Even with 1GB you are good with AERO, as Vista only uses a fraction of system RAM for the AERO effects, since it intelligently co-shares system and video RAM.
And then...
"WDDM now allows for "virtualized" video memory. Virtualization abstracts video memory so that it is no longer necessary to think about creating a resource in either video or system memory. Just specify what the resource is going to be used for and the system will place the memory in the best place possible. Additionally, virtualization allows for the allocation of more memory than actually exists on the hardware. Memory is then paged into the correct hardware as needed."
Dude. You are making a dunce out of yourself in public. In the context of GPU operation, if GPU memory is "virtualised" that means it is mapped into the OS memory areas (since it must be maintained in a persistent state from the perspective of non-directx 10 apps), so that the various applications which attempt to get at the "real" GPU memory can be held off until their "scheduled" time comes up at which time their individual idea of the GPU memory contents is mapped in.
That means that the overall memory usage of the OS is a sum of the GPU memory size allocated by the applications and the OS, with the actual GPU hardware containing the "current" state of the application which happens to be in the foreground. Which means that when you use Aero, the OS uses the GPU fully plus a considerable chunk of OS memory with all those currently "un-scheduled" GPU states.
This of course goes contrary to your premise, that Vista uses memory "efficiently". What is actually happening is that Vista sacrifices memory for virtualization, thus expanding the system memory usage significantly when compared to a pre-Vista situation.
In other words, WhiteWolf666 was quite right, you do not know what you are talking about.
#9 and one that does NOT store all its data in a corruptable, binary-only database system because nobody sane would want to reinstall the whole system when that binary, unrepairable, single point of falure... fails. (not to forget the dependency of the whole package management solution on the related database libraries)
It's just that socialists believe the workers should share in the control of production (either through government control, trade unions, etc.).
And I was attempting to point out that it is not the case. Socialists are not concerned as much about the "means of production" bit (that is the communist thing) but about the businesses and their owners being good members of the society (i.e. not causing harm to their neighbours, employees etc). The control part might come into play as a side effect of considering how major national assets should be dealt with. For example consider these differences:
From the perspective of capitalism, the only factor of importance is profitability of a business. That means that the business must be nice (or succesfully deceitful) to its customers. How it treats its employees (they might be indentured slaves) or how does it treat its neighbours or environment is irrelevant (because it usually does not impact sales -- sad but true)
To a socialist, this is unacceptable because such a business is a bad member of the society. The problem is not the "profit" part (or "ownership", or "control" parts) but how does this business go about procuring it. Subsequently socialists will seek to empower the employees (via unions, or regulations or what not) and to restrict the environmental damage (by regulation, taxation penalties and what not). Note that the "control of means of production" is not a part of the equation.
To a communist the very idea of a "business" run for profit (instead of the benefit of humanity) is abhorrent. Means of production are all "owned" by the workers (meaning all of the workers, not just the ones working in a particular place). A communist society does not feature competition for survival between various worker-controlled factories etc. The idea (a rather naive one) was that the meticulous planning and analysis of needs of the society and allocation of resources will take place of the capitalist-style competition. That is why many of the original communist ideologies involved abolishment of money.
In other words communism and socialism are not just two stops on the same scale, they are two different worldviews, each concerned with different aspect of human behaviour (one with kind, humane society and the other with "ownership" of things, allocation of products etc). Few of the remedies to some of the problems they seek to address can coincide but that is a result of the fact that they both originated as a response to the same defficiencies of industialized societies. Note that communist theoreticians also tended to be socialists since they hoped that their money-less utopia would turn out kind to its members...
Well, yes, by definition socialists are trying to take control of production out of the hands of large businesses and into the hands of the workers.
You are confusing communism with socialism, which only shows how effective the dis-information campaign of the "conservatives" has been over the years. Socialism is merely concerned about organizing things in such a way that some basic functions of society take precedence over personal greed. It is quite possible to have small/medium sized private enterprise in a socialist country, the criterion is not the word "private" but the overall offect on society such operations have. Since gigantic mega-businesses do impact society in significant ways (mostly negatively) that automatically produces a desire to counter-act these activities by the socialists. That is why socialists are likely to be for nationalization of major assets such as natural resources, roads etc. But they will not be so inclined when it comes to bakeries, grocery stores, muffler shops and the like.
I think it's been demonstrated that a capitalist society works best for the majority of people, even in medicine.
Most of the planet, all industrialized OECD countries (minus USA) and 40+ million completely uninsured US citizens disagree.
And so do I.
So much for the "it's been demonstrated" part.
Greed, as sadly as it may sound, may be our strongest motivation and I don't think it helps to deny that
It is only one of the many motivations. As a matter of fact, its status as "the strongest" is purely a function of greed-centered culture which has been carefully constructed and foisted on the general population by those who most benefit from such a scheme.
