As any chemist knows, the material dictates the pattern. Carbon is willing to do things that copper is not--and the "patterns" of life all exist on this level.
The purpose of science is to achieve scientific understanding, not to learn truth. This is good because it's difficult to rigorously identify truth outside of logic and mathematics--a consistent scientific understanding may not be provably true, but it is consistent with all of our experiences as of yet, and that's the best we can do for the external world. If we believe in the second law of thermodynamics and understand it accurately, our observations of the external world will make more sense, and be more predictable.
... if you have a sufficiently stable substrate with differences in energy potential, it is possible for an organized system to have quasi-nervous action, which leads to thought. (I was thinking of the nature of thought because I was answering my own hypothetical question, "How do angels or other immaterial creatures think?")
Meaningless. Energy is part of the materialist universe, and in any case the existence of immaterial substances has never been demonstrated--any speculation on the quasi-physical properties of immaterial substances is simply fiction spun out of whole cloth.
Philosophy only gets us so far, as to either accept a First Mover or to deny all causality when a chain of thought is extended long enough. I accept a First Mover, because I believe in causality. (Note: this is not meant to be a rigorous analysis.)
That's good, because there's no sufficiently rigorous analysis that would have gotten you to that conclusion. (Hint: what caused the prime mover?) The only thing I can suggest to you is a more thorough study of philosophy.
I don't see anywhere the parent post mentioned the UN--NATO actions in Yugoslavia were indeed taken in concert with fellow nations.
If you haven't noticed, cooperation means that other people must want the same thing too and there are all kinds of nasty people, illogical people, indifferent people, and so on out there.
Yes, and the first part is to not be those people. Until the Americans have mastered the fine art of not being nasty, illogical, and indifferent to the rest of the world, they're in no position to defend it.
A country that prosecuted people based on their skin color was liberating the world from a country that prosecuted people based on their religion.
I know of no trials in which the State was the plaintiff where anyone, in Germany or America, was charged with being of a certain race or religion. The word you are looking for is "persecuted". Also, I'm not going to get into how Nazi anti-Semitism was not simply "based on religion" because you aren't likely to be of the intellectual level to understand such distinctions.
"Small things" by definition don't consume much RAM. The only true concern is large things which you are willing to process slowly in order to leave more RAM available to other applications, in which case the memory manager should be clever (or manipulable) enough to allocate in the general case, so individual apps don't have to work around it.
Cereal brands don't make a natural monopoly, they aren't competing over usage of public areas, not to mention the cost to enter the market is very low as compared to rolling out your own network to all the houses in an area.
As I said, "It very well may be the case that it's impractical to lay 5 different sets of cables in your neighborhood. In that case, a regulated monopoly makes sense." Did you even finish reading my post before replying?
Would you think that it's great if someone bought the only road to your house, and then started limiting what traffic went down it by their arbitrary rules?
No. As I said, "In that case, a regulated monopoly makes sense." But that's only because of the physical and geometric properties of physical infrastructure--not because duplicated effort is an inherent fault of a competitive system.
I had no idea Apple had to follow the exact same strategy all the time, even when introducing a significantly new product. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, as my friend Ralph Waldo once said.
The Google analogy only holds up if Apple took away your iPhone and gave you $600 in Apple Store credit. That's not what happened at all. Plus, Apple Store credit is good for lots of neat things, like third-party software and iPhone accessories. Or iPod socks!
No, not at all. Pricing is one of the main points Jobs criticized Sculley about later on--Jobs initially wanted to go with a low-price, high-share strategy on the Macintosh. (You might note that Apple since 1997 has maintained that strategy--but this was already after the issue had seemingly already been decided in favor of Windows, leaving Apple with no choice but to stay in a high-margin niche.)
Let's set aside the other reply to this, which suggests (rightly) that the registration costs pay more towards the fixed costs than the low variable costs you mention. There's still a good reason to support high prices for domain registration--it manages the scarcity of them. If it only cost 3 cents to register a domain, then some profiteering registrar would charge 4 cents per for bulk registrations and some spammer would write a bot that registers every available URL between 1 and 10 characters for 2 orders of magnitude less than it would cost now.
when a company charges consumers different prices for the same thing (bandwidth) based on usage patterns (and not some characteristics of the service), that strongly implies the company is using (in)elasticity of demand to extract larger profits than a competitive market would allow them to.
