You forget that this will leave Munich with suppliers who are able to do mass Linux migrations to government specifications. This unique ability was hard fought for in administrative and legal nightmares over the past years, and is a major part of what the 35 million buy.
Munich will be quick to offer practical migration services to other cities all over Germany. If even a few see the chance to save some money over the M$ option (many German cities, most importantly Berlin, are in big financial trouble), Munich will see its initial investments pay off very well.
> They have a market position but little in the way of real IP as far as I can tell.
Correct. Their business model seems to involve a bet IP as we know it will be dead before they run out of legal resources. Since others have been willing to place $580 million on the same bet, the idea doesn't seem so far out. I would not be too surprised if someone was to bet $1.5 billion.
Why do we always mothball the weapons systems that actually work?
Because the important question is not whether they work, but whether they are useful. The SR-71 was made unattractive by satellite imagery. The F-14 is made unattractive by the fact no army in the entire world bothers to have an air force that it takes F-14s to take down. The B-1B and B-2 are great because they make sense in an asymetric scenario, while the F-14 doesn't.
Nations are becoming less and less important as the information age gets going. Similarily, extended families became less and less important with the industrial era. Before that, the hometown/village. Before that, the clan. Each been the central social group everyone identified themselves by, each had seemed a natural constant in the lives of people and still each was replaced by the next. Currently, nation states are being replaced by continent-size cultural zones; most obviously so in Europe and South America.
You can call this unfortunate, like you can call any natural process unfortunate. Or you can realize that identifying yourself as a citizen of your country is a cultural habit, not a necessity, so the value you are losing was virtual in the first place. Other social reference groups (say your family, or your race, or mankind) may be used interchangably. And some choices give you more options than others.
I don't think car vendors and financial services have much interest in the smart-enough-to-use-Adblock demographic.
Re:everyone had a job in the stone age
on
The Engine of US Jobs
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
> Why should people serve themselves if they know the system will serve them?
According to rational choice theory (which underlies almost all economic thinking in this day) they should not. The availability of unemployment benefits, medical care etc. means that logically, people shouldn't work. But they do. Germany is an economic force to be reckoned with - and survived disasters like two World War defeats and annexation of part of the country be the Soviet Bloc - even though this "abuse incentive" has been in place since Bismarck's Health Insurance Act of 1883. The idea that unemployment benefits make people stop working is a fallacy that just keep being repeated.
Re:everyone had a job in the stone age
on
The Engine of US Jobs
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
> Would YOU like to pay more in taxes so I could quit my job and yet still take 2 vacations a year?
Actually, I do pay taxes in Germany and I have financed such vacations. I have good reason to. My reason is simple. Imagine a poor family in the US finds themselves facing a choice between a $100.000 hospital bill or death of their child.
Do you think they will let the kid die? The economic model according to which helping the poor is a bad idea (called neoliberal although it is neither new nor liberal), assumes that they will.
Or will use desperate measures that harm the system that forces them to make the decision? (Examples include defrauding the hospital, trying to raise money through crime - or even suicide, which destroys investments in education that you helped pay.) US crime and suicide rates firmly prove this to be the case.
This is why the thinking that the poor do not need help is fundamentally flawed. People not served by the system will attack the system and defending/repairing the system is potentially much more expensive I do prefer financing vacations to massive crime rates and exploding prison populations, thank you very much.
> When a $100k house's value increases to $300k this is seen as a $200k increase in the economy.... but this is just bullshit, no value has been created.
Value is virtual - it is created when people agree it is created. Your disagreement stems from your arbitrary belief the GDP wasn't bullshit in the first place.
everyone had a job in the stone age
on
The Engine of US Jobs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
From the start I'm inclined to believe the article is flawed from a statistical perspecitve.
I think it is flawed to concentrate on jobs in the first place. By far the more meaningful data to compare countries by is standard of living. After all, everyone had a job in the stone age!
Of course standard of living is a subjective thing, practically only measurable through composition of a set of factors including such things as working hours per week, life expectancy, crime rate and even family size. Naturally, the weighing of factors would bias results in favor of one country or the other. Still it would perhaps give less absurd results than these statistics: I mean they make the US, where a single mom of average education is practically forced to take two jobs, look better than Germany, where some unemployed people still go on holiday twice a year!
