Perhaps, but the big, big problem is that software has almost zero marginal cost, and huge capital cost. In the example of CAD and engineering software, the market is really quite niche, but good tools are extremely valuable to that market: if an engineer's time is worth $140k in salary and benefits, a tool that improves his productivity threefold is easily worth $5k a license.
The expectation is not only that people make a lot of money using the tools, but that there are not many of them. If Pro/E had an user base as large as Word, they could afford to charge the same price, even though their product is vastly more complicated and fault sensitive.
And, indeed, you don't even have to have an equal number of "bad" players. You can run it like "America's Army" and assign people goals and sides based on need.
"Steal $foo from $bar for $baz" looks awfully similar to "get $foo back from $baz for $bar."
Similarly "Defend the town from Brigands" vs. "Rescue the town from brigands."
And.. what, precisely, is wrong with eating dog? Seriously? Pigs are smarter than dogs, and we've got no problem eating them.
I know, you might not like the idea of consuming Fido, but neither would you eat a pet pig. Unless you were live-or-die starving, but that goes for everything.
Is there some health reason why canis lupus is verboten?
The real problem is where politicians notice this and offer "sweetheart deals" to a specific company to get them to come in. Then they can claim "bringing in those jobs."
But if the "sweetheart deal" was the policy for *every* company, how many more companies would immigrate. Unfortunately, in a way that the politician cannot claim individual, direct credit for.
So, instead, the policy is to be slightly (or heavily) hostile to businesses in general, and use specific high-profile cases to bring them back in. That way, even if employment is constant or declining the politicians can claim to have "brought jobs."
At least.. that's how it works here on the east coast.
You fail as a skeptic. Please stop claiming to represent us.
You can't predict whether a sample of cobalt-60 will emit a photon in any specific short time interval. But you can certainly make statements about how many will be released over a long enough time period, and you can also predict how many will be released over an equal time period at an arbitrary point in the future to a reasonable accuracy (which you can also predict).
Not knowing whether it will rain tomorrow in Albuquerque doesn't mean that total rainfall can't be predicted with much better accuracy.
Climate is the same. Please, object GW chicken heading on grounds that aren't stupid.
I don't know any Christians whose definition of "having sex" excludes what Clinton did with his intern. (although, the permissible kinds of 'having sex' in a number of cases exclude it)
IIRC, it was Clinton himself who tried to make the distinction, as justification for his statement that he "did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinksy." When he could have simply played that sentence straight and gone for the perfectly serviceable explanation that he was telling Ms. Lewinksy as part of his deposition, for no good reason, that he did not have sexual relations with some other woman who is not mentioned in the documents.
If the No Fly List is bad and we scrap it, what then should we do to thwart future hijackings?
Even if the no fly list is good, the thing that we should do to thwart future hijackings has already been done. By ~19 terrorists on four planes in mid September at the turn of the century. That thing was to dispel the notion that it is best to just keep your head down and wait for ransom or rescue.
An other thing that could be done is to obviate worries about collateral damage by phasing out the large planes that can threaten skyscrapers in favor of smaller planes flying more frequent and direct routes.
This would have the unfortunate side effect of bringing the major airlines into profit (like Southwest), and possibly being better for the environment: smaller, slightly less efficient aircraft that are more likely take off close to full capacity.
Oh, and we should read a little sun tzu. Spending a fortune to protect against a potential, relatively low-cost attack might not help our enemies, but it sure hurts us.
Another valid argument. But it is also an argument for someone to proselytize at you as to why you should care more. After all, if you couldn't care any less, it can't hurt to try to make you care more.
Who didn't assume the Chinese would "cheat to win" at least a few times in this Olympics?
Not me. But I'm so paranoid that after a bunch of competitors lost points for "hops" during the team competition, I suspected the mat might be slightly more springy than most competitors trained on.
