Ahem: "Variable costs are expenses that change in proportion to the activity of a business. In other words, variable cost is the sum of marginal costs."
Marginal utility analysis assumes commodity-like uniformity of products and services AND free and open competition. Remove these assumptions, and much of the analysis collapses. My point, for those not paying attention, was that analyses of markets using traditional econometrics (of which marginal utility is one) is ineffective in markets that are not competitive. Moreover, I argued that highly profitable markets are - by definition - not competitive.
Appeals to diminishing marginal utility speak not at all to the fact that high profit margins are categorically impossible in a truly competitive market, irrespective of that market's positioning on the supply and demand curves.
A further irony is that the classic paradox used to illustrate diminishing marginal utility - water vs diamonds - is itself flawed: diamonds are perhaps the best example of "conspicuous consumption" wherein buyers actively seek high prices with minimal utility in order to flamboyantly demonstrate their wealth, power and status by way of flagrant wasteful spending.
Wow, you totally blew my hypothesis of how profit precludes genuine competition out of the water... by citing monopolies in the tech industry and the oligopoly in the soda market.
Well then it depends on how you define "actual care". You can drive a Model T if you rebuild it from scratch every few thousand miles. But if you just want to change the oil and tires and have regular servicing that costs ~$50, an American car will last 5 years before starting to fall apart - meaning, "oh, well we're going to need to replace X and that'll be $450, plus we should swap out Y and that's another $300. A Japanese car will last 10 before doing the same. I've owned both, I speak from personal experience and all of the annecdotal experience from dozens of friends and acquantences attests to the same. You can cite exceptions, but unless you've got hard data from studies showing otherwise, I believe my own eyes and my own experiences.
Ask any American why they bought a Honda or a Toyota instead of a Ford or Chevy that gets the same gas mileage. What do you think they will say? Reliability.
This is an interesting example of just how borked econometrics get by social factors: There is no conceivable quantitative economic mechanism by which the European market demand would justify a price 3 times higher than the North American market. That only leaves qualitative/fuzzy social factors as the explanation. And that, of course, throws any quantitative analysis of the market using econometrics right out the window.
Software may be exceptional because it is unique as a product in that it has close to zero variable costs (ie: same cost to make one copy as 1 billion copies). But personally, I don't buy this. I think most markets are similarly borked by social factors - everything from the price of movies to the price of shoes to the price of legal services. The price really is 'whatever the market will bear', but what the market will bear has very little to do with the actual costs of production in any industry.
Now think about what this means: if prices correlate poorly (or not at all) to costs, that means the industry in question is not competitive. If there were legitimate competition, there would be perpetual downward pressure on prices and everything would be priced just a little more than it costs to produce. Now think what else this means: any industry with profitable prices (ie high margins) cannot be genuinely competitive. One of the defining characteristics of a free market is that consumers are not coerced by force or fraud, where a lack of competition constitutes coercion (think of a monopoly jacking up prices because it has no competitors...).
I don't think there is a lack of patience for challenging problem-solving, but rather a lack of patience - tolerance might be a better word - for time-consuming drudgery in service of problem-solving. I mapped out ALL of Pool of Radiance as a young lad, and certainly wouldn't have the patience to do it again, but that doesn't mean I don't have patience for solving problems. The problem the old dungeon crawlers by today's standards isn't so much that they're too challenging but that they're genuinely too boring - too repetitive, too redundant, too time-consuming. You could remove much of the drudgery and retain much of the puzzle elements quite easily. Some modern games have done this, and some have not.
I think the GP had it right. We already have taxis and Zip cars. They don't dominate the market because they're not what people want, they don't allow for many kinds of activity, and personal property is categorically different than communal property. In any dense urban locale on Earth, people with sufficient money have their own cars.
