "natural monopoly" and thus needed to be regulated. (At the time gas and water distribution were considered to be "natural monopolies" because it would cost N times as much to install pipes for N companies, so supposedly a monopoly under price regulation could deliver the service for less than the cost of multiple copies of the infrastructure.)
So the regulators set up a system where "franchises" - regional monopolies - were given to various companies. Of course where a local phone company already existed it got the franchise, and where multiple companies existed the big guy typically got it and the little guys had to sell him their equipment (or trade it for equipment in a less-lucrative market they also shared).
If I recall correctly, Bell was the big gorilla at the time because it had had selective access to Bell's patents, another government monopoly. (Bell made it to the patent office a half hour ahead of another inventer with a virtually identical device.) So in the early days Bell had the best equipment and others had to work-around, and once the patents expired Bell was the big kid on the block.
Under regulation the prices were set at levels that guaranteed Bell about a 6% return on investment - and whenever it dropped below that they could petition for and receive a price hike.
(Bell Labs actually existed to spend as much money as possible on research vuagely connected with telephony, because for every dollar spent there Bell could bill customers $1.06. It was the biggest failure of the system, because basic research pays off big. Virtually from the start they made more money licensing Bell Labs inventions than the lab cost.)
As long distance became possible, Bell (who had by then bought out most of the little guys, except for some rural co-ops and small towns wired by the likes of General Telephone) became the regulated monopoly for interconnecting the cities.
Bell continued to be a government-mandated monopoly until a series of court decisions.
First the Carterphone decision led to the "foreign attachments" tariff - and you could stop renting a phone built by Western Electric (Bell's manufacturing subsidary) and hook up one bought from an independent manufacturer. Phones went from a paper cost of hundreds of bux to cheap disposables over a few years.
Then Microwave Communications Inc. (MCI) took advantage of that tariff and inflated long distance charges by setting up their own inter-city microwave hops, renting local lines, and bypassing Bell. Bell sued, MCI counter-sued for antitrust, and the fallout was that not only was MCI (and others) allowed to continue, but Bell was required to let them hook up on the same basis as Bell's own long-distance operation. And to keep Bell from playing accounting games to subsidize unregulated long distance from monopoly local bills, Bell was split up into AT&T (long distance), Lucent (Western Electric & Bell Labs), and a handfull of "Baby Bell" RBOCs (Regional Bell Operating Companies) to continue the monopoly local/short-range long distance service.
Meanwhile, virtually all the local copper was installed by Bell Telephone or the Baby Bells while they were regulated monopolies, with government-mandated monopoly pricing for their service subsidizing the cost. A new competitor in a deregulated local phone business would have to wire a whole city and then pay for it with money made while charging less than the established RBOC, which is sitting on paid-for subsidized copper and can cut prices to the bone. Can't be done.
Eventually the RBOCs were allowed back into the long distance business - at a price. They had to provide DSL service and rent their local copper to upstart competitors at a wholesale price. It seemed like a good idea at the time, because the long-distance service was where the money was. Players there were mostly AT&T, MCI, and SPRINT. (The Southern Pacific Railroad had strung fiber along their right-of-way for their own communication. Fiber has a LOT of bandwidth, so they rented out the surplus bandwidth by becoming a long-distance phone and long-haul data carrier.)
But about the time that deal was cut, several upstart long-distance companies completed THEIR long-haul fiber loops, and the price war started. Suddenly the Baby Bells had no revenue from the shiny new long-distance operations. So they started dragging their feet on the DSL deployment. As for installing more copper to expand their own service and rent to their competitors, it no longer makes ANY sense with the only revenue coming form local service. So they won't do it until the ruling is reversed.
Meanwhile the competitive local phone carriers never really materialized (except for the cable operators, who also had existing copper installed). And the little DSL ISPs - except Covad which re-organized out of bankruptcy, dumping ITS startup costs - are pretty much dead, from their own price war (and from the local Bells' tendency to raise their service costs by screwing up their local copper). So from the regulators' point of view the competitive market they're trying to protect hasn't, and won't appear. Thus the release of the Baby Bells from the wholesale price controls, in the hope they'll start installing more cable.
But you know that the majority of buyers are people who don't understand what the consequences are.