I did not watch long enough to see if the Chinese competitors had the same problem, and I certainly don't know enough about gymnastics to know if there even is a damping factor specification for the mats used for landing.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the vehicles in North American Stock Car Racing share very few parts with the models actually in stock at your local auto dealership.
but I'm not sure where the analogy goes from there.
Both of those phrases make me cringe, too, but not because they're wrong. More because, every time I hear or read them, I try to come up with some kind of internal logic as to why one should be preferred over the other. Unfortunately, I keep coming up with (weak) arguments for each.
For instance, if you're sick of talking about something, you might want to threaten that you could care even less than you already do, so quit while you're ahead and shut up already.
Your brother was in the gestapo? Damn, that sucks.
Yes, I see now. You appear to have trouble with the concept of: If <something>, then <something else> follows.
Hedonists, who have a very different basis for morality than "evolutionists" and even possibly nihilists, were not on my list of people who would demand that someone make a sacrifice for themselves if that someone unwilling. Although, perhaps they ought to have been.
Someone who derives their morality from evolution isn't "promoting evolution" per se. They are declaring some outcome as "the good" and things which lead to that outcome as "good acts." That kind of person might have no qualms about demanding someone else's sacrifice for their own benefit. Got it?
objectively better than the 80s. Still not "good" though. The 90s weren't too bad. "Alternative," which was mainstream at the time is quite listenable, although not particularly groundbreaking.
Nevertheless, it was far better than the drug-addled collision of tones that survives as the "best" of the 70s. And that's without even mentioning the pinnacle of 70s metal had a guy wearing kitty cat face paint.
Which is why they like coins so much. The stamping process is only part of it: the coins themselves can be made of metals and traces of precious metals such that counterfeiters' profit margin isn't that great. For example: pennies are made mostly of zinc now. Dollar coins however are not, even though they certainly could be. Think about that.
What the hell are you talking about? Iraq had sketchy, possibly tenuous ties the hijackers, but that was not the justification for the war.
The "Bush Doctrine" following the 9/11 attack was what eventually lead to the ending of the armistice on our end due to numerous, systematic violations of the armistice by Iraq over the previous decade.
Jeez man, did you even read the 9/11 commission report, the lengthy debates, the multiple UN resolutions, the weapons' inspectors' reports (and, btw, not just Hans' Blix's public rants)?
Might doesn't make right, but those governments are all economically incapable of threatening the US in response to the alleged assassination attempts. They are stuck in a bad situation: They, too, cannot afford to let assassination attempts go unresponded, but they also cannot afford to make the appropriate response, if that response is against the US. If Cambodia attempted to assassinate a Vietnamese leader, do you think they should let that stand?
The US is not so shackled. It is capable of responding militarily to any nation that makes such an attempt.
Should the US deliberately fail to protect it's sovereign interest simply because some smaller nations are less capable of protecting theirs?
Also, he acted like a federal gas tax holiday was a good idea
To be fair, they were both right (and both very, very wrong) A cut in the gas tax wouldn't lead to a drop in price by the same amount. But it would lead to a drop in price by a small amount.
Also, you should probably add that the federal government takes takes no risk for their cut.
But Obama was more wrong than McCain, as Obama both wanted to not do the tax holiday, but also wanted to not facilitate more drilling, which although a temporary solution that might not have any effect for half a decade, is a temporary step we'll be wishing we'd started five years ago in five years time.
You misunderstand. If you believe in evolution (as opposed to simply believing it), then you'd notice that it offers only one reward: the propagation of your genetic code.
Therefore, the highest morality is whatever maximizes the number of organisms sharing your genes through the future.
There was, in fact, an entire school of thought dedicated to figuring out "evolutionary morality." It was called the eugenics movement, and it lead to the creation of whole new words for mass murder on an incomprehensibly grand scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps, but the big, big problem is that software has almost zero marginal cost, and huge capital cost. In the example of CAD and engineering software, the market is really quite niche, but good tools are extremely valuable to that market: if an engineer's time is worth $140k in salary and benefits, a tool that improves his productivity threefold is easily worth $5k a license.
