Also, who says finite is good? What happens when the economy grows to the point that you need more gold, but none is to be had. Well then you start experiencing deflation and that is a very bad thing. Deflation is a wonderful way to get people to stop spending, stop lending, and as such to freeze the economy.
Deflation isn't necessarily a bad thing, though.
What is bad is deflation combined with a shortage of ideas for trying to increase the money velocity. (That is, it's possible for the economy to expand even if prices are falling. It happened about 120 years ago, back when the US was on the gold standard.)
Kind of weird that the stem cells differentiated into bone marrow in the kidney, though - it'd be interesting to (through, probably, animal experiments) determine if that's the "default" differentiation in the presence of antibodies or what.
On that note, I wonder what you'd get if you injected the stem cells into where bone marrow should be if you had an autoimmune disorder that attacked the bone marrow. "Hey ma! I gots brains in mah bones!":-D
Eh, the point I was just attempting to make (and yes, I forgot about the situation of costs here, but since we're talking about e-books here, the cost is essentially a one-time fixed cost and therefore tends towards zero as the number of items sold increases) was that $1.99 should be more profitable than $2.99 more often than not, given that $2.49 has been ruled out (but sold 50% more product than $2.99 did when it was an option).
Or: in the long run, the sale of digital goods at any price is always profitable given sufficient demand. (Again, not always true, I know. Selling it at a single cent probably won't cover your bandwidth costs.) This is because of the (not complete, but nearly so) elimination of per-unit costs in favor of a single fixed cost.
True, but selling it at $1.99 is almost definitely guaranteed to bring in more money than selling it at $2.99 in this situation. (Barring the case that selling it at $1.99 brings in fewer customers than selling it at $2.49 would, which is always a possibility.)
Yes, $1.99 means you're forgoing revenue relative to $2.49, but given the options you're now restricted to, dropping the price is still probably optimal versus raising it.
tl;dr: This example was bad and you should feel bad.:-)
1. The charge of the black hole is completely irrelevant. Remember how a black hole got it's name? Not even light, a time-varying electromagnetic field, can escape it. Likewise, an electrostatic field can't escape a black hole, because of the extreme local curvature of space-time.
> Even in this scenario, we have a few million years before things become > problematic, I think.
Closer to a quintillion years, I suspect.
Well... (note: scroll down to the next comment if you don't want to look at badly done back-of-random-scrap-of-paper math)
The radius of the black hole is going to be proportionate to its mass. The accretion rate is going to be proportionate to its surface area, and therefore to the square of its mass.
So, the rate of increase in mass (dM/dt) is proportionate to the square of its mass, and therefore its mass is roughly proportionate to the cube of its age. So, based on infinite sums, it takes (initial time to double)/(1 - cuberoot(2)), or about 4.84 times the initial time-to-double, before it consumes the Earth.
The obviously unknown figure is how long that first doubling takes, but a million years doesn't sound unreasonably low.
Granted, the surface area of a 20amu black hole is about 3*10^-104 square meters. So even if Hawking radiation doesn't exist, that may be one of the suppression effects for low-mass black holes: they're too small to meaningfully exist! Any black hole under, roughly, one milligram in mass just flat-out isn't directly observable because it's under one Planck length in radius.
Extra dimensions make this even more entertaining: black holes under this mass end up falling into them.
Does anyone think this is a valid explanation for "dark matter"?
Actually, the extreme case if Hawking is right is that there's at least one baryon with non-up/down quarks close enough for the black hole to absorb, which jumps its mass up by a factor of about 30 at a minimum.
The worst-case scenario is obviously "Hawking was wrong, and black holes don't evaporate", which means there was something else suppressing the production of quantum-scale black holes in the past. (Even in this scenario, we have a few million years before things become problematic, I think.)
"Its" is both a plural (an irregular plural at that; correctly it's "them" [bring forth the giant ants]) and a possessive; "it's" is just a contraction of "it is".
See, back in my day, we only had three fonts to work with - Times Roman, Courier, and Helvetica. One day I needed to make a program, and none of these fonts were cutting it. Did I mention that it was for someone I hate? Anyway, I went with the only sans-serif font we got to use, Helvetica. I hog-tied that sucker and proceeded to rape the shit out of it. It whined, it begged, it called me names for hours. Finally, exhausted, I let loose into it and left it to cry in a puddle of its own rasters.
Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson. This is the best-written argument I've seen against non-expiring copyrights (and, by extension, copyrights of inanely long duration).