And part of that is because nobody TOLD them there are consequences.
But as soon as warning labels start showing up, some of 'em will start to wonder what they're being warned about
So some will ask, or look around on the net, and maybe find out. Then they'll be able to make an informed decision about whether it matters to them enough to affect their purchase decision.
And others will just avoid products with the warning label in favor of those without - which will create pressure on the providers to stop using technologies which require a warning label. B-)
Don't underestimate joe sixpack. Just because he isn't an expert on the things YOU'RE expert on doesn't mean he's dumb or lazy. He may be quite the genius, and just focussed on other interests.
I have also experienced this [hearing "ultrasound"] in physics class, where a high voltage was being passed through a sphere painted with metallic paint. can anyone enlighten me as to how this ultrasonic side-effect occurs in the first place?
If it's being continuously charged (i.e. a van de graff generator with a rubber belt) you'll get ultrasound because the corona discharge makes the system act like a relaxation oscilator:
- Voltage rises until the ionization potential of the air is exceeded and the air molecules start breaking up, becoming conductive.
- The ionized air leaks off charge until the voltage below the extinction potential, and the arc goes out.
- Now the voltage rises again. Repeat indefinitely.
Similar to the way a neon-lamp/capacator/resistor/DC power supply blinky-light works.
The arc heats the air and causes it to rush away, creating a pressure wave. This is what you hear.
The basic cycle will vary with the charging rate and geometry, but typically will be either a high whistle or ultrasonic.
Both the exact timing of the individual arcs and their locations are somewhat random, and ionized gas is a negative resistance (higher current, more ionization, lower voltage) which amplifies any signal at any frequency, so random variations in anything that affects the voltage or current get amplified. People whose hearing quits at a frequency below the basic cyclic rate hear the "envelope" - the lower-frequency variations of the arcing - as a random-noise "hiss". People whose hearing extends up to the cyclic rate or beyond hear the whistle - with the random variations making the whistle sound somewhat hissy, like a breathy note on a flute.
(Of course if the sphere was being charged by a flyback-like electronic high-voltage supply operating at a near-ultrasonic rate, like the flyback system in a TV or monitor, you might just be hearing the power supply, or the arcing happening at the peak of each charging cycle.)
Re:Just so long as you're not a chicken...
on
Soundless Music?
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· Score: 1
True story: 7 Hz is the resonant frequency of a chicken's skull cavity.
Unlikely.
But it IS in the range of entrainment frequencies of neurons.
Nerves (especially sensory nerves, which have receptors for non-other-nerve-pulse stimulous), after being fired, go through a series of steps during recovery:
- Absolute refractory period, where nothing can fire them.
- Negative afterpotential, where they can be fired by a stronger-than-normal stimulus.
- Postiive afterpotential, where they can be fired by a WEAKER-than-normal stimulus.
Followed by a return to the resting state.
The ramp from refractory to negative to positive afterpotential serves to encode the strength of a continuous stimulus into pulse-train frequency.
But if you hit it with a periodic pulse of stimulus, so that every nerve of the particular type that fired on one pulse will be in the middle of the positive afterpotential at the next pulse, you can quickly get all of 'em firing in unison on every pulse.
This is particularly interesting when done with a strobe light. It occurs near the flicker-fusion frequency (around 14 hz, I think). The visual field (even portions only lightly illuminated by the strobe and stroingly with other light sources) tends to disolve into flickering saturated colors, something like a psychedelic poster.
DON'T try this if you're susceptable to epileptic seizures. (Lightshow operators know the frequency in question and avoid it for fear of injuring the viewers.)
It's not unreasonable to believe that this effect, working on the nerves controlling the skeletal muscles, breathing muscles, intestinal tract, or the heart, could cause severe medical problems very quickly. (A similar phenomenon may occur with certain muscles, too.)
The signal would have to be reasonably strong, however. If it could be triggered with a weak signal it would have evolved out quickly or defenses evolved, and if it could be triggered with a moderate signal there would be organisms using it as a weapon.
And of course different frequencies (over a narrow range) might affect different organ systems.
While on the subject of cool vinyl tricks, supposedly (I haven't seen it), Monty Python had a comedy record with two intertwined spiral tracks. So when you played the same side, sometimes you'd get one track, and sometimes the other.