So what this article boils down to is an argument for sacrificing quality of life for economy, efficiency and the well-being of the environment. Sadly, people simply will not make that choice voluntarily so long as they can afford the alternatives. Rather than try to get people to change in an improbable (or nearly impossible) way, the time, energy and resources would be better spent finding ways to accomodate and improve quality of life through more efficient and environmentally friendly technologies.
True enough. Interesting how being willing to pay for something without asking any questions about where it came from hasn a way of creating problems, isn't it? Clothes sold everywhere from Wal-Mart and the Disney Store to Oscar De Larente boutiques are made in sweatshops by 'sub-contractors' so the buyers can retain plausible deniability. Same goes for electronics parts - like the iPod and the iPhone. More personally, say your child needed a kidney, for example. It'd be easy to not ask where a donor organ came from.
So the question is, who draws the line - and where - when it comes to the supply of goods or services whose origins are mired in strife? We regulate the donor organ market pretty heavily. We consumer products like apparel and electronics moderately. And we don't regulate diamonds or oil at all.
I don't have any answers, mind you. (Well, maybe I do - but the cat will stay snug in the bag until after I'm published). For now, I'm just saying there are important questions here that have gone unasked and unanswered for too long.
I have no supporting data, but my guess is that people fall broadly into one of two categories: folks like you (and me) who NEVER click ads, and people (like grandma) who click them all the time.
I also have no good data about how the ad-selling process works. But to give an example, Coke and McDonalds advertise largely to create brand awareness, not to attract individual sales for individual products advertised. That's not really how click-ads work, whose revenue is not based on page views but on clicks. Obviously neither work well when you're running a pop-up and ad blocker, but my guess would be that click-ads have never been hugely effective - perhaps on par with coupon print-ads - while brand-awareness advertising works reasonably well.
since it makes no mention of the resurrection, which is a central part of Christian belief."Imagine that! Oh wait, that's the whole problem to begin with...
People don't want them. Very, very few people will pay new-car prices for a car that will go 150 miles then require a 3-hour recharge.
The only time consumer electric cars have ever been available - GM's EV1 - there was a waiting list because demand was so high. And they only got 60 miles per charge. There are facts out there, and you, sir, need to acquaint yourself with them. By your lights, one could argue that no-one would want a cell phone that didn't have 6 hours of talk-time battery life because it takes 3 hours to charge a cell phone, and who wants the inconvenience of having to change the battery? The truth is, most people rarely talk/drive that long in one stretch. And you leave the device - car or phone or laptop or shaver or whatever - plugged in when you're not using it to keep it full charge. Last I checked, that's not how gasoline works. You have no option but to get fuel at a pumping station. Personally, I like the idea of being able to 'refuel' at home and always leave the house at full capacity. Not only that, but on big SUVs the range is pathetic. I borrowed a relative's GM Yukon to move some furniture and the thing could not have a range of more than 120 miles - we used a quarter of a tank going across town and back. My Prius will get 500 miles a tank - vastly more convenient.
Plus, quick-charge technology is on the horizon not only for phones but for BEVs too. It takes 10 minutes to gas up Chevy Suburban. If it takes 15 minutes to charge your all-electric Chevy volt, is that extra five minutes on a 200+ mile trip a deal-breaker?
Every year or so I hunt for a simple utility to allow me to connect to more than one wifi network simultaneously and boost bandwidth that way. Never had any luck. Anyone know if this is feasible or not? The apartment complex where I currently live has multiple secure wifi networks set up specifically for residents, plus a bunch of folks have unsecured ones based on local cable broadband they don't mind sharing. If there was a way to connect to all of them at once... awesome.
Isn't it ironic how our retarded embargoes facilitate tyrannical governments when the stated goal is the opposite? By helping tyrants keep their citizens in the dark and giving them a big target to point at and say "enemy" it makes you wonder what the real goals of these embargoes are...
