When the cellphone companies bid for spectrum, it was on the basis of their projected income. Given free texts, their projected income would have been lower, so they would have bid less. There's no opportunity to "recover the cost", since the amount bid was based upon revenue-maximising charges in any case. Charging more for a call would get the companies less revenue, rather than more.
Result: Call charges wouldn't be much different than they are now.
The bidding process means that the government has ripped off the customer by proxy, and any mandated limitations would have saved the customer at the government's expense. The cellphone companies wouldn't have seen much difference.
Certainly there's an argument in terms of corporate freedom for the government not placing such conditions of licence, but it's not one of customer interest.
Perhaps the better plan would have been to forgo bidding, and allocate spectrum, so that the parties involved would have had breathing space in which to compete.
Where I live (Cambridge), voting Tory could easily let the Labour candidate back in. Furthermore, our MP is very strong on civil liberties. Imperfect, to be sure (I disagree with the utilitarian strain of liberalism that leads to such things as the smoking ban), but unlikely to be easily improved upon, even if the Tory did get in, since it would be difficult to beat a law scholar who care about civil liberties in efficacy.
Apart from the special case of Cambridge, that Lib Dems are typically strong on civil liberties must mean that if this is an issue of importance for you, you should be willing to hold your nose to vote for them if it's appropriate in your constituency. Of course, the same reasoning applies in reverse to those places where the Lib Dems are weaker than the Tories.
There is, however an upper limit on the vote available to the Tories: some people feel that they simply cannot vote for them. Accordingly where the support for Lib Dems and Tories are similar, a vote for the Lib Dems will be more likely to succeed. Realistically speaking, intent to vote Conservative is felt by borderline LD/Labour voters, so that they shrink from voting Lib Dem in order to 'keep the Tories out'.
The question here is about what it is reasonable for the certificating authority to do given a piece of code, rather than what it is reasonable for a programmer to do. Certainly, the argument for the fee may still hold, but the license requirement must be bias, since to oppose the GPL is to state that the GPL model intrisically yields poor code.
Of course the programmer can choose another license, but to require that of the programmer can only be a special interest. If this were made law, it would be a clear instance of 'regulatory capture'.
Unfortunately for the author, this sequence of events does not show that false facts get established as truth, for the simple reason that your name is the name that you use.
"Property" addles the brain. Also, universities don't see their mission as helping the economy, so acts on their part which harm the formation of wealth are fine, as long as their research is protected.
Government, however, should know better. But there, lawyers (such as most politicians) make the decisions, and law is centred around property (well, '9/10'ths of it is). Lawyers are often constitutionally incapable of comprehending how certain forms of "intellectual property" are counterproductive. Besides, politicians frequently confuse economics and finance, and are under constant pressure to reduce costs, rather than maximise productivity.
Additionally, in terms of American politics, universities are expected to do what they can with their own "assets" according to industry norms; to do otherwise would seem "socialist". Ironically, this attitude results in a branch of the state owning wealth-creating ideas and effectively taxing them twice (once to use the idea, once with the profits made from the idea).
This attitude on the part of Government isn't exclusive to the US. In my home city of Cambridge, UK, the university fought Government pressure to claim patent rights over student and staff discoveries. Here, ownership of one's ideas has had a long history. In the end some compromise (generous licence terms) was found, but the Government truly do not understand the harm that it is causing - ultimately to its own tax revenue.
So says everyone, but why were the numbers so different before?
Who actually gets to see the 'C' code, and at what age?
Why are the girls different? Is that nature or nurture?
It is notable that more and more girls go on to take mathematics at uni. How does that fit assumptions of natural appeal?
I would suggest that the difference with mathematics is that neither sex can avoid it until it's too late - peer pressure and expectations have already been overcome. By contrast there is basically no programming in most childrens' education.
You cannot tell people's natural aptitude and future motivation "just by looking" when their current motivation is so coloured by other factors. That so many people (especially teachers) believe otherwise is one of the big reasons for the sheer degree of current disparaties.
I'm not claiming that there are no natural disparaties; I am only seeking to explain why the ratio used to be different to what it is now.