That's how the pre-semiconductor string-pull talking dolls (starting with "Chatty Cathy") generated multiple sayings. Several spiral tracks, and the one you got depended on the disk position when the needle dropped onto the lead-in.
Not a very technical article, but interesting nonetheless.
One thing that REALLY bugged me about the article is that it said "scientists" did this experiment, but DIDN'T say WHICH scientists, not naming people, the institution, the funding agency, etc.
Makes it hard to find out more about the experiment.
(At least they named the site where it was performed. So if the paper, excerpts, or another more complete report made it to the web we might be able to dig it out with a keyword search, rather than retreating to a library and digging out the medical and accoustic journals.)
And then the media wonder why people no longer look to them for news...
Slashdot Mirror
Except where functionality is actually removed. E.g. Stallman insists that man pages are obsolete and refuses to support them, which is incredibly wrongheaded.
I'll second that.
Info always was a pain in the butt - especially for those who don't use emacs as their preferred editor. And now that HTML (and its augmentations) is here and browsers are essentially universally available, info (which never achieved the user penetration of man) is itself at least as "obsolete". Considerably more so, in fact, precicely due to that lack of penetration.
Sometimes an adequate standard is better than a "better" multi-standard solution. Books, for instance, are not obsolete (even if clay tablets have been depreciated for a while.) Man is just a convenient online set of loose-leaf notebooks (suitable for hardcopying for those times a spare square-yard of screen isn't handy).
Needing a mix of tools to read the minimal subset of manuals is so broken it hurts my head just to think about it. The "man is obsolete and gnu won't support it" case of Not Invented Here is one of the biggest impediments to general conversion from proprietary software to Gnu offerings.
Fortunately there are info-to-HTML translators. Unfortunately, I have yet to meet one that conveniently ports all the info functionality into the browser environment - which is a problem, since the "info" manuals were written assuming it and pretty much require it for effective use.
So they discovered ANSI bombs over again.
Looks like it.
I recall the "ANSI Standard Trojan Horse" (though it was misnamed). It became quite common after ANSI standardized a cross between the VT100 and Ann Arbor Terminals escape sequences.
Simplest form was to send a "talk" mesage to a root user containing an escape sequence that programmed a hotkey with your command-to-be-run-as-root and then "hit the key" by remote control. (You could even bury it invisibly in an otherwise innocuous-looking message.)
ANCIENT stuff. What-early '70s?
It's just stupid to think that it is fair to allow an artificial monopoly on important discoveries because it is an incentive to develop more.
Which would you rather have?
1) A cure for AIDS (or drug-resistant staph, or whatever fatal nastiness) that costs $500,000, and a lot of aids patients cured.
2) No cure for AIDS (or drug-resistant staph, or whatever fatal nastiness), and all of those patients dead.
You only get one. Because it costs many millions of dollars to hunt up a cure for anything. And once it's found, another $13 million (and rising) to get it approved by a bureaucracy that gets dinged big-time for approving a drug that harms a few people through side-effects but not for withholding one that would save 100,000 lives a year (example: Beta blockers for preventing second-and-fatal heart attacks.)
The bright side is that they're going to try to get as much money as possible from their drug once they have it. So they won't price it so high that only five patients can afford it. Fast nickles are better than slow dimes - so (as soon as a few rich ones have been soaked to get it early), they'll drop the price and sell it to a few thousand well-to-do, then again to get the insurance companies to declare it no longer experimental, then again to sell as much as they can to the people without insurance. And they'll sell 'em cheaper in poor countries (as soon as they've sold some to any rich rulers that need curing.) Meanwhile they'll donate some to charity clinics for a tax deduction based on the high price, and hand out physician samples (to physicians who will save 'em for the people who can't afford 'em because there aren't enough samples to cure everybody). (And there's a rare-disease special approval for drugs that don't have enough market to pay for the bureacuracy's regular approval process.)