I don't have time to reply to each poster, but the general comments boil down to this:
1. Race shouldn't be an issue so it is unreasonable to argue that Obama represents something new.
2. He's all talk and no walk.
For the first point, it is painfully obvious that every single person who says, "I don't see color - you're a reverse-racist for saying it is relevant" is white. Maybe the fact that Obama hails from minority heritage is irrelevant to you, but it is positively moronic to think it doesn't matter to tens of millions of minority voters or to billions around the world. When a brown-skinned man at last becomes President of the United States, it will fundamentally alter how minorities - particularly African Americans - view themselves. It will prove once and for all the anything is possible for anyone; that the American Dream is available to all of us. If you don't realize or understand that black people living in the projects DO think the American Dream excludes them, you are a fucking idiot. You're also obviously too young to remember a time just forty years ago when brown people couldn't use the same fucking drinking fountain as white people in some parts of the country. As for the billions across the rest of the world, much the same applies. If you don't understand the significance of America electing a minority president, you simply don't understand the views and positions of the majority of the people on our planet. Here's a hint: that is not something to be proud of.
Obama's ethnicity may not mean anything to you, but it means a lot to most of the world's people. But please, don't let that stop you from breaking your arm patting yourself on the back for "not seeing color."
As for the second point, Obama's record is a strong as anyone in congress. The FISA bill is the first bit of ammunition anyone has against him, and was a compromise vote - not an outright flipflop as some would brand it. If you read his published statements (it's obvious who among you hasn't) then you'll see his reasoning for voting for the bill. No-one can get elected by acting like Kucinich. Obama must play the political game if he wants to get elected. And he plays it brilliantly. But as another poster mentioned, he is the only candidate whose pounding rhetoric is supported by a firm call to rationality and reason for dealing with complex issues instead of a standard platform-based response.
Really? Obama is 'just another democrat'? Is that what people smart enough to post in html on slashdot really think? I'm surprised it isn't obvious to more people how significant Obama is as a fundamentally new kind of candidate. More so even than JFK, Obama has inspired a whole new generation of voters to get involved in politics because they can actually relate to someone running for office. Why? Because for the first time in 40 years there is a contender who isn't a rich old white guy. For the first time EVER there is a real contender who isn't white.
After this election, there is a very good chance that we'll have a president who does NOT hail from a family of either wealth or privilege or both; he'll be a Harvard-educated, self-made minority millionaire.
If you can't see that this is an astonishing departure from the status quo, then you really are blind. I'm not sure what kind of candidate it would take to impress people like you, short of a 35-year old gay atheist inuit liberatarian.
Fortunately, the difference - if it is lost of slashdotters - is NOT lost on the rest of the world. 5 billion brown people in foreign countries know that Obama represents a tectonic shift in American politics, in American foreign-relations, and in American global leadership - economic, political, cultural, environmental, and more.
This is the highest wave that has ever been known."
Known in recorded history, perhaps. We've 'known' of vastly larger waves though. A 20-mile-long lava shelf broke off the southwest side of the Big Island of Hawaii some 40,000 years ago and created a Tsunami hundreds of feet tall that washed over the entire island of Lanai whose highest point is over 3,300 feet. And then, of course, there have been meteorite impacts that have created tsunamis that have washed over whole continents...
I've only tried the Wii once for a few minutes, and it seemed to be reasonably accurate and fluid - I didn't notice jerkiness or jumping around. However, I did notice what seemed like significant lag in the games we tried. Maybe that was a feature, since in some circumstances you it would be unrealistic for the character to - say - bowl a bowling ball as fast as you can flick your wrist. But with the golf and baseball games we tried, there was a huge lag on the swing. I wanted to love it, and it was definitely fun, but this was - in my opinion - a serious drawback that if corrected would take a major chunk of suckage out of the gameplay experience.
I thought quantum interference was a problem with circuits and gates smaller than 40nm, so even the ability to etch the channels won't mean they'll work. Maybe I'm remembering incorrectly - can someone set the record straight?
