I think that you are framing the question incorrectly. The question is not if it would be better to use a more robust networking method. The question is if this would be better than no network at all. Is a network that only works 50% of the time better than a network that works 0% of the time? The original poster doesn't share the purpose of this network, but for many applications, sometimes working is better than never working.
Another issue here is that if they can build an ad hoc network that sometimes saves lives, it will be easier to then get funding for a more robust networking option that can consistently help them save lives.
It's also true that there are some applications where intermittent connectivity is worse than no connectivity. It's possible that this is one of those situations. You're right to call out that possibility. However, shouldn't we at least consider the possibility that the poster has thought that through and really would be better off with intermittent connectivity?
I'm pretty sure that we can make a robot that mimics the human gait. The problem is that unless we also have the robot mimic the human shape and composition, the robot will fall over while doing so. And that's not the worst problem. The much harder problem is for a robot to do things like change direction while walking. This is the kind of thing that our brains are evolved (or intelligently designed if you prefer) to handle well. It's a complex physical problem involving balancing a number of factors. It's not just copying what humans do; it's copying what we do *unconsciously*.
You mention that you have no trouble understanding that computer vision is hard. You understand that walking involves vision, right? That's how you avoid walking into things. Walking also involves a sense of balance and other things that you don't get from electric motors.
This could be used either way. If you are using it as an archival medium, it is less of a hassle than finding three facilities of your own (the promise is that there are at least three copies of the data at all times). To get the equivalent from tape, you'd have to buy three tapes. Plus, you need places to store them.
If you are using it as the offsite part of your backup procedure, then it only needs to match the latency of other offsite backups. If you are restoring from a tape that you have stored in a safe deposit box, that also takes three to five hours to restore (it takes time to get to the bank and retrieve the tape, then it takes more time to read from the tape). And truly, that time will rarely matter. If you really lost
1. Your primary data store. 2. Your backup data store. 3. Your local archive copy.
all at the same time, you likely lost your physical hardware as well. Or you are experiencing a security problem that you need to fix before restoring from backup. You could promote your archived data from Glacier to S3 while you were replacing that hardware or fixing your security.
It also may be worth thinking about how this works if you are doing everything AWS. In that case, Multi-AZ RDS provides your primary and backup data stores. It also provides the ability to rebuild your data store from real-time backups. Next, you use snapshots to take regular backups (the equivalent of a local archive copy). Weekly makes sense as RDS can store up to eight days of real-time backups. You keep a few of the most recent snapshots, but you archive most that are older than a month to Glacier. You can still keep the one month, three month, and six month snapshots in the quicker, more expensive storage.
Now, you face a major data problem. Amazon loses two facilities. These happen to be the two facilities with your RDS stores. However, you still have the snapshots (which are stored in more than two facilities). You restore quickly. You only need to go to Glacier if you have data corruption that you don't notice for a month (so that the archive copy that you need has dropped out of the snapshots).
If you are not using AWS for everything, then you are responsible for creating your own primary and backup data stores as well as local archive copies. Other than that, the same issues apply.
That's a standard form. The person just went through and filled it out. I doubt that it took long. In my opinion, several of the Xs are wrong. For example:
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
What money? Why do you need to find the guy? Better would have been
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
As this is the kind of approach against spam that is easy to bypass once spammers realize that it is there.
Subnet blocking works great if the spamster posts himself from his own computer.
If the spammer instead hires someone and then double checks that person's work, this would fail any time they are on different subnets. At best that makes it less likely that the spammer/contractor relation works out. If the spammer uses a botnet to post, this does the reverse of what you want. It gives the spammer access to the subnets on which the botnet is located, but it shows the spammer that it didn't post for everyone else. Same thing if the spammer uses the botnet to proxy manual attempts.
My WordPress site gets a regular stream of spam posts. It's pretty obvious that they don't check if they post, as they never post (I have to manually approve all comments). I very much doubt that most of them involve any human interaction whatsoever.
This might help briefly. As soon as the spammers realize what's happening though, it will be trivial to adapt their botnets to this. All it takes is a proxy and this method loses its verification.
I like the idea of write-only comments. That would defeat most automated spam commenters. I'm less convinced of the utility of attempting to show the posts to the spammer. Particularly extending it to try to catch verification attempts by someone other than the original poster.
You complain about several layers of bureaucracy in regards to raising one tax and lowering another, but you think that we can subsidize clean energy programs without bureaucracy?
The number one, best clean energy program is for individuals to use less energy. If energy were more expensive, people would do that naturally. No bureaucracy needed. The biggest failure of our current system is that it paints with too broad a brush. For example, fuel economy standards mean that we are pushing people who drive their car less than ten miles a week to drive a more fuel efficient car. However, if we just got existing people who drive 10,000 miles a year to drive less (even in their existing cars), we could save more energy.
What's the number one way we could save fuel? Shorter commutes. When fuel economy standards increased, we continued to spend the same amount on fuel. Why? We increased our commutes to use just as much fuel as previously. If people would choose to live closer to work, we could save a lot of fuel. However, governments have almost no ways of directly subsidizing shorter commutes.
Markets are really good at distributing decision making. Governments are really bad at it; governments are good at centralizing decision making. The best way for governments to participate is in changes in things that are already centralized, like taxes. By increasing the cost of fuel, the government can simultaneously promote increased fuel economy (for those that have to drive long distances) and decreased driving (for those who have options). That has the government doing what it does best while leaving markets to do what they do best. It allows individuals to make decisions for themselves.