And that makes sense even to compensated psychopaths in the executive suite. But I'll tell you a dirty little secret: Not ALL the decision-makers in drug companies are money-grubbing psychopaths. Some of 'em are there because they really want to help people. But (unlike some bleeding-hearts) they're smart enough to know that, after researching ten thousand compounds to get a cure (or "treatment" - make it better without ending it, if that's all you can manage) for ONE disease, you need to make enough money to pay off the cost, and the investors, to have enough left over (or enough profit to attract more from investors) to find cures or treatments for the next two, or ten, or fifty diseases.
Most of these patents are for these which nature has spent millions of years perfecting. The first person who comes along and notices it does not deserve an artificial monopoly on a natural drug.
This system was perfected back when the way to find a new antibiotic was to hunt up plants and molds, extract their funny compounds, identify any that did something useful, figure out how to make it in bulk, and productize it. (Think "penicillin" and "{whatever}mycin".) That's exactly the financial case above, and exacty what we're talking about with this new compound. They DAMNED WELL deserve a return for the millions they spent finding this - and the other millions they spent going down blind alleys while hunting for it.
I must have missed something, however... What was "the secret" that Mussolini (and later Carpentier) knew that allowed them to move freely about Hell?
I thought that was made explicit near the end - that hell was a post-life chance to repent, renounce your sins, redeem yourself (through pennance), and achieve heaven. (And also to get stuck again in a different hellish object-lesson by embracing some other sin.)
(Of course IAJAR (I Am Just A Reader). Maybe I didn't get the point either.)
In the so-called "Golden Age" of science fiction sex was not commonly dealt with, probably as a result of the mores and values during that time.
In the golden age sex was not commonly dealt with because the publishing houses censored the pulp magazines. Yes, an explicit censor, who could override the editor's decisions.
Campbell and some of his authors often played a game of "get something past the censor". One item I recall was a reference to a "ball bearing rat trap" (which, it develops a couple pages later, is a tomcat). She completely missed it.
(I have occasionally wondered how much of the cluelessness of baby-boom male nerds about the female gender resulted from the dearth of realistic male/female interaction in golden-age science fiction, along with other censorship-derivd distortions of interpersonal relations and behavioral consequenses prevalent in fiction of the time. B-( )
According to the DoJ *rolling papers* are also now considered "drug paraphenalia" and a federal offense to possess, which will surprise the hell out of a lot of "roll your own" tobacco smokers I know.
So is aluminum foil. Since the '60s.
It was used to make hashish pipes - by lining the bowl of any pipe-like object (or a hole punched near one end of a toilet-paper roll), then puncturin the foil a few times with the point of a pin.
This made it interesting when you bought some to wrap a sandwich or meat for your freezer. B-) So of course the law was selectively enforced.
Since you've brought up economic theory, you might also have mentioned that Keynes
Keynes had some significant insights - many of which can be expressed as "if you screw around with the negative feedback loop you can make the output jump wildly". (Unfortunately, only temporarily, while it both makes the system unstable, unresponsive to real signals, and susceptable to long-term saturation in the direction opposite that you tried to drive it.)
The long run iddn't matter to him - he's the one who said "In the long run we're all dead." Perhaps appropriate for someone (like Keynes) who neigher had nor desired children. But leaving the later generations holding the bag is not my preferred economic policy - especially when I, and you, are the later generations. B-)
I prefer the Chicago School. Their models seem to work a lot better than those of the Keynesians. They take into account decision-making with less than perfect information (due to the cost of information, the time cost of processing it, errors, and the cost of correcting errors). This seems especially appropriate for swarm modeling. And their bias is toward spreading the wealth by making so much more of it (through technological improvement and exponential growth) that necessities and the fancy toys get cheap - even if it means more toys in the hands of nerds like us who invent or make them (or Bill, who DOES satisfy a lot of peoples' wants even if non-ideally B-) ) than in the hands of those with the fewest.
[Keynes] showed that the end result of swarm behaviour can be distinctly sub-optimal [...] The general point is that while the swarm will do surprising things given the limitations of their interactions, what they do could often be improved upon.
No argument there. The trick is to set up the rules for interaction so the individual biases of the swarm members (which are mostly hard-wired and not subject to gross adjustment, no matter how hard socialists try) drive the swarm to prosperity.
it's quite possible (indeed normal) for the economy to reach equilibrium without full employment.