The question is how effective is the policing of it--there are no cops waiting by your phone, so the onus is on you to report any violations.
.
Yeah, but that's a pretty lame attitude by most people's standards and that's why we have statute law and regulatory law with criminal code instead of just civil cases where someone has to actually complain in order for something to be judged wrong.
There's also a solution here that should be the responsibility of the folks who make it all possible (namely, the telcos): there should be a telemarketer registry as well, and it should be a violation (with a massive great big fucking fine) for connecting a call from that registry to anything on the DNC registry. This could easily be a feature (opt-in or preferably opt-out) provided automatically with your phone service.
Also, there should also be a piss-easy way of reporting telemarketing violations (like hang up and dial *25 or whatever). As it stands, it's a huge pain in the ass - you have to ask for the number of the caller and make sure they're not calling from a masked/hidden number. And again, if a telemarketing company is caught making calls from unregistered numbers, then it gets whacked with those same gigantic fines.
I suppose I'm both ignorant and stupid, having been out of the build-your-own-box scene for more than five years now, because whenever I stroll past the video card section at best buy I swear I read things like, "LIGHTNING FAST DVD PLAYBACK AND VIDEO DECODING!" I had no idea video decoding was still CPU dependent. Give the governor harumph, I guess.
The priesthood has also traditionally provided a mechanism of denial for self-loathing homosexuals: if you're gay and believe it is immoral/sinful/whatever and don't want anybody to know about it, choose an occupation whose description and qualifications are ostensibly antithetical to homosexuality.
Note that the priesthood is not the only mechanism available for such denial: being a mega-preacher or a republican politician with a 'family values' platform are also high-profile examples.
I'm not sure why there's such suprise about discovering water on the Moon, Mars and other bodies in the solar system. Not only are comets and debris certain to have delivered significant quantities to every significant object in the solar system, it seems patently obvious that accretion is not a perfect centrifuge. If it were otherwise, Mercury would be comprised of 100% of one material - say, gold - while earth would be 100% iron or nickel, Mars 100% something else, and so on.
Since this is not the case, it seems not just obvious but inevitable that virtually all materials be found in some quantity within every signficant body in the solar system.
I'm afraid you'll need to support that with quotes - in context. In my experience, Chomsky is a paragon of rationality, reason and objectivity. The only time people have a problem with him is when they are made uncomfortable by the fact that he applies objective standards to the United States in his role as political watchdog. It's easy to paint him as a 'loon' for saying that the US engages in campaigns of terror, but if you look at his arguments they are ALWAYS supported by indisputable facts.
My guess is you've no direct experience yourself and are just regurgitating BS opinions you've gotten second-hand from others. That's pretty standard on Slashdot, I grant you, but the line must be drawn somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Bzzzt. Marginal cost, not variable.
Ahem: "Variable costs are expenses that change in proportion to the activity of a business. In other words, variable cost is the sum of marginal costs."
Bzzzt.
Marginal utility analysis assumes commodity-like uniformity of products and services AND free and open competition. Remove these assumptions, and much of the analysis collapses. My point, for those not paying attention, was that analyses of markets using traditional econometrics (of which marginal utility is one) is ineffective in markets that are not competitive. Moreover, I argued that highly profitable markets are - by definition - not competitive.
Appeals to diminishing marginal utility speak not at all to the fact that high profit margins are categorically impossible in a truly competitive market, irrespective of that market's positioning on the supply and demand curves.
A further irony is that the classic paradox used to illustrate diminishing marginal utility - water vs diamonds - is itself flawed: diamonds are perhaps the best example of "conspicuous consumption" wherein buyers actively seek high prices with minimal utility in order to flamboyantly demonstrate their wealth, power and status by way of flagrant wasteful spending.
Wow, you totally blew my hypothesis of how profit precludes genuine competition out of the water ... by citing monopolies in the tech industry and the oligopoly in the soda market.
