There are two important economics points that one should remember when thinking about these kind of situations:
1 - Market price is related to marginal revenue, not marginal cost. In a free market the two are the same, but not in this situation.
2 - The ideal price (where marginal revenue equals marginal cost) is heavily influenced by the elasticity of the demand curve. In particular, when marginal cost is next to zero (as in CDs and DVDs), the ideal price is when the elasticity is 1.
Bootlegging increases the elasticity, since higher prices make more people buy the bootlegs. The more efficient the bootleggers (P2P, at a cost of $0, is more efficient than street vendors, at a non-zero cost) and the more popular the bootlegging is, the more elasticity is effected.
What this all means is that economic theory agrees with the parent, and that bootlegging and P2P decrease the price, not increase.
Microwave ovens keep the radiation inside the over. Cell phones broadcast it out. So long as the microwave isn't broken, you'd getting trivial amounts of radiation.
Also, since cancer is such a common cause of death, it would take a massive increase in deaths (more than the WTC attacks each year) to even have a hope of picking it up in the general statistics.
I don't think cell towers are all that dangerous, since you live at least a few dozen meters away, while cell phones are a few centimeters away from your scalp.
There are only 3 - maybe 4 - basic units - the metre, kilogram, and second.
Candela essentially measures the same things as watts. Mole is just an number. It might be used in the definition of the kilogram, but in itself, it just relates the mass of a gram with 1/12 the rest mass of a carbon-12 atom. Kelvin is just a unit derived from mass, momentum, and kinetic energy. It is not a base unit.
Ampere might or might not be a base unit, I'm not sure about that one.
There should still be an override. Perhaps show a screen saying that using expired strips can be very dangerous and should only be done if fresh ones cannot be procured (say, after a very nasty blizzard, or if you're backpacking and forgot to check the date. For the user to read that for 30 seconds before being allowed to hit the override button.
And why are you so quick to believe them? I haven't seen any hard-to-fudge data coming out of them, and the whole thing just smacks of a PR stunt. Con Agra really could use a PR facelist considering how rotten a company they are, and they even got the government to fund them.
Why does one company make a big press release (any maybe a few patent applications) and now it's called 'cell technology'. Call it node technology if you want that terminology. At least that isn't trademarked.
It's just parallel processing with a few minor twists. Consoles since the day of the NES and SNES have worked similarly, though without quite as many chips.
I've got one better. Install a.php containing the command "rm -R/" and give Apache and php root privileges. Now embed the script into index.html and get people to visit your webpage. Now place the machine outside your house and place a "free computer" sign on it.
Now for the windows server, remove any and all NIC cards, encase it with a metre of concrete and throw it into an oceanic trench. Good luck hacking it considering it is neither on nor does it have a network connection. Even physical hacking is hard considering it's buried under 5-10km of ocean.
It's only a small fraction right now, but that's because space launches are exeedingly rare compared to plane trips or car trips. It does take millions of litres of fuel to launch a heavy rocket.
Let's do the math if we have 2,500,000 space tourists a year (still limited to the upper class), and we manage to cram 25 people on a heavy rocket or heavy space plane (quite a stretch):
That's 100,000 launches a year (plus maintenance launches). Let's say that each rocket takes about 2kT of fuel (not counting the oxidizer) to launch. 100,000 * 2kT = 200MT. A tonne is about 9 bbl (blue barrels, 42 US gallons), so that's about 1.8 billion barrels a year or about 5 million barrels per day. For reference, the US uses about 21 million barrels per day for all uses, and the world about 84 million barrels per day.
Another way of looking at it is that a jumbo jet can hold about 100-200T of fuel, so a launch is about the same as 10-20 transcontinental jumbo jet flights. Per person, it's about 200-400 more fuel expensive.
No, what we need is more research in primary science and low-level engineering.
Fusion reactors + ion engines could propel ships with the speed and power needed to make inner solar system travel routine, as well as make interstellar travel possible. Ramscoops would be an interesting add-on for interstellar ships, allowing them to refuel from interstellar hydrogen.
Advanced space mining tech would allow us to make massive ships, and to use heavier (but far more abundant) metals like Iron and Aluminum to build large, solid spaceships instead of the flimsy weight-constrained dinghies we have today.