So my Commodore Vic-20 isn't still the hottest machine around?
Computers used to be learning machines, not business machines; you used to be able to get your first taste for programming with:
10 print "Hello" 20 goto 10
There you immediately knew whether you had a taste for programming. Nowadays you need a 'C' compiler, and your first program is:
#include <stdio.h> int main() {
printf("Hello world\n");
return (0); }
Then you can't just run it, you first need to compile it.
You might be wondering what my point is. Surely, it's just as hard for boys to overcome such barriers to entry as it is for girls? Well, actually no. Before it was easy for just about anyone to try their hand at programming. Now someone needs to make a decision, and put some work into it. How you you know that it's something that you might want to do? Well, to a first approximation, you look to what your peers are doing, and what's cool with them, unless you're very nerdy indeed.
The barrier to entry is such that girls need to overcome social pressure, while boys are at least to some extent supported by social pressure. Without this barrier to entry, such social pressure is irrelevant.
The poor idiot starving masses you mean. Looking for a job is a full time job in itself (and actually is more labor intensive than actually having a job, in many cases, especially in IT). If you have nothing better to do while being unemployed, you deserve to starve.
Sometimes it's worth taking on a project for the same reason that one goes on training courses. Doing your project could arguably be better than anything else (including searching for work) after the first 'n' hours. There is literally nothing better to do.
What happens if you turn up for interview and you've forgotten some important aspect of coding because you've only been focused upon looking for work?
Just wondering. Given your aversion to anything with an indirect benefit, claiming that people who take that approach "deserve to starve", are you in management?
The GP is more right than you think for one simple reason: economists are not employed by everyman and woman.
Economists either work for the private sector, or for government. Neither is especially interested in you looking after your own kid. For the private sector, there's no profit in it; for the government, there's no tax revenue. Both private sector and state policy are therefore aligned with what the GP attributes to "economics".
You are of course right in the strict sense of economics as an academic discipline.
I was trying, in a clumsy way, to point out that anyone who still believes that a "free market" is going to help us in any way is way off base.
I don't know. Bankruptcy for these institutions is making a lot of sense to me right now. Bail out the depositors, to be sure; stage the bailout is there's an inflationary risk. But the banks themselves? No welfare for them!
Check out my latest journal entry if you think that I believe in the status quo.
There are positions more subtle than "everything is right" or "everything is wrong" with the marketplace. The mechanism for arbitage is simple, and the short seller who gets it wrong loses out. I suppose that your answer is that if the price is too high, well. It should stay there!
So many folks are blaming the banks woes on short-sellers, but why are banks having to pay attention to something as ephemeral as share price in any case? Surely it's cash-flow and the state of their books that counts. The existing state of regulation is barmy.
Keep in mind the quote was brief and may have been taken out of context. He may have just been talking about the motivation of the pro-buisiness lobbyists.
Perhaps the quote was deliberately ironic. The ideologically blinded would get the exoteric message, and those with some sense of what they're meant to be doing would get the deeper message.
One way of looking at it is that the industry interests cancel out, so why not look at the interests of the people?
I find it amusing that politicians always appear to look to how to keep things overpriced and scarce: surely the opposite of value creation!
And, since there were more than 3x as many Democrats in the pool as Republicans, I would assume that many of the "Independents" were also left-leaning. For whatever reason, apparently "economist" is a field that attracts liberals.
It's entirely possible that the field makes liberals instead of attracting them. I suspect that the important factor is less "being an economist" than being an academic. Non-academic types go into industry, and (I'd imagine) would be more likely to be rightists.
One other factor: the economic mode of analysis encourages nonjudgementalism regarding individual decision-making, so I suspect that economists would tend to be socially liberal, whatever their fiscial position.
The one fact that jumped out at me though was the lack of correlation between the economists' view on taxation and their own income. This single fact mutes my own cynicism.
Unless a post is hilarious, a Funny mod is worth basically -½, since sense of humour varies, and someone else is likely to mark the post -1 Overrated. They might, or might not, depending upon whether the post is funnier on the initial rater's clock, or the modder's.