Ask any American why they bought a Honda or a Toyota instead of a Ford or Chevy that gets the same gas mileage. What do you think they will say? Reliability.
The lifetime of a car is 10 to 20 years.
You obviously drive Japanese, not American cars. With American cars, the 5-year life cycle is no problem...
A fair price is "whatever the market will bear."
This is an interesting example of just how borked econometrics get by social factors: There is no conceivable quantitative economic mechanism by which the European market demand would justify a price 3 times higher than the North American market. That only leaves qualitative/fuzzy social factors as the explanation. And that, of course, throws any quantitative analysis of the market using econometrics right out the window.
Software may be exceptional because it is unique as a product in that it has close to zero variable costs (ie: same cost to make one copy as 1 billion copies). But personally, I don't buy this. I think most markets are similarly borked by social factors - everything from the price of movies to the price of shoes to the price of legal services. The price really is 'whatever the market will bear', but what the market will bear has very little to do with the actual costs of production in any industry.
Now think about what this means: if prices correlate poorly (or not at all) to costs, that means the industry in question is not competitive. If there were legitimate competition, there would be perpetual downward pressure on prices and everything would be priced just a little more than it costs to produce. Now think what else this means: any industry with profitable prices (ie high margins) cannot be genuinely competitive. One of the defining characteristics of a free market is that consumers are not coerced by force or fraud, where a lack of competition constitutes coercion (think of a monopoly jacking up prices because it has no competitors...).
Gasp! Horror! Profitable markets =/= free markets!
Where is your Economic God now?
I don't think there is a lack of patience for challenging problem-solving, but rather a lack of patience - tolerance might be a better word - for time-consuming drudgery in service of problem-solving. I mapped out ALL of Pool of Radiance as a young lad, and certainly wouldn't have the patience to do it again, but that doesn't mean I don't have patience for solving problems. The problem the old dungeon crawlers by today's standards isn't so much that they're too challenging but that they're genuinely too boring - too repetitive, too redundant, too time-consuming. You could remove much of the drudgery and retain much of the puzzle elements quite easily. Some modern games have done this, and some have not.
I think the GP had it right. We already have taxis and Zip cars. They don't dominate the market because they're not what people want, they don't allow for many kinds of activity, and personal property is categorically different than communal property. In any dense urban locale on Earth, people with sufficient money have their own cars.
So what this article boils down to is an argument for sacrificing quality of life for economy, efficiency and the well-being of the environment. Sadly, people simply will not make that choice voluntarily so long as they can afford the alternatives. Rather than try to get people to change in an improbable (or nearly impossible) way, the time, energy and resources would be better spent finding ways to accomodate and improve quality of life through more efficient and environmentally friendly technologies.
Anything that reduces QOL is DOA. QED.
True enough. Interesting how being willing to pay for something without asking any questions about where it came from hasn a way of creating problems, isn't it? Clothes sold everywhere from Wal-Mart and the Disney Store to Oscar De Larente boutiques are made in sweatshops by 'sub-contractors' so the buyers can retain plausible deniability. Same goes for electronics parts - like the iPod and the iPhone. More personally, say your child needed a kidney, for example. It'd be easy to not ask where a donor organ came from.
So the question is, who draws the line - and where - when it comes to the supply of goods or services whose origins are mired in strife? We regulate the donor organ market pretty heavily. We consumer products like apparel and electronics moderately. And we don't regulate diamonds or oil at all.
I don't have any answers, mind you. (Well, maybe I do - but the cat will stay snug in the bag until after I'm published). For now, I'm just saying there are important questions here that have gone unasked and unanswered for too long.
I have no supporting data, but my guess is that people fall broadly into one of two categories: folks like you (and me) who NEVER click ads, and people (like grandma) who click them all the time.