And if you win, then the corporation has to pay your legal costs. It cuts both ways. If your case has merit, you are better off bringing it in a loser pays jurisdiction (like Europe). If your opponent's case does not have merit, you are better off if they bring it in loser pays jurisdiction. If your case lacks merit, you are better off under the American rule. In the US, a big corporation that can afford millions in lawyers can sue you, drag you through a meritless case, and then you have to sue them if you want your legal costs back.
I'm also not convinced that big corporations have better lawyers. Corporate defense lawyers get paid a salary. Consumer injury lawyers get paid commission. Better lawyers will tend to gravitate towards the consumer injury jobs, as they pay better. Corporations lose court cases all the time.
It's also worth noting that loser pays is generally not automatic. It's not like you lose and get a bill. If you lose, your opponent presents costs to the court and explains why they think that you should pay them. The court can then evaluate the costs, determine if they are reasonable, and either order you to pay them or not.
Loser pays is the normal rule. The US is an exception in not following it. The rest of the world somehow manages to get by with it. The US could too.
I wonder why they are announcing the security flaw in the malware. Shouldn't they try to exploit the security flaw to find the malware users first?
What's the benefit of reporting the flaw? Usually, people report security flaws so that the application writer can close them. Do they actually want the DDOS kit to close its security flaw? Does that make the world better in some way?
The only possible advantage that I can see is that it might make other malware users more careful about using similar software. And of course, smart malware users will no longer use Dirt Jumper. However, if they just switch from Dirt Jumper to another DDOS kit, it seems that we are worse off (DDOSed by a kit without a security flaw to exploit).
The optimal time to make this kind of announcement would be after it becomes common knowledge in the malware community, preferably by publication of the proceedings of some prosecutions. At that time, it gives minimal benefit to existing malware users while still scaring potential malware users from jumping on the bandwagon. I wouldn't expect the scare benefits to be that large, so the benefit from an early announcement is small.
It wasn't the EM radiation that they were tracking. The police got a court order for the cell phone carrier to send them data on the location of the cell phone.
The confusing thing is how they could have gotten a court order without a warrant. If they had enough for a court order, how didn't they have enough for a warrant justifying the data collection implicit in the court order? The bizarreness of the US legal system.
Devices (perhaps less energy efficient and certainly not as automated) like this already exist and were available during the oil spill crisis. The Dutch offered to loan some of their skimmer boats to the US early in the crisis. The US turned them down as not being efficient enough (<sarcasm>obviously, it's better to let the spill keep growing rather than skim out a mere 98% of the oil</sarcasm>). Once the spill had already spread, the US government then granted a waiver to allow the Dutch ships to be used.
The article doesn't touch on the question of whether or not these particular devices would meet US environmental requirements. Even if they existed, it's not clear that the US government would have allowed them to be used in the early days of the crisis.
Note that the delay made the existing devices less effective in a couple ways. First, they reduced the amount of time the skimmers could be used before the oil became too diffuse. Second, they would have been most effective at the beginning of the crisis when the oil was at its most localized. When working in an area that is 50% oil, it doesn't matter as much that they leave 2% contamination (or whatever the actual number is; I can't find a citation for the actual efficiency at the moment). That's still a removal of 96% of the oil. However, if there is only 4% oil, then leaving 2% is leaving 50% of the oil that was present.
For example, they cite three different, independently organised large scale studies, and are then accused by you of cherry picking numbers without you giving any counterexample whatsoever (not even a pharma-sponsored "white paper").
They only cited two studies in calculating their number. And they did cherry pick their numbers. They clearly picked all their numbers except one from the CAM study. The one number they picked from the IMS study was only picked because it was higher.
Anyway, I did pick a number for the value of the drug samples as promotion. My number was 0. I said that I didn't think of samples as a promotion cost. I said that if someone disagreed (since that is in fact an arguable proposition), they could use the costing number rather than the retail number. It's true that I didn't give the costing number, although if you really wanted it, it was available in the study (it was the CAM number that they did not use, $6.3 billion).
I'm not complaining about the data in the study. The data is fine (one of the sources that they used was the pharmaceutical industry; in fact, the number that I don't like came from the pharmaceutical industry). I'm complaining that the methodology they used to interpret the data was horrible. They took two studies that gave promotion numbers of $27.5 billion (the pharmaceutical industry number) and $33.5 billion and somehow arrived at a number of $57.5 billion.
I apologize that I didn't copy and paste those numbers from the report previously, but I don't really care what the number is. I simply found their method of calculating it to be ridiculous. In particular, it should be obvious why CAM was using the wholesale cost rather than the retail cost. Pharmaceutical companies do not buy free samples from themselves at retail cost. Even the wholesale cost isn't really what's wanted here -- it should be the manufacture cost.
The argument regarding counting free samples as a production cost rather than a promotion cost is that these drugs would have to get manufactured anyway. Having the free sample simply saves having to prescribe them. Unless you are claiming that someone who would not have bought the drug is using the free sample?
There are any number of things that have a promotion benefit but no related promotion cost. For example, if your neighbor uses a drug and then you ask your doctor to prescribe it to you, the company benefited from that. However, would you really claim that such a referral cost the company in any way?