The expectation is not only that people make a lot of money using the tools, but that there are not many of them. If Pro/E had an user base as large as Word, they could afford to charge the same price, even though their product is vastly more complicated and fault sensitive.
And, indeed, you don't even have to have an equal number of "bad" players. You can run it like "America's Army" and assign people goals and sides based on need.
"Steal $foo from $bar for $baz" looks awfully similar to "get $foo back from $baz for $bar."
Similarly "Defend the town from Brigands" vs. "Rescue the town from brigands."
And yet, you still bothered to memorize lyrics from the song.
What happened to all those jobs we sent down there?
Are we outsourcing to Mexico only to have our outsourcing further outsourced to Guatemala or China?
And.. what, precisely, is wrong with eating dog? Seriously? Pigs are smarter than dogs, and we've got no problem eating them.
I know, you might not like the idea of consuming Fido, but neither would you eat a pet pig. Unless you were live-or-die starving, but that goes for everything.
Is there some health reason why canis lupus is verboten?
The real problem is where politicians notice this and offer "sweetheart deals" to a specific company to get them to come in. Then they can claim "bringing in those jobs."
But if the "sweetheart deal" was the policy for *every* company, how many more companies would immigrate. Unfortunately, in a way that the politician cannot claim individual, direct credit for.
So, instead, the policy is to be slightly (or heavily) hostile to businesses in general, and use specific high-profile cases to bring them back in. That way, even if employment is constant or declining the politicians can claim to have "brought jobs."
At least.. that's how it works here on the east coast.
Huh.. Used to be that when making a comment, there was a list of allowable tags below the comment box.
Anyway, one of those was <ecode>
Something fishy IS going on. Why would a weather report site that works the way you've described need encryption.. at all.
cat is better. Unless you're a sloppy-thinking slob.
You fail as a skeptic. Please stop claiming to represent us.
You can't predict whether a sample of cobalt-60 will emit a photon in any specific short time interval. But you can certainly make statements about how many will be released over a long enough time period, and you can also predict how many will be released over an equal time period at an arbitrary point in the future to a reasonable accuracy (which you can also predict).
Not knowing whether it will rain tomorrow in Albuquerque doesn't mean that total rainfall can't be predicted with much better accuracy.
Climate is the same. Please, object GW chicken heading on grounds that aren't stupid.
I don't know any Christians whose definition of "having sex" excludes what Clinton did with his intern. (although, the permissible kinds of 'having sex' in a number of cases exclude it)
IIRC, it was Clinton himself who tried to make the distinction, as justification for his statement that he "did not have sexual relations with that woman, Ms. Lewinksy." When he could have simply played that sentence straight and gone for the perfectly serviceable explanation that he was telling Ms. Lewinksy as part of his deposition, for no good reason, that he did not have sexual relations with some other woman who is not mentioned in the documents.
Where did you get the shell interface to google search?
Even if the no fly list is good, the thing that we should do to thwart future hijackings has already been done. By ~19 terrorists on four planes in mid September at the turn of the century. That thing was to dispel the notion that it is best to just keep your head down and wait for ransom or rescue.
An other thing that could be done is to obviate worries about collateral damage by phasing out the large planes that can threaten skyscrapers in favor of smaller planes flying more frequent and direct routes.
This would have the unfortunate side effect of bringing the major airlines into profit (like Southwest), and possibly being better for the environment: smaller, slightly less efficient aircraft that are more likely take off close to full capacity.
Oh, and we should read a little sun tzu. Spending a fortune to protect against a potential, relatively low-cost attack might not help our enemies, but it sure hurts us.
Another valid argument. But it is also an argument for someone to proselytize at you as to why you should care more. After all, if you couldn't care any less, it can't hurt to try to make you care more.
Not me. But I'm so paranoid that after a bunch of competitors lost points for "hops" during the team competition, I suspected the mat might be slightly more springy than most competitors trained on.
