Market forces *ALWAYS* work. All you can do with regulation is change the constraints a little.
And you do have to be careful how much, because market forces affect governments, too. For instance, during Prohibition, market forces determined that the economy was not producing and distributing certain goods efficiently, and established competing governments to route around the problem.
It's true that you want to keep the barriers to entry down, but there are other concerns as well, which is why men form governments at all. The trick is addressing those concerns without pushing the market into an unintended new equilibrium. Your final two paragraphs are spot on.
Heh. I'd settle for it not spinning up the HDD every 5 minutes to page out some little used program/texture/whatever. Consolidate paging, and try to avoid it at all if the hard drive has spun down.
What, exactly, are you going to do with your three thousand dollar laptop, anyway? If your answer is CAD, you're probably buying such machines in bulk, and you're probably not going to be able to use macs, anyway.
If your answer is research, you've probably got a hundred+ node cluster stashed away in a fishbowl room in one of your universities' buildings corridor-crossings. (Macs make great front-ends to research computers, though, but I'm not sure the $2800 model would be a wise investment)
If your answer is graphics.. well 'grats I guess. Macs are good machines and graphics (and video) will tend to use all available resources.
But I don't know anyone spending that kind of scratch on a home computer that isn't planning to be using it for games.
There is no need to spend $400 for a video card to play games. There are PLENTY of $150-range cards that are more than adequate to play everything currently available, and almost everything at "max settings."
Further, if your budget for video cards is $400, you're better off spending $150 now, and $150 in two years than to blow it all at once.
Compute power is a moving target. The wise buyer optimizes for cost per relative capabilities over time.
Considering their pricing scheme, I always thought it a bit shady that eBay doesn't hold the items. I mean.. Christies takes possession of the items, and their "warehouse" space is in the most expensive parts of several dozen cities.
eBay's business isn't "auctions." It's pretty much the same market as "classifieds."
They choose to use an "auction" style to help determine the market price for goods which are no longer commodities by virtue of their used-ed-ness, and more importantly to drum up excitement to convince people to participate.
And they do bring something to that market that is useful: they are much better organized than craigs list.
But they are not well organized. They have a decent database with which to drill down to individual items, but either they're scraping the text, or the people filling in the values are ignorant/maliciously entering in useless values or no values.
But that's all you need. eBay's pricing is way out of line with the marginal cost of their product, so there's a real market opportunity here for someone with the resources to kickstart it. You can even do the auction-type business if you want, but you can snap the fat right out from under eBay if you are willing to operate like a classified site and charge for bandwidth rather than final price.
Now, granted, bandwidth-pricing suggests commoditization of the online classifieds market, so your company would have pretty thin margins, but the benefit to society would be enormous.
Yeah, but back before Xbox came out, Halo's planned claim to faim was going to be a lot of evolutionary realism improvements that add up to a revolutanary change.
On the list were:
vehicles: not only playable vehicles, but ones with realistic suspensions.
General graphics improvements.
smooth envierment transitions (IIRC, you weren't supposed to *ever* see a "loading" screen, even going from outdoors to indoors)..Vast playable world. IIRC, the entire ring was supposed to be playable. I don't remember if it was supposed to be mostly dynamically generated procedural content or not, but that seems likely given the area of the ring exceeds the area of an entire earth by a significant margin.
Some of those improvements made it into the final game, but the vastness was gone. As was the FPS-ness, and much of the graphical candy.
If you really want to be seen, you should get a giant orange flag installed, or a flashing light on the end of a pole like the cops do. Motorcycle cops have no trouble being seen without making environmentally dubious modifications to their machines. You should be able to, also.
In a world where bikes cost more than many cars, no one is on a bike because it's "all they can afford." Your right to ride a death-mobile through a neighborhood doesn't trump the kids' right to go to school rested enough to learn something.
Normal pipes are loud enough. Bikes with sound and emissions control devices removed are simply inconsiderate. If you think that that is necessary to ride safely, perhaps you should consider... owning a small car instead. You'll even get better gas mileage.
