One reason why it's not exciting is that a number of outfits already have qualifying vehicles. That makes this more of an announcement of a Green Car Race two years in advance than throwing down the technology gauntlet and challenging teams to come up with something genuinely ground-breaking. Just as one example, Tesla Motors (www.teslamotors.com) plans to have a car substantially superior to the specs mentioned in this X-Prize in production by 2010: the WhiteStar.
Also relevant is the fact that very few people are surprised that the government is spying on them. Any guesses on what polling figures would show for the percentage of people who believethe government has been spying on citizens since the Cold War? My guess is well over 50%.
It's either a Detroit stunt cashing in on green hype, or (yet another) Detroit stunt intended to undermine market perception of electric cars by creating something with ludicrously outdated styling and performance with the intention of making electric cars seem like a ridiculously inadequate alternative to combustion-engine vehicles (visit www.teslamotors.com to see how completely bullshit this perception is).
Living and working in the area, I strongly suspect the latter. If someone digs a bit, dollars to donuts says it turns out they're bankrolled by one of the Big Three US automakers.
1. Exclusive control by one group of the means of producing or selling a commodity or service: "Monopoly frequently... arises from government support or from collusive agreements among individuals" (Milton Friedman).
"One group" in this context refers to ownership, not to market or industry. The four record companies are separately owned; therefore they are not one group.
"The world's four major recording studios had devised an illegal enterprise intent on maintaining their virtually complete monopoly over the distribution of recorded music."
That would be an oligopoly, not a monopoly. "Monopoly" means "one seller". We have four fish to fry here.
Ads really are the driver of this market, and therefore the crux of its problems in adapting to new technologies like P2P. Advertising is largely what pays for these networks and the shows they bankroll. Youtube and Tivo are ad killers, so it it does present a genuine problem to the revenue stream of the traditional broadcast media business model.
While there may be no one obvious solution, if you're a TV network there are definitely some things to NOT do.
1. DO NOT put MORE ads in your programs - you'll just drive more people to use alternative services like P2P.
2. SHORTEN the ads you do have, and charge companies more for them. This model works for VOD pretty well. But exercise caution here: 30 seconds at the beginning of a clip is about the maximum I'll put up with, and I'm no ADHD case.
3. LOWER the prices of DVDs for older content, and release new content onto DVD more quickly - make this supplementary revenue stream work better (it may turn into your primary revenue stream).
4. Stop whining and start adapting, or your lunch will continue to get eaten by Google and the Pirate Bay.
5. Stop listening to your geriatric network execs and start listening to your customers: give the people what they want, or you're toast.
Yeah yeah, mod me troll, whatever. If you're modding on slashdot - "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" - and you don't think spending $3 trillion on a pointless war is relevant to how our government prioritizes its financial support of other society-critical concerns such as green energy technologies and education, you're the worst possible kind of moron there is: the kind who thinks they're actually smart.
when you compare it to the $2 billion the DOE was going to spend in developing new rural coal plants you have to ask where their priorities lie.
Or to the $14 billion/month the DOD and pentagon are spending in Iraq to "secure our strategic interests" (read "oil"). 1/1000th the amount we burn every month in Iraq, and we're supposed to cheer about this? Ridiculous. Come back to me when DOE gives $14 million each to a thousand different universities, research think tanks and private technology firms, then we'll have something to get excited about.
The interesting thing here is the part about data being relayed through third parties and the issues involved. As for the data figures themselves, those are pretty misleading because data does not equal useful information. There is far less useful information in an MS Word file than 100Kb or whatever, for example, so these zetabyte figures bandied about aren't terribly meaningful other than to draw attention to the infrastructure needed to support digital data relaying. To see my point, turn things upside down: there is vastly more data stored on an LP record or celluloid film than on a CD or digital photograph. But is that data useful information? Only a few audiophiles and filmophiles would argue that there is.