Actually, it's irrelevant as to how many contributors there are for that - the ones who are blocking the idea for whatever reason are still assholes. (If the contributors collectively just can't decide on an amount and therefore say "you know, since we can't come up with a fair amount, you're out of luck"... well, that's not assholery, that's more of a "if you're this indecisive about something that should be beneficial, I'd hate to see how you guys react to a disaster" situation.)
In an ideal world, you should be able to buy a non-GPL license from any GPL project that you don't want to contribute your additions to for whatever reason. (The project's team should be able to ask what this reason is and charge accordingly.) This right should not allow you to then proceed to cockblock the project in any way - just let you distribute the program without providing your changes in source form. (If the original team manages to figure out how you wrote your additions and adds them, the license in question should provide them with immunity from a lawsuit from you.) This provides a simple means for injecting capital into GPL projects.
The problems are two-fold: 1) people are assholes; and 2) the mass delusion that once a project has been released under the GPL, it can not be released under another license without violating the GPL (...which I think may actually be true for second-generation GPL projects - the second-gen group would have to get a relicensing from the first-gen group in order to relicense it, right?).
On the latter, the author has the power to do that since they are the copyright holder and I am sure many would be happy to offer you a proprietary license for your company for the right price.
Do I risk being labeled as an anti-GPL troll for saying that the people who aren't willing to offer one for any price are assholes?
Slashdot Mirror
Also, who says finite is good? What happens when the economy grows to the point that you need more gold, but none is to be had. Well then you start experiencing deflation and that is a very bad thing. Deflation is a wonderful way to get people to stop spending, stop lending, and as such to freeze the economy.
Deflation isn't necessarily a bad thing, though.
What is bad is deflation combined with a shortage of ideas for trying to increase the money velocity. (That is, it's possible for the economy to expand even if prices are falling. It happened about 120 years ago, back when the US was on the gold standard.)
Label at least one computer "ham sandwich" to confuse future language researchers.
Alternatively, label each computer with a character's name from (insert show of your choice here).
Kind of weird that the stem cells differentiated into bone marrow in the kidney, though - it'd be interesting to (through, probably, animal experiments) determine if that's the "default" differentiation in the presence of antibodies or what.
On that note, I wonder what you'd get if you injected the stem cells into where bone marrow should be if you had an autoimmune disorder that attacked the bone marrow. "Hey ma! I gots brains in mah bones!" :-D
Your doing it wrong.
nigger nigger nigger nigger.
Quiet, Weeajew Man.
Creepy isn't a good argument against "why should we do X". If it were, we wouldn't have bad CGI. Or Uwe Boll movies.
Eh, Safe Mode is great for getting rid of things that don't quite qualify as full-blown infections but are still irritating.
Eh, the point I was just attempting to make (and yes, I forgot about the situation of costs here, but since we're talking about e-books here, the cost is essentially a one-time fixed cost and therefore tends towards zero as the number of items sold increases) was that $1.99 should be more profitable than $2.99 more often than not, given that $2.49 has been ruled out (but sold 50% more product than $2.99 did when it was an option).
Or: in the long run, the sale of digital goods at any price is always profitable given sufficient demand. (Again, not always true, I know. Selling it at a single cent probably won't cover your bandwidth costs.) This is because of the (not complete, but nearly so) elimination of per-unit costs in favor of a single fixed cost.
True, but selling it at $1.99 is almost definitely guaranteed to bring in more money than selling it at $2.99 in this situation. (Barring the case that selling it at $1.99 brings in fewer customers than selling it at $2.49 would, which is always a possibility.)
Yes, $1.99 means you're forgoing revenue relative to $2.49, but given the options you're now restricted to, dropping the price is still probably optimal versus raising it.
tl;dr: This example was bad and you should feel bad. :-)
1. The charge of the black hole is completely irrelevant. Remember how a black hole got it's name? Not even light, a time-varying electromagnetic field, can escape it. Likewise, an electrostatic field can't escape a black hole, because of the extreme local curvature of space-time.
Um, unfortunately, a charged black hole is not necessarily irrelevant to anything.
Think of the charge as being spread over the event horizon, rather than simplifying the object to be a point charge.
> Even in this scenario, we have a few million years before things become
> problematic, I think.
Closer to a quintillion years, I suspect.
Well... (note: scroll down to the next comment if you don't want to look at badly done back-of-random-scrap-of-paper math)
The radius of the black hole is going to be proportionate to its mass. The accretion rate is going to be proportionate to its surface area, and therefore to the square of its mass.