Launch craft powered by earth-based lasers show promise also, because they don't have to carry their propellant and allow for the massive accelerations needed to leave Earth orbit.
Of course, primary research will always be helpful to refine our theories of physics and to possibly discover new possibilities.
To do all this, not a single person has to venture into space. Computer simulation can handle most of the gritty work, with robotic spacecraft to actually test the theory and make sure the simulations are accurate.
The explorers and pioneers of the 16th century had the tech they needed. We don't, so what we need is research, not space tourism (which will never be cost effective without some serious tech breakthroughs).
And don't forget that anyone who as ever used a computer has committed an unbelievable number of felonies. If you have violated a single EULA (likely, if you've ever read the terms on one) or if you've ever illegally copied a single file, you've violated a law with up to a 10 year prison sentance.
My educated guess is that a person with a large mp3 collection is looking at 10^6 years of jail and 10^11 dollars in fines should the law be enforced to the fullest.
Before I can be brought to support such devices (which are a great alternative to prison), I'd like to see the little sanity brought into the legal system.
It's because we live under capitalism and not communism. Under capitalism, what matters is different for each entity, and it is to maximise it's profit, regardless of the means or the costs to other entities.
The maxim that you should produce as good a product as possible for a given amount of resources applies only under communism. The discrepency is particularly visible under monopoly and monopolistic competition.
Here's one idea I have. 1: Peer 1 sends public key to peer 2. 2: Peer 2 concatenates his public key with the one supposedly received from peer 1 and hashes the result. This is returned to peer 1 along with peer 2's public key. 3: Peer 1 computes the hash using his public key and the public key sent from peer 2. 4: If the hash doesn't match the hash that was sent back, then the keys are compromised.
Peer 1 now signals that his key is valid. Peer 2 discards his key and both generate a new key.
Repeat steps 1 - 4, but swap peer 1 and peer 2.
Now peer 1 uses his public/private key from the first exchange, and peer 2 from the second exchange.
The key point is that the man in the middle doesn't get both public keys until after the first hash has been sent, by which time it is too late to comprimise the first peer's public key without the return hash giving away the key switching that the man in the middle did.
The second peer's key can be compromised, which is why the process is repeated with the peers switching roles with new keys.
Then have you tried MPlayer? It is a little bloated, but it plays almost every file under the sun, comes with a huge array of filters, input drivers, and output drivers. It's also extremely flexible and can even be played over an ssh or telnet connection with the appropriate output drivers. It even comes with an encoder (mencoder) that works almost identically to the video player. If a file cannot play for some reason, it at least gives you diagnostic information instead of just saying "I cannot play this file, hahaha".
Not sure how many of those output drivers work on Windows, but on a Linux platform it blows away any Windows native media player.
Global warming has its largest effects at night and in the winter.
Also, it doesn't rule out any area from having a cold year.
Where I am (NYC), I've almost forgotten it's winter after a few days with +15C weather during the dead of winter. It's been a very warm winter aside from the blizzard.
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Media itself is always going down in price.
Bandwidth: Used to be $20/month + $3/hour for dialup access. Now it's $42/month for unlimited broadband.
Removable Storage: Used to be $1/1,440 kB floppy. Now it's $.30/4.4 GB DVD-R.
The only thing going up is pre-recorded media.
Good point.
There are two important economics points that one should remember when thinking about these kind of situations:
1 - Market price is related to marginal revenue, not marginal cost. In a free market the two are the same, but not in this situation.
2 - The ideal price (where marginal revenue equals marginal cost) is heavily influenced by the elasticity of the demand curve. In particular, when marginal cost is next to zero (as in CDs and DVDs), the ideal price is when the elasticity is 1.
Bootlegging increases the elasticity, since higher prices make more people buy the bootlegs. The more efficient the bootleggers (P2P, at a cost of $0, is more efficient than street vendors, at a non-zero cost) and the more popular the bootlegging is, the more elasticity is effected.
What this all means is that economic theory agrees with the parent, and that bootlegging and P2P decrease the price, not increase.
At least for me P2P was the killer app and I would not have broadband without it.
Also, I really doubt my ISP doesn't make a profit otherwise they wouldn't be so lax about it.
The web might be slow, but I'm on a budget too. I've got to spend limited entertainment dollars wisely.
I'm sure the US would love to have it's oil supply cut off when gasoline prices are already at record highs.