Yes, there is a lot of data in the world. But is there really that much more information out there? A zillion copies of the same song just means more data, not more information.
you can always describe a simple system with a complex one
I suppose it depends on how you define complexity. If we assume that none of the 'dimensions' of music are infinite - ie pieces are not infinitely long, there are not an infinite number of instruments playing at once, there are not an infinite number of audible tones, etc - then musical space is, well, pretty darn finite as far as the math is concerned. There are, after all, only 12 notes spread across 12 or so audible octaves. Even if we do not limit music to the 12 discrete notes of Western scales, there are still a very finite number of frequencies discernable to the human ear.
So while the number of possible combinations and permutations within musical space is very large, it is certainly finite and clearly definable. The fact that string theory might be able to do this is nifty, though I have my doubts about how well it's really working from this paper.
One of the biggest, if not the biggest barriers I see is the desperate attempts of managers to pretend they know more than their staff.
This is just bad management. Managers aren't supposed to be experts in every specialized field or function. Rather, they have an obligation to understand the capabilities and limitations of experts and specialized functions so that they can make well-informed decisions. Good management is simply about making decisions and taking responsibility for them. A good manager isn't the guy who knows how to MacGuyver a pager and a few soupcans into a working server when the IT department has a meltdown. A good manager is the guy who genuinely understands what his teams and their various systems are capable of and knows exactly how this threads together with what the organization is trying to achieve.
It's like driving a car. You don't have to be an engineer to be a great F1 driver, but you do have to know and appreciate what your pit crew is capable of if you want to win races.
Generalized downmodding is a flawed concept, in my opinion; it should only be available to report cases of abuse (cursing, ad hominem, racism/hate-speech, etc). When given the choice between offering constructive or destructive criticism, the vast majority of slashdotters choose the quicker, easier, more seductive path. It's pretty sad, but that's the baseline human response: give someone a inkling of power and they abuse it or use it to bully others (like shite cops do) rather than using it to constructive ends. The more anti-social the individual, the worse the problem is - you do the math yourself on the slashdot crowd... As smart as people here think they are, they forget one of the simplest, easiest, most useful rules of human conduct: Thumper's Rule. If you don't have something nice to say, don't say anything at all.
Slashdot's system is comfortable and familiar, but it's getting dated. I think it's time for an overhaul, and many others have had good suggestions for updates/refinements. I think the elimination of generalized downmodding along with the elimination (or at least expanding) of the 5-point cap on upmodding would be good improvements. Some of these things are already implemented on sites like digg.com to good effect.
I'm no programmer, so you'll have to forgive my ignorance, but I thought CPU usage mattered more than memory. Obviously useless, wasted memory is no good (presumably this is what 'leaks' are). But what about useful memory usage? I have 2GB of RAM in my system, and I've never seen more than half of it used when I pull up task manager. Firefox could hog 500MB for all I care - I wish it would, if it'd speed things up, perhaps by preloading links on a page for example. Maybe just the act of using RAM slows a machine down, but if so can someone explain why? So long as the CPU isn't maxed out, shouldn't apps being taking advantage of the fact that I've got a big ol' bucket of RAM in my box?
All this criticism of Jimmy Wales seems a bit silly. The guy could easily have created Wikipedia as a for-profit enterprise. It would be no different as a website or a resource, and he could be profiting immensely from it. As for me, text-based ads a la Google don't bother me much. I'm much more irked by the flashy banner ad crap like what's at the top of this slashdot page than a few text links down the right hand margin.
Funny how no one is harassing Coyboy Neil for not running Slashdot like Mother Theresa.
I'm no conspiracy theorist because this is no conspiracy. It's just far, far simpler than people like yourself can bring themselves to believe. Economics treats every market as if its variables are writ in stone no different than physics or chemistry, forgetting that it economic analysis is only as good as the data that comes in. Just as a single, personal example, I did the Economist Magazine Cost of Living Survey for several Gulf countries from 2001 - 2007. Half the numbers we just guessed, since the items couldn't be found on in the marketplace. Economists then crunch those numbers, taking them as absolutely correct. By pulling costs of, say, rent out of the air, I could easily have thrown off their calculations by a factor of 2 or 3. So now you've got governments, Wall Street folks and people in the media all crunching the same numbers - numbers I made up because I didn't feel like arguing with the greasy manager of the local real estate agency to get him to tell me the real rent charges for his properties. Now compound that example with a thousand others just like it and you get an idea of how valid the data your economic analysis is based upon is.