Free samples make sense as a promotion cost in industries where one might take something for free that one wouldn't otherwise try, e.g. shampoo or gum. It doesn't make as much sense with prescribed drugs. It's also worth noting that there is a big difference with pharmaceutical samples, since they are given to the doctor who doesn't normally pay for them rather than to someone who does (e.g. the patient, the insurance, or the government).
They may be planning on using trade secrets until the proposal is developed enough to enter production. Then they could patent it and get the seventeen years protection starting then.
After a couple of hundred years, languages change and develop and non-heterogeneous populations' usage will diverge.
Changes like removing the u from favour or changing the re to er in calibre occurred within the first fifty years. It was a deliberate attempt to establish American spellings. See Webster's Dictionary or Noah Webster for some more discussion.
It's not clear if Webster would have been as successful in this if he had tried to preserve the more complex British spellings.
My guess as to what will actually happen here is that a judge will get the case, will rule that Barr has no standing to bring the lawsuit, and will promptly throw the case out of court.
Why? Who would have standing, if not Barr? If it just requires a Texas voter, I suspect that they will find a Texas Libertarian (e.g. Patrick Dixon) to bring the suit.
the housing bubble was primarily fueled by errors on Wall Street, not Washington.
There were three important Washington errors. Washington allowed banks to loan federally insured deposit money to companies with only securities (e.g. securitized mortgages) as a collateral. This put taxpayers on the hook and led to the Bear Stearns bail out.
The second Washington error was that even with the housing bubble, Washington left the reserve rate (how much banks have to hold of their deposits) at 15% rather than raising it. If they had raised the reserve rate, there would have been less money for loans and banks would have been more careful to whom they loaned it. As it was, banks were over capitalized and desperate to loan money.
The third Washington error was to make it more difficult to take bankruptcy. As a result, banks were more willing to loan money for over priced houses (figuring that they could grab other assets instead).
At the worst of the bubble, house prices were sixty percent over priced (using rental values for a comparison). House prices are still thirty percent over priced. They have more to fall before the market stabilizes. Unfortunately, most of the programs that are being launched are aimed at stabilizing house prices. This won't work until houses stop being over priced.
What Washington should be doing is helping house prices fall. One way that they could do that would be to amend bankruptcy laws back to their previous difficulty and add the ability for judges to adjust the principal of the loan down to the current value of the house. This would allow people to sell their houses after declaring bankruptcy (rather than taking a foreclosure). Too many people can't sell their houses because they owe more than the house is worth.
The reason why slashdotters go ape over this is that we might actually take a Stanford online course on robotics. That's why it's news for nerds. It's also worth noting that/. is probably heavy on Intuitive Thinkers, the kind of people who are good at math and not interested in teaching. As such, it is often hard for us to find good real world teachers (teachers tend to be Empiricals rather than Intuitives). Replacing teacher and book courses with online courses makes sense for us, since teachers are scarce in our subjects and we are online friendly.
Now, if you want to talk about how we could change the educational system to be more supportive of people who aren't going to go to college, let's start with making it easier to leave school earlier. The typical schooling in the US is 12 years of 180 days each. Move that around a bit, and you can get the same 2160 days in ten years of 216 days each. No more summer vacation to work the farm (and forget what was learned last year), but still about five weeks of vacation (which could be spread around the year in addition to the current four weeks of holidays).
For those who aren't going on to college, offer better apprenticeship programs. Companies will need to provide this, but the government can help with tax incentives and some adjustments to labor laws.
The problem was not ARMs per se. The problem was teaser ARMs where the original interest rate did not match the long term interest rate. These were a horrible idea.
The worst part of this is how banks were allowed to loan federally insured deposit money against securities (in this case, securitized mortgages). Bear Stearns is an investment bank. Why couldn't they raise their own capital? Why did they have to borrow it from FDIC insured banks?
We should do two things:
FDIC insured deposits should require full reserves for at will deposits.
FDIC insured banks should not be allowed to own stock or participate in non-FDIC insured activities directly. Only through partners (or an entity that owns the FDIC insured bank).
In terms of the immediate crisis, we should take fewer steps to stabilize home prices at the current level and more steps to encourage them to go to a sustainable level. For example, we could allow bankruptcy judges to adjust the principle level of the mortgage down to the current value of the property. Later, once home prices are back down to the equivalent rental value, we can start doing things to stabilize home prices (like bailing out banks and mortgage companies).
That's why housing starts are so low. We're artificially propping up prices. If prices return to their correct levels, people would be able to afford to buy houses with regular mortgages again.
The problem is that most laws currently on the books are unjust. So no, I don't want them enforced better. The state says that you don't own your own body, or any of your so-called "property". I don't want better enforcement of those rules, I want much worse enforcement.
In any case, the value of oil is only going to go up.
What gives you that impression? Oil prices have been falling. If China stops subsidizing the stuff (in China, gasoline costs about $2.49 per gallon, cheaper than the US pre-tax price), oil consumption could actually fall.
Historically, while nominal prices of oil have increased over time, they haven't kept pace with inflation. See http://inflationdata.com/inflation/images/charts/Oil/Gasoline_inflation_chart.htm for an inflation adjusted graph of gasoline prices. Note that we are currently above the long term trend. It's quite possible that this is the highest that oil will ever be again. If we have viable alternatives before the next oil shock, then oil won't have its current monopoly on transport.