In contrast, many other equally or more powerful reward mechanisms exist, such as "professional stature" amongst scientists, or acceptance of art for artists and so on. It is what the society deems desirable which becomes the driving force in many people's lives. The desperate attempts to "outdo the Johneses" do not come from any intrinsic functions of the human brain. They do come from the parental behavioural patterns, cultural programming, media, etc and so on. In many other, non-western societies, such external pressures do not exist (or are actually replaced with other schemes) and as the result it becomes more desirable to be "more pious" or have more tatoos or a bigger bone in one's nose. So it is quite possible to construct a culture whereby professional recognition is more important to people then accumulating the most impressive collection of crappy Chinese plastic garbage in the neighbourhood or the most impractical and uneconomical vehicle on the block (whith the expectation of discarding it in 3 years).
While mindless consumption is a good motto for maggots, I persist in hope that humanity is somewhat more astute then that.
Capitalism is supposed to deal only with one aspect of existence of humanity, that is allocation of resources in areas where the resources in question are not fundamental to existence of the society. It is a very simplistic but self-adjusting (on a small scale) system which frees the society from the need of being involved in direct managment of such trivialities as penis enlargement cures and 9-blade razors.
And that is all which capitalism is. A mere tool meant to accomplish one small task of many which any society must address. Unfortunately some misguided (and usually supremely greedy and self-centered individuals) seem to preceive some tenets of capitalism as holy dictums and demand that all restrictions be removed from their deity and that blood sacrifices be made to it so that they can hoard things more effectively, usually at the expense of their very neighbours.
But more often that not, businesses that make good decisions, that earn money by helping people, reinvest that money in helping us more. Money in a capitalist society is really like voting in a communist society except that it is not evenly distributed. That, to me, is a good thing; people who have proven themselves should have more say in society.
This aspect of capitalism, the supposed "meritocratic" function of it, is only present in small scale capitalist endavours. Adam Smith clearly foresaw that in order for his "meritocracy" to function, many conditions must be met, such as: consumers being completely informed about the relative merits of the products they buy and thus being able to make rational decisions, the size of the businesses being small enough that a large number of them competes in every business category and every product or service, and that none of these individually or in a group can collude to create a market distortion which would render competition between them unnecessary, etc. and so on. None of which conditions are of course met today. Add to this the fact that vast fortunes make accumulation of even more vast fortunes easier
A thousand companies aren't going to "fiercely" fight for a dollar's profit.
Ah so you mean this whole "capitalism" thing is a mere charade and this "competition" hype is just a ruse. In the "real libertarian world" enterpreneurs do not get out of bed for less than a million dollars. It would certainly explain the recent pay expectations by all those "hard working" CEOs, wouldn't it?
Poor Adam Smith. The dude was talking about small-time companies making "mouse traps". Little did he know....
That's fine for a socialist/communist country.
No it is fine for any country with just a hint of an inkling of an idea of what this whole concept of a "country" or a "society" is all about. Any "country" who lets millions of its citizens die tortuous deaths because they failed to accumulate the necessary funds to participate in your perverted idea of a "free market" (where all the beneficiaries are foreign) is not a "country" but a disguisting heaven for thugs and mass-murdering thieves. And any denizens of that kind of place who do not proceed to capture and execute the said thugs in charge are simply getting what they deserve: words of "A victim of a free market" engraved on their children's graves.
It is called "publicly funded research". People pay taxes, out of which academia is funded, whereby researchers work for the public good developing cures and technologies. (Note also that you managed to repeat the ever-popular "free-market" fundamentalist zealot lie that there is "no incentive without profit", to which one can only respond with inquiries about the size of Albert Einstein's castle and the number of bedrooms in his 300-footer 'yacht', surely?)
Then, since all of the fruits of the academic's labours are in the public domain, private enterprises proceed to do what they are best at, that is fiercely competing at manufacturing, distribution, sales and what not. Or in the case of Indonesia, a local government-owned manufacturer providing vaccines as required in that society, at a cost locally affordable to be funded by taxation.
No need for any nonsensical "intellectual property" and also no need for some insane dog-eat-dog, anti-social, psychopatic rendition of Hell under the label of "free-market" either.
You see, capitalist enterprise and communal, societal structures each have their own areas of strength for which they are each far better suited then the other.
Unfortunately some greed motivated people, who see only greed, who act only greed and who think only greed, would like us to belive the set of lies you just enumerated, in hopes of abusing the society around them for their personal profit.
$5?! Try $50 for unlimited data here in Canada, that is what Rogers is milking me for. Otherwise its $.35 per kilobyte.
North America is in stone age when it comes to communication services.
There's billions of dollars in up front costs to build plants, convince part suppliers that you're not going to can the project after 4 years (how good at you in selling services 5 or 10 years out?), invest in R&D, etc. This is a lot more time and money consuming than deciding if you're going to do J2EE or.NET for a particular client.
Which is precisely the reason why I said that I was not in a position to start one. Somebody however keeps conflating my disinterest (and lack of clout in that business) with the general market unworthiness of electric vehicles. As I keep pointing out, the EV1 prototype owners begged to buy those vehicles, some at prices far exceeding the supposed "sale" price the vehicles were supposed to have. That alone should give you indication of the tremendous desirability of such vehicles in many urban marketplaces. The fact that I am not the man to bring them to market, changes none of that.
