When I was reading 1984 through for the second time, I realized that the world that he had set up was the logical conclusion of where the Atlas Shrugged world was headed before the strike. Think about it, IngSoc was to the point where they had all power, and they made so much stuff illegal that everybody was breaking some law. They had removed the concept of the innocent man through thoughtcrime.
If you want an interesting read, try reading the two back to back. They're like the bookends of a trilogy.
If the manufacturer has a monopoly, he can squeeze out the most shoddy piece of crap possible and, if you want an item with the uses of the product, you HAVE to buy this shoddy piece of crap.
This is true. HOWEVER (since you seem to like caps for emphasis), Apple doesn't have a monopoly on either mp3 players or "mp3" distribution. See here for a list of a few other places you can go to choose where to buy mp3s that can be used on any player. The ipod doesn't lock you into any one music store; it plays mp3s from any source, so no lock in there.
Now it's true that ITMS "locks" you into using the iPod, but this would only seem to hurt Apple by reducing the potiential number of end-users that can use their media. You CAN get the vast majority of the music in the ITMS catalog from other sources, you know.
There is no monopoly in digital media distribution (music stores) or consumption (mp3 players). Consumers have lots of choice.
Software Patents will make it impossible to create a non-infringing application unless you are as big as MS or IBM.
I think this statement, taken very litterally, is the crux of the matter. There should be a lot of freedom to create new software, even if it does the exact same thing as existing (even patented?) software. It's the old mouse trap situation: you can patent a new kind of mouse trap, but not the idea of a mousetrap.
I guess I've been hanging around academic crowd too long. In academia, people come up with parallel or independant discoveries all the time, and no one is crying foul here. Makes me wonder about academic patents. ..
350 years ago, Newton would have patented calculus and sued the pants off of Leibniz. The case would probably still be in court! Then again, Leibniz would have patented his notation, and we'd all have to pay his decendents royalties any time we wanted to find out how fast we're going (dx/dt).
Those guys are not planning on building a massive travel corridor from Canada to Mexico. From their website:
There are no plans to build a new NAFTA Superhighway - it exists today as I-35.
and
Our goals:
To be a strong advocacy and lobby group for transportation and related issues and interests of the jurisdictions along the corridor.
To gain federal, provincial/state, and municipal government support in all three NAFTA countries.
. ..
To push for, facilitate and support any Corridor related projects or initiatives that focus on enhancing the security, safety and efficiency of transportation, trade processing and logistics systems along the corridor
Looking over their website, they are more a lobbying coallition getting state and federal funding to maintain and improve the highways/railways in order to benefit the communities near this transporation corridor. I don't think of lobbying as a big project, no matter how many "gifts" they give our elected officials.
I think it's more an extreme case of risk aversion and myopic planning than complacency.
There is no way a public company would invest enough time to pull off something like this, and, as you mentioned, private companies don't have enough money to do it.
Governments (at least here in the States) won't do anything like this, anymore for the same reasons public companies won't do it. They think need results now or their voters (~stockholders) won't vote for them and they'll lose all that precious power they hold so dear.
Big projects don't get done because MBAs are running the world.
I have a serious question about who decides what makes it into "standards". I know that there's an organization that makes up what standards are. I know (at least I've read a lot here on/.) that IE is not compliant to those standards. BUT Microsoft still has around 90% market share (I'm not arguing that this is a good thing at all), so for all intents and purposes, their protocalls, and whatnot should be the de facto standard, if not the official one, right? Develop for IE and you reach 90% of your audience (much more for many sites), but write 100% compliant code for a site, and you might alienate 90% of your audience. I just don't get it.
Dreadful security and dated UI aside, ahy are we going after MS to change IE rather than adapt new browsers to the IE "standards"? Are IE "standards" not widely used because they are closed and opaque to developers, thereby locking any developer into using their tools? Does IE follow any standard? Has the W3C standardized on things that are easier to use and will age more gracefully? In short, and this is an honest question, why aren't the IE "standards" standard?
I know I'm exposing my ignorance to all things concerning web development with this post, but every time I see people getting up in arms about IE not being compliant I wonder about this.
-- Thanks for taking the time to read this and using your precious mod points to bury this post. --
There are some interesting things to think about in your post, but I think that your saying that
What kind of analyst says that a company like Craigslist can generate half a billion dollars in revenue? An analyst hyping himself, I'd say.
is a little flawed. Even if his numbers are off by an order of magnitude, he still points out that Craigslist could make twice what it is making now.
So let's assume that he's off by $475 million. That still leaves a very interesting question: "What company with only a couple dozen employees leaves $25 million on the table?" There are already a number of posts with answers that are probably pretty close to the mark. Whatever the answer, it will baffle Wall-Street types who are obsessed with short-term growth at all costs.
Your statement makes you come off like a hypocrite. Whereas it is obvious that you do speak our language (take that England!), have access to our mainstream media, and have probably visited, I don't think that you know what the citizens of the US are focused on.