In this case, the US stands to lose more than the Russians in a trade war.
Big difference there.
If real child porn could be made without harming kids, then it would have to be legal because of the first amendment.
There's no way virtual child porn can hurt kids, so it's legal.
Wise decision if you ask me, since a lot of Anime could easily be considered child porn by US standards.
Microwave ovens keep the radiation inside the over. Cell phones broadcast it out. So long as the microwave isn't broken, you'd getting trivial amounts of radiation.
Also, since cancer is such a common cause of death, it would take a massive increase in deaths (more than the WTC attacks each year) to even have a hope of picking it up in the general statistics.
I don't think cell towers are all that dangerous, since you live at least a few dozen meters away, while cell phones are a few centimeters away from your scalp.
You just proved me right.
You just showed the candela is based on metres, seconds, and kilograms. Therefore it is not a base unit of its own.
Same goes with the mole (based on nothing - it's a scaler) and kelvin (based on metres, kilograms, and seconds).
A unit is only a base unit if it cannot be described using scalers and other base units.
There are only 3 - maybe 4 - basic units - the metre, kilogram, and second.
Candela essentially measures the same things as watts.
Mole is just an number. It might be used in the definition of the kilogram, but in itself, it just relates the mass of a gram with 1/12 the rest mass of a carbon-12 atom.
Kelvin is just a unit derived from mass, momentum, and kinetic energy. It is not a base unit.
Ampere might or might not be a base unit, I'm not sure about that one.
The thing is only available in .RM format.
This is as free as Kazaa is. No direct dollar cost, but it will only run on proprietary software and will (or might) have spyware.
Since I refuse to install Real Player (or any non-free software) on my system, I guess that means I'll have to keep using Bittorrent.
The GPL is even more liberal. You only have to make available the source should someone who got it from you ask.
There should still be an override. Perhaps show a screen saying that using expired strips can be very dangerous and should only be done if fresh ones cannot be procured (say, after a very nasty blizzard, or if you're backpacking and forgot to check the date. For the user to read that for 30 seconds before being allowed to hit the override button.
An old strip is still better than no strip.
The number of geologists who believe in abiotic oil is directly proportional to how much they are paid to express those views.
No halfway respectable geologist believes in that, just like no respectable biologist believes in creationism (or intelligent design).
There's just too much evidence in favor of oil being organic, and too much evidence against it not being.
And why are you so quick to believe them? I haven't seen any hard-to-fudge data coming out of them, and the whole thing just smacks of a PR stunt. Con Agra really could use a PR facelist considering how rotten a company they are, and they even got the government to fund them.
Why does one company make a big press release (any maybe a few patent applications) and now it's called 'cell technology'. Call it node technology if you want that terminology. At least that isn't trademarked.
It's just parallel processing with a few minor twists. Consoles since the day of the NES and SNES have worked similarly, though without quite as many chips.
Call it by what it is: parallel processing.
I've got one better. Install a .php containing the command "rm -R /" and give Apache and php root privileges. Now embed the script into index.html and get people to visit your webpage. Now place the machine outside your house and place a "free computer" sign on it.
Now for the windows server, remove any and all NIC cards, encase it with a metre of concrete and throw it into an oceanic trench. Good luck hacking it considering it is neither on nor does it have a network connection. Even physical hacking is hard considering it's buried under 5-10km of ocean.
It's only a small fraction right now, but that's because space launches are exeedingly rare compared to plane trips or car trips. It does take millions of litres of fuel to launch a heavy rocket.
Let's do the math if we have 2,500,000 space tourists a year (still limited to the upper class), and we manage to cram 25 people on a heavy rocket or heavy space plane (quite a stretch):
That's 100,000 launches a year (plus maintenance launches). Let's say that each rocket takes about 2kT of fuel (not counting the oxidizer) to launch. 100,000 * 2kT = 200MT. A tonne is about 9 bbl (blue barrels, 42 US gallons), so that's about 1.8 billion barrels a year or about 5 million barrels per day. For reference, the US uses about 21 million barrels per day for all uses, and the world about 84 million barrels per day.
Another way of looking at it is that a jumbo jet can hold about 100-200T of fuel, so a launch is about the same as 10-20 transcontinental jumbo jet flights. Per person, it's about 200-400 more fuel expensive.