Well, duh. My father gets such samples all the time, along with glossy brochures extolling their fantastic effects and why he should prescribe them to his patients.
And then if he does prescribe them to his patients, he starts them off with a free sample, right? And if the patient has no money, he gives them several free samples. As such, I think that free samples (as a cost) should simply appear as part of the production costs.
Tylenol used to advertise that it was the most used by hospitals. Why was that? Because it was the cheapest. They sold to hospitals much more cheaply than they sold to consumers. Should we count that discount as a promotion cost? They used it as a promotion.
The basic complaint is that drug companies spend too much on promotion and not enough on R&D. That that's why drugs are so expensive. Since free samples make drugs cheaper (in aggregate), I think that it is at the least disingenuous to count them as overspending in promotion. They are more a side effect of promotion IMO than a main component.
I am not sure that free samples should be counted as a marketing cost. If they are counted, then they should be counted based on the cost to the company, not the retail cost (what the company would get if it had sold the sample). Use of such RIAA like tactics makes me very suspicious of the study. Such an obvious flaw strongly suggests that they picked the data to fit their theory rather than picking a theory to fit the data.
They also increased their estimate by 30% for "unmonitored" expenses. I.e. they assume that there is uncollected data. They then claim that this still under reports expenses by alleging that there are other expense categories that are not included. They have no references for the 30% number; no evidence that 30% is the right number; no evidence that the other expense categories are not already included in the 30%.
The best that could be said for this report is that it may be just as accurate as the reports from the pharmaceutical companies it decries.
at $4 a gallon, 30mpg in a gas engine gives you 300 miles for $40.
That's not a comparable vehicle. Most diesels get far less than 65 mpg, so this should be compared to a leading car, not a typical car. There have been gas powered vehicles in the 50 mpg range. That would be 500 miles for $40 and 6500 miles for $520. For the diesel example, 6500 miles is $500.
The diesel is still cheaper, but not as much cheaper as you indicated.
Of course, it turns out that diesel is not that much more expensive than gasoline. According to the DOE, diesel is only about sixty cents per gallon more expensive than gasoline usually and only twenty cents more expensive now (gas has been spiking while diesel has remained stable). Using sixty cents difference, for the ten gallon tanks, we have for diesel:
$4.60 a gallon, 650 miles for $46 and 6500 miles for $460.
That's a $60 savings per tank over the 50 mpg gas alternative. About a penny per mile cheaper for diesel.
According to the article, they keep records of the cell phone towers used to interact with your phone. I know the summary says GPS, but that's not what the EFF attorney said in the article.
There are any number of perfectly good reasons for cell phone companies to track cell phone tower usage. That's their equipment. There are even reasons (e.g. potential billing disputes) why they might not want to anonymize that data.
If websites were voted on, I'm wondering if the web will turn into one giant human group think.
That already occurs. All Google page rank is is a way to evaluate what people think about a site. It does this by analyzing the social network formed by hyperlinks.
I've seen a lot of speculation that this would work as an alternative to the existing algorithm for ordering search results in general. Wouldn't this make more sense if changed the ordering for an individual? I.e. if Google learns that I am more likely to rank up open source sites and rank down closed source sites, Google could push open source sites to the top of my listings for new searches while leaving the closed source listings at the top for others.
I also think that the comments might be more useful in generating rankings than the votes. For example, I might add comments that say "open" and "closed" to my search results so that I can quickly see which results go to open source projects, then Google can use that information to bump up those links when the user is using "open" or "closed" as keywords.
It used to be rather difficult to produce inflation, back before we switched to a fiat money system. I don't believe that most people were jobless back then.
We had a commodity peg during the great depression. We suspended trading on it (i.e. you couldn't get gold for your dollars) and devalued it (reducing the amount of gold per dollar), but we didn't go to fiat money until the 1970s. Unemployment was rampant, around four times the level that it is now.
Prior to fiat money, we used to alternate between periods of inflation (e.g. the influx of gold after 1849) and periods of deflation (e.g. the great depression). Deflation is associated with high unemployment (the only way to get deflation is to make people so desperate that they'll take any price).
Overall, fiat money has been good for us. It's gotten rid of the deflations (depressions) and has mostly worked without high inflation. Exceptions include the 70s and now (inflation is not yet really high but is elevated and rising). Hopefully the next President will appoint a better chair than Bernanke and a better board to support the new chair. A good Federal Reserve chair can control inflation, just look at what Volcker did in 1981.
Fractional reserve banking, on the other hand, is an anachronism. With commodity pegged money, it was needed to allow adjustments in the money supply. With fiat money, we can adjust the money supply directly.
Now, fractional reserve banking is harmful, as it allows the investment market to counter or amplify the Federal Reserve's open market operations. Further, since fractional reserves only affects money that is saved, it tends to lead to bubbles where saving reinforces saving followed by busts where money removed from savings forces more money out of savings.
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I think that you are framing the question incorrectly. The question is not if it would be better to use a more robust networking method. The question is if this would be better than no network at all. Is a network that only works 50% of the time better than a network that works 0% of the time? The original poster doesn't share the purpose of this network, but for many applications, sometimes working is better than never working.
Another issue here is that if they can build an ad hoc network that sometimes saves lives, it will be easier to then get funding for a more robust networking option that can consistently help them save lives.