This is true even is one is the first moderator and others push it up to an equilibrium, since the poster will be short of a point of Karma at any given level of moderation.
Funny should therefore be used ironically. For example, where someone has a hilarious and outrageous political opinion that one would not wish to reward. To act in any other way, one would have to be confident that funny mods would at least insulate against downmods, even if they didn't bring Karma in their own right.
Personally, I agree that funny shouldn't bring Karma unless the post gets to +5, whereupon it is worth a single point. But then, funny mods shouldn't cost any Karma either.
*?!#ing unicode. Well,/. should cope, just as it should understand the <p/> tag. I don't feel like fixing it.
You may not write any data to the drive or disassemble the drive.
So you're not allowed to (for example) exploit redundancy or error checking on the drive itself? If dd wrote zeros, that's what'll be read unles you can get "lower" than normal drive access.
This challenge has nothing to do with the security of your wipe. Rather, it has everything to do with dd successfully writing zeros given normal access.
What do you do in places that don't have sufficient wind for wind power?
Those who do pump water uphill; those who don't, take what they need from said body of water.
Hydroelectric isn't the flavour de jour, but is notable for having the opposite qualities from those of windpower, in that it is able to manage variable demand extremely well, and absorb surpluses on the grid.
I notice that they haven't even linked the blog directly.
Does anyone care about the stories, or it it just "another libertarian story that they'll love"?
Granted, it wasn't hard to click through from the article, but it's not as if blogspot as going to get slashdotted, and free speech needs examples, not just meta-waffling.
Slashdot Mirror
5 years hell. Now come all the appeals. Is he out on bail?
This is money we're talking about. That makes for a looong sentence.
Now if he'd killed someone, you'd be right.
Your post is far too meta, 'though you're spot on.
This one has no chance!
When the cellphone companies bid for spectrum, it was on the basis of their projected income. Given free texts, their projected income would have been lower, so they would have bid less. There's no opportunity to "recover the cost", since the amount bid was based upon revenue-maximising charges in any case. Charging more for a call would get the companies less revenue, rather than more.
Result: Call charges wouldn't be much different than they are now.
The bidding process means that the government has ripped off the customer by proxy, and any mandated limitations would have saved the customer at the government's expense. The cellphone companies wouldn't have seen much difference.
Certainly there's an argument in terms of corporate freedom for the government not placing such conditions of licence, but it's not one of customer interest.
Perhaps the better plan would have been to forgo bidding, and allocate spectrum, so that the parties involved would have had breathing space in which to compete.
Where I live (Cambridge), voting Tory could easily let the Labour candidate back in. Furthermore, our MP is very strong on civil liberties. Imperfect, to be sure (I disagree with the utilitarian strain of liberalism that leads to such things as the smoking ban), but unlikely to be easily improved upon, even if the Tory did get in, since it would be difficult to beat a law scholar who care about civil liberties in efficacy.
Apart from the special case of Cambridge, that Lib Dems are typically strong on civil liberties must mean that if this is an issue of importance for you, you should be willing to hold your nose to vote for them if it's appropriate in your constituency. Of course, the same reasoning applies in reverse to those places where the Lib Dems are weaker than the Tories.
There is, however an upper limit on the vote available to the Tories: some people feel that they simply cannot vote for them. Accordingly where the support for Lib Dems and Tories are similar, a vote for the Lib Dems will be more likely to succeed. Realistically speaking, intent to vote Conservative is felt by borderline LD/Labour voters, so that they shrink from voting Lib Dem in order to 'keep the Tories out'.
The question here is about what it is reasonable for the certificating authority to do given a piece of code, rather than what it is reasonable for a programmer to do. Certainly, the argument for the fee may still hold, but the license requirement must be bias, since to oppose the GPL is to state that the GPL model intrisically yields poor code.
Of course the programmer can choose another license, but to require that of the programmer can only be a special interest. If this were made law, it would be a clear instance of 'regulatory capture'.
Unfortunately for the author, this sequence of events does not show that false facts get established as truth, for the simple reason that your name is the name that you use.
*pop* goes the entire basis for the article.