I did not watch long enough to see if the Chinese competitors had the same problem, and I certainly don't know enough about gymnastics to know if there even is a damping factor specification for the mats used for landing.
I dunno either.
Maybe it has something to do with the fact that the vehicles in North American Stock Car Racing share very few parts with the models actually in stock at your local auto dealership.
but I'm not sure where the analogy goes from there.
Both of those phrases make me cringe, too, but not because they're wrong. More because, every time I hear or read them, I try to come up with some kind of internal logic as to why one should be preferred over the other. Unfortunately, I keep coming up with (weak) arguments for each.
For instance, if you're sick of talking about something, you might want to threaten that you could care even less than you already do, so quit while you're ahead and shut up already.
Is this the road we're going down? Pseudo-homophones of idiomatic phrases?
Yeah, yeah, grammar pedantry is bad. Nevertheless, this stuff hurts to read.
Your brother was in the gestapo? Damn, that sucks.
Yes, I see now. You appear to have trouble with the concept of: If <something>, then <something else> follows.
Hedonists, who have a very different basis for morality than "evolutionists" and even possibly nihilists, were not on my list of people who would demand that someone make a sacrifice for themselves if that someone unwilling. Although, perhaps they ought to have been.
Someone who derives their morality from evolution isn't "promoting evolution" per se. They are declaring some outcome as "the good" and things which lead to that outcome as "good acts." That kind of person might have no qualms about demanding someone else's sacrifice for their own benefit. Got it?
objectively better than the 80s. Still not "good" though. The 90s weren't too bad. "Alternative," which was mainstream at the time is quite listenable, although not particularly groundbreaking.
Nevertheless, it was far better than the drug-addled collision of tones that survives as the "best" of the 70s. And that's without even mentioning the pinnacle of 70s metal had a guy wearing kitty cat face paint.
Which is why they like coins so much. The stamping process is only part of it: the coins themselves can be made of metals and traces of precious metals such that counterfeiters' profit margin isn't that great. For example: pennies are made mostly of zinc now. Dollar coins however are not, even though they certainly could be. Think about that.
What the hell are you talking about? Iraq had sketchy, possibly tenuous ties the hijackers, but that was not the justification for the war.
The "Bush Doctrine" following the 9/11 attack was what eventually lead to the ending of the armistice on our end due to numerous, systematic violations of the armistice by Iraq over the previous decade.
Jeez man, did you even read the 9/11 commission report, the lengthy debates, the multiple UN resolutions, the weapons' inspectors' reports (and, btw, not just Hans' Blix's public rants)?
Might doesn't make right, but those governments are all economically incapable of threatening the US in response to the alleged assassination attempts. They are stuck in a bad situation: They, too, cannot afford to let assassination attempts go unresponded, but they also cannot afford to make the appropriate response, if that response is against the US. If Cambodia attempted to assassinate a Vietnamese leader, do you think they should let that stand?
The US is not so shackled. It is capable of responding militarily to any nation that makes such an attempt.
Should the US deliberately fail to protect it's sovereign interest simply because some smaller nations are less capable of protecting theirs?
To be fair, they were both right (and both very, very wrong) A cut in the gas tax wouldn't lead to a drop in price by the same amount. But it would lead to a drop in price by a small amount.
Also, you should probably add that the federal government takes takes no risk for their cut.
But Obama was more wrong than McCain, as Obama both wanted to not do the tax holiday, but also wanted to not facilitate more drilling, which although a temporary solution that might not have any effect for half a decade, is a temporary step we'll be wishing we'd started five years ago in five years time.
You misunderstand. If you believe in evolution (as opposed to simply believing it), then you'd notice that it offers only one reward: the propagation of your genetic code.
Therefore, the highest morality is whatever maximizes the number of organisms sharing your genes through the future.
There was, in fact, an entire school of thought dedicated to figuring out "evolutionary morality." It was called the eugenics movement, and it lead to the creation of whole new words for mass murder on an incomprehensibly grand scale.