Most bikers that die in accidents weren't wearing proper protective gear (i.e. helmets. and "skull caps" aren't helmets, at least, not from a safety standpoint.) There is very little correlation between muffler removal and accident avoidance.
This topic has two sides. You seem to have bought the kool-aid of the poorly-reasoned, egocentric one.
Ok, but does it work by making sex less enjoyable, or by making it less risky?
There is no medical benefit to the circumcision itself. There are religious reasons you might have the procedure done, but from what I've heard, if you're already circumcised by an MD, the religious official still has to snip something, so you're not really doing yourself a favor there.
I picked it specifically because it is a PC port of a console game. And because the console game borrows gameplay concepts heavily from the battlefield franchise, making them easier to compare.
Yeah, but console games sometimes suffer from what I like to call, "console vision." The game worlds are limited and confining, possibly due to shoehorning PC genres into a console control scheme.
Case in point: compare battlefield 1942 with battlefront. And compare either of them to Tribes or Tribes 2.
I know those are old examples, but they're representative ones. The "way of thinking" problems are not related to the display hardware: the original tribes ran decently on a P-II 300 mhz machine, yet had over 100 km^2 maps.
They don't measure the magnetic field over the sensor. They measure the frequency of the resonant circuit which includes the sensor. Parking a big lump of metal over the loop changes the reactance. Dropping a small kitchen magnet over it will not change it by nearly enough.
You're going to need something roughly the size of a car...
Many of those things are red herrings. And unions aren't there for getting laws passed. It's an option, but it's not necessarily a good one.
Wage caps are what got us into the "benefits" mess in the first place. Companies needed something they could offer prospective employees (during one of the big wars, IIRC) that wouldn't count as wages, because of an employee shortage.
So.. benefits were born.
The problem is that employer-paid health care has driven up the cost of medicine (although it is also true that the library of medical procedures has also increased in size, which is responsible for a significant portion of the "rising cost of medicine") through it's price-insulating properties.
It is very similar to the way college costs have skyrocketed as a result of student loans and grants, which, ironically, are seen by many as a solution to the rising price of education.
We would be much better off if every one got the full amount of their compensation, in hard currency, and paid for everything ourselves. If collectively bargaining with one of a few giant companies was more efficient than individually contracting with a lot of companies, insulin would be cheaper than hamburgers.
Every rich nation in the world today is only rich riding on the back of cheap labor to produce gigantic amounts of consumer goods to fuel their consumption-dependent economies.
So.. every rich nation is rich because they produce a tremendous amount of wealth. How insightful of you. Do you want a ribbon?
I think you will be very disappointed with pilots' night. And, further, you should try the arms thing. Not the "hands held high" shtick, but.. just let your arms go like a ragdoll, and try and give them a little push at the bottom of the hills on the up-stroke, so they get as much hang-time as possible.
Although.. six-flags probably also isn't the place to do it. Their poorly-maintained rattle-traps don't give you much opportunity for decent "floating" before battering you punch-drunk.
Woah, woah there. Clinton was pretty ineffective as a president. And more importantly, in part thanks to his sexual escapades, he was distracted from being the worst president ever.
That title probably goes to Woodrow Wilson, for his abysmal domestic policies and his massive foreign policy blunder of sacrificing so much in an effort to prevent another world war that he set up the conditions which would.. cause another world war, AND set up the conditions that lead to the Vietnam debacle.
Although FDR and Lincoln are certainly contenders, but they both had significant mitigating factors to the harm they caused.
Wait.. Your friend traveled from Scotland to England.. by air??? I suppose you have another friend who regularly flies from Baltimore to DC? Or from downtown Manhattan to, like..., uptown Manhattan?
Slashdot Mirror
Woah, calm down.
Market forces *ALWAYS* work. All you can do with regulation is change the constraints a little.
And you do have to be careful how much, because market forces affect governments, too. For instance, during Prohibition, market forces determined that the economy was not producing and distributing certain goods efficiently, and established competing governments to route around the problem.