> if the current base is really so bad and unreliable as he makes it look, this will result in taking over everything bad but shutting out the broad mass of eyes that could spot a error and correct it.
Editor/article ratio will not just be low, it will quickly flatline for the following reason. The relatively few editors Citizendium wants to have are supposed to register under their real names with a working e-mail address in order to participate. Even today, wiki admins who make the stupid mistake of using their real name are frequently harassed by dissenting readers. Names are Google-able and experts are particularly easy to find. Once that happens, contribution on the Citizendium page on the Israel-Palestine conflict will turn out to have been a very bad idea.
I believe Larry Sanger's explanation for the lack of highly-educated experts in the ranks of Wikipedia is a grave misconception. Academics have way more efficient ways to invest their time. Rational choice theory predicts that time-intensive tasks will be most readily accepted by people who do not have access to more attractive options for investment of their resources (here, time). This is why the most active contributors to the wiki are single, workaholics, unemployed and/or relatively isolated socially. (I don't have a source on this, but I think it is obvious.) Academics can use just the same resources required for wiki contribution (spare time, computer, web access) to increase scientific knowledge, earn money and further their careers. So it is only natural many prefer that investment of their resources over wiki editorship.
Plus, academics have already written everything they know, in massive libraries of science journals that everyone is free to read and paraphrase into the wiki (or anywhere else, for that matter). Sooner or later, people with more time to spare will do that anyway. Thus, I do not believe my colleagues will be in any way more inclined to contribute to this new project than to Wikipedia.
Could it be possible that this whole region free rumor was started by a mistake.
Imagine you were Nintendo, and not sure about how region locking actually affects sales because there is no hard data on that. Would you consider collecting the data yourself? As in, have two lackeys make contradictory announcements, and watch the customer responses?
>What I really fear is the torture that Tibetans are going to endure before the Olympic games. They're gonna be looking for a platform and China is probably just gonna round 'em up.
You underestimate the Chinese. They're going to run a huge campaign where happy Tibetans in traditional-but-clean garments smile into cameras before magnificent Himalaya skylines and say how much better their country is after the Chinese helped them electrify it, and how the Dalai Lama and his guys are really just a bunch of old theocrats who want their dictatorship back. There'll be local representatives ready for interviewing, guided tours through Tibet (with really helpful translators so journalists can converse with the locals freely) and all sorts of helpful press maps/video clips/etc. After all, this is the perfect opportunity: the Chinese will, temporarily, have all the media in the World to press down the Party's version of the story in everyone's minds.
Unruly Tibetans aren't going to be rounded up before the games (because the World could find out), but will be temporarily arrested "to prevent violence" during the games, to be seriously rounded up a bit later when the World has grown tired of China for a while, and looks somewhere else.
I spent months on a 700MHz Duron with 128(!) megs of RAM translating a 400+ pages book in OOo, occasionally switching to the Firefox window for some relaxing browsing, with WinAmp constantly running. No complaints, it ran like a charm (except when I saved to the ancient 8GB hard drive). I can see how image and sound editing wouldn't be fun on this kind of machine, and how decoding MPEG4 on it just doesn't work, but OOo and Firefox absolutely are not a problem.
This is even more true when you don't need all the OS overhead I had in the above scenario, using Win2000 i.e. requiring malware protection etc.
> a single point of contact which doesn't ever have to change
Ever as in: as long as you pay $20 every year?
It doesn't make sense in any way, for customers. For people who seek to collect all data about you and are forever after a unique ID (see SSN) to organize their victi^H^H^H^H^Hcustomer database more effectively, it must seem like something really worth looking into. I reckon we are seeing a particularly blatant grab for investors money. More power to the guys who do it: stupid investors need to be burned every once in a while.
In North America. They have industry associations in the rest of the world as well. Settling invites over the European and Japanese guys to extor^H^H^H^H^Hreceive their own part of your cake.
> The odds of winning a prize depend upon the total number of eligible entries received.
Nice way of saying that to max your chances, do not advertise this site.
When in this sort of situation, it is much more desirable for your evidence to be stolen rather than destroyed. Unfortunately, to fake a burglary (or even get insurance to pay...) is a crime. I'd obviously never advise anyone to commit such a crime, mind you. It is a fact, however, that such a crime will be much, much less expensive than letting the RIAA have their way with you.