I never talked about any "eternal" dominance. Mere "temporary" (as measured in years) is enough to cause market distortion and thus have a very negative impact on consumers. Remember, this whole Capitalist show, contrary to its name, is supposed to be all about consumers, not capitalists. The purpose of allowing businesses and capitalists in our social order is to improve lives of average people, not merely to lubricate hoarding of wealth for some few selected individuals. This is the fundamental truth of the system, which, everytime it is swept under the carpet, comes back to bite back with a vengence.
In other words you're a professor that knows how to fix everything but hasn't actually done anything. Sure everything's easy (or everything's a conspiracy to keep the engine part manufacturers in business) when you don't actually have to do it.
I already run a successful IT consulting business. That is how I know how startups look like. Mine was one of them many years ago. But you would have known that if you read my posts instead of rushing to make yourself look idiotic with your unfounded assumptions.
Why should we listen to someone that doesn't want to do it?
Because 99% of human activity is planned and analysed by those who do not actually end up performing the tasks. Architects do not lay mortar. Aircraft designers do not actually rivet the aircraft together, etc. and so on.
You are misconstruding. You assumed that I would be automatically motivated by a prospect of multi-milion revenues, if only I were willing to turn my life upside down, run around begging for money, wreck my health working 120 hour weeks in total stress and do all of the other things someone trying to run a "startup" with 100% of someone elses' money subjects himself to.
Contrary to your assumption, I am not in that rat race. Unlike some others, money is not a primary motivating factor in my life and being comfortable, I see no reason to do engage in such silliness just because it would bring me millions. It might come as a terrible shock to you, but I do not need millions to have a happy life.
This of course has no relationship whatsoever to the profitablity of electric cars.
Of course, I'm sure you would have said exactly this 10 years ago about how, due to the overwhelming barriers to entry created by AOL and Compuserve, no one can compete in the fascist, monopolistic marketplace of the internet.
Internet (heavilly funded by the evil government via DARPA and various other academic projects) was a system completely independent of Compuserve BBS and had nothing to do with it. AOL was busy trying to be an ISP as were thousands of other businesses back then, most of which required no more then $10k in investment to get going.
There would be no way for two, poor college students to create a company that could overtake the evil industrial giants.
The "giants" back then consisted of a single mini-computer attached to a T1 line. The up-front investment required to compete with them was measured in tens of thousands, as opposed to billions of dollars today.
It would take government subsidies, regulation, and the wholesale socialization of the internet to wrest it from the corrupt industrial machine.
Now you are projecting your own fobias onto me. "Regulation" of the internet is the last thing I would suggest.
Just like in ten years you'll be whining about how, whoever has replaced Google, has a lock on the technology and power, and no one can assail them, and we need the government to come in and regulate it to make it fair.
Your anti-government paranoia is showing.
Because we all know how government regulation or operation has improved every aspect of life that it touches. Why look at the great schools, fantastic emergency management, luxurious social retirement, and etc. systems the government has provided for us.
The abysmal performance of the US government services is a rather unique... erhm... "achievment" by your nation amongst all the other industralized countries. Nowhere else one can observe such vast expenditures so cunningly vanishing without providing even a fraction of what all the other governments are providing to their citizens. You have the highly dubious privilege of being an undisputed #1 in this regard. So it does not surprise me much that so much vehement hatred is directed at the said government of yours. We foreigners do also wonder as to what the heck exactly is going on over there.
If you are right, develop a business plan, found a company and build it. If you believe there is a enough of a market to make a profit and can construct a business plan that supports that belief, you will be able to find Venture Capitalists who will put up the money.
That is a really naive way of looking at these things. Billion dollar investments do not happen to anyone but exceedingly well connected people, sometimes by gambling the stock market after spreading incessant hype via a multitude of professional propaganda dispensers (see Google or most of the "dot com" boom). I do not revolve in the right social circles to even begin approaching such a thing. The best I could hope for is a small-time operation doing small production runs for enthusiasts. But I already have a business which occupies my time quite nicely.
No. Where's your proof that enough demand is present? How many electric cars do you think they can sell? 10k? 50k? You have to have a market of 150k a year to start a new line or else the costs associated with it (even the evil marketing ones) make it prohibitable.
Are you serious? Many car brands are very happy if they sell 30k cars of all their models combined a year. The demand is there, far in excess of 10k a year, which should make an entire product line and associated facilites profitable. But an electric car would severly impair other operations in which the major stakeholders of car companies are heavily invested, such as oil, gas stations, periodic maintenance, spare parts (electric cars need much fewer components and no oil changes) etc and so on.
Also where's the infrastructure to handle electric power to cars? There isn't any.
That is the whole point: electric cars need only a tiny fraction of the "infrastructure" of the regular cars. No gas stations (they are charged overnight at home), no oil changes, no radiators, no belts, no sparkplugs etc etc etc.