"Property" addles the brain. Also, universities don't see their mission as helping the economy, so acts on their part which harm the formation of wealth are fine, as long as their research is protected.
Government, however, should know better. But there, lawyers (such as most politicians) make the decisions, and law is centred around property (well, '9/10'ths of it is). Lawyers are often constitutionally incapable of comprehending how certain forms of "intellectual property" are counterproductive. Besides, politicians frequently confuse economics and finance, and are under constant pressure to reduce costs, rather than maximise productivity.
Additionally, in terms of American politics, universities are expected to do what they can with their own "assets" according to industry norms; to do otherwise would seem "socialist". Ironically, this attitude results in a branch of the state owning wealth-creating ideas and effectively taxing them twice (once to use the idea, once with the profits made from the idea).
This attitude on the part of Government isn't exclusive to the US. In my home city of Cambridge, UK, the university fought Government pressure to claim patent rights over student and staff discoveries. Here, ownership of one's ideas has had a long history. In the end some compromise (generous licence terms) was found, but the Government truly do not understand the harm that it is causing - ultimately to its own tax revenue.
A great variant, I have to say, on "Some are born posthumously", Ecce Homo.
http://www.answers.com/topic/instant-coffee-1
As an owner of a Rancilio Silvia, I find that link in equal parts fascinating and horrifying.
So says everyone, but why were the numbers so different before?
Who actually gets to see the 'C' code, and at what age?
Why are the girls different? Is that nature or nurture?
It is notable that more and more girls go on to take mathematics at uni. How does that fit assumptions of natural appeal?
I would suggest that the difference with mathematics is that neither sex can avoid it until it's too late - peer pressure and expectations have already been overcome. By contrast there is basically no programming in most childrens' education.
You cannot tell people's natural aptitude and future motivation "just by looking" when their current motivation is so coloured by other factors. That so many people (especially teachers) believe otherwise is one of the big reasons for the sheer degree of current disparaties.
I'm not claiming that there are no natural disparaties; I am only seeking to explain why the ratio used to be different to what it is now.
So my Commodore Vic-20 isn't still the hottest machine around?
Computers used to be learning machines, not business machines; you used to be able to get your first taste for programming with:
There you immediately knew whether you had a taste for programming. Nowadays you need a 'C' compiler, and your first program is:
Then you can't just run it, you first need to compile it.
You might be wondering what my point is. Surely, it's just as hard for boys to overcome such barriers to entry as it is for girls? Well, actually no. Before it was easy for just about anyone to try their hand at programming. Now someone needs to make a decision, and put some work into it. How you you know that it's something that you might want to do? Well, to a first approximation, you look to what your peers are doing, and what's cool with them, unless you're very nerdy indeed.
The barrier to entry is such that girls need to overcome social pressure, while boys are at least to some extent supported by social pressure. Without this barrier to entry, such social pressure is irrelevant.
"Azureus" (which is a made up word).
Nope. It's a blue poison dart frog, hence the logo.
The poor idiot starving masses you mean. Looking for a job is a full time job in itself (and actually is more labor intensive than actually having a job, in many cases, especially in IT). If you have nothing better to do while being unemployed, you deserve to starve.
Sometimes it's worth taking on a project for the same reason that one goes on training courses. Doing your project could arguably be better than anything else (including searching for work) after the first 'n' hours. There is literally nothing better to do.
What happens if you turn up for interview and you've forgotten some important aspect of coding because you've only been focused upon looking for work?
Just wondering. Given your aversion to anything with an indirect benefit, claiming that people who take that approach "deserve to starve", are you in management?
The GP is more right than you think for one simple reason: economists are not employed by everyman and woman.
Economists either work for the private sector, or for government. Neither is especially interested in you looking after your own kid. For the private sector, there's no profit in it; for the government, there's no tax revenue. Both private sector and state policy are therefore aligned with what the GP attributes to "economics".
You are of course right in the strict sense of economics as an academic discipline.
I was trying, in a clumsy way, to point out that anyone who still believes that a "free market" is going to help us in any way is way off base.