I disagree. Governments have an interesting in keeping their population on numbing drugs, not on cheerful-making ones. Happy people are unafraid. So you can allow people to become happy for a short time as they can and do with alcohol (just enough for a riot), but you risk serious political trouble when you have people like the hippies, who drugged themselves into happiness for long periods and could actually form an opposition. This is part of the reason why alcohol production was subsidized in the Communist bloc, and why it is allowed in most non-Islamic areas, while drugs that not only make you happy, but even have clearly beneficial effects on work effectivity, such as MDMA, are tightly controlled everywhere - they can make people happy for a too long time.
When you say Brave New World, don't forget that Soma, the drug in that book, was explicitly a light drug with short-term effects (rather like Coffee really), while highly effective drugs were unknown in that world. Aldous Huxley must have explicitly excluded them, because he knew about psychedelics (he wrote about them) and if he had thought strong drugs were compatible with a totalitarian government, they would have been in the book.
And when they manage to create a drug that makes you more happy/motivated/industrious/intelligent (all related factors!) without noticable side effects, you'll get an interesting situation.
If it is regarded ethically acceptable to ask people to take them (or unethical to deny them access!), they will become a commodity item at least for the rich, depending on production prices. I expect employers who fire people who do not use such drugs, insurances with better rates for users, politicians demanding a supply of them for everyone as part of health care.
If, however, they are made illegal (out of habit if for no other reason), they'll be another street drug much like coke and will be extremely popular in schools, especially before exams. Success in life will be directly influenced by one's skill in obtaining illegal items.
I'm all for the former option. The latter is more "natural" and "humane", but I never understood the supposed value of those attributes anyway, and the former is certainly more likely to make a lot of things better in all areas: individual happiness, crime, economy, health... it may be ethical to give up (more of) our natural human condition.
Key quote:
"His resignation came as ministers furious at Mr Blair's handling of the crisis said they would push for an emergency recall of parliament in a manoeuvre they hoped would trigger the Prime Minister's downfall.
More than 150 MPs have urged Jack Straw, the Commons leader, to ask the Speaker to summon politicians back from their 76-day break as diplomatic calls at the United Nations stalled and Israel stepped up its offensive in Lebanon."
This is a not-so-expensive method of asking the userbase what it wants, and getting their ideas. I'm willing to bet a number of entries (especially of those which didn't win, or didn't even make it into the round of 24) will end up as features in the next MacOS.
I believe we will see more ventures of this kind in the future, even outside software. The ideas that "little people" never had the resources to implement are a resource that can be valuable and is easily tapped. What is funny is that the whole model started not in some corporate think tank, but in FPS mods. Final Doom is the first instance I can think of.
No. The only unique property of moon ore is that it isn't inside such a big gravity well, so it is less expensive to move up into space. And unless something fantastically rare and useful can be found there, even the most prized minerals would only be attractive in massive amounts because you would first have to more the necessary equipment up there, not to mention transport capacity to get the stuff to any buyer.
Only tourism and science are likely to be viable there in the foreseeable future. Big exception: if we unexpectedly manage to get automated construction from raw minerals to work, this could make industry on the moon so cheap it could become viable to start mining and export there. However, this isn't going to happen anytime soon, and when it does it will end capitalism as we know it anyway, so it is nothing you could base a business model on.
Between another series of civil wars all over the Middle East practically inevitable and daily production capacity already at a limit, oil prices are very likely to double in the next two years. Biofuel will be a good choice for countries able to produce it (Europe, US, China, Russia, Brazil, Australia), but a massive problem for regions already in agriculture hell (Africa, India, even the Middle East). In the latter regions, the need for fuel will press food production to drop further. Much of the fuel - especially from Africa - will be exported, too.
If there was no biofuel, the fuel consumers would be forced to change their lifestyles. The way things are, we won't, and the starvation toll is going to rise accordingly. Currently, it stands at 27000 - or 8 times 9/11 as I like to call it - per day. (Source: WHO)
Slashdot Mirror
You forget that this will leave Munich with suppliers who are able to do mass Linux migrations to government specifications. This unique ability was hard fought for in administrative and legal nightmares over the past years, and is a major part of what the 35 million buy.