You also suffer from cultural myopeia. You said we'd never invade Saudi over oil. Oh really? Funny how people like you said that about Iraq before 2002. If you'd ever been to the Gulf you'd know that every local person there is convinced that their country could be next. Funny enough, they're probably more right that you. There's a vastly stronger case for Saudi supporting terrorism than there ever was for Iraq. Or perhaps you've forgotten that all but one of the 9/11 hijackers was Saudi?
So I'll reiterate my point, to which you have still not responded: if Obama were elected President and met with King Fahad, one of his 'diplomatic' options would be to say, "I want oil at $20/barrel by this time next week. Turn on the taps, or Saudi is next." And Saudi would do exactly as told. And oil would drop to $20/barrel. And Saudi has the reserves to produce at that price level for 10-15 years minimum. It is quite likely that this is precisely what Clinton's strategy was with Saudi. You'll notice that oil prices were nice and low throughout his presidency.
The reason why the market forces you cite are irrelevant is because of the trump factor. Any time any market has a trump factor - some individual party controls a game-changing variable - then all of your conventional market analysis is irrelevant. Read up a bit on your microeconomics: price functions are only valid so long as the market is both transparent AND prices are negotiated 'without force or fraud'. Neither of these conditions is true in the oil market, not just because of Saudi - although it is clearly the largest trump factor - but for a hundred other reasons too. As I said, oil is a textbook example of market failure. S&D analysis of a failed market is useless by definition.
So you're welcome to continue spouting economic jargon from the confines of your own ass. As for me, I prefer the simpler course: if it looks like a dog and barks like a dog, guess what? It's probably a dog. Follow the money, and it leads straight to Washington's vested interests in the big oil companies. QED.
Ubuntu is coming on strong at long last. I myself made the leap halfway recently to a dual-boot system. Anyone have any forecast about the state of the OS market come 2010?
While I agree with your sentiment that there must be, on balance, some temporal relativity in the abortion issue, I would remind you - along with all rational people - to realize that objection to abortion is based solely on our historical ethical baggage courtesy of Abrahamic religion.
Even if you don't realize it, if you are a westerner your objections to abortion are based almost solely upon irrational religious beliefs about the special sanctity of human life over other forms of life. While there are very good rational arguments for the preservation of human life, there is a great deal more shady territory than you might imagine as well. An adult chimpanzee or dolphin or even dog has a far more developed consciousness, sense of self and capacity to suffer than an unborn human child. Yet we slaughter these and other thinking, feeling creatures daily without so much as a second thought let alone an earnest moral debate.
Again, the point I'm making is that our normative western morality is massively biased by our particular religious history. And lest you make the mistake of assuming this is a human universal, the same is NOT true in many other cultures. We tend to criticize those cultures which do not adequately respect the sanctity of human life over animal life, but we do so on a religious basis - not on a logical or philosophically defensible one.
Same BS as the parent poster: drink the Wall Street Kool-Aid and spew all the usual economic rationalizations for the price of oil. It's absolute bollocks, every bit of it. You believe it because you've never been to Saudi or worked in the Gulf, and simply have no concept of true situation over there. Like a million other suckers, you believe what you see on CNN and read in the Economist. Market forces are virtually insignificant in this market. The diamonds market has greater Pareto and Kaldor-Hicks efficiency, for Christ's sake. The price of oil is controlled by one thing only: the relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia. The US decides how much Saudi produces. That's it. Everyone would love for it to be more complicated and more mysterious than that, but it simply isn't. If Obama wants the price of oil to be $15/barrel, he'll meet with King Saud, Saudi will turn on the taps, and a week later that's what oil will cost. Saudi could produce at triple it's current output for the next 30 years given its staggering reserves - reserves that vastly exceed all published accounts. Production costs in Saudi are ridiculously low - around $1/barrel.
Like so many others ignorant of the actual situation in Saudi, you think the standard economic logic applies to the oil market. That is utter and complete nonsense. Oil is a textbook case of market failure. Here's the short version, in case you're still confused: Saudi supplies whatever we say in order to keep their skies clear of bombs. The price of oil has risen for one reason: because the vested interests in Washington profit immensely from high oil prices. Cui bono? Who profits? That's always the magic question.