"Full employment" is optimal? Without euthenizing the unemployable and untrainable? No, thanks. Body-beautiful utopias are right out for me - especially since I'm no Aryian Superman, while my wife has significant medical problems.
I'll settle for a significant fraction living lives of leisure on previous earnings, temporarily unemployed while switching jobs or hunting (but not starving and homeless meanwhile), charity due to truly incurable issues, or incarcerated for chosing to steal other people's stuff when they could have taken charity.
It's already being used in financial models. Explains everything from the dot-bomb crash to "tomorrow will, 2 out of 3 times, be like today"
Not just that:
Adam Smith's "Invisible Hand" was exactly swarm intelligence emergent behavior: A large number of humans applying simple rules of self-interest organize large movements of capital goods into the production of more-desirable products by sending each other simple price signals.
Simiar comparisons might be made to the success of voluntary vs. totalitarian governmental systems, the free software movement, the explosion of network applications, and a number of other "less control gives better results" situations.
I think Dr. Bonabeau might find it useful, when trying to sell his ideas to administrators, to bring up these comparisons. Successful administrators and decision-makers already have a solid understanding of these concepts, so speaking in these terms should be immediately accessable.
Imagine going to a non-pointy-haired business exec or a conservative politician: Will he more quickly grasp an argument couched in terms of ants, or in terms of free markets?
Heck: Even central-control systems (such as bureaucracies and military staff command) work by giving only broad directions and letting the subordinates use their own intelligence (and local incentive structures) to work out the details. A fundamental lesson in officer training works as follows:
- Instructor gives the new second louies a platoon, a sergant, and a tent. Tells 'em to try to direct the men to pitch the tent.
- Each second louie tries to micro-manage the tent-pitching, with disastrous results.
- Then the instructor shows 'em how it's done:
"Sergant! (points to spot on ground) I want that tent pitched HERE!"
Then he goes away and lets the sergant handle it.
(Of course the sergant, in turn, passes the order on with only slight elaboration, maybe assigning labor division or providing feedback if somebody's slacking or screwing up. But mostly he lets the men, in turn, apply their own brains and brawn to doing their own pieces of the tent-raising.)
If the GPL rejected the concept of intellectual property it would called "public domain."
If I understand it correctly, GPL attempts to overcome a problem with releasing software in the public domain:
With public domain software, someone can take a hunk of code, fix a few bugs, and copyright the fixes. Then nobody else can fix the code the same way, including the original author. Under existing law the working code is now proprietary and the creator is out in the cold.
So with GPL the authors retain the copyright (which they might transfer to others such as FSF) but license everybody with terms that require them to similarly license their fixed or improve versions.
After a few fixes the total work cosists of many fragments wose copyrights are distributed among many owners, so there's no effective way to get them all to agree to release the same version under a different license.
GPL, unfortunately, also bans incorporating the GPLed code into certain closed products, making it hard to use it in proprietary software. Maybe that's an unfortunate side-effect or maybe it was the GPL authors' attepmt to cripple proprietary software efforts. Take your pick.
To a large extent the other open-source licenses (including the LGPL) exist mainly to try to mitigate this side-effect in various ways.
I'd have preferred one that required the user of the software to allow reverse-engineering. Let 'em keep the source - but make things like DMCA moot. The time lag for reverse engineering would let them profit from a first-mover advantage and establish a market position, after which they'd have to compete with upstarts on merit. That should provide more than adequate return to stimulate investment in new software.
CmdrTaco says:
;)
Nice to get a head start on what we'll be cloning next year
Jeez, Commander! Don't rub their noses in it! Or next time they might hold off until the release rather than leaking early.
Thanks for the correction.
There is a valid question of whether you should be able to sue somebody out of state in small claims court for $500. Think about it -- it costs $500 at least to come and defend yourself in an out of state case, so how can you win, even if you are totally innocent?
That's why most small claims court laws require you to sue in a court near where the defendant lives or works.
As the plantif you get to bear the cost of going to a place near him. (And if you win, try to get your travel expenses reimbursed, too, as "reasonable costs". B-) )
was *your* e-mail stamped with the originating phone number at the top of each page?
If you can convince a judge that an email is a fax, you can convince one that an email address is a phone number.