It's also true that there are some applications where intermittent connectivity is worse than no connectivity. It's possible that this is one of those situations. You're right to call out that possibility. However, shouldn't we at least consider the possibility that the poster has thought that through and really would be better off with intermittent connectivity?
I'm pretty sure that we can make a robot that mimics the human gait. The problem is that unless we also have the robot mimic the human shape and composition, the robot will fall over while doing so. And that's not the worst problem. The much harder problem is for a robot to do things like change direction while walking. This is the kind of thing that our brains are evolved (or intelligently designed if you prefer) to handle well. It's a complex physical problem involving balancing a number of factors. It's not just copying what humans do; it's copying what we do *unconsciously*.
You mention that you have no trouble understanding that computer vision is hard. You understand that walking involves vision, right? That's how you avoid walking into things. Walking also involves a sense of balance and other things that you don't get from electric motors.
This could be used either way. If you are using it as an archival medium, it is less of a hassle than finding three facilities of your own (the promise is that there are at least three copies of the data at all times). To get the equivalent from tape, you'd have to buy three tapes. Plus, you need places to store them.
If you are using it as the offsite part of your backup procedure, then it only needs to match the latency of other offsite backups. If you are restoring from a tape that you have stored in a safe deposit box, that also takes three to five hours to restore (it takes time to get to the bank and retrieve the tape, then it takes more time to read from the tape). And truly, that time will rarely matter. If you really lost
1. Your primary data store.
2. Your backup data store.
3. Your local archive copy.
all at the same time, you likely lost your physical hardware as well. Or you are experiencing a security problem that you need to fix before restoring from backup. You could promote your archived data from Glacier to S3 while you were replacing that hardware or fixing your security.
It also may be worth thinking about how this works if you are doing everything AWS. In that case, Multi-AZ RDS provides your primary and backup data stores. It also provides the ability to rebuild your data store from real-time backups. Next, you use snapshots to take regular backups (the equivalent of a local archive copy). Weekly makes sense as RDS can store up to eight days of real-time backups. You keep a few of the most recent snapshots, but you archive most that are older than a month to Glacier. You can still keep the one month, three month, and six month snapshots in the quicker, more expensive storage.
Now, you face a major data problem. Amazon loses two facilities. These happen to be the two facilities with your RDS stores. However, you still have the snapshots (which are stored in more than two facilities). You restore quickly. You only need to go to Glacier if you have data corruption that you don't notice for a month (so that the archive copy that you need has dropped out of the snapshots).
If you are not using AWS for everything, then you are responsible for creating your own primary and backup data stores as well as local archive copies. Other than that, the same issues apply.
That's a standard form. The person just went through and filled it out. I doubt that it took long. In my opinion, several of the Xs are wrong. For example:
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
What money? Why do you need to find the guy? Better would have been
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
As this is the kind of approach against spam that is easy to bypass once spammers realize that it is there.
Subnet blocking works great if the spamster posts himself from his own computer.
If the spammer instead hires someone and then double checks that person's work, this would fail any time they are on different subnets. At best that makes it less likely that the spammer/contractor relation works out. If the spammer uses a botnet to post, this does the reverse of what you want. It gives the spammer access to the subnets on which the botnet is located, but it shows the spammer that it didn't post for everyone else. Same thing if the spammer uses the botnet to proxy manual attempts.
My WordPress site gets a regular stream of spam posts. It's pretty obvious that they don't check if they post, as they never post (I have to manually approve all comments). I very much doubt that most of them involve any human interaction whatsoever.
This might help briefly. As soon as the spammers realize what's happening though, it will be trivial to adapt their botnets to this. All it takes is a proxy and this method loses its verification.
I like the idea of write-only comments. That would defeat most automated spam commenters. I'm less convinced of the utility of attempting to show the posts to the spammer. Particularly extending it to try to catch verification attempts by someone other than the original poster.
You complain about several layers of bureaucracy in regards to raising one tax and lowering another, but you think that we can subsidize clean energy programs without bureaucracy?
The number one, best clean energy program is for individuals to use less energy. If energy were more expensive, people would do that naturally. No bureaucracy needed. The biggest failure of our current system is that it paints with too broad a brush. For example, fuel economy standards mean that we are pushing people who drive their car less than ten miles a week to drive a more fuel efficient car. However, if we just got existing people who drive 10,000 miles a year to drive less (even in their existing cars), we could save more energy.
What's the number one way we could save fuel? Shorter commutes. When fuel economy standards increased, we continued to spend the same amount on fuel. Why? We increased our commutes to use just as much fuel as previously. If people would choose to live closer to work, we could save a lot of fuel. However, governments have almost no ways of directly subsidizing shorter commutes.
Markets are really good at distributing decision making. Governments are really bad at it; governments are good at centralizing decision making. The best way for governments to participate is in changes in things that are already centralized, like taxes. By increasing the cost of fuel, the government can simultaneously promote increased fuel economy (for those that have to drive long distances) and decreased driving (for those who have options). That has the government doing what it does best while leaving markets to do what they do best. It allows individuals to make decisions for themselves.
And if you win, then the corporation has to pay your legal costs. It cuts both ways. If your case has merit, you are better off bringing it in a loser pays jurisdiction (like Europe). If your opponent's case does not have merit, you are better off if they bring it in loser pays jurisdiction. If your case lacks merit, you are better off under the American rule. In the US, a big corporation that can afford millions in lawyers can sue you, drag you through a meritless case, and then you have to sue them if you want your legal costs back.