One last piece of proof, in case you're still clinging to your vacuous economic rhetoric: why do you think foreign oil companies still produce in Saudi? Saudi's oil is the most easily accessible in the world, requiring technology that was available in the 19th Century. Why do you think they hand away tens of billions of dollars in production concessions to US companies? Do you really think Saudi couldn't produce its own oil with nationalized industry and reduce Exxon-Mobil's operation in the Gulf to that of a shipping firm? Put it another way: if Saudi's reserves were in China, what would stop China from flooding the market with cheap oil just like they flood the market with cheap toys and electronics? Nothing. Our bombs are all that keep Saudi at bay. We're just lucky there's no madman dictator in charge there. Yet.
I just thought of the classic example: "An eye for an eye only makes the world blind." Perfect example of 'balance of power' divorced from nonzero-sum effects.
What nutsack modded the parent troll? The poster raised a good point with his/her analogy: information exchange is a nonzero-sum transaction even if the 'balance' of power is maintained because there is overarching positive utility to transparency. The analogy illustrates this by pointing out the opposite effect: clobbering each other maintains the balance of power but has a negative nonzero-sum effect, because there is overarching negative utility to being clobbered.
Go live in the Middle East for 20 years, then talk to me about being ignorant and paranoid. History has seldom seen a more transparent ploy for profiteering than driving the price of oil up with the War on Terror and the War in Iraq. OPEC is puppeteered by the US; they do what we say because - for better or worse - we still have the biggest bombs. Our military and economic might ensure OPEC's cooperation, and always have. Do you really think oil was sitting at $20/barrel through the 1990s because of supply and demand issues? Please wake up. The lakes of oil in Saudi (that have at least double the official reserves figures) can be tapped with a garden hose for a cost of under $1/barrel. I know. I've been there. I've worked there.
So hang up your ivory tower rhetoric. Time to wake up and smell the economic bullshit you're shoveling. The price of oil is set by heads of state in smoke-filled rooms, not by Wall Street. If you think there is any other reason why Bush Sr regularly visits Saudi, I'd love to hear your tinfoil hat theory for it.
is better to take the hit early... than to wait until the last minute and energy prices have climbed to astronomical levels.
Not if you're President or Vice-President with massive vested interests in oil companies. In that case, when oil climbs over $100/barrel it's Miller Time.
Slashdot Mirror
One reason why it's not exciting is that a number of outfits already have qualifying vehicles. That makes this more of an announcement of a Green Car Race two years in advance than throwing down the technology gauntlet and challenging teams to come up with something genuinely ground-breaking. Just as one example, Tesla Motors (www.teslamotors.com) plans to have a car substantially superior to the specs mentioned in this X-Prize in production by 2010: the WhiteStar.
Maybe. But the joy of pottery is still around, even though people haven't made their own crockery in Western societies for centuries.
Boy, this will be a challenging problem for enemy combatants to solve. I can see it now:
BBC News January 2013: "U.S. begins use of COM-BAT robotic bat-like surveilance device."
BBC News January, 2014: "Scientists report inexplicable collapse of local bird and bat populations over the last year."
Also relevant is the fact that very few people are surprised that the government is spying on them. Any guesses on what polling figures would show for the percentage of people who believethe government has been spying on citizens since the Cold War? My guess is well over 50%.
Living and working in the area, I strongly suspect the latter. If someone digs a bit, dollars to donuts says it turns out they're bankrolled by one of the Big Three US automakers.
"One group" in this context refers to ownership, not to market or industry. The four record companies are separately owned; therefore they are not one group.
That would be an oligopoly, not a monopoly. "Monopoly" means "one seller". We have four fish to fry here.
While there may be no one obvious solution, if you're a TV network there are definitely some things to NOT do.
1. DO NOT put MORE ads in your programs - you'll just drive more people to use alternative services like P2P.
2. SHORTEN the ads you do have, and charge companies more for them. This model works for VOD pretty well. But exercise caution here: 30 seconds at the beginning of a clip is about the maximum I'll put up with, and I'm no ADHD case.