What if you're on a long trip? This isn't Europe where the next city is 3 miles away, the typical commute here is 30 miles (let me guess, that's another problem that should be fixed in our defunct marketplace).
Electric cars are not intended for that. For long trips you have plains, buses and railways. These cars are strictly for economic commutes, which constitute 90% of car use in most cities.
Everything, except for real estate and collectables, declines in value after purchase. Do you want to buy my 3 year old iBook for the same price I paid for it then?
Only under one of the two conditions: the product is obsolete within weeks (electronics) or it is nearly worhless within weeks (most "consumer" junk people buy). The cars fall into the "nearly worthless" category because of their abysmal quality and predatory pricing by manufacturers (due to their oligopoly status). Land, precious metals and the like are the only items which cannot be poorly made and thus do not immediately lose value on purchase. People are so used to being ripped off by the mindless consumption-driven plastic junk orgy that they are now conditioned to accept 80% loss of value on purchase as "normal". It is really pathetic.
Funny thing is, I remember, way back in the late nineties, when the search engine market was locked up by Yahoo and Alta Vista, and only a fool would try to break in.
AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo etc of the nineties were all Mickey-Mouse operations when compared to Google today. AltaVista run out of a single minicomputer in a single location for example. A T1 line was considered to be a massive pipeline. Most people were on dialup and 56kbaud was "lightning speed". An upfront investment to get a viable (i.e. one that actually responded in less then 5 seconds to a request) search engine going was measured in tens of thousands of dollars, as opposed to billions of dollars today.
The demand is there, sure. For an electric car that gets 400 miles per recharge, recharges in 5 minutes, goes 0-60mph in 8 seconds or less, is the size of an SUV, and is built using materials that are just as strong (and thus, safe in an accident) as its gas-cousins.
For the same price.
Nothing of the sort. People were exceedingly happy with the EV1 prototype, which had none of these characteristics. But because electric cars are economicaly "inconvenient" for the massive car industry conglomerates and the vast networks of co-mingled parts suppliers, oil change shops, gas stations, oil behemoths and what not, who would all suffer disastrous consequeces, they will not be sold.
SO you actually believe that there is a market for a $100,000 electric car
An electric car is (and always was) cheaper to manufacture then a regular one (far less components). The main obstacle was the performance of the battery pack, a limitation which was overcome many years ago. The main reason of the lack of such products is the collusion between car makers, parts suppliers, oil industry and the gas station operators. An electric car would have a devastating effect on most of these operations and thus is not in the interest of the massive car conglomerates. For a practical case in point, check out the history of the EV1 about which whole movies were made. Similar scenarios are applicable to the other types of vehicles I mentioned. The car conglomerates are not truly competing amongst each other and are primarily interested in maintaining the status quo.
FYI: The absence of specific products does not equate to a lack of competition.
Yes it does. If the technology exists and the demand is present, absence of such products is a very good indication of deficiency in competition brought on by a defunct marketplace.
Buy a Honda. If you bother to take care of the thing like you're supposed to it'll last longer than you will.
None of the currently made "economy" vehicles hold up well in prolonged use. All one has to do is to check out the massive decreases in resale value (most are in excess of 50%) on all of them which occurs in just 2-3 years time from purchase.
Well then, show me what are the "barriers to entry" that plague the world of search engines. What stops anyone from putting a website up and providing their own web search/directory service?
Nothing other then a twenty or so thousands servers, distributed in hundreds of co-location centers worldwide and a few petabytes of bandwidth from major ISPs on the globe.
Oh, you meant a garage-based, toy "search" engine with a 128k DSL uplink and 75 websites in its "index". Never mind.
There is good competition in the auto industry at the moment,
You must be joking. What dealership do I go to buy my electric car, for which there is considerable demand? Where do I get my bio-diesel/electric hybrid? How about an in-hub electric motor 4 wheel drive system? Stuff that has been around for decades and for which there would be a 2 year-long waiting list if it were only available from any of the major makers. Give me a break, none of the major, entrenched car makers compete on anything but marketing and manufacturing vehicles that are as cheap as possible to make and last as short a period of time as it is humanly possible while generating maximum after warranty parts demand. The term to use is "oligopoly". In a properly functioning marketplace there would be hundreds of car makers, not less then 10 globally.
Legal barriers to entry cannot be gotten around.
Neither can be geographic. A toll road built in the only valley linking major metropolies is just as difficult to "compete" with as a legal decree. In one case there is next to impossible political power to overcome, in the other a few trillion tons of rock. A conglomerate who manages to purchase all, say, nickel deposits world-wide, is also impossible to compete with. The very simple fact that the deposits accessible to mining (at non-astronomical price) are finite. There is no room to "expand" or to compete. Etc and so on.
Men with guns, that's the difference between a legal barrier to entry and a financial one.
As I pointed out, "financial" is only one of many different types of barriers to entry, of which legal only but one. Most of them are as insurmountable as men with guns.
Google is open to competition at any time, on an equal footing. Buy a domain and enough hosting facilities and you too can index the internet and sell ads, just as they have.
