The number of injuries/deaths in the nuclear power industry, per year, is small compared to other power industries
As an ex-NukeE and the son of an ex-NukeE, let me qualify that for you: the United States nuclear power industry has a good safety record overall; Chernobyl put a nasty blip in the international stats, and we'll never know the exact death count.
TMI, on the other hand, went quite well overall, aside from trashing a several hundred million dollar toy. The US has lost a few people over the years... and mostly learned from the mistakes so that it stayed only a few.
I, Robot didn't suck. It just had absolutly nothing to do with the book. I bet your opinion of it would be a lot higher if they had stuck with the original title, "Hardwired".
Yes, our opinion would be different if they had refrained from RAPING ASIMOV'S CORPSE!
That's going a little too far. While I'd agree the movie is a travesty demonstrating that Hollywood is hard pressed to produce even one new idea in almost a hundred years, some of the dangers the movie obsessed over were at least hinted at in Asimov's works. That there is some gold dust sprinkled on, however, does not change that what you have stepped in is primarily a turd. If they had left the original "Hardwired" title in, and yanked the attempts to exploit Asimov's name, it would merely be bad; if such had been offered on DVD free with a box of cereal, I'd have bought the box provided I wasn't allergic to the cereal. (Five brand name candidates, last I counted.)
As is... I took different measures.
Then again, I haven't seen it
Given my respect for film, I didn't want to trash the movie without seeing it. On the other hand, if it was as bad as reported, I didn't want any of my money going anywhere near the people responsible. So when the DVD came out, for my first and only time for a Hollywood release, I downloaded BitTorrent, found a pirate torrent, and tied up my DSL for two days. If it was any good, I would have bought it. After watching it, I deleted it. I have better uses for the 5GB of storage.
Having seen it, the only reason I feel that the time spent watching it was not completely wasted is that I can say with a clear concience: It is a Piece of Crap; Someone Please Buy Harlan Ellison The Movie Rights.
The HHGTTG movie sounds bad, but not that bad. I might catch a matinee... but I'll bring a towel to wrap around my head, just in case it's worse than I expect.
Any switch will do, so long as it runs the Cisco IOS--because that's what our support is trained and experienced with; and if we can get Cisco to support it--because we have used Cisco support, and they are reliable, fast, and knowledgeable.
So, the real spec to keep both the techs and the beaureacrats happy would be: any switch that (1) either is compatible with the existing skills base, or where the vendor will provide full retraining for current personnel, and hire bonded temp contractors certified for the current gear to cover the retraining period, and (2) will match various benchmarks of Cisco support.
Possibly useful for including in support benchmarks if verifiable, an anecdote about Cisco's support via FoaFoaF:
Immediately after an unrelated crisis required him to pull two consecutive all-nighters, some poor techie had yet another a major problem, this time involving an exotic bug in Cisco IOS somehow hosing the network, leading for him to have to pull yet another all-nighter. This leads to a long night on the phone with the Cisco support techs, while they isolate the cause and try various workarounds while they prepare a custom patch to fix it. So about 1AM, waiting for the custom bug-patched IOS to finish downloading over dialup modem, he puts his head down while talking to the tech.... and wakes up to hear "Hello? Hello? Are you awake again?"
It's 7AM; he fell asleep with the phone handset as a pillow. But Cisco support policy explicitly forbids their techs to EVER be the ones to hang up on a support call, NO MATTER WHAT. So, after a few minutes trying to wake him, the techs decided he really needed the sleep; they put him on speakerphone, and had someone check back every 15 minutes or so to ask if he had woken back up.
The bug fix worked. So did the customer service. You'd need at least eight pro linebackers to drag him away from his Cisco support contract now. Foolhardy ones at that.
Barry Longyear did a much better job with the concept in his 1979 novelette "The Homecoming," included in his magnificient collection It Came From Schenectady and later expanded to a full stand-alone novel. Mind you, I think "The House of If" and the haunting "Collector's Item" are better examples of his work, but he executed the dinosaur idea competently enough.