I'm also not convinced that big corporations have better lawyers. Corporate defense lawyers get paid a salary. Consumer injury lawyers get paid commission. Better lawyers will tend to gravitate towards the consumer injury jobs, as they pay better. Corporations lose court cases all the time.
It's also worth noting that loser pays is generally not automatic. It's not like you lose and get a bill. If you lose, your opponent presents costs to the court and explains why they think that you should pay them. The court can then evaluate the costs, determine if they are reasonable, and either order you to pay them or not.
Loser pays is the normal rule. The US is an exception in not following it. The rest of the world somehow manages to get by with it. The US could too.
More discussion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attorney's_fee#Which_party_pays
I wonder why they are announcing the security flaw in the malware. Shouldn't they try to exploit the security flaw to find the malware users first?
What's the benefit of reporting the flaw? Usually, people report security flaws so that the application writer can close them. Do they actually want the DDOS kit to close its security flaw? Does that make the world better in some way?
The only possible advantage that I can see is that it might make other malware users more careful about using similar software. And of course, smart malware users will no longer use Dirt Jumper. However, if they just switch from Dirt Jumper to another DDOS kit, it seems that we are worse off (DDOSed by a kit without a security flaw to exploit).
The optimal time to make this kind of announcement would be after it becomes common knowledge in the malware community, preferably by publication of the proceedings of some prosecutions. At that time, it gives minimal benefit to existing malware users while still scaring potential malware users from jumping on the bandwagon. I wouldn't expect the scare benefits to be that large, so the benefit from an early announcement is small.
It wasn't the EM radiation that they were tracking. The police got a court order for the cell phone carrier to send them data on the location of the cell phone.
The confusing thing is how they could have gotten a court order without a warrant. If they had enough for a court order, how didn't they have enough for a warrant justifying the data collection implicit in the court order? The bizarreness of the US legal system.
More discussion of this on a legal site: http://www.volokh.com/2012/08/14/sixth-circuit-rules-that-pinging-a-cell-phone-to-determine-its-location-is-not-a-fourth-amendment-search/?ModPagespeed=off
Note that to see the comments, you may have to whitelist volokh.com and disqus.com in your Javascript disabler.
Devices (perhaps less energy efficient and certainly not as automated) like this already exist and were available during the oil spill crisis. The Dutch offered to loan some of their skimmer boats to the US early in the crisis. The US turned them down as not being efficient enough (<sarcasm>obviously, it's better to let the spill keep growing rather than skim out a mere 98% of the oil</sarcasm>). Once the spill had already spread, the US government then granted a waiver to allow the Dutch ships to be used.
The article doesn't touch on the question of whether or not these particular devices would meet US environmental requirements. Even if they existed, it's not clear that the US government would have allowed them to be used in the early days of the crisis.
Note that the delay made the existing devices less effective in a couple ways. First, they reduced the amount of time the skimmers could be used before the oil became too diffuse. Second, they would have been most effective at the beginning of the crisis when the oil was at its most localized. When working in an area that is 50% oil, it doesn't matter as much that they leave 2% contamination (or whatever the actual number is; I can't find a citation for the actual efficiency at the moment). That's still a removal of 96% of the oil. However, if there is only 4% oil, then leaving 2% is leaving 50% of the oil that was present.
Example citation for the refusal of the Dutch help (based on a Google search): http://www.eagleworldnews.com/2010/06/15/obama-refuses-dutch-help-for-gulf-oil-crisis/
For example, they cite three different, independently organised large scale studies, and are then accused by you of cherry picking numbers without you giving any counterexample whatsoever (not even a pharma-sponsored "white paper").
They only cited two studies in calculating their number. And they did cherry pick their numbers. They clearly picked all their numbers except one from the CAM study. The one number they picked from the IMS study was only picked because it was higher.
Anyway, I did pick a number for the value of the drug samples as promotion. My number was 0. I said that I didn't think of samples as a promotion cost. I said that if someone disagreed (since that is in fact an arguable proposition), they could use the costing number rather than the retail number. It's true that I didn't give the costing number, although if you really wanted it, it was available in the study (it was the CAM number that they did not use, $6.3 billion).
I'm not complaining about the data in the study. The data is fine (one of the sources that they used was the pharmaceutical industry; in fact, the number that I don't like came from the pharmaceutical industry). I'm complaining that the methodology they used to interpret the data was horrible. They took two studies that gave promotion numbers of $27.5 billion (the pharmaceutical industry number) and $33.5 billion and somehow arrived at a number of $57.5 billion.
I apologize that I didn't copy and paste those numbers from the report previously, but I don't really care what the number is. I simply found their method of calculating it to be ridiculous. In particular, it should be obvious why CAM was using the wholesale cost rather than the retail cost. Pharmaceutical companies do not buy free samples from themselves at retail cost. Even the wholesale cost isn't really what's wanted here -- it should be the manufacture cost.
The argument regarding counting free samples as a production cost rather than a promotion cost is that these drugs would have to get manufactured anyway. Having the free sample simply saves having to prescribe them. Unless you are claiming that someone who would not have bought the drug is using the free sample?
There are any number of things that have a promotion benefit but no related promotion cost. For example, if your neighbor uses a drug and then you ask your doctor to prescribe it to you, the company benefited from that. However, would you really claim that such a referral cost the company in any way?