That is not strictly true. The idea that "anyone" can compete with any company on "equal footing" is one of those silly libertarian, "free market cures all" delusions.
In the real world, something called a "barrier to entry" exists for each of competitors in the marketplace. If those barriers are small, competition is usually flourishing and the "free market" functions as intended. Not so if the "barriers" are measured in billions of dollars or political power.
Sometimes those barriers are regulatory and legal in nature, which causes libertarians and "anarcho captialists" to howl and whine about the evils of government.
But more often then not they are based on other factors, such as technological, geographic, geo-politicial and the like. In the case of Google, the company is at this point in time "open" to competition by any Microsoft or Haliburton out there, or any one individual with a few billion dollars to spare on a risky venture. That is because Google has achieved nearly 50% market penetration (compared to 25% of the nearest competitor) and thus wields tremendous power over the marketplace. And that is why socially unjustifiable monopolies or, in this case, oligopolies are a fundamentally bad idea, no matter if their creation is coupled "good intentions" or not.
In short, it is exceedingly foolish to allow any one company to control anything near 50% of the marketplace in any product, for market distortions of massive scale are sure to follow.
Simply put, without big countries there would be no wars.
Countries are simply an institutionalized form of tribalism. In their absence you still get religious warfare, economic warfare, ethnic warfare etc and so on. When hominids were barely off the trees, they immediately self-organized into tribes and proceeded to murder each other over... just about anything. This is the "natural", genetically influenced, animalistic state of affairs. Peace and prosperity on the other hand are something that requires cognitive efforts to overcome these primeval tendencies. The current sorry state of global affairs, a result of millenia of "progress", should give you pretty good idea of the difficulty of that task.
You got it backwards - private trackers enforce sharing, whereas public trackers give no penalties for hit'n'run leeches.
No. Private trackers are designed to restrict sharing to the "in" group. In essence they are the equivalent of private clubs where one needs to know a secret handshake to get in, the whole point of course being to make their vain, empty headed members feel "superior" to all those outside. Sharing is far more efficient when it is wide open to participation, even if there are those who mis-behave. Large redundancy ratios efficiently compensate for any "hit-and-run" leachers. With public trackers the torrents have far longer life spans and far higher overall reliability. That is why the "private" trackers only ever concern themselves with the latest, most popular torrents and quickly abandon anything which is not considered "cool" and "leet" amongst their inane membership.
Slashdot Mirror
And then ...
Dude. You are making a dunce out of yourself in public. In the context of GPU operation, if GPU memory is "virtualised" that means it is mapped into the OS memory areas (since it must be maintained in a persistent state from the perspective of non-directx 10 apps), so that the various applications which attempt to get at the "real" GPU memory can be held off until their "scheduled" time comes up at which time their individual idea of the GPU memory contents is mapped in.
That means that the overall memory usage of the OS is a sum of the GPU memory size allocated by the applications and the OS, with the actual GPU hardware containing the "current" state of the application which happens to be in the foreground. Which means that when you use Aero, the OS uses the GPU fully plus a considerable chunk of OS memory with all those currently "un-scheduled" GPU states.
This of course goes contrary to your premise, that Vista uses memory "efficiently". What is actually happening is that Vista sacrifices memory for virtualization, thus expanding the system memory usage significantly when compared to a pre-Vista situation.
In other words, WhiteWolf666 was quite right, you do not know what you are talking about.
And he forgot:
You: rp... up2... err... ugh...
- From the perspective of capitalism, the only factor of importance is profitability of a business. That means that the business must be nice (or succesfully deceitful) to its customers. How it treats its employees (they might be indentured slaves) or how does it treat its neighbours or environment is irrelevant (because it usually does not impact sales -- sad but true)
- To a socialist, this is unacceptable because such a business is a bad member of the society. The problem is not the "profit" part (or "ownership", or "control" parts) but how does this business go about procuring it. Subsequently socialists will seek to empower the employees (via unions, or regulations or what not) and to restrict the environmental damage (by regulation, taxation penalties and what not). Note that the "control of means of production" is not a part of the equation.
- To a communist the very idea of a "business" run for profit (instead of the benefit of humanity) is abhorrent. Means of production are all "owned" by the workers (meaning all of the workers, not just the ones working in a particular place). A communist society does not feature competition for survival between various worker-controlled factories etc. The idea (a rather naive one) was that the meticulous planning and analysis of needs of the society and allocation of resources will take place of the capitalist-style competition. That is why many of the original communist ideologies involved abolishment of money.