Star Trek's main strength is its willingness to unabashedly steal the best material in science fiction and adapt it. It's main weakness is that it the writers (or perhaps their editors) are often such incompetent thieves.
That did occur to me just before I posted. Obviously didn't stop me...
Also, the Slashcode has inserted spaces as the 49th character in each data line, which does rather render the UUE much less coherent than it ought to be. However, I'm not feeling motivated enough to recompile my uuencode command with a non-default line length, especially as many (crappy (Windows)) versions of UUdecode get pissy when you do that to their input. If you manually remove those extra spaces from the input, it actually does decode. Someone want to post a perl script for that?
But in essence these are bargain-bin sales, where the labels and retailers are simply trying to recoup some revenue from physical inventory they have sitting around gathering dust.
Agreed; but with on-line sales, this has the potential to be a major source of revenue. I refer you to Wired's excellent article about the "Long Tail", which was previously covered in Slashdot. Without spending a lot of time, I would trust that the implications of this are obvious to anyone who has read Lessig's discussions of copyright getting "eternity on the installment plan", and Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants": the enjoyment of music in modern society is in for a major change unprecedented in history due to the diminished information costs of modern computer search aggregation techniques.
Adding the ability to have such a "bargain bin" to iTunes might be a good thing for everyone... at least until creativity runs out.
They are not concerned with expanding the volume of music sold. [...] Apple has the right idea, in that they are trying to grow the music market.
Also, agreed. More exactly, I believe that Steve Jobs has a better understanding of the elasticity of the demand curve, and that there will be more money made at lower prices. But you're right, far to many of the studio executives think that "we want to make more money" means "we want to be able to raise prices."
It might be interesting for someone to do a study to actually measure the elasticity of the demand curve, and try to determine where songs "should" be priced. However, doing so would be a non-trivial experiment to design and perfom.
If you actually believe that this system will result in any tracks being priced less than 99c you are very naive.
No; naive would be to believe that there would be many such tracks, or that there would be a lot of the high quality classics (such as from Simon and Garfunkle or from Elvis) in with the discount bin... but you might find Joel Christie's "Since I Found You". I'd guess younger folk (EG: teens) are the prime purchase demographic for music, and the last thing the RIAA wants is for them to decide that the new stuff is all crap, and to start focusing on great 1930's Jazz. It's a substitutability/elasticity question, as I was noting in another comment.
Unnaturally fixed prices (such as, say, when fixed by a cartel) are bad.
Exactly, that is why we should NOT give a cartel control of the pricing structure.
Ah, such as Apple and Napster?
Throwing off one yoke for another is NOT a good idea. Steve Jobs is a vast improvement over the RIAA. He is a little more longsighted than the RIAA, is far better able to understand the implications of evolving technology, shows signs of having a better understanding of the underlyingeconomics, and is probably even a better judge of what's good music... but don't ever believe he's any less greedy than the RIAA is. He's just vastly less stupid.
A little give-and-take between Steve and the RIAA labels might make for a good thing for the consumer for a while, but I trust Apple exactly as far as I can throw the city of Cupertino.
So I don't buy for a minute that Apple isn't planning for that day that songs are variably priced, but I think the labels are downplaying the challenges of offering $0.49 singles and still having enough money left over to cover the transaction costs. Of course, for old songs, they're not paying the artists any more, so they *could* lower their price to Apple, but I doubt they'll volunteer that.
I believe your analysis is largely correct. That doesn't mean it's not in the RIAA's interest to want variable pricing now. What's the worst they figure that can happen? Apple's iTunes goes under, and the RIAA sells CD's for a few more years, while their members try to figure out how to make a music store the public can (under)stand. Watch the crocodile tears.... And in the best case, they get their variable pricing sooner. Of course, the worst case scenario is far from Apple's desire, and not to great for the consumer either.