Free samples make sense as a promotion cost in industries where one might take something for free that one wouldn't otherwise try, e.g. shampoo or gum. It doesn't make as much sense with prescribed drugs. It's also worth noting that there is a big difference with pharmaceutical samples, since they are given to the doctor who doesn't normally pay for them rather than to someone who does (e.g. the patient, the insurance, or the government).
They may be planning on using trade secrets until the proposal is developed enough to enter production. Then they could patent it and get the seventeen years protection starting then.
After a couple of hundred years, languages change and develop and non-heterogeneous populations' usage will diverge.
Changes like removing the u from favour or changing the re to er in calibre occurred within the first fifty years. It was a deliberate attempt to establish American spellings. See Webster's Dictionary or Noah Webster for some more discussion.
It's not clear if Webster would have been as successful in this if he had tried to preserve the more complex British spellings.
My guess as to what will actually happen here is that a judge will get the case, will rule that Barr has no standing to bring the lawsuit, and will promptly throw the case out of court.
Why? Who would have standing, if not Barr? If it just requires a Texas voter, I suspect that they will find a Texas Libertarian (e.g. Patrick Dixon) to bring the suit.
the housing bubble was primarily fueled by errors on Wall Street, not Washington.
There were three important Washington errors. Washington allowed banks to loan federally insured deposit money to companies with only securities (e.g. securitized mortgages) as a collateral. This put taxpayers on the hook and led to the Bear Stearns bail out.
The second Washington error was that even with the housing bubble, Washington left the reserve rate (how much banks have to hold of their deposits) at 15% rather than raising it. If they had raised the reserve rate, there would have been less money for loans and banks would have been more careful to whom they loaned it. As it was, banks were over capitalized and desperate to loan money.
The third Washington error was to make it more difficult to take bankruptcy. As a result, banks were more willing to loan money for over priced houses (figuring that they could grab other assets instead).
At the worst of the bubble, house prices were sixty percent over priced (using rental values for a comparison). House prices are still thirty percent over priced. They have more to fall before the market stabilizes. Unfortunately, most of the programs that are being launched are aimed at stabilizing house prices. This won't work until houses stop being over priced.
What Washington should be doing is helping house prices fall. One way that they could do that would be to amend bankruptcy laws back to their previous difficulty and add the ability for judges to adjust the principal of the loan down to the current value of the house. This would allow people to sell their houses after declaring bankruptcy (rather than taking a foreclosure). Too many people can't sell their houses because they owe more than the house is worth.
The reason why slashdotters go ape over this is that we might actually take a Stanford online course on robotics. That's why it's news for nerds. It's also worth noting that /. is probably heavy on Intuitive Thinkers, the kind of people who are good at math and not interested in teaching. As such, it is often hard for us to find good real world teachers (teachers tend to be Empiricals rather than Intuitives). Replacing teacher and book courses with online courses makes sense for us, since teachers are scarce in our subjects and we are online friendly.
Now, if you want to talk about how we could change the educational system to be more supportive of people who aren't going to go to college, let's start with making it easier to leave school earlier. The typical schooling in the US is 12 years of 180 days each. Move that around a bit, and you can get the same 2160 days in ten years of 216 days each. No more summer vacation to work the farm (and forget what was learned last year), but still about five weeks of vacation (which could be spread around the year in addition to the current four weeks of holidays).
For those who aren't going on to college, offer better apprenticeship programs. Companies will need to provide this, but the government can help with tax incentives and some adjustments to labor laws.
The problem was not ARMs per se. The problem was teaser ARMs where the original interest rate did not match the long term interest rate. These were a horrible idea.
The worst part of this is how banks were allowed to loan federally insured deposit money against securities (in this case, securitized mortgages). Bear Stearns is an investment bank. Why couldn't they raise their own capital? Why did they have to borrow it from FDIC insured banks?
We should do two things:
In terms of the immediate crisis, we should take fewer steps to stabilize home prices at the current level and more steps to encourage them to go to a sustainable level. For example, we could allow bankruptcy judges to adjust the principle level of the mortgage down to the current value of the property. Later, once home prices are back down to the equivalent rental value, we can start doing things to stabilize home prices (like bailing out banks and mortgage companies).
That's why housing starts are so low. We're artificially propping up prices. If prices return to their correct levels, people would be able to afford to buy houses with regular mortgages again.
The problem is that most laws currently on the books are unjust. So no, I don't want them enforced better. The state says that you don't own your own body, or any of your so-called "property". I don't want better enforcement of those rules, I want much worse enforcement.
If we're talking about changing the system, why not better *laws*. Hoping that bad laws will be weakly enforced is fraught with danger. Consider the case of the guy who was convicted of committing oral sodomy (i.e. cunnilingus) with his wife. It's a stupid law and rarely enforced but so long as it's on the books, it can be. Why not just get rid of the stupid law?
If 100% enforcement of a law would result in injustice, then the law should be changed.
In any case, the value of oil is only going to go up.
What gives you that impression? Oil prices have been falling. If China stops subsidizing the stuff (in China, gasoline costs about $2.49 per gallon, cheaper than the US pre-tax price), oil consumption could actually fall.