Munich will be quick to offer practical migration services to other cities all over Germany. If even a few see the chance to save some money over the M$ option (many German cities, most importantly Berlin, are in big financial trouble), Munich will see its initial investments pay off very well.
> They have a market position but little in the way of real IP as far as I can tell.
Correct. Their business model seems to involve a bet IP as we know it will be dead before they run out of legal resources. Since others have been willing to place $580 million on the same bet, the idea doesn't seem so far out. I would not be too surprised if someone was to bet $1.5 billion.
Why do we always mothball the weapons systems that actually work?
Because the important question is not whether they work, but whether they are useful. The SR-71 was made unattractive by satellite imagery. The F-14 is made unattractive by the fact no army in the entire world bothers to have an air force that it takes F-14s to take down. The B-1B and B-2 are great because they make sense in an asymetric scenario, while the F-14 doesn't.
Nations are becoming less and less important as the information age gets going.
Similarily, extended families became less and less important with the industrial era.
Before that, the hometown/village.
Before that, the clan.
Each been the central social group everyone identified themselves by, each had seemed a natural constant in the lives of people and still each was replaced by the next. Currently, nation states are being replaced by continent-size cultural zones; most obviously so in Europe and South America.
You can call this unfortunate, like you can call any natural process unfortunate. Or you can realize that identifying yourself as a citizen of your country is a cultural habit, not a necessity, so the value you are losing was virtual in the first place. Other social reference groups (say your family, or your race, or mankind) may be used interchangably. And some choices give you more options than others.
I don't think car vendors and financial services have much interest in the smart-enough-to-use-Adblock demographic.
> Why should people serve themselves if they know the system will serve them?
According to rational choice theory (which underlies almost all economic thinking in this day) they should not. The availability of unemployment benefits, medical care etc. means that logically, people shouldn't work. But they do. Germany is an economic force to be reckoned with - and survived disasters like two World War defeats and annexation of part of the country be the Soviet Bloc - even though this "abuse incentive" has been in place since Bismarck's Health Insurance Act of 1883. The idea that unemployment benefits make people stop working is a fallacy that just keep being repeated.
> Would YOU like to pay more in taxes so I could quit my job and yet still take 2 vacations a year?
Actually, I do pay taxes in Germany and I have financed such vacations. I have good reason to. My reason is simple. Imagine a poor family in the US finds themselves facing a choice between a $100.000 hospital bill or death of their child.
Do you think they will let the kid die?
The economic model according to which helping the poor is a bad idea (called neoliberal although it is neither new nor liberal), assumes that they will.
Or will use desperate measures that harm the system that forces them to make the decision?
(Examples include defrauding the hospital, trying to raise money through crime - or even suicide, which destroys investments in education that you helped pay.)
US crime and suicide rates firmly prove this to be the case.
This is why the thinking that the poor do not need help is fundamentally flawed. People not served by the system will attack the system and defending/repairing the system is potentially much more expensive I do prefer financing vacations to massive crime rates and exploding prison populations, thank you very much.
> When a $100k house's value increases to $300k this is seen as a $200k increase in the economy.... but this is just bullshit, no value has been created.
Value is virtual - it is created when people agree it is created. Your disagreement stems from your arbitrary belief the GDP wasn't bullshit in the first place.
From the start I'm inclined to believe the article is flawed from a statistical perspecitve.
I think it is flawed to concentrate on jobs in the first place. By far the more meaningful data to compare countries by is standard of living. After all, everyone had a job in the stone age!
Of course standard of living is a subjective thing, practically only measurable through composition of a set of factors including such things as working hours per week, life expectancy, crime rate and even family size. Naturally, the weighing of factors would bias results in favor of one country or the other. Still it would perhaps give less absurd results than these statistics: I mean they make the US, where a single mom of average education is practically forced to take two jobs, look better than Germany, where some unemployed people still go on holiday twice a year!
> if the current base is really so bad and unreliable as he makes it look, this will result in taking over everything bad but shutting out the broad mass of eyes that could spot a error and correct it.
Editor/article ratio will not just be low, it will quickly flatline for the following reason. The relatively few editors Citizendium wants to have are supposed to register under their real names with a working e-mail address in order to participate. Even today, wiki admins who make the stupid mistake of using their real name are frequently harassed by dissenting readers. Names are Google-able and experts are particularly easy to find. Once that happens, contribution on the Citizendium page on the Israel-Palestine conflict will turn out to have been a very bad idea.