You're also slightly mistaken in that they do still have to pay artists for older songs; however, you're correct in that they could make such songs cheaper, since on the one hand the royalty rates are generally lower (but not zero), and because the promotional costs have already been paid and amortized away. They don't exactly have to buy a lot of air time for commercials to promote Louis Armstrong's music these days, and the royalties to the estate don't amount to much, but it's still making a little money for them.
Hm. How about... today? Using Amazon's convenient on-line store for a price quote (brick-and-mortar based Sam Goody isn't much different), compare the price of Brittany's 2003 "In the Zone" at $14 (list $19) with Richard Marx's 1989 "Repeat Offender", list price $7? They strike me as being about the same grade of crap. The back catalog song also seems lower to me, and lower than when I bought it at the store (I'm ashamed to admit) even without factoring inflation. $7 also seems lower than most albums released in the last three or four years.
True, one point does not a statistical sample make, so feel free to do a comprehensive study and report on it, or to cite one if you know of such.
These guys have shown over and over again that they are interested in standardized pricing for music, punctuated only by *more expensive* pricing on certain high-demand albums.
That they want more expensive pricing on certain high demand items is something I will agree with.
I will even go so far as to say that their pricing of high demand items may be beyond elasticity points-- although that probably ties my earlier observations about pricing to why it's so easy to find those hot new albums on sale well below list price. (The RIAA's unscrupulous accounting and contract terms also contribute, but that's a different rant.) However, they do tend to drop prices on older items in lower demand as well.
With current distribution methods, there is a threshold price, where the cost of stamping and printing the CD, putting it in a jewel case, printing the liner notes, and getting to market equals any revenues earned. There may be a few of these out there, but not many. Internet based music stores like iTunes or Napster have potentially lower manufacturing/distribution costs (or rather, decentralized and customer-optional costs-- I can print pretty CDs if I want to buy a CD-printer, or I can hand label). The lower costs allow for a lower threshold price. It still won't be zero (got to pay the CEO's salary somehow), but it might be as low as $0.10 per song. Again, not a lot would be out there at that price; but there might be a fair number of interesting old items in the $0.50 range.
Of course, in addition to elasticity of price, there's also the question of substitutability. In other words, while for some people only Brittany's latest will satisfy, a lot of people would just as soon add another cheaper old hit to their collection of listening music, rather than Brittany, regardless of whether or not Brittany is in fact the better artist. (That she isn't adds insult to injury, but doesn't change the main point.) Thus, the RIAA cartel probably does not lower prices on older albums as much as it ought to in a truly competitive market. Now, with the Indie rise, half-or-more-compent Indie bands can serve the same function as half-or-more-compent older releases, and have a larger potential target market since nobody owns copies yet.
This competition from and substitutibility of indie label output produces incentive for the RIAA to lower prices to help remain competitive. Of course... with iTunes, they can't. No wonder they're feeling the pressure.
As for the "standardized" pricing, that ties into the fact that they ARE effectively a cartel; and thus they want to have limits to price variation. Unfortunately for them these days, with various artists putting up free samples, so that plan has major holes.
The limited number of prices may have another explanation. I suspect that there's also issues of info
The most dubious part of this is the quote that "The teaching of science and mathematics must be purged of its authoritarian and elitist characteristics95, and the content of these subjects enriched by incorporating the insights of the feminist, queer, multiculturalist and ecological critiques." Out of context, I can make a reasonable laymans translation of this that the postmodernist authorial voice would reject, but that many techies would at least thoughtfully consider.