3. LOWER the prices of DVDs for older content, and release new content onto DVD more quickly - make this supplementary revenue stream work better (it may turn into your primary revenue stream).
4. Stop whining and start adapting, or your lunch will continue to get eaten by Google and the Pirate Bay.
5. Stop listening to your geriatric network execs and start listening to your customers: give the people what they want, or you're toast.
Yeah yeah, mod me troll, whatever. If you're modding on slashdot - "News for Nerds, Stuff that Matters" - and you don't think spending $3 trillion on a pointless war is relevant to how our government prioritizes its financial support of other society-critical concerns such as green energy technologies and education, you're the worst possible kind of moron there is: the kind who thinks they're actually smart.
Or to the $14 billion/month the DOD and pentagon are spending in Iraq to "secure our strategic interests" (read "oil"). 1/1000th the amount we burn every month in Iraq, and we're supposed to cheer about this? Ridiculous. Come back to me when DOE gives $14 million each to a thousand different universities, research think tanks and private technology firms, then we'll have something to get excited about.
"It wasn't me grabbing her ass your honor, someone hacked my arm!"
Yes, there is a lot of data in the world. But is there really that much more information out there? A zillion copies of the same song just means more data, not more information.
I suppose it depends on how you define complexity. If we assume that none of the 'dimensions' of music are infinite - ie pieces are not infinitely long, there are not an infinite number of instruments playing at once, there are not an infinite number of audible tones, etc - then musical space is, well, pretty darn finite as far as the math is concerned. There are, after all, only 12 notes spread across 12 or so audible octaves. Even if we do not limit music to the 12 discrete notes of Western scales, there are still a very finite number of frequencies discernable to the human ear.
So while the number of possible combinations and permutations within musical space is very large, it is certainly finite and clearly definable. The fact that string theory might be able to do this is nifty, though I have my doubts about how well it's really working from this paper.
This is just bad management. Managers aren't supposed to be experts in every specialized field or function. Rather, they have an obligation to understand the capabilities and limitations of experts and specialized functions so that they can make well-informed decisions. Good management is simply about making decisions and taking responsibility for them. A good manager isn't the guy who knows how to MacGuyver a pager and a few soupcans into a working server when the IT department has a meltdown. A good manager is the guy who genuinely understands what his teams and their various systems are capable of and knows exactly how this threads together with what the organization is trying to achieve.
It's like driving a car. You don't have to be an engineer to be a great F1 driver, but you do have to know and appreciate what your pit crew is capable of if you want to win races.
Slashdot's system is comfortable and familiar, but it's getting dated. I think it's time for an overhaul, and many others have had good suggestions for updates/refinements. I think the elimination of generalized downmodding along with the elimination (or at least expanding) of the 5-point cap on upmodding would be good improvements. Some of these things are already implemented on sites like digg.com to good effect.
I'm no programmer, so you'll have to forgive my ignorance, but I thought CPU usage mattered more than memory. Obviously useless, wasted memory is no good (presumably this is what 'leaks' are). But what about useful memory usage? I have 2GB of RAM in my system, and I've never seen more than half of it used when I pull up task manager. Firefox could hog 500MB for all I care - I wish it would, if it'd speed things up, perhaps by preloading links on a page for example. Maybe just the act of using RAM slows a machine down, but if so can someone explain why? So long as the CPU isn't maxed out, shouldn't apps being taking advantage of the fact that I've got a big ol' bucket of RAM in my box?
Funny how no one is harassing Coyboy Neil for not running Slashdot like Mother Theresa.
You also suffer from cultural myopeia. You said we'd never invade Saudi over oil. Oh really? Funny how people like you said that about Iraq before 2002. If you'd ever been to the Gulf you'd know that every local person there is convinced that their country could be next. Funny enough, they're probably more right that you. There's a vastly stronger case for Saudi supporting terrorism than there ever was for Iraq. Or perhaps you've forgotten that all but one of the 9/11 hijackers was Saudi?