Historically, while nominal prices of oil have increased over time, they haven't kept pace with inflation. See http://inflationdata.com/inflation/images/charts/Oil/Gasoline_inflation_chart.htm for an inflation adjusted graph of gasoline prices. Note that we are currently above the long term trend. It's quite possible that this is the highest that oil will ever be again. If we have viable alternatives before the next oil shock, then oil won't have its current monopoly on transport.
Well, duh. My father gets such samples all the time, along with glossy brochures extolling their fantastic effects and why he should prescribe them to his patients.
And then if he does prescribe them to his patients, he starts them off with a free sample, right? And if the patient has no money, he gives them several free samples. As such, I think that free samples (as a cost) should simply appear as part of the production costs.
Tylenol used to advertise that it was the most used by hospitals. Why was that? Because it was the cheapest. They sold to hospitals much more cheaply than they sold to consumers. Should we count that discount as a promotion cost? They used it as a promotion.
The basic complaint is that drug companies spend too much on promotion and not enough on R&D. That that's why drugs are so expensive. Since free samples make drugs cheaper (in aggregate), I think that it is at the least disingenuous to count them as overspending in promotion. They are more a side effect of promotion IMO than a main component.
Where's the other 62% go? Also, according to that report, free samples are promotion costs.
Link to actual study: The Cost of Pushing Pills: A New Estimate of Pharmaceutical Promotion Expenditures in the United States
I am not sure that free samples should be counted as a marketing cost. If they are counted, then they should be counted based on the cost to the company, not the retail cost (what the company would get if it had sold the sample). Use of such RIAA like tactics makes me very suspicious of the study. Such an obvious flaw strongly suggests that they picked the data to fit their theory rather than picking a theory to fit the data.
They also increased their estimate by 30% for "unmonitored" expenses. I.e. they assume that there is uncollected data. They then claim that this still under reports expenses by alleging that there are other expense categories that are not included. They have no references for the 30% number; no evidence that 30% is the right number; no evidence that the other expense categories are not already included in the 30%.
The best that could be said for this report is that it may be just as accurate as the reports from the pharmaceutical companies it decries.
at $4 a gallon, 30mpg in a gas engine gives you 300 miles for $40.
That's not a comparable vehicle. Most diesels get far less than 65 mpg, so this should be compared to a leading car, not a typical car. There have been gas powered vehicles in the 50 mpg range. That would be 500 miles for $40 and 6500 miles for $520. For the diesel example, 6500 miles is $500.
The diesel is still cheaper, but not as much cheaper as you indicated.
Of course, it turns out that diesel is not that much more expensive than gasoline. According to the DOE, diesel is only about sixty cents per gallon more expensive than gasoline usually and only twenty cents more expensive now (gas has been spiking while diesel has remained stable). Using sixty cents difference, for the ten gallon tanks, we have for diesel:
$4.60 a gallon, 650 miles for $46 and 6500 miles for $460.
That's a $60 savings per tank over the 50 mpg gas alternative. About a penny per mile cheaper for diesel.
According to the article, they keep records of the cell phone towers used to interact with your phone. I know the summary says GPS, but that's not what the EFF attorney said in the article.
There are any number of perfectly good reasons for cell phone companies to track cell phone tower usage. That's their equipment. There are even reasons (e.g. potential billing disputes) why they might not want to anonymize that data.
If websites were voted on, I'm wondering if the web will turn into one giant human group think.
That already occurs. All Google page rank is is a way to evaluate what people think about a site. It does this by analyzing the social network formed by hyperlinks.
I've seen a lot of speculation that this would work as an alternative to the existing algorithm for ordering search results in general. Wouldn't this make more sense if changed the ordering for an individual? I.e. if Google learns that I am more likely to rank up open source sites and rank down closed source sites, Google could push open source sites to the top of my listings for new searches while leaving the closed source listings at the top for others.
I also think that the comments might be more useful in generating rankings than the votes. For example, I might add comments that say "open" and "closed" to my search results so that I can quickly see which results go to open source projects, then Google can use that information to bump up those links when the user is using "open" or "closed" as keywords.
It used to be rather difficult to produce inflation, back before we switched to a fiat money system. I don't believe that most people were jobless back then.
We had a commodity peg during the great depression. We suspended trading on it (i.e. you couldn't get gold for your dollars) and devalued it (reducing the amount of gold per dollar), but we didn't go to fiat money until the 1970s. Unemployment was rampant, around four times the level that it is now.
Prior to fiat money, we used to alternate between periods of inflation (e.g. the influx of gold after 1849) and periods of deflation (e.g. the great depression). Deflation is associated with high unemployment (the only way to get deflation is to make people so desperate that they'll take any price).
Overall, fiat money has been good for us. It's gotten rid of the deflations (depressions) and has mostly worked without high inflation. Exceptions include the 70s and now (inflation is not yet really high but is elevated and rising). Hopefully the next President will appoint a better chair than Bernanke and a better board to support the new chair. A good Federal Reserve chair can control inflation, just look at what Volcker did in 1981.
Fractional reserve banking, on the other hand, is an anachronism. With commodity pegged money, it was needed to allow adjustments in the money supply. With fiat money, we can adjust the money supply directly.
Now, fractional reserve banking is harmful, as it allows the investment market to counter or amplify the Federal Reserve's open market operations. Further, since fractional reserves only affects money that is saved, it tends to lead to bubbles where saving reinforces saving followed by busts where money removed from savings forces more money out of savings.