I would submit that "The teaching of science and mathematics must be purged of its authoritarian and elitist characteristics" could be interpreted as suggesting that it should be emphasized to students early on that science and mathematics are not handed down on stone tablets on high, but rather developed over time and accepted due to their repeatability. This could be done by an early introduction of the set theory basis for counting and the development of mathematics (possibly leading to exposure to Goedel's theorem by early middle school), and an emphasis on the experimental nature of science. In other words, science is not "This is the theory, because Einstein said so", but "This is the theory, because it comes closest to reliably describing what we see when we do this, this, or this, so that's what we're calling true until someone has a better explanation. Can you find one?"
(As an aside, I'll note that this is not far from how the school district I went to inculcated math and science to my class.)
Similarly, if there are in fact insights that "feminist, queer, multiculturalist and ecological critiques" have to offer to science, and if such alleged insights can stand up to the science's base criterion of being verfiable by repeatable falsifiable experiments, then by the spinning of Einstein's corpse, they OUGHT to be incorporated. (I think they're more likely to be shown to be full of horseshit, but I'm willing to watch the experiments...)
Of course, this isn't what the paper is getting at in any way, as the post modernist feminists would doubtlessly claim that "verfiability by repeatable falsifiable experiment" is an oppressive tool of the patriarchal established heirarchy, and the paper's postmodernist authorial voice itself would probably classify the requirement as part of the "dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony". So, your choice of quotes isn't ideal. In fact, I think a much better example is:
It has thus become increasingly apparent that physical ``reality'', no less than social ``reality'', is at bottom a social and linguistic construct; that scientific ``knowledge", far from being objective, reflects and encodes the dominant ideologies and power relations of the culture that produced it; that the truth claims of science are inherently theory-laden and self-referential; and consequently, that the discourse of the scientific community, for all its undeniable value, cannot assert a privileged epistemological status with respect to counter-hegemonic narratives emanating from dissident or marginalized communities.
Now... that is silly, especially given such narratives' lack of basis under ANY of the main epistemiological schools.
It only takes one researcher to get pissed off because his/her legitimate research over I2 is being negatively impacted
Where I'm at, I believe Internet2 traffic shares some of the shaping characteristics given to any traffic along the internal backbone; http/https, ftp, ssh, SMTP, POP, IMAP, and two other "academically important" ports are allowed to take up to 95% of the bandwidth; all other traffic shares what's left when the important stuff has moved. I understand at least one of those ports was added at a faculty members request; the central IT staff just asked for a written request, and confirmation he was faculty.
The number I cite was (if I recall) mentioned in a copy of a Dummies book I looked at before deciding A+ certification was an utter waste of time, and went for CCNA instead. They said this was the print resolution used for that book. YMMV. =)
Of course, even at 900 lpi, that's still far higher than the ~150 dpi you'll find on even the highest density LCD screens (such as in high-end laptops); ~75 dpi is more common for LCDs. Neither LCD type makes for comforable long term reading, which is why I have several dead tree versions of O'Reilly books, despite having several Multi-Book CDs from them and unlimited access to the Safari Library through work.
Cripes, this is so damn typical of the entertainment industry.
Errr.... no. In many industries, having a range of prices, especially that vary with time, allows not only for greater profits, but for larger numbers of satisfied customers. The math is a bit more involuted than a simple supply/demand scissors curve, because you also have to factor in substitutibility, price elasticity, and information costs, and time value of money, but in many situations this allows for a good thing all around.
This is one reason why grocery stores have sales; people who would not ordinarily buy a product at price X will consider buying it at price 0.9X. Furthermore, it's one reason why grocery stores accept manufacturers coupons; the customer gets a lower price, the grocery store gets slightly more money (for slightly more hassle), and the increased sales (and potentially increased regular customers) result in net higher profits for the manufacturer.
In this case, the RIAA is wishing that they could run the backcatalog at a discount, while charging a premium for newest releases. And if they were willing to, say, knock $0.24 off their current $0.65 share of the price for releases over 10 years old, while adding $0.01 to the recent releases and $0.25 to items released within the last year, I'd consider it likely to be a net benefit for consumers overall.