In other words communism and socialism are not just two stops on the same scale, they are two different worldviews, each concerned with different aspect of human behaviour (one with kind, humane society and the other with "ownership" of things, allocation of products etc). Few of the remedies to some of the problems they seek to address can coincide but that is a result of the fact that they both originated as a response to the same defficiencies of industialized societies. Note that communist theoreticians also tended to be socialists since they hoped that their money-less utopia would turn out kind to its members...You are confusing communism with socialism, which only shows how effective the dis-information campaign of the "conservatives" has been over the years. Socialism is merely concerned about organizing things in such a way that some basic functions of society take precedence over personal greed. It is quite possible to have small/medium sized private enterprise in a socialist country, the criterion is not the word "private" but the overall offect on society such operations have. Since gigantic mega-businesses do impact society in significant ways (mostly negatively) that automatically produces a desire to counter-act these activities by the socialists. That is why socialists are likely to be for nationalization of major assets such as natural resources, roads etc. But they will not be so inclined when it comes to bakeries, grocery stores, muffler shops and the like.
Most of the planet, all industrialized OECD countries (minus USA) and 40+ million completely uninsured US citizens disagree.
And so do I.
So much for the "it's been demonstrated" part.
It is only one of the many motivations. As a matter of fact, its status as "the strongest" is purely a function of greed-centered culture which has been carefully constructed and foisted on the general population by those who most benefit from such a scheme.
In contrast, many other equally or more powerful reward mechanisms exist, such as "professional stature" amongst scientists, or acceptance of art for artists and so on. It is what the society deems desirable which becomes the driving force in many people's lives. The desperate attempts to "outdo the Johneses" do not come from any intrinsic functions of the human brain. They do come from the parental behavioural patterns, cultural programming, media, etc and so on. In many other, non-western societies, such external pressures do not exist (or are actually replaced with other schemes) and as the result it becomes more desirable to be "more pious" or have more tatoos or a bigger bone in one's nose. So it is quite possible to construct a culture whereby professional recognition is more important to people then accumulating the most impressive collection of crappy Chinese plastic garbage in the neighbourhood or the most impractical and uneconomical vehicle on the block (whith the expectation of discarding it in 3 years).
While mindless consumption is a good motto for maggots, I persist in hope that humanity is somewhat more astute then that.
Capitalism is supposed to deal only with one aspect of existence of humanity, that is allocation of resources in areas where the resources in question are not fundamental to existence of the society. It is a very simplistic but self-adjusting (on a small scale) system which frees the society from the need of being involved in direct managment of such trivialities as penis enlargement cures and 9-blade razors.
And that is all which capitalism is. A mere tool meant to accomplish one small task of many which any society must address. Unfortunately some misguided (and usually supremely greedy and self-centered individuals) seem to preceive some tenets of capitalism as holy dictums and demand that all restrictions be removed from their deity and that blood sacrifices be made to it so that they can hoard things more effectively, usually at the expense of their very neighbours.
This aspect of capitalism, the supposed "meritocratic" function of it, is only present in small scale capitalist endavours. Adam Smith clearly foresaw that in order for his "meritocracy" to function, many conditions must be met, such as: consumers being completely informed about the relative merits of the products they buy and thus being able to make rational decisions, the size of the businesses being small enough that a large number of them competes in every business category and every product or service, and that none of these individually or in a group can collude to create a market distortion which would render competition between them unnecessary, etc. and so on. None of which conditions are of course met today. Add to this the fact that vast fortunes make accumulation of even more vast fortunes easier
Ah so you mean this whole "capitalism" thing is a mere charade and this "competition" hype is just a ruse. In the "real libertarian world" enterpreneurs do not get out of bed for less than a million dollars. It would certainly explain the recent pay expectations by all those "hard working" CEOs, wouldn't it?
Poor Adam Smith. The dude was talking about small-time companies making "mouse traps". Little did he know ....
No it is fine for any country with just a hint of an inkling of an idea of what this whole concept of a "country" or a "society" is all about. Any "country" who lets millions of its citizens die tortuous deaths because they failed to accumulate the necessary funds to participate in your perverted idea of a "free market" (where all the beneficiaries are foreign) is not a "country" but a disguisting heaven for thugs and mass-murdering thieves. And any denizens of that kind of place who do not proceed to capture and execute the said thugs in charge are simply getting what they deserve: words of "A victim of a free market" engraved on their children's graves.
But of course.
It is called "publicly funded research". People pay taxes, out of which academia is funded, whereby researchers work for the public good developing cures and technologies. (Note also that you managed to repeat the ever-popular "free-market" fundamentalist zealot lie that there is "no incentive without profit", to which one can only respond with inquiries about the size of Albert Einstein's castle and the number of bedrooms in his 300-footer 'yacht', surely?)
Then, since all of the fruits of the academic's labours are in the public domain, private enterprises proceed to do what they are best at, that is fiercely competing at manufacturing, distribution, sales and what not. Or in the case of Indonesia, a local government-owned manufacturer providing vaccines as required in that society, at a cost locally affordable to be funded by taxation.
No need for any nonsensical "intellectual property" and also no need for some insane dog-eat-dog, anti-social, psychopatic rendition of Hell under the label of "free-market" either.
You see, capitalist enterprise and communal, societal structures each have their own areas of strength for which they are each far better suited then the other.
Unfortunately some greed motivated people, who see only greed, who act only greed and who think only greed, would like us to belive the set of lies you just enumerated, in hopes of abusing the society around them for their personal profit.