I also have no good data about how the ad-selling process works. But to give an example, Coke and McDonalds advertise largely to create brand awareness, not to attract individual sales for individual products advertised. That's not really how click-ads work, whose revenue is not based on page views but on clicks. Obviously neither work well when you're running a pop-up and ad blocker, but my guess would be that click-ads have never been hugely effective - perhaps on par with coupon print-ads - while brand-awareness advertising works reasonably well.
since it makes no mention of the resurrection, which is a central part of Christian belief."Imagine that! Oh wait, that's the whole problem to begin with...
Maybe they could go with paper batteries? Google "paper batteries" for a hundred other links to the same and related stories/technologies.
The only time consumer electric cars have ever been available - GM's EV1 - there was a waiting list because demand was so high. And they only got 60 miles per charge. There are facts out there, and you, sir, need to acquaint yourself with them. By your lights, one could argue that no-one would want a cell phone that didn't have 6 hours of talk-time battery life because it takes 3 hours to charge a cell phone, and who wants the inconvenience of having to change the battery? The truth is, most people rarely talk/drive that long in one stretch. And you leave the device - car or phone or laptop or shaver or whatever - plugged in when you're not using it to keep it full charge. Last I checked, that's not how gasoline works. You have no option but to get fuel at a pumping station. Personally, I like the idea of being able to 'refuel' at home and always leave the house at full capacity. Not only that, but on big SUVs the range is pathetic. I borrowed a relative's GM Yukon to move some furniture and the thing could not have a range of more than 120 miles - we used a quarter of a tank going across town and back. My Prius will get 500 miles a tank - vastly more convenient.
Plus, quick-charge technology is on the horizon not only for phones but for BEVs too. It takes 10 minutes to gas up Chevy Suburban. If it takes 15 minutes to charge your all-electric Chevy volt, is that extra five minutes on a 200+ mile trip a deal-breaker?
Every year or so I hunt for a simple utility to allow me to connect to more than one wifi network simultaneously and boost bandwidth that way. Never had any luck. Anyone know if this is feasible or not? The apartment complex where I currently live has multiple secure wifi networks set up specifically for residents, plus a bunch of folks have unsecured ones based on local cable broadband they don't mind sharing. If there was a way to connect to all of them at once ... awesome.
Isn't it ironic how our retarded embargoes facilitate tyrannical governments when the stated goal is the opposite? By helping tyrants keep their citizens in the dark and giving them a big target to point at and say "enemy" it makes you wonder what the real goals of these embargoes are...
1. Race shouldn't be an issue so it is unreasonable to argue that Obama represents something new.
2. He's all talk and no walk.
For the first point, it is painfully obvious that every single person who says, "I don't see color - you're a reverse-racist for saying it is relevant" is white. Maybe the fact that Obama hails from minority heritage is irrelevant to you, but it is positively moronic to think it doesn't matter to tens of millions of minority voters or to billions around the world. When a brown-skinned man at last becomes President of the United States, it will fundamentally alter how minorities - particularly African Americans - view themselves. It will prove once and for all the anything is possible for anyone; that the American Dream is available to all of us. If you don't realize or understand that black people living in the projects DO think the American Dream excludes them, you are a fucking idiot. You're also obviously too young to remember a time just forty years ago when brown people couldn't use the same fucking drinking fountain as white people in some parts of the country. As for the billions across the rest of the world, much the same applies. If you don't understand the significance of America electing a minority president, you simply don't understand the views and positions of the majority of the people on our planet. Here's a hint: that is not something to be proud of.
Obama's ethnicity may not mean anything to you, but it means a lot to most of the world's people. But please, don't let that stop you from breaking your arm patting yourself on the back for "not seeing color."
As for the second point, Obama's record is a strong as anyone in congress. The FISA bill is the first bit of ammunition anyone has against him, and was a compromise vote - not an outright flipflop as some would brand it. If you read his published statements (it's obvious who among you hasn't) then you'll see his reasoning for voting for the bill. No-one can get elected by acting like Kucinich. Obama must play the political game if he wants to get elected. And he plays it brilliantly. But as another poster mentioned, he is the only candidate whose pounding rhetoric is supported by a firm call to rationality and reason for dealing with complex issues instead of a standard platform-based response.