It's true that you want to keep the barriers to entry down, but there are other concerns as well, which is why men form governments at all. The trick is addressing those concerns without pushing the market into an unintended new equilibrium. Your final two paragraphs are spot on.
Ah, but the problem is.. There can be only one!
Heh. I'd settle for it not spinning up the HDD every 5 minutes to page out some little used program/texture/whatever. Consolidate paging, and try to avoid it at all if the hard drive has spun down.
How is turning UP the GPU fan going to help the OTHER components?
What, exactly, are you going to do with your three thousand dollar laptop, anyway? If your answer is CAD, you're probably buying such machines in bulk, and you're probably not going to be able to use macs, anyway.
If your answer is research, you've probably got a hundred+ node cluster stashed away in a fishbowl room in one of your universities' buildings corridor-crossings. (Macs make great front-ends to research computers, though, but I'm not sure the $2800 model would be a wise investment)
If your answer is graphics.. well 'grats I guess. Macs are good machines and graphics (and video) will tend to use all available resources.
But I don't know anyone spending that kind of scratch on a home computer that isn't planning to be using it for games.
Wow.
There is no need to spend $400 for a video card to play games. There are PLENTY of $150-range cards that are more than adequate to play everything currently available, and almost everything at "max settings."
Further, if your budget for video cards is $400, you're better off spending $150 now, and $150 in two years than to blow it all at once.
Compute power is a moving target. The wise buyer optimizes for cost per relative capabilities over time.
Which doctor?
Considering their pricing scheme, I always thought it a bit shady that eBay doesn't hold the items. I mean.. Christies takes possession of the items, and their "warehouse" space is in the most expensive parts of several dozen cities.
If you were really using IRC, you wouldn't have the (virtual) lawn...
eBay's business isn't "auctions." It's pretty much the same market as "classifieds."
They choose to use an "auction" style to help determine the market price for goods which are no longer commodities by virtue of their used-ed-ness, and more importantly to drum up excitement to convince people to participate.
And they do bring something to that market that is useful: they are much better organized than craigs list.
But they are not well organized. They have a decent database with which to drill down to individual items, but either they're scraping the text, or the people filling in the values are ignorant/maliciously entering in useless values or no values.
But that's all you need. eBay's pricing is way out of line with the marginal cost of their product, so there's a real market opportunity here for someone with the resources to kickstart it. You can even do the auction-type business if you want, but you can snap the fat right out from under eBay if you are willing to operate like a classified site and charge for bandwidth rather than final price.
Now, granted, bandwidth-pricing suggests commoditization of the online classifieds market, so your company would have pretty thin margins, but the benefit to society would be enormous.
Depends on what you mean by "free" I suppose. Your description describes GNOME as more free, however.
Why should the window manager restrict the applications' licenses?
sound is an emission.
And I'm not convinced that the people cutting off the mufflers aren't also cutting off the cat.
Yeah, but back before Xbox came out, Halo's planned claim to faim was going to be a lot of evolutionary realism improvements that add up to a revolutanary change.
On the list were:
vehicles: not only playable vehicles, but ones with realistic suspensions.
General graphics improvements.
smooth envierment transitions (IIRC, you weren't supposed to *ever* see a "loading" screen, even going from outdoors to indoors) ..Vast playable world. IIRC, the entire ring was supposed to be playable. I don't remember if it was supposed to be mostly dynamically generated procedural content or not, but that seems likely given the area of the ring exceeds the area of an entire earth by a significant margin.
Some of those improvements made it into the final game, but the vastness was gone. As was the FPS-ness, and much of the graphical candy.
uh.. duh?
If the state agencies were less stringent than the feds, they'd have a hard time justifying their budgets, wouldnt they?
If you really want to be seen, you should get a giant orange flag installed, or a flashing light on the end of a pole like the cops do. Motorcycle cops have no trouble being seen without making environmentally dubious modifications to their machines. You should be able to, also.