So, the rate of increase in mass (dM/dt) is proportionate to the square of its mass, and therefore its mass is roughly proportionate to the cube of its age. So, based on infinite sums, it takes (initial time to double)/(1 - cuberoot(2)), or about 4.84 times the initial time-to-double, before it consumes the Earth.
The obviously unknown figure is how long that first doubling takes, but a million years doesn't sound unreasonably low.
Granted, the surface area of a 20amu black hole is about 3*10^-104 square meters. So even if Hawking radiation doesn't exist, that may be one of the suppression effects for low-mass black holes: they're too small to meaningfully exist! Any black hole under, roughly, one milligram in mass just flat-out isn't directly observable because it's under one Planck length in radius.
Extra dimensions make this even more entertaining: black holes under this mass end up falling into them.
Does anyone think this is a valid explanation for "dark matter"?
Actually, the extreme case if Hawking is right is that there's at least one baryon with non-up/down quarks close enough for the black hole to absorb, which jumps its mass up by a factor of about 30 at a minimum.
The worst-case scenario is obviously "Hawking was wrong, and black holes don't evaporate", which means there was something else suppressing the production of quantum-scale black holes in the past. (Even in this scenario, we have a few million years before things become problematic, I think.)
So then is it correctly "hi's" bicycle?
And what about the women? Would it be "he'r"?
"Its" is both a plural (an irregular plural at that; correctly it's "them" [bring forth the giant ants]) and a possessive; "it's" is just a contraction of "it is".
See, back in my day, we only had three fonts to work with - Times Roman, Courier, and Helvetica. One day I needed to make a program, and none of these fonts were cutting it. Did I mention that it was for someone I hate? Anyway, I went with the only sans-serif font we got to use, Helvetica. I hog-tied that sucker and proceeded to rape the shit out of it. It whined, it begged, it called me names for hours. Finally, exhausted, I let loose into it and left it to cry in a puddle of its own rasters.
Nine months later, Comic Sans MS was born.
Melancholy Elephants by Spider Robinson. This is the best-written argument I've seen against non-expiring copyrights (and, by extension, copyrights of inanely long duration).
Right, it'll sink. Just like the Apollo capsules sank when they did re-entry into the ocean.
I felt a great disturbance in the Blogosphere, as if millions of rants were posted but were abruptly truncated at 140 characters. I fear som
Fixed.
Okay, then. Giving people money for software is a bad thing. Got it.
Giving them money to do so doesn't count as gratitude?
Actually, it's irrelevant as to how many contributors there are for that - the ones who are blocking the idea for whatever reason are still assholes. (If the contributors collectively just can't decide on an amount and therefore say "you know, since we can't come up with a fair amount, you're out of luck"... well, that's not assholery, that's more of a "if you're this indecisive about something that should be beneficial, I'd hate to see how you guys react to a disaster" situation.)
In an ideal world, you should be able to buy a non-GPL license from any GPL project that you don't want to contribute your additions to for whatever reason. (The project's team should be able to ask what this reason is and charge accordingly.) This right should not allow you to then proceed to cockblock the project in any way - just let you distribute the program without providing your changes in source form. (If the original team manages to figure out how you wrote your additions and adds them, the license in question should provide them with immunity from a lawsuit from you.) This provides a simple means for injecting capital into GPL projects.
The problems are two-fold: 1) people are assholes; and 2) the mass delusion that once a project has been released under the GPL, it can not be released under another license without violating the GPL (...which I think may actually be true for second-generation GPL projects - the second-gen group would have to get a relicensing from the first-gen group in order to relicense it, right?).
On the latter, the author has the power to do that since they are the copyright holder and I am sure many would be happy to offer you a proprietary license for your company for the right price.
Do I risk being labeled as an anti-GPL troll for saying that the people who aren't willing to offer one for any price are assholes?
...that things from the Island of Misfit Toys probably weren't a good idea to begin with.
That said, is the person standing up for these apps equipped with a red nose that glows and makes a buzzing noise?
kdawson's excellent journalistic track record remains spotless!
Whoever wrote the Bing API was probably planning on exploiting it in exactly this fashion.
You're right, sending C&Ds isn't doing nothing.
It's actively producing negative work, turning productively spent time into wasted time.
So congratulations, you're doing less than nothing!
...that processors that support this type of memory will have to provide a Halt-and-Catch-Fire opcode?