I believe Larry Sanger's explanation for the lack of highly-educated experts in the ranks of Wikipedia is a grave misconception. Academics have way more efficient ways to invest their time. Rational choice theory predicts that time-intensive tasks will be most readily accepted by people who do not have access to more attractive options for investment of their resources (here, time). This is why the most active contributors to the wiki are single, workaholics, unemployed and/or relatively isolated socially. (I don't have a source on this, but I think it is obvious.) Academics can use just the same resources required for wiki contribution (spare time, computer, web access) to increase scientific knowledge, earn money and further their careers. So it is only natural many prefer that investment of their resources over wiki editorship.
Plus, academics have already written everything they know, in massive libraries of science journals that everyone is free to read and paraphrase into the wiki (or anywhere else, for that matter). Sooner or later, people with more time to spare will do that anyway. Thus, I do not believe my colleagues will be in any way more inclined to contribute to this new project than to Wikipedia.
Could it be possible that this whole region free rumor was started by a mistake.
Imagine you were Nintendo, and not sure about how region locking actually affects sales because there is no hard data on that. Would you consider collecting the data yourself? As in, have two lackeys make contradictory announcements, and watch the customer responses?
>What I really fear is the torture that Tibetans are going to endure before the Olympic games. They're gonna be looking for a platform and China is probably just gonna round 'em up.
You underestimate the Chinese. They're going to run a huge campaign where happy Tibetans in traditional-but-clean garments smile into cameras before magnificent Himalaya skylines and say how much better their country is after the Chinese helped them electrify it, and how the Dalai Lama and his guys are really just a bunch of old theocrats who want their dictatorship back. There'll be local representatives ready for interviewing, guided tours through Tibet (with really helpful translators so journalists can converse with the locals freely) and all sorts of helpful press maps/video clips/etc. After all, this is the perfect opportunity: the Chinese will, temporarily, have all the media in the World to press down the Party's version of the story in everyone's minds.
Unruly Tibetans aren't going to be rounded up before the games (because the World could find out), but will be temporarily arrested "to prevent violence" during the games, to be seriously rounded up a bit later when the World has grown tired of China for a while, and looks somewhere else.
I spent months on a 700MHz Duron with 128(!) megs of RAM translating a 400+ pages book in OOo, occasionally switching to the Firefox window for some relaxing browsing, with WinAmp constantly running. No complaints, it ran like a charm (except when I saved to the ancient 8GB hard drive). I can see how image and sound editing wouldn't be fun on this kind of machine, and how decoding MPEG4 on it just doesn't work, but OOo and Firefox absolutely are not a problem.
This is even more true when you don't need all the OS overhead I had in the above scenario, using Win2000 i.e. requiring malware protection etc.
> a single point of contact which doesn't ever have to change
Ever as in: as long as you pay $20 every year?
It doesn't make sense in any way, for customers. For people who seek to collect all data about you and are forever after a unique ID (see SSN) to organize their victi^H^H^H^H^Hcustomer database more effectively, it must seem like something really worth looking into. I reckon we are seeing a particularly blatant grab for investors money. More power to the guys who do it: stupid investors need to be burned every once in a while.
>once you pay of one group, what about the next?
>Theres the RIAA, MPAA and the BSA.
In North America. They have industry associations in the rest of the world as well. Settling invites over the European and Japanese guys to extor^H^H^H^H^Hreceive their own part of your cake.
> The odds of winning a prize depend upon the total number of eligible entries received. Nice way of saying that to max your chances, do not advertise this site.
[sarcasm]Yay for justice![/sarcasm]
When in this sort of situation, it is much more desirable for your evidence to be stolen rather than destroyed. Unfortunately, to fake a burglary (or even get insurance to pay...) is a crime. I'd obviously never advise anyone to commit such a crime, mind you. It is a fact, however, that such a crime will be much, much less expensive than letting the RIAA have their way with you.
Disclaimer: IANAL.