Which is precisely the reason why I said that I was not in a position to start one. Somebody however keeps conflating my disinterest (and lack of clout in that business) with the general market unworthiness of electric vehicles. As I keep pointing out, the EV1 prototype owners begged to buy those vehicles, some at prices far exceeding the supposed "sale" price the vehicles were supposed to have. That alone should give you indication of the tremendous desirability of such vehicles in many urban marketplaces. The fact that I am not the man to bring them to market, changes none of that.
I never talked about any "eternal" dominance. Mere "temporary" (as measured in years) is enough to cause market distortion and thus have a very negative impact on consumers. Remember, this whole Capitalist show, contrary to its name, is supposed to be all about consumers, not capitalists. The purpose of allowing businesses and capitalists in our social order is to improve lives of average people, not merely to lubricate hoarding of wealth for some few selected individuals. This is the fundamental truth of the system, which, everytime it is swept under the carpet, comes back to bite back with a vengence.
I already run a successful IT consulting business. That is how I know how startups look like. Mine was one of them many years ago. But you would have known that if you read my posts instead of rushing to make yourself look idiotic with your unfounded assumptions.
Because 99% of human activity is planned and analysed by those who do not actually end up performing the tasks. Architects do not lay mortar. Aircraft designers do not actually rivet the aircraft together, etc. and so on.
You are misconstruding. You assumed that I would be automatically motivated by a prospect of multi-milion revenues, if only I were willing to turn my life upside down, run around begging for money, wreck my health working 120 hour weeks in total stress and do all of the other things someone trying to run a "startup" with 100% of someone elses' money subjects himself to.
Contrary to your assumption, I am not in that rat race. Unlike some others, money is not a primary motivating factor in my life and being comfortable, I see no reason to do engage in such silliness just because it would bring me millions. It might come as a terrible shock to you, but I do not need millions to have a happy life.
This of course has no relationship whatsoever to the profitablity of electric cars.
Internet (heavilly funded by the evil government via DARPA and various other academic projects) was a system completely independent of Compuserve BBS and had nothing to do with it. AOL was busy trying to be an ISP as were thousands of other businesses back then, most of which required no more then $10k in investment to get going.
The "giants" back then consisted of a single mini-computer attached to a T1 line. The up-front investment required to compete with them was measured in tens of thousands, as opposed to billions of dollars today.
Now you are projecting your own fobias onto me. "Regulation" of the internet is the last thing I would suggest.
Your anti-government paranoia is showing.
The abysmal performance of the US government services is a rather unique ... erhm ... "achievment" by your nation amongst all the other industralized countries. Nowhere else one can observe such vast expenditures so cunningly vanishing without providing even a fraction of what all the other governments are providing to their citizens. You have the highly dubious privilege of being an undisputed #1 in this regard. So it does not surprise me much that so much vehement hatred is directed at the said government of yours. We foreigners do also wonder as to what the heck exactly is going on over there.
That is a really naive way of looking at these things. Billion dollar investments do not happen to anyone but exceedingly well connected people, sometimes by gambling the stock market after spreading incessant hype via a multitude of professional propaganda dispensers (see Google or most of the "dot com" boom). I do not revolve in the right social circles to even begin approaching such a thing. The best I could hope for is a small-time operation doing small production runs for enthusiasts. But I already have a business which occupies my time quite nicely.
Are you serious? Many car brands are very happy if they sell 30k cars of all their models combined a year. The demand is there, far in excess of 10k a year, which should make an entire product line and associated facilites profitable. But an electric car would severly impair other operations in which the major stakeholders of car companies are heavily invested, such as oil, gas stations, periodic maintenance, spare parts (electric cars need much fewer components and no oil changes) etc and so on.
That is the whole point: electric cars need only a tiny fraction of the "infrastructure" of the regular cars. No gas stations (they are charged overnight at home), no oil changes, no radiators, no belts, no sparkplugs etc etc etc.
Electric cars are not intended for that. For long trips you have plains, buses and railways. These cars are strictly for economic commutes, which constitute 90% of car use in most cities.
Only under one of the two conditions: the product is obsolete within weeks (electronics) or it is nearly worhless within weeks (most "consumer" junk people buy). The cars fall into the "nearly worthless" category because of their abysmal quality and predatory pricing by manufacturers (due to their oligopoly status). Land, precious metals and the like are the only items which cannot be poorly made and thus do not immediately lose value on purchase. People are so used to being ripped off by the mindless consumption-driven plastic junk orgy that they are now conditioned to accept 80% loss of value on purchase as "normal". It is really pathetic.
That was in the days when a "big" search engine consisted of a minicomputer attached to a T1 line (see AltaVista).
AltaVista, Lycos, Yahoo etc of the nineties were all Mickey-Mouse operations when compared to Google today. AltaVista run out of a single minicomputer in a single location for example. A T1 line was considered to be a massive pipeline. Most people were on dialup and 56kbaud was "lightning speed". An upfront investment to get a viable (i.e. one that actually responded in less then 5 seconds to a request) search engine going was measured in tens of thousands of dollars, as opposed to billions of dollars today.