You've nailed one dimension of the net neutrality issue. The other is QoS--I might want to, and probably should be able to, spend more money if I want more reliability (i.e. VoIP). This should be possible while still allowing for net neutrality in the general case.
the real question is why then would the government propose laws that will encourage monopoly and enhance profits of the few large players in the game.
Who runs the government? The few large players in the game. There's no question to it--the large players in the game will always want to propose laws to enhance their own profits.
You used to hear the same kind of thing from communists. "Why, in America, are there 20 brands of breakfast cereal? That is redundant and wasteful! In Soviet Russia we have one standard breakfast cereal!". Competition always leads to duplication of effort. And yet somehow, it still works faster than the alternative due to the strange peculiarities of human motivation. Plus, the redundancy is a good thing in and of itself.
It very well may be the case that it's impractical to lay 5 different sets of cables in your neighborhood. In that case, a regulated monopoly makes sense. But that's based on the specific vagaries of that market, not on anything fundamental.
Why can't the GIMP query for the available memory size and set the tile cache size to 80% automatically, while providing that setting as a manual override? Photoshop has no problem doing that.
Of course you are right. In fact, you are too right. Protectionists can no longer remain in denial that its happening, so they try to put a negative spin on it when it does happen. They may be right in one respect--the U.S. can't power over other countries economically--but I'm not interested in an international pissing contest.
Could you explain more what you mean by "framing the story" in the opening? I have a vague sense of what you're trying to say but not enough to fully understand.
That's not very good advice to give a writer, however. "Be Harlan Ellison" is the type of advice only one writer can follow, and he doesn't need it. Now, if the advice was "be more like Harlan Ellison", that would involve breaking down everything Harlan Ellison does right and emulating those things--which, again, is going to be more specific than just, "be like Harlan Ellison".
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I'm an Aborigine you insensitive clod!
As any chemist knows, the material dictates the pattern. Carbon is willing to do things that copper is not--and the "patterns" of life all exist on this level.
The purpose of science is to achieve scientific understanding, not to learn truth. This is good because it's difficult to rigorously identify truth outside of logic and mathematics--a consistent scientific understanding may not be provably true, but it is consistent with all of our experiences as of yet, and that's the best we can do for the external world. If we believe in the second law of thermodynamics and understand it accurately, our observations of the external world will make more sense, and be more predictable.
... if you have a sufficiently stable substrate with differences in energy potential, it is possible for an organized system to have quasi-nervous action, which leads to thought. (I was thinking of the nature of thought because I was answering my own hypothetical question, "How do angels or other immaterial creatures think?")Meaningless. Energy is part of the materialist universe, and in any case the existence of immaterial substances has never been demonstrated--any speculation on the quasi-physical properties of immaterial substances is simply fiction spun out of whole cloth.
Philosophy only gets us so far, as to either accept a First Mover or to deny all causality when a chain of thought is extended long enough. I accept a First Mover, because I believe in causality. (Note: this is not meant to be a rigorous analysis.)That's good, because there's no sufficiently rigorous analysis that would have gotten you to that conclusion. (Hint: what caused the prime mover?) The only thing I can suggest to you is a more thorough study of philosophy.
Who could have known that science fiction enthusiasts could be so stodgy, conservative, and stuck in the past?
I don't see anywhere the parent post mentioned the UN--NATO actions in Yugoslavia were indeed taken in concert with fellow nations.
If you haven't noticed, cooperation means that other people must want the same thing too and there are all kinds of nasty people, illogical people, indifferent people, and so on out there.Yes, and the first part is to not be those people. Until the Americans have mastered the fine art of not being nasty, illogical, and indifferent to the rest of the world, they're in no position to defend it.
I know of no trials in which the State was the plaintiff where anyone, in Germany or America, was charged with being of a certain race or religion. The word you are looking for is "persecuted". Also, I'm not going to get into how Nazi anti-Semitism was not simply "based on religion" because you aren't likely to be of the intellectual level to understand such distinctions.
It's perfectly legitimate for them to offer nothing. Were you this bratty to your parents on Christmas morning?