Or, as the plantif, you can just stipulate that YOU will accept a WORKING email address as equivalent to a phone number. Then if he forged his headers (and also didn't include a working phone number) you can say that he also violated the self-identification requirement of the statute.
And as a defendant you can also argue that an email address is "the phone number of your fax machine" - because it serves to uniquely identify your email account to the sender and provides him a means to contact you - by sending a message to your email account where you can read or print it on your workstation, which is a "fax machine" by the definition in the law.
Lex Talionis, the principle of an eye for an eye, is a morally bankrupt code of law we've been moving away from for the past few thousand years, thankfully.
Wrong. Lex Talionis was the principle that you take NO MORE than an eye for an eye - promulgated as an "improvement" in an era where the response to losing an eye (or a purse) might be to do in the alleged perpetrator and confiscate all his worldly goods.
It's morally bankrupt, all right. But only to the extent that if the theif only loses what he stole, and has a nonzero chance of getting away with it, thevery remains a profitmaking enterprise despite full enforcement of the law. So it becomes an endorsement of theft as a lifestyle. This is why there are "puntitive damages" - extra penalties to punish the perpetrator (thus making continued misbehavior a losing proposition even in with imperfect law enforcement).
None of which applies here. Applying "Lex Talionis" to the spammer would mean spamming him, rather than seeking compensatory and puntitive damages.
For those of us who are trying to set up incoming SMTP servers (or who are just curious):
What are the current "best practices" and state-of-the-art for the little guy (enterprise, small office/home office, little ISP, etc.) who:
- has some need or desire to directly serve inbound and outbound SMTP and
- has SOME time to sysadmin, but
- does not have the resources to throw several full-time-plus-pager sysadmins into the spam wars?
B-)
... if the lament wasn't coming out of the mouths of the SAME DAMNED MEDIA CONGLOMERATES.
Look down the article a bit and you find it's mostly quoting Warner and EMI. A press release perhaps? And who owns and operates the International Herald Tribune, in which it was published? The New York Times, as of January 2, 2003.
Oh, dear! Piracy is so rampant that we - I mean the artists - can't make any money on royalties. So they have to sign up with us - I mean the media conglomerates - who run their tours and take a percentage of everything else they make in their entire carreers.
Sorry. But you guys already fed me so much baloney that the taste is stuck in my mouth, and I can't tell if there's any trace of truth in this latest helping.
... the two folks I know at Covad are saying that it can't be VOIP or VoDSL, it has to be traditional voice service.
So install a POTS/VoIP bridge box next to the DSLAM (or on its linecard) and hot up the lines' baseband with POTS that's carried as VoIP to your switching/bridging center. B-)
It wasn't government granted monopoly either. Bell & AT&T existed because they were the biggest, and existed long before anti-trust laws.
That's partly right. But the AC had the bulk of it right, too.
Early in the history of telephony -when it was still local - there was competition. And the competing companies refused to interconnect and complete each other's calls. (In particular, Bell, the big gorilla, refused.) So businesses (like hotels, banks, legal firms, newspapers, telegraph offices, and cab companies) had to have phones from two or three companies to be sure all their customers could get to them.
Bell used their own reluctance to aid the competition to convince the government that telephony was a "natural monopoly" and thus needed to be regulated. (At the time gas and water distribution were considered to be "natural monopolies" because it would cost N times as much to install pipes for N companies, so supposedly a monopoly under price regulation could deliver the service for less than the cost of multiple copies of the infrastructure.)
So the regulators set up a system where "franchises" - regional monopolies - were given to various companies. Of course where a local phone company already existed it got the franchise, and where multiple companies existed the big guy typically got it and the little guys had to sell him their equipment (or trade it for equipment in a less-lucrative market they also shared).
If I recall correctly, Bell was the big gorilla at the time because it had had selective access to Bell's patents, another government monopoly. (Bell made it to the patent office a half hour ahead of another inventer with a virtually identical device.) So in the early days Bell had the best equipment and others had to work-around, and once the patents expired Bell was the big kid on the block.
Under regulation the prices were set at levels that guaranteed Bell about a 6% return on investment - and whenever it dropped below that they could petition for and receive a price hike.