Someone with more background in economics and without a head cold might explain it better, but it comes down to: the ability for suppliers to have prices that vary is a good thing for the consumer. Unnaturally fixed prices (such as, say, when fixed by a cartel) are bad.
But I still prefer reading my books on paper. And most people I know feel the same.
Books are printed at ~15000 dpi. At that resolution density, the pixels from a typical 19" LCD display would give you rather under an eighth of an inch diagonally.
So how come when I got a high paying job I suddenly started getting letters from AMEX offering me a gold credit card when I have never done business with AMEX in my life and they were totally uninterested in me as a struggling student working a bunch of low paying jobs?
Indeed. Who besides you and your bank could possibly know that you now had an employer giving you a much larger paycheck?
When expressing constant items relative to price, Moore's law says prices fall with time, remember? So your reward should be 2^-26 of the original cover price. But if you ask, Intel will probably round up to a penny to make it easier for their accounting department.
On the one hand, re-entry is the most dangerous part of the mission after initial launch, and most of the scenarios involve discovering that the shuttle has developed a defect that will not allow it (and the crew) to survive that reentry. On the other hand, the shuttle's computer can probably be programmed to do a timed minimal dock-and-move-off burn without a human aboard. On the gripping hand, the space station also has thrusters for minor maneuvering; it might be possible to undock, and then move the station.
Mind you, that last wouldn't be pretty, but this is already an emergency scenario. In such cases, people think way outside the box, equipment gets used for alternate purposes, and plans get modified. Sometimes literally.
"All right, Aquarius, this is Houston. do you have the flight plan up there?"
"Affirmative, Andy. Jack's got one right here."
"Okay, we have a... an unusual procedure for you here. We need you to rip the cover off."
Disclaimer: I am not an astronaut, I just work with one.
Slashdot Mirror
As an ex-NukeE and the son of an ex-NukeE, let me qualify that for you: the United States nuclear power industry has a good safety record overall; Chernobyl put a nasty blip in the international stats, and we'll never know the exact death count.
TMI, on the other hand, went quite well overall, aside from trashing a several hundred million dollar toy. The US has lost a few people over the years... and mostly learned from the mistakes so that it stayed only a few.
Yes, our opinion would be different if they had refrained from RAPING ASIMOV'S CORPSE!
That's going a little too far. While I'd agree the movie is a travesty demonstrating that Hollywood is hard pressed to produce even one new idea in almost a hundred years, some of the dangers the movie obsessed over were at least hinted at in Asimov's works. That there is some gold dust sprinkled on, however, does not change that what you have stepped in is primarily a turd. If they had left the original "Hardwired" title in, and yanked the attempts to exploit Asimov's name, it would merely be bad; if such had been offered on DVD free with a box of cereal, I'd have bought the box provided I wasn't allergic to the cereal. (Five brand name candidates, last I counted.)
As is... I took different measures.
Then again, I haven't seen it
Given my respect for film, I didn't want to trash the movie without seeing it. On the other hand, if it was as bad as reported, I didn't want any of my money going anywhere near the people responsible. So when the DVD came out, for my first and only time for a Hollywood release, I downloaded BitTorrent, found a pirate torrent, and tied up my DSL for two days. If it was any good, I would have bought it. After watching it, I deleted it. I have better uses for the 5GB of storage.
Having seen it, the only reason I feel that the time spent watching it was not completely wasted is that I can say with a clear concience: It is a Piece of Crap; Someone Please Buy Harlan Ellison The Movie Rights.
The HHGTTG movie sounds bad, but not that bad. I might catch a matinee... but I'll bring a towel to wrap around my head, just in case it's worse than I expect.
And when was the last time you read that ingredients list?
So, the real spec to keep both the techs and the beaureacrats happy would be: any switch that (1) either is compatible with the existing skills base, or where the vendor will provide full retraining for current personnel, and hire bonded temp contractors certified for the current gear to cover the retraining period, and (2) will match various benchmarks of Cisco support.