I disagree. Governments have an interesting in keeping their population on numbing drugs, not on cheerful-making ones. Happy people are unafraid. So you can allow people to become happy for a short time as they can and do with alcohol (just enough for a riot), but you risk serious political trouble when you have people like the hippies, who drugged themselves into happiness for long periods and could actually form an opposition. This is part of the reason why alcohol production was subsidized in the Communist bloc, and why it is allowed in most non-Islamic areas, while drugs that not only make you happy, but even have clearly beneficial effects on work effectivity, such as MDMA, are tightly controlled everywhere - they can make people happy for a too long time.
When you say Brave New World, don't forget that Soma, the drug in that book, was explicitly a light drug with short-term effects (rather like Coffee really), while highly effective drugs were unknown in that world. Aldous Huxley must have explicitly excluded them, because he knew about psychedelics (he wrote about them) and if he had thought strong drugs were compatible with a totalitarian government, they would have been in the book.
And when they manage to create a drug that makes you more happy/motivated/industrious/intelligent (all related factors!) without noticable side effects, you'll get an interesting situation.
If it is regarded ethically acceptable to ask people to take them (or unethical to deny them access!), they will become a commodity item at least for the rich, depending on production prices. I expect employers who fire people who do not use such drugs, insurances with better rates for users, politicians demanding a supply of them for everyone as part of health care.
If, however, they are made illegal (out of habit if for no other reason), they'll be another street drug much like coke and will be extremely popular in schools, especially before exams. Success in life will be directly influenced by one's skill in obtaining illegal items.
I'm all for the former option. The latter is more "natural" and "humane", but I never understood the supposed value of those attributes anyway, and the former is certainly more likely to make a lot of things better in all areas: individual happiness, crime, economy, health... it may be ethical to give up (more of) our natural human condition.
Source: sploid.com Aug 11 2006 - Terra! Terra! Terra!
Key quote:
"The timing of the hysteria was even more useful to Blair, who was on the verge of being thrown out of Downing Street last night."
I'm also interested in a source on the vote of no confidence. While again I would not be particularly opposed to it I do feel my spidey sense tingling
Source: The Scotsman, 9 Aug 2006 - MP quits government over Blair's policy on Middle East
Key quote:
"His resignation came as ministers furious at Mr Blair's handling of the crisis said they would push for an emergency recall of parliament in a manoeuvre they hoped would trigger the Prime Minister's downfall.
More than 150 MPs have urged Jack Straw, the Commons leader, to ask the Speaker to summon politicians back from their 76-day break as diplomatic calls at the United Nations stalled and Israel stepped up its offensive in Lebanon."
This is a not-so-expensive method of asking the userbase what it wants, and getting their ideas. I'm willing to bet a number of entries (especially of those which didn't win, or didn't even make it into the round of 24) will end up as features in the next MacOS.
I believe we will see more ventures of this kind in the future, even outside software. The ideas that "little people" never had the resources to implement are a resource that can be valuable and is easily tapped. What is funny is that the whole model started not in some corporate think tank, but in FPS mods. Final Doom is the first instance I can think of.
No. The only unique property of moon ore is that it isn't inside such a big gravity well, so it is less expensive to move up into space. And unless something fantastically rare and useful can be found there, even the most prized minerals would only be attractive in massive amounts because you would first have to more the necessary equipment up there, not to mention transport capacity to get the stuff to any buyer.
Only tourism and science are likely to be viable there in the foreseeable future. Big exception: if we unexpectedly manage to get automated construction from raw minerals to work, this could make industry on the moon so cheap it could become viable to start mining and export there. However, this isn't going to happen anytime soon, and when it does it will end capitalism as we know it anyway, so it is nothing you could base a business model on.
What is clear is that politicians need to be talking to scientists and economists on the whole energy and water issue, not to lobbyists.
I could name a hundred other issues with exactly the same solution.
Between another series of civil wars all over the Middle East practically inevitable and daily production capacity already at a limit, oil prices are very likely to double in the next two years. Biofuel will be a good choice for countries able to produce it (Europe, US, China, Russia, Brazil, Australia), but a massive problem for regions already in agriculture hell (Africa, India, even the Middle East). In the latter regions, the need for fuel will press food production to drop further. Much of the fuel - especially from Africa - will be exported, too.
If there was no biofuel, the fuel consumers would be forced to change their lifestyles. The way things are, we won't, and the starvation toll is going to rise accordingly. Currently, it stands at 27000 - or 8 times 9/11 as I like to call it - per day. (Source: WHO)