(Bell Labs actually existed to spend as much money as possible on research vuagely connected with telephony, because for every dollar spent there Bell could bill customers $1.06. It was the biggest failure of the system, because basic research pays off big. Virtually from the start they made more money licensing Bell Labs inventions than the lab cost.)
As long distance became possible, Bell (who had by then bought out most of the little guys, except for some rural co-ops and small towns wired by the likes of General Telephone) became the regulated monopoly for interconnecting the cities.
Bell continued to be a government-mandated monopoly until a series of court decisions.
First the Carterphone decision led to the "foreign attachments" tariff - and you could stop renting a phone built by Western Electric (Bell's manufacturing subsidary) and hook up one bought from an independent manufacturer. Phones went from a paper cost of hundreds of bux to cheap disposables over a few years.
Then Microwave Communications Inc. (MCI) took advantage of that tariff and inflated long distance charges by setting up their own inter-city microwave hops, renting local lines, and bypassing Bell. Bell sued, MCI counter-sued for antitrust, and the fallout was that not only was MCI (and others) allowed to continue, but Bell was required to let them hook up on the same basis as Bell's own long-distance operation. And to keep Bell from playing accounting games to subsidize unregulated long distance from monopoly local bills, Bell was split up into AT&T (long distance), Lucent (Western Electric & Bell Labs), and a handfull of "Baby Bell" RBOCs (Regional Bell Operating Companies) to continue the monopoly local/short-range long distance service.
Meanwhile, virtually all the local copper was installed by Bell Telephone or the Baby Bells while they were regulated monopolies, with government-mandated monopoly pricing for their service subsidizing the cost. A new competitor in a deregulated local phone business would have to wire a whole city and then pay for it with money made while charging less than the established RBOC, which is sitting on paid-for subsidized copper and can cut prices to the bone. Can't be done.
Eventually the RBOCs were allowed back into the long distance business - at a price. They had to provide DSL service and rent their local copper to upstart competitors at a wholesale price. It seemed like a good idea at the time, because the long-distance service was where the money was. Players there were mostly AT&T, MCI, and SPRINT. (The Southern Pacific Railroad had strung fiber along their right-of-way for their own communication. Fiber has a LOT of bandwidth, so they rented out the surplus bandwidth by becoming a long-distance phone and long-haul data carrier.)
But about the time that deal was cut, several upstart long-distance companies completed THEIR long-haul fiber loops, and the price war started. Suddenly the Baby Bells had no revenue from the shiny new long-distance operations. So they started dragging their feet on the DSL deployment. As for installing more copper to expand their own service and rent to their competitors, it no longer makes ANY sense with the only revenue coming form local service. So they won't do it until the ruling is reversed.
Meanwhile the competitive local phone carriers never really materialized (except for the cable operators, who also had existing copper installed). And the little DSL ISPs - except Covad which re-organized out of bankruptcy, dumping ITS startup costs - are pretty much dead, from their own price war (and from the local Bells' tendency to raise their service costs by screwing up their local copper). So from the regulators' point of view the competitive market they're trying to protect hasn't, and won't appear. Thus the release of the Baby Bells from the wholesale price controls, in the hope they'll start installing more cable.
Don't underestimate joe sixpack. [...]
say what? am I still reading Slashdot? what kind of comment is this? not a flamer, not a troll... some sort of new entity never before seen.
Naw. Just a midwestern redneck with "Karma Excellent". B-)
If you're interested you can read some of my other posts
But you know that the majority of buyers are people who don't understand what the consequences are.
And part of that is because nobody TOLD them there are consequences.
But as soon as warning labels start showing up, some of 'em will start to wonder what they're being warned about
So some will ask, or look around on the net, and maybe find out. Then they'll be able to make an informed decision about whether it matters to them enough to affect their purchase decision.
And others will just avoid products with the warning label in favor of those without - which will create pressure on the providers to stop using technologies which require a warning label. B-)
Don't underestimate joe sixpack. Just because he isn't an expert on the things YOU'RE expert on doesn't mean he's dumb or lazy. He may be quite the genius, and just focussed on other interests.
I have also experienced this [hearing "ultrasound"] in physics class, where a high voltage was being passed through a sphere painted with metallic paint. can anyone enlighten me as to how this ultrasonic side-effect occurs in the first place?