Possibly useful for including in support benchmarks if verifiable, an anecdote about Cisco's support via FoaFoaF:
Immediately after an unrelated crisis required him to pull two consecutive all-nighters, some poor techie had yet another a major problem, this time involving an exotic bug in Cisco IOS somehow hosing the network, leading for him to have to pull yet another all-nighter. This leads to a long night on the phone with the Cisco support techs, while they isolate the cause and try various workarounds while they prepare a custom patch to fix it. So about 1AM, waiting for the custom bug-patched IOS to finish downloading over dialup modem, he puts his head down while talking to the tech.... and wakes up to hear "Hello? Hello? Are you awake again?"
It's 7AM; he fell asleep with the phone handset as a pillow. But Cisco support policy explicitly forbids their techs to EVER be the ones to hang up on a support call, NO MATTER WHAT. So, after a few minutes trying to wake him, the techs decided he really needed the sleep; they put him on speakerphone, and had someone check back every 15 minutes or so to ask if he had woken back up.
The bug fix worked. So did the customer service. You'd need at least eight pro linebackers to drag him away from his Cisco support contract now. Foolhardy ones at that.
No. However, reverse engineering was easy, common, and acceptable.
Star Trek's main strength is its willingness to unabashedly steal the best material in science fiction and adapt it. It's main weakness is that it the writers (or perhaps their editors) are often such incompetent thieves.
An excerpt from your post.
Comedy gold.
That did occur to me just before I posted. Obviously didn't stop me...
Also, the Slashcode has inserted spaces as the 49th character in each data line, which does rather render the UUE much less coherent than it ought to be. However, I'm not feeling motivated enough to recompile my uuencode command with a non-default line length, especially as many (crappy (Windows)) versions of UUdecode get pissy when you do that to their input. If you manually remove those extra spaces from the input, it actually does decode. Someone want to post a perl script for that?
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Agreed; but with on-line sales, this has the potential to be a major source of revenue. I refer you to Wired's excellent article about the "Long Tail", which was previously covered in Slashdot. Without spending a lot of time, I would trust that the implications of this are obvious to anyone who has read Lessig's discussions of copyright getting "eternity on the installment plan", and Spider Robinson's "Melancholy Elephants" : the enjoyment of music in modern society is in for a major change unprecedented in history due to the diminished information costs of modern computer search aggregation techniques.
Adding the ability to have such a "bargain bin" to iTunes might be a good thing for everyone... at least until creativity runs out.
They are not concerned with expanding the volume of music sold. [...] Apple has the right idea, in that they are trying to grow the music market.
Also, agreed. More exactly, I believe that Steve Jobs has a better understanding of the elasticity of the demand curve, and that there will be more money made at lower prices. But you're right, far to many of the studio executives think that "we want to make more money" means "we want to be able to raise prices."
It might be interesting for someone to do a study to actually measure the elasticity of the demand curve, and try to determine where songs "should" be priced. However, doing so would be a non-trivial experiment to design and perfom.
Throwing off one yoke for another is NOT a good idea. Steve Jobs is a vast improvement over the RIAA. He is a little more longsighted than the RIAA, is far better able to understand the implications of evolving technology, shows signs of having a better understanding of the underlying economics, and is probably even a better judge of what's good music... but don't ever believe he's any less greedy than the RIAA is. He's just vastly less stupid.
A little give-and-take between Steve and the RIAA labels might make for a good thing for the consumer for a while, but I trust Apple exactly as far as I can throw the city of Cupertino.
I believe your analysis is largely correct. That doesn't mean it's not in the RIAA's interest to want variable pricing now. What's the worst they figure that can happen? Apple's iTunes goes under, and the RIAA sells CD's for a few more years, while their members try to figure out how to make a music store the public can (under)stand. Watch the crocodile tears.... And in the best case, they get their variable pricing sooner. Of course, the worst case scenario is far from Apple's desire, and not to great for the consumer either.