I don't know. Bankruptcy for these institutions is making a lot of sense to me right now. Bail out the depositors, to be sure; stage the bailout is there's an inflationary risk. But the banks themselves? No welfare for them!
Check out my latest journal entry if you think that I believe in the status quo.
There are positions more subtle than "everything is right" or "everything is wrong" with the marketplace. The mechanism for arbitage is simple, and the short seller who gets it wrong loses out. I suppose that your answer is that if the price is too high, well. It should stay there!
So many folks are blaming the banks woes on short-sellers, but why are banks having to pay attention to something as ephemeral as share price in any case? Surely it's cash-flow and the state of their books that counts. The existing state of regulation is barmy.
You got your easy mod points I see. Well done.
Cashing in on market inefficiency is the antithesis of capitalism.
Conventional shorting is just a form of arbitage in time. "Cashing in on market inefficiency" actually corrects that inefficiency.
Keep in mind the quote was brief and may have been taken out of context. He may have just been talking about the motivation of the pro-buisiness lobbyists.
Perhaps the quote was deliberately ironic. The ideologically blinded would get the exoteric message, and those with some sense of what they're meant to be doing would get the deeper message.
One way of looking at it is that the industry interests cancel out, so why not look at the interests of the people?
I find it amusing that politicians always appear to look to how to keep things overpriced and scarce: surely the opposite of value creation!
And, since there were more than 3x as many Democrats in the pool as Republicans, I would assume that many of the "Independents" were also left-leaning. For whatever reason, apparently "economist" is a field that attracts liberals.
It's entirely possible that the field makes liberals instead of attracting them. I suspect that the important factor is less "being an economist" than being an academic. Non-academic types go into industry, and (I'd imagine) would be more likely to be rightists.
One other factor: the economic mode of analysis encourages nonjudgementalism regarding individual decision-making, so I suspect that economists would tend to be socially liberal, whatever their fiscial position.
The one fact that jumped out at me though was the lack of correlation between the economists' view on taxation and their own income. This single fact mutes my own cynicism.
Someone else mark this funny, please!
Unless a post is hilarious, a Funny mod is worth basically -½, since sense of humour varies, and someone else is likely to mark the post -1 Overrated. They might, or might not, depending upon whether the post is funnier on the initial rater's clock, or the modder's.
This is true even is one is the first moderator and others push it up to an equilibrium, since the poster will be short of a point of Karma at any given level of moderation.
Funny should therefore be used ironically. For example, where someone has a hilarious and outrageous political opinion that one would not wish to reward. To act in any other way, one would have to be confident that funny mods would at least insulate against downmods, even if they didn't bring Karma in their own right.
Personally, I agree that funny shouldn't bring Karma unless the post gets to +5, whereupon it is worth a single point. But then, funny mods shouldn't cost any Karma either.
*?!#ing unicode. Well, /. should cope, just as it should understand the <p/> tag. I don't feel like fixing it.
So you're not allowed to (for example) exploit redundancy or error checking on the drive itself? If dd wrote zeros, that's what'll be read unles you can get "lower" than normal drive access.
This challenge has nothing to do with the security of your wipe. Rather, it has everything to do with dd successfully writing zeros given normal access.
What do you do in places that don't have sufficient wind for wind power?
Those who do pump water uphill; those who don't, take what they need from said body of water.
Hydroelectric isn't the flavour de jour, but is notable for having the opposite qualities from those of windpower, in that it is able to manage variable demand extremely well, and absorb surpluses on the grid.
mmmm meta-waffle
do they come with irony icing and sarcasm syrup?
Absolutely. If the link had been there, my post would have had no reason d'etre!
Bleh - no UTF-8 support :o(
I notice that they haven't even linked the blog directly.
Does anyone care about the stories, or it it just "another libertarian story that they'll love"?
Granted, it wasn't hard to click through from the article, but it's not as if blogspot as going to get slashdotted, and free speech needs examples, not just meta-waffling.
I get this on my command-line:
Web 2.0
^W: Web
^W:
The GGP might only be describing his own system, but he isn't trolling.
My geek licence, BTW; I should have realised that not all systems are the same in this regard.