The people were just used as a battery system along with the fusion reactors. They weren't meant to be a net power source.
"Small things" by definition don't consume much RAM. The only true concern is large things which you are willing to process slowly in order to leave more RAM available to other applications, in which case the memory manager should be clever (or manipulable) enough to allocate in the general case, so individual apps don't have to work around it.
As I said, "It very well may be the case that it's impractical to lay 5 different sets of cables in your neighborhood. In that case, a regulated monopoly makes sense." Did you even finish reading my post before replying?
Would you think that it's great if someone bought the only road to your house, and then started limiting what traffic went down it by their arbitrary rules?No. As I said, "In that case, a regulated monopoly makes sense." But that's only because of the physical and geometric properties of physical infrastructure--not because duplicated effort is an inherent fault of a competitive system.
I had no idea Apple had to follow the exact same strategy all the time, even when introducing a significantly new product. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, as my friend Ralph Waldo once said.
The Google analogy only holds up if Apple took away your iPhone and gave you $600 in Apple Store credit. That's not what happened at all. Plus, Apple Store credit is good for lots of neat things, like third-party software and iPhone accessories. Or iPod socks!
No, not at all. Pricing is one of the main points Jobs criticized Sculley about later on--Jobs initially wanted to go with a low-price, high-share strategy on the Macintosh. (You might note that Apple since 1997 has maintained that strategy--but this was already after the issue had seemingly already been decided in favor of Windows, leaving Apple with no choice but to stay in a high-margin niche.)
Let's set aside the other reply to this, which suggests (rightly) that the registration costs pay more towards the fixed costs than the low variable costs you mention. There's still a good reason to support high prices for domain registration--it manages the scarcity of them. If it only cost 3 cents to register a domain, then some profiteering registrar would charge 4 cents per for bulk registrations and some spammer would write a bot that registers every available URL between 1 and 10 characters for 2 orders of magnitude less than it would cost now.
Two points:
when a company charges consumers different prices for the same thing (bandwidth) based on usage patterns (and not some characteristics of the service), that strongly implies the company is using (in)elasticity of demand to extract larger profits than a competitive market would allow them to.You've nailed one dimension of the net neutrality issue. The other is QoS--I might want to, and probably should be able to, spend more money if I want more reliability (i.e. VoIP). This should be possible while still allowing for net neutrality in the general case.
the real question is why then would the government propose laws that will encourage monopoly and enhance profits of the few large players in the game.Who runs the government? The few large players in the game. There's no question to it--the large players in the game will always want to propose laws to enhance their own profits.
You used to hear the same kind of thing from communists. "Why, in America, are there 20 brands of breakfast cereal? That is redundant and wasteful! In Soviet Russia we have one standard breakfast cereal!". Competition always leads to duplication of effort. And yet somehow, it still works faster than the alternative due to the strange peculiarities of human motivation. Plus, the redundancy is a good thing in and of itself.
It very well may be the case that it's impractical to lay 5 different sets of cables in your neighborhood. In that case, a regulated monopoly makes sense. But that's based on the specific vagaries of that market, not on anything fundamental.
So much for the GPL, then?
I'm glad I can compensate for my software's shortcomings, but that doesn't excuse those shortcomings.
Why can't the GIMP query for the available memory size and set the tile cache size to 80% automatically, while providing that setting as a manual override? Photoshop has no problem doing that.
Of course you are right. In fact, you are too right. Protectionists can no longer remain in denial that its happening, so they try to put a negative spin on it when it does happen. They may be right in one respect--the U.S. can't power over other countries economically--but I'm not interested in an international pissing contest.
I know that, that was my entire point--your point, while true, completely missed the crux of the topic.
Could you explain more what you mean by "framing the story" in the opening? I have a vague sense of what you're trying to say but not enough to fully understand.
That's not very good advice to give a writer, however. "Be Harlan Ellison" is the type of advice only one writer can follow, and he doesn't need it. Now, if the advice was "be more like Harlan Ellison", that would involve breaking down everything Harlan Ellison does right and emulating those things--which, again, is going to be more specific than just, "be like Harlan Ellison".
Cane sugar? We don't even use cane sugar for sugar anymore, why on earth would we use it for biofuels?