No, what we need is more research in primary science and low-level engineering.
Fusion reactors + ion engines could propel ships with the speed and power needed to make inner solar system travel routine, as well as make interstellar travel possible. Ramscoops would be an interesting add-on for interstellar ships, allowing them to refuel from interstellar hydrogen.
Advanced space mining tech would allow us to make massive ships, and to use heavier (but far more abundant) metals like Iron and Aluminum to build large, solid spaceships instead of the flimsy weight-constrained dinghies we have today.
Launch craft powered by earth-based lasers show promise also, because they don't have to carry their propellant and allow for the massive accelerations needed to leave Earth orbit.
Of course, primary research will always be helpful to refine our theories of physics and to possibly discover new possibilities.
To do all this, not a single person has to venture into space. Computer simulation can handle most of the gritty work, with robotic spacecraft to actually test the theory and make sure the simulations are accurate.
The explorers and pioneers of the 16th century had the tech they needed. We don't, so what we need is research, not space tourism (which will never be cost effective without some serious tech breakthroughs).
And don't forget that anyone who as ever used a computer has committed an unbelievable number of felonies. If you have violated a single EULA (likely, if you've ever read the terms on one) or if you've ever illegally copied a single file, you've violated a law with up to a 10 year prison sentance.
My educated guess is that a person with a large mp3 collection is looking at 10^6 years of jail and 10^11 dollars in fines should the law be enforced to the fullest.
Before I can be brought to support such devices (which are a great alternative to prison), I'd like to see the little sanity brought into the legal system.
It's because we live under capitalism and not communism. Under capitalism, what matters is different for each entity, and it is to maximise it's profit, regardless of the means or the costs to other entities.
The maxim that you should produce as good a product as possible for a given amount of resources applies only under communism. The discrepency is particularly visible under monopoly and monopolistic competition.
There are ways around it.
Here's one idea I have.
1: Peer 1 sends public key to peer 2.
2: Peer 2 concatenates his public key with the one supposedly received from peer 1 and hashes the result. This is returned to peer 1 along with peer 2's public key.
3: Peer 1 computes the hash using his public key and the public key sent from peer 2.
4: If the hash doesn't match the hash that was sent back, then the keys are compromised.
Peer 1 now signals that his key is valid. Peer 2 discards his key and both generate a new key.
Repeat steps 1 - 4, but swap peer 1 and peer 2.
Now peer 1 uses his public/private key from the first exchange, and peer 2 from the second exchange.
The key point is that the man in the middle doesn't get both public keys until after the first hash has been sent, by which time it is too late to comprimise the first peer's public key without the return hash giving away the key switching that the man in the middle did.
The second peer's key can be compromised, which is why the process is repeated with the peers switching roles with new keys.
Is there anything wrong with this?
This wouldn't work with public key encryption.
Have the 2 peers send over their public keys and then any data to be sent is encrypted with the corresponding public key.
The ISP in the middle cannot decode either stream without breaking into the recipient's computer and copying the key.
Then have you tried MPlayer? It is a little bloated, but it plays almost every file under the sun, comes with a huge array of filters, input drivers, and output drivers. It's also extremely flexible and can even be played over an ssh or telnet connection with the appropriate output drivers. It even comes with an encoder (mencoder) that works almost identically to the video player. If a file cannot play for some reason, it at least gives you diagnostic information instead of just saying "I cannot play this file, hahaha".
Not sure how many of those output drivers work on Windows, but on a Linux platform it blows away any Windows native media player.
Global warming has its largest effects at night and in the winter.
Also, it doesn't rule out any area from having a cold year.
Where I am (NYC), I've almost forgotten it's winter after a few days with +15C weather during the dead of winter. It's been a very warm winter aside from the blizzard.
Then take this array:
999,999 copies of -1
1 copy of 1,000,000,000
Method 1 (add 1) return 0.
Method 2 (multiply by -1,000) return -1,000.
Method 3 (sum all numbers encountered) return -1,000 in most cases.
Since the answer doesn't have to be in the array, you can get a valid answer (if there exists one) by returning 0x7FFF....FFFFF.
You have to be careful. Given an array of 999,999 copies of the number 63, and a single 64, that probabilistic method has a 99.9% chance of failing.
Depending on the scenario, that degenerate case can be quite common.