Really? Obama is 'just another democrat'? Is that what people smart enough to post in html on slashdot really think? I'm surprised it isn't obvious to more people how significant Obama is as a fundamentally new kind of candidate. More so even than JFK, Obama has inspired a whole new generation of voters to get involved in politics because they can actually relate to someone running for office. Why? Because for the first time in 40 years there is a contender who isn't a rich old white guy. For the first time EVER there is a real contender who isn't white.
After this election, there is a very good chance that we'll have a president who does NOT hail from a family of either wealth or privilege or both; he'll be a Harvard-educated, self-made minority millionaire.
If you can't see that this is an astonishing departure from the status quo, then you really are blind. I'm not sure what kind of candidate it would take to impress people like you, short of a 35-year old gay atheist inuit liberatarian.
Fortunately, the difference - if it is lost of slashdotters - is NOT lost on the rest of the world. 5 billion brown people in foreign countries know that Obama represents a tectonic shift in American politics, in American foreign-relations, and in American global leadership - economic, political, cultural, environmental, and more.
This is the highest wave that has ever been known."
Known in recorded history, perhaps. We've 'known' of vastly larger waves though. A 20-mile-long lava shelf broke off the southwest side of the Big Island of Hawaii some 40,000 years ago and created a Tsunami hundreds of feet tall that washed over the entire island of Lanai whose highest point is over 3,300 feet. And then, of course, there have been meteorite impacts that have created tsunamis that have washed over whole continents...
Just my 2 cents.
I thought quantum interference was a problem with circuits and gates smaller than 40nm, so even the ability to etch the channels won't mean they'll work. Maybe I'm remembering incorrectly - can someone set the record straight?
.
Yeah, but that's a pretty lame attitude by most people's standards and that's why we have statute law and regulatory law with criminal code instead of just civil cases where someone has to actually complain in order for something to be judged wrong.
There's also a solution here that should be the responsibility of the folks who make it all possible (namely, the telcos): there should be a telemarketer registry as well, and it should be a violation (with a massive great big fucking fine) for connecting a call from that registry to anything on the DNC registry. This could easily be a feature (opt-in or preferably opt-out) provided automatically with your phone service.
Also, there should also be a piss-easy way of reporting telemarketing violations (like hang up and dial *25 or whatever). As it stands, it's a huge pain in the ass - you have to ask for the number of the caller and make sure they're not calling from a masked/hidden number. And again, if a telemarketing company is caught making calls from unregistered numbers, then it gets whacked with those same gigantic fines.
Problem solved.
I suppose I'm both ignorant and stupid, having been out of the build-your-own-box scene for more than five years now, because whenever I stroll past the video card section at best buy I swear I read things like, "LIGHTNING FAST DVD PLAYBACK AND VIDEO DECODING!" I had no idea video decoding was still CPU dependent. Give the governor harumph, I guess.
Note that the priesthood is not the only mechanism available for such denial: being a mega-preacher or a republican politician with a 'family values' platform are also high-profile examples.
Since this is not the case, it seems not just obvious but inevitable that virtually all materials be found in some quantity within every signficant body in the solar system.
I'm afraid you'll need to support that with quotes - in context. In my experience, Chomsky is a paragon of rationality, reason and objectivity. The only time people have a problem with him is when they are made uncomfortable by the fact that he applies objective standards to the United States in his role as political watchdog. It's easy to paint him as a 'loon' for saying that the US engages in campaigns of terror, but if you look at his arguments they are ALWAYS supported by indisputable facts.
My guess is you've no direct experience yourself and are just regurgitating BS opinions you've gotten second-hand from others. That's pretty standard on Slashdot, I grant you, but the line must be drawn somewhere.