Nothing of the sort. People were exceedingly happy with the EV1 prototype, which had none of these characteristics. But because electric cars are economicaly "inconvenient" for the massive car industry conglomerates and the vast networks of co-mingled parts suppliers, oil change shops, gas stations, oil behemoths and what not, who would all suffer disastrous consequeces, they will not be sold.
An electric car is (and always was) cheaper to manufacture then a regular one (far less components). The main obstacle was the performance of the battery pack, a limitation which was overcome many years ago. The main reason of the lack of such products is the collusion between car makers, parts suppliers, oil industry and the gas station operators. An electric car would have a devastating effect on most of these operations and thus is not in the interest of the massive car conglomerates. For a practical case in point, check out the history of the EV1 about which whole movies were made. Similar scenarios are applicable to the other types of vehicles I mentioned. The car conglomerates are not truly competing amongst each other and are primarily interested in maintaining the status quo.
Yes it does. If the technology exists and the demand is present, absence of such products is a very good indication of deficiency in competition brought on by a defunct marketplace.
None of the currently made "economy" vehicles hold up well in prolonged use. All one has to do is to check out the massive decreases in resale value (most are in excess of 50%) on all of them which occurs in just 2-3 years time from purchase.
Nothing other then a twenty or so thousands servers, distributed in hundreds of co-location centers worldwide and a few petabytes of bandwidth from major ISPs on the globe.
Oh, you meant a garage-based, toy "search" engine with a 128k DSL uplink and 75 websites in its "index". Never mind.
You must be joking. What dealership do I go to buy my electric car, for which there is considerable demand? Where do I get my bio-diesel/electric hybrid? How about an in-hub electric motor 4 wheel drive system? Stuff that has been around for decades and for which there would be a 2 year-long waiting list if it were only available from any of the major makers. Give me a break, none of the major, entrenched car makers compete on anything but marketing and manufacturing vehicles that are as cheap as possible to make and last as short a period of time as it is humanly possible while generating maximum after warranty parts demand. The term to use is "oligopoly". In a properly functioning marketplace there would be hundreds of car makers, not less then 10 globally.
Neither can be geographic. A toll road built in the only valley linking major metropolies is just as difficult to "compete" with as a legal decree. In one case there is next to impossible political power to overcome, in the other a few trillion tons of rock. A conglomerate who manages to purchase all, say, nickel deposits world-wide, is also impossible to compete with. The very simple fact that the deposits accessible to mining (at non-astronomical price) are finite. There is no room to "expand" or to compete. Etc and so on.
As I pointed out, "financial" is only one of many different types of barriers to entry, of which legal only but one. Most of them are as insurmountable as men with guns.
That is not strictly true. The idea that "anyone" can compete with any company on "equal footing" is one of those silly libertarian, "free market cures all" delusions.
In the real world, something called a "barrier to entry" exists for each of competitors in the marketplace. If those barriers are small, competition is usually flourishing and the "free market" functions as intended. Not so if the "barriers" are measured in billions of dollars or political power.
Sometimes those barriers are regulatory and legal in nature, which causes libertarians and "anarcho captialists" to howl and whine about the evils of government.
But more often then not they are based on other factors, such as technological, geographic, geo-politicial and the like. In the case of Google, the company is at this point in time "open" to competition by any Microsoft or Haliburton out there, or any one individual with a few billion dollars to spare on a risky venture. That is because Google has achieved nearly 50% market penetration (compared to 25% of the nearest competitor) and thus wields tremendous power over the marketplace. And that is why socially unjustifiable monopolies or, in this case, oligopolies are a fundamentally bad idea, no matter if their creation is coupled "good intentions" or not.
In short, it is exceedingly foolish to allow any one company to control anything near 50% of the marketplace in any product, for market distortions of massive scale are sure to follow.
Countries are simply an institutionalized form of tribalism. In their absence you still get religious warfare, economic warfare, ethnic warfare etc and so on. When hominids were barely off the trees, they immediately self-organized into tribes and proceeded to murder each other over ... just about anything. This is the "natural", genetically influenced, animalistic state of affairs. Peace and prosperity on the other hand are something that requires cognitive efforts to overcome these primeval tendencies. The current sorry state of global affairs, a result of millenia of "progress", should give you pretty good idea of the difficulty of that task.
No. Private trackers are designed to restrict sharing to the "in" group. In essence they are the equivalent of private clubs where one needs to know a secret handshake to get in, the whole point of course being to make their vain, empty headed members feel "superior" to all those outside. Sharing is far more efficient when it is wide open to participation, even if there are those who mis-behave. Large redundancy ratios efficiently compensate for any "hit-and-run" leachers. With public trackers the torrents have far longer life spans and far higher overall reliability. That is why the "private" trackers only ever concern themselves with the latest, most popular torrents and quickly abandon anything which is not considered "cool" and "leet" amongst their inane membership.