If it's being continuously charged (i.e. a van de graff generator with a rubber belt) you'll get ultrasound because the corona discharge makes the system act like a relaxation oscilator:
- Voltage rises until the ionization potential of the air is exceeded and the air molecules start breaking up, becoming conductive.
- The ionized air leaks off charge until the voltage below the extinction potential, and the arc goes out.
- Now the voltage rises again. Repeat indefinitely.
Similar to the way a neon-lamp/capacator/resistor/DC power supply blinky-light works.
The arc heats the air and causes it to rush away, creating a pressure wave. This is what you hear.
The basic cycle will vary with the charging rate and geometry, but typically will be either a high whistle or ultrasonic.
Both the exact timing of the individual arcs and their locations are somewhat random, and ionized gas is a negative resistance (higher current, more ionization, lower voltage) which amplifies any signal at any frequency, so random variations in anything that affects the voltage or current get amplified. People whose hearing quits at a frequency below the basic cyclic rate hear the "envelope" - the lower-frequency variations of the arcing - as a random-noise "hiss". People whose hearing extends up to the cyclic rate or beyond hear the whistle - with the random variations making the whistle sound somewhat hissy, like a breathy note on a flute.
(Of course if the sphere was being charged by a flyback-like electronic high-voltage supply operating at a near-ultrasonic rate, like the flyback system in a TV or monitor, you might just be hearing the power supply, or the arcing happening at the peak of each charging cycle.)
True story: 7 Hz is the resonant frequency of a chicken's skull cavity.
Unlikely.
But it IS in the range of entrainment frequencies of neurons.
Nerves (especially sensory nerves, which have receptors for non-other-nerve-pulse stimulous), after being fired, go through a series of steps during recovery:
- Absolute refractory period, where nothing can fire them.
- Negative afterpotential, where they can be fired by a stronger-than-normal stimulus.
- Postiive afterpotential, where they can be fired by a WEAKER-than-normal stimulus.
Followed by a return to the resting state.
The ramp from refractory to negative to positive afterpotential serves to encode the strength of a continuous stimulus into pulse-train frequency.
But if you hit it with a periodic pulse of stimulus, so that every nerve of the particular type that fired on one pulse will be in the middle of the positive afterpotential at the next pulse, you can quickly get all of 'em firing in unison on every pulse.
This is particularly interesting when done with a strobe light. It occurs near the flicker-fusion frequency (around 14 hz, I think). The visual field (even portions only lightly illuminated by the strobe and stroingly with other light sources) tends to disolve into flickering saturated colors, something like a psychedelic poster.
DON'T try this if you're susceptable to epileptic seizures. (Lightshow operators know the frequency in question and avoid it for fear of injuring the viewers.)
It's not unreasonable to believe that this effect, working on the nerves controlling the skeletal muscles, breathing muscles, intestinal tract, or the heart, could cause severe medical problems very quickly. (A similar phenomenon may occur with certain muscles, too.)
The signal would have to be reasonably strong, however. If it could be triggered with a weak signal it would have evolved out quickly or defenses evolved, and if it could be triggered with a moderate signal there would be organisms using it as a weapon.
And of course different frequencies (over a narrow range) might affect different organ systems.
While on the subject of cool vinyl tricks, supposedly (I haven't seen it), Monty Python had a comedy record with two intertwined spiral tracks. So when you played the same side, sometimes you'd get one track, and sometimes the other.
That's how the pre-semiconductor string-pull talking dolls (starting with "Chatty Cathy") generated multiple sayings. Several spiral tracks, and the one you got depended on the disk position when the needle dropped onto the lead-in.
Not a very technical article, but interesting nonetheless.
One thing that REALLY bugged me about the article is that it said "scientists" did this experiment, but DIDN'T say WHICH scientists, not naming people, the institution, the funding agency, etc.
Makes it hard to find out more about the experiment.
(At least they named the site where it was performed. So if the paper, excerpts, or another more complete report made it to the web we might be able to dig it out with a keyword search, rather than retreating to a library and digging out the medical and accoustic journals.)
And then the media wonder why people no longer look to them for news...