In a world where bikes cost more than many cars, no one is on a bike because it's "all they can afford." Your right to ride a death-mobile through a neighborhood doesn't trump the kids' right to go to school rested enough to learn something.
Dick.
Normal pipes are loud enough. Bikes with sound and emissions control devices removed are simply inconsiderate. If you think that that is necessary to ride safely, perhaps you should consider... owning a small car instead. You'll even get better gas mileage.
Most bikers that die in accidents weren't wearing proper protective gear (i.e. helmets. and "skull caps" aren't helmets, at least, not from a safety standpoint.) There is very little correlation between muffler removal and accident avoidance.
This topic has two sides. You seem to have bought the kool-aid of the poorly-reasoned, egocentric one.
Ok, but does it work by making sex less enjoyable, or by making it less risky?
There is no medical benefit to the circumcision itself. There are religious reasons you might have the procedure done, but from what I've heard, if you're already circumcised by an MD, the religious official still has to snip something, so you're not really doing yourself a favor there.
I picked it specifically because it is a PC port of a console game. And because the console game borrows gameplay concepts heavily from the battlefield franchise, making them easier to compare.
Yeah, but console games sometimes suffer from what I like to call, "console vision." The game worlds are limited and confining, possibly due to shoehorning PC genres into a console control scheme.
Case in point: compare battlefield 1942 with battlefront. And compare either of them to Tribes or Tribes 2.
I know those are old examples, but they're representative ones. The "way of thinking" problems are not related to the display hardware: the original tribes ran decently on a P-II 300 mhz machine, yet had over 100 km^2 maps.
You'll need a pretty big magnet.
They don't measure the magnetic field over the sensor. They measure the frequency of the resonant circuit which includes the sensor. Parking a big lump of metal over the loop changes the reactance. Dropping a small kitchen magnet over it will not change it by nearly enough.
You're going to need something roughly the size of a car...
Many of those things are red herrings. And unions aren't there for getting laws passed. It's an option, but it's not necessarily a good one.
Wage caps are what got us into the "benefits" mess in the first place. Companies needed something they could offer prospective employees (during one of the big wars, IIRC) that wouldn't count as wages, because of an employee shortage.
So.. benefits were born.
The problem is that employer-paid health care has driven up the cost of medicine (although it is also true that the library of medical procedures has also increased in size, which is responsible for a significant portion of the "rising cost of medicine") through it's price-insulating properties.
It is very similar to the way college costs have skyrocketed as a result of student loans and grants, which, ironically, are seen by many as a solution to the rising price of education.
We would be much better off if every one got the full amount of their compensation, in hard currency, and paid for everything ourselves. If collectively bargaining with one of a few giant companies was more efficient than individually contracting with a lot of companies, insulin would be cheaper than hamburgers.
So.. every rich nation is rich because they produce a tremendous amount of wealth. How insightful of you. Do you want a ribbon?
I think you will be very disappointed with pilots' night. And, further, you should try the arms thing. Not the "hands held high" shtick, but.. just let your arms go like a ragdoll, and try and give them a little push at the bottom of the hills on the up-stroke, so they get as much hang-time as possible.
Although.. six-flags probably also isn't the place to do it. Their poorly-maintained rattle-traps don't give you much opportunity for decent "floating" before battering you punch-drunk.
Woah, woah there. Clinton was pretty ineffective as a president. And more importantly, in part thanks to his sexual escapades, he was distracted from being the worst president ever.
That title probably goes to Woodrow Wilson, for his abysmal domestic policies and his massive foreign policy blunder of sacrificing so much in an effort to prevent another world war that he set up the conditions which would.. cause another world war, AND set up the conditions that lead to the Vietnam debacle.
Although FDR and Lincoln are certainly contenders, but they both had significant mitigating factors to the harm they caused.
Clinton.. didn't really do anything of note.
Wait.. Your friend traveled from Scotland to England.. by air???
I suppose you have another friend who regularly flies from Baltimore to DC? Or from downtown Manhattan to, like..., uptown Manhattan?