You're also slightly mistaken in that they do still have to pay artists for older songs; however, you're correct in that they could make such songs cheaper, since on the one hand the royalty rates are generally lower (but not zero), and because the promotional costs have already been paid and amortized away. They don't exactly have to buy a lot of air time for commercials to promote Louis Armstrong's music these days, and the royalties to the estate don't amount to much, but it's still making a little money for them.
Hm. How about... today? Using Amazon's convenient on-line store for a price quote (brick-and-mortar based Sam Goody isn't much different), compare the price of Brittany's 2003 "In the Zone" at $14 (list $19) with Richard Marx's 1989 "Repeat Offender", list price $7? They strike me as being about the same grade of crap. The back catalog song also seems lower to me, and lower than when I bought it at the store (I'm ashamed to admit) even without factoring inflation. $7 also seems lower than most albums released in the last three or four years.
True, one point does not a statistical sample make, so feel free to do a comprehensive study and report on it, or to cite one if you know of such.
These guys have shown over and over again that they are interested in standardized pricing for music, punctuated only by *more expensive* pricing on certain high-demand albums.
That they want more expensive pricing on certain high demand items is something I will agree with. I will even go so far as to say that their pricing of high demand items may be beyond elasticity points-- although that probably ties my earlier observations about pricing to why it's so easy to find those hot new albums on sale well below list price. (The RIAA's unscrupulous accounting and contract terms also contribute, but that's a different rant.) However, they do tend to drop prices on older items in lower demand as well.
With current distribution methods, there is a threshold price, where the cost of stamping and printing the CD, putting it in a jewel case, printing the liner notes, and getting to market equals any revenues earned. There may be a few of these out there, but not many. Internet based music stores like iTunes or Napster have potentially lower manufacturing/distribution costs (or rather, decentralized and customer-optional costs-- I can print pretty CDs if I want to buy a CD-printer, or I can hand label). The lower costs allow for a lower threshold price. It still won't be zero (got to pay the CEO's salary somehow), but it might be as low as $0.10 per song. Again, not a lot would be out there at that price; but there might be a fair number of interesting old items in the $0.50 range.
Of course, in addition to elasticity of price, there's also the question of substitutability. In other words, while for some people only Brittany's latest will satisfy, a lot of people would just as soon add another cheaper old hit to their collection of listening music, rather than Brittany, regardless of whether or not Brittany is in fact the better artist. (That she isn't adds insult to injury, but doesn't change the main point.) Thus, the RIAA cartel probably does not lower prices on older albums as much as it ought to in a truly competitive market. Now, with the Indie rise, half-or-more-compent Indie bands can serve the same function as half-or-more-compent older releases, and have a larger potential target market since nobody owns copies yet.
This competition from and substitutibility of indie label output produces incentive for the RIAA to lower prices to help remain competitive. Of course... with iTunes, they can't. No wonder they're feeling the pressure.
As for the "standardized" pricing, that ties into the fact that they ARE effectively a cartel; and thus they want to have limits to price variation. Unfortunately for them these days, with various artists putting up free samples, so that plan has major holes.
The limited number of prices may have another explanation. I suspect that there's also issues of info
I would submit that "The teaching of science and mathematics must be purged of its authoritarian and elitist characteristics" could be interpreted as suggesting that it should be emphasized to students early on that science and mathematics are not handed down on stone tablets on high, but rather developed over time and accepted due to their repeatability. This could be done by an early introduction of the set theory basis for counting and the development of mathematics (possibly leading to exposure to Goedel's theorem by early middle school), and an emphasis on the experimental nature of science. In other words, science is not "This is the theory, because Einstein said so", but "This is the theory, because it comes closest to reliably describing what we see when we do this, this, or this, so that's what we're calling true until someone has a better explanation. Can you find one?"