So I'll reiterate my point, to which you have still not responded: if Obama were elected President and met with King Fahad, one of his 'diplomatic' options would be to say, "I want oil at $20/barrel by this time next week. Turn on the taps, or Saudi is next." And Saudi would do exactly as told. And oil would drop to $20/barrel. And Saudi has the reserves to produce at that price level for 10-15 years minimum. It is quite likely that this is precisely what Clinton's strategy was with Saudi. You'll notice that oil prices were nice and low throughout his presidency.
The reason why the market forces you cite are irrelevant is because of the trump factor. Any time any market has a trump factor - some individual party controls a game-changing variable - then all of your conventional market analysis is irrelevant. Read up a bit on your microeconomics: price functions are only valid so long as the market is both transparent AND prices are negotiated 'without force or fraud'. Neither of these conditions is true in the oil market, not just because of Saudi - although it is clearly the largest trump factor - but for a hundred other reasons too. As I said, oil is a textbook example of market failure. S&D analysis of a failed market is useless by definition.
So you're welcome to continue spouting economic jargon from the confines of your own ass. As for me, I prefer the simpler course: if it looks like a dog and barks like a dog, guess what? It's probably a dog. Follow the money, and it leads straight to Washington's vested interests in the big oil companies. QED.
Ubuntu is coming on strong at long last. I myself made the leap halfway recently to a dual-boot system. Anyone have any forecast about the state of the OS market come 2010?
Even if you don't realize it, if you are a westerner your objections to abortion are based almost solely upon irrational religious beliefs about the special sanctity of human life over other forms of life. While there are very good rational arguments for the preservation of human life, there is a great deal more shady territory than you might imagine as well. An adult chimpanzee or dolphin or even dog has a far more developed consciousness, sense of self and capacity to suffer than an unborn human child. Yet we slaughter these and other thinking, feeling creatures daily without so much as a second thought let alone an earnest moral debate.
Again, the point I'm making is that our normative western morality is massively biased by our particular religious history. And lest you make the mistake of assuming this is a human universal, the same is NOT true in many other cultures. We tend to criticize those cultures which do not adequately respect the sanctity of human life over animal life, but we do so on a religious basis - not on a logical or philosophically defensible one.
Like so many others ignorant of the actual situation in Saudi, you think the standard economic logic applies to the oil market. That is utter and complete nonsense. Oil is a textbook case of market failure. Here's the short version, in case you're still confused: Saudi supplies whatever we say in order to keep their skies clear of bombs. The price of oil has risen for one reason: because the vested interests in Washington profit immensely from high oil prices. Cui bono? Who profits? That's always the magic question.
One last piece of proof, in case you're still clinging to your vacuous economic rhetoric: why do you think foreign oil companies still produce in Saudi? Saudi's oil is the most easily accessible in the world, requiring technology that was available in the 19th Century. Why do you think they hand away tens of billions of dollars in production concessions to US companies? Do you really think Saudi couldn't produce its own oil with nationalized industry and reduce Exxon-Mobil's operation in the Gulf to that of a shipping firm? Put it another way: if Saudi's reserves were in China, what would stop China from flooding the market with cheap oil just like they flood the market with cheap toys and electronics? Nothing. Our bombs are all that keep Saudi at bay. We're just lucky there's no madman dictator in charge there. Yet.
I just thought of the classic example: "An eye for an eye only makes the world blind." Perfect example of 'balance of power' divorced from nonzero-sum effects.
What nutsack modded the parent troll? The poster raised a good point with his/her analogy: information exchange is a nonzero-sum transaction even if the 'balance' of power is maintained because there is overarching positive utility to transparency. The analogy illustrates this by pointing out the opposite effect: clobbering each other maintains the balance of power but has a negative nonzero-sum effect, because there is overarching negative utility to being clobbered.
So hang up your ivory tower rhetoric. Time to wake up and smell the economic bullshit you're shoveling. The price of oil is set by heads of state in smoke-filled rooms, not by Wall Street. If you think there is any other reason why Bush Sr regularly visits Saudi, I'd love to hear your tinfoil hat theory for it.
Not if you're President or Vice-President with massive vested interests in oil companies. In that case, when oil climbs over $100/barrel it's Miller Time.