(As an aside, I'll note that this is not far from how the school district I went to inculcated math and science to my class.)
Similarly, if there are in fact insights that "feminist, queer, multiculturalist and ecological critiques" have to offer to science, and if such alleged insights can stand up to the science's base criterion of being verfiable by repeatable falsifiable experiments, then by the spinning of Einstein's corpse, they OUGHT to be incorporated. (I think they're more likely to be shown to be full of horseshit, but I'm willing to watch the experiments...)
Of course, this isn't what the paper is getting at in any way, as the post modernist feminists would doubtlessly claim that "verfiability by repeatable falsifiable experiment" is an oppressive tool of the patriarchal established heirarchy, and the paper's postmodernist authorial voice itself would probably classify the requirement as part of the "dogma imposed by the long post-Enlightenment hegemony". So, your choice of quotes isn't ideal. In fact, I think a much better example is:
Now... that is silly, especially given such narratives' lack of basis under ANY of the main epistemiological schools.Where I'm at, I believe Internet2 traffic shares some of the shaping characteristics given to any traffic along the internal backbone; http/https, ftp, ssh, SMTP, POP, IMAP, and two other "academically important" ports are allowed to take up to 95% of the bandwidth; all other traffic shares what's left when the important stuff has moved. I understand at least one of those ports was added at a faculty members request; the central IT staff just asked for a written request, and confirmation he was faculty.
(Still in denial... still in denial...)
And we believe everything that a CEO says to be gospel....
Semi-independent confirmation and analysis is helpful. Which is why Jupiter and other consultants are in business.
Of course, even at 900 lpi, that's still far higher than the ~150 dpi you'll find on even the highest density LCD screens (such as in high-end laptops); ~75 dpi is more common for LCDs. Neither LCD type makes for comforable long term reading, which is why I have several dead tree versions of O'Reilly books, despite having several Multi-Book CDs from them and unlimited access to the Safari Library through work.
Errr.... no. In many industries, having a range of prices, especially that vary with time, allows not only for greater profits, but for larger numbers of satisfied customers. The math is a bit more involuted than a simple supply/demand scissors curve, because you also have to factor in substitutibility, price elasticity, and information costs, and time value of money, but in many situations this allows for a good thing all around.
This is one reason why grocery stores have sales; people who would not ordinarily buy a product at price X will consider buying it at price 0.9X. Furthermore, it's one reason why grocery stores accept manufacturers coupons; the customer gets a lower price, the grocery store gets slightly more money (for slightly more hassle), and the increased sales (and potentially increased regular customers) result in net higher profits for the manufacturer.
In this case, the RIAA is wishing that they could run the backcatalog at a discount, while charging a premium for newest releases. And if they were willing to, say, knock $0.24 off their current $0.65 share of the price for releases over 10 years old, while adding $0.01 to the recent releases and $0.25 to items released within the last year, I'd consider it likely to be a net benefit for consumers overall.
Someone with more background in economics and without a head cold might explain it better, but it comes down to: the ability for suppliers to have prices that vary is a good thing for the consumer. Unnaturally fixed prices (such as, say, when fixed by a cartel) are bad.
Books are printed at ~15000 dpi. At that resolution density, the pixels from a typical 19" LCD display would give you rather under an eighth of an inch diagonally.
Well, a major warning sign was when Dan Akroyd pulled out to do Ghostbusters instead....
Indeed. Who besides you and your bank could possibly know that you now had an employer giving you a much larger paycheck?
Oh, wait...
When expressing constant items relative to price, Moore's law says prices fall with time, remember? So your reward should be 2^-26 of the original cover price. But if you ask, Intel will probably round up to a penny to make it easier for their accounting department.
Mind you, that last wouldn't be pretty, but this is already an emergency scenario. In such cases, people think way outside the box, equipment gets used for alternate purposes, and plans get modified. Sometimes literally.
Disclaimer: I am not an astronaut, I just work with one.