Yes, we have more than our share of slack-jawed yokels who want to have a drink with the president, and yes, there are an alarming number of people that celebrate stupidity on all levels. But to imply, as you do, that people/governments of other countries all too busy making the rest of the world a great place to screw people over and make stupid decisions/policies is a stretch. There are plenty of apathetic citizens celebrating stupidity the world over, and there are plenty of people, conservative and liberal, here in the States who are pissed off at what our politicians are doing to our country (and the world, too, I guess). Please stop blaming all the world's problems on us.
In conclusion, yes, making "France surrenders" jokes is much more fun.
A good example is gasoline... people cry murder for $3 a gallon when almost every other liquid they buy costs by far more.
Apples and oranges (or apple juice and orange juice, if you prefer).
Nobody I know drinks a couple gallons of milk (approx. $3/gal) on their way to and from work every day. If they did, there would be a lot more complaining about high milk prices (not to mention complaining about crippling stomach pains). If people used one gallon of gas each week, instead of one tank, I think we'd see a lot less complaining about $3 gas.
I never did like that argument against "high" gas prices, and with your comment, I finally figured out why. Thanks.
It is in whales. You may have heard about the bandwidth of pigeons a while back (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/ 31/2224227). Whales are even better. Not only do they have a vastly higher BPA (bytes per animal) than pigeons, but they can get your data to different continents!
But what's your point in pointing this out? Does the fact that things may change in the future somehow make XM or Sirius a less attractive proposition now?
The innevitable encroachment of commercials to sattelite radio doesn't change the fact that it's great now. However, the point of bringing it up is that people use the lack of mind-numbing commercials as the major selling point of sattelite radio (see original post). I'd bet that in the future, when commercials have discovered and populated this frontier, subscriptions don't drop significantly.
Of course there's no way of really proving this, but let's take a look at another industry that has increased advertising in the recent past: the movies. There was a time not too long ago that you could go to the movies and only see commercials for upcoming movies that were, more or less, relevant to the audience in the theater. As such, they weren't really that intrusive or annoying. Now, you can go to the movies and see ten minutes worth of automobile, soft drink, television, and a host of other commercials. Despite this universal annoyance (I've yet to meet a movie-goer who likes the new ads) people still go to good movies in droves.
I think that the same thing will happen to sattelite radio. People will still pay for the service because "lack of annoying commercials" is only one of the reasons to subscribe (reception in really remote places is my personal favorite). Just like people will still go to theaters to see movies, because there's something really cool about seeing stuff blow up on a really big screen.
(Oh, and before anyone brings up the fact that movie attendance is dropping, any movie that grosses even $100 million still has ten million people paying too much to see the movie in the theater)
One day, your precious (almost) commercial-free satellite radio content will go the way of commercial-free cable TV content. Prices will go up, and amount of content will go down owinf to commercials creep in "to pay the bills".
Looks into crystal ball I predict that in the not-too distant future satellite radio stations will be just like their terrestrial ancestors.
To me science is, basically, the pusuit to find out how everything in the universe works, not to find out how everything probably works. While it is true that we rarely get it right the first time (or even the second, or the third, etc.) getting it right (finding the facts) is the goal of science; that's what science is "about".
Papers in Nature, Science, or any other peer-reviewed journal aren't always right. They don't always agree with one another, and they just might be right enough today but really wrong next year. That is the process. It's OK when there are conflicts, it doesn't mean that someone's necessarily done "bad" science.
My point wasn't that the process of peer review is flawed, or anything of the sort. I know that science is continuously evolving. My point was that just because it has been reviewed, doesn't mean it's right, which was implied by the GGP.
There's a lot of bad science that has passed through peer review . . .
Granted, Nature is a very respected journal, but just because things are peer reviewed doesn't make them fact. Interesting ideas, right or not, are sometimes published to get more minds thinking on the problem. In a case like this, I'm sure this will stir things up a bit.
There is no doubt that critical thinking is in the long run more important than "just the facts", but at there has to be some level of rote memorization of the foundations of knowledge if anyone is to get any sort of education in under 30 or 40 years.
An example from the news: in my area there is a school district that is teaching "new math" that makes 3rd grade kids derive the times tables rather than memorize them. One result: the kids in this school district are well behind their peers in standardized tests.
I'm a geologist, so I like to think that I have some capacity for rational, analytical thinking. However, I would rather have someone explain the basic principles that are the basic foundation for the science. For example, I would rather have someone explain to me the basic concepts behind radioisotopic dating (decay constants, half life, etc.) than have to derive those concepts from first principles.
TFA is talking about the recent rash of fake memoirs that have duped millions.
Textbooks are usually written by professors who, although they may let loads of bias into their writings, are at least somewhat faithful to some version of "the truth"; any good textbook has loads, and loads of references that you can check if you doubt the validity of what is presented.
By the way, it's probably not a great idea to believe everything you read on Wikipedia. Just browse the headlines here at/.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was reading 1984 through for the second time, I realized that the world that he had set up was the logical conclusion of where the Atlas Shrugged world was headed before the strike. Think about it, IngSoc was to the point where they had all power, and they made so much stuff illegal that everybody was breaking some law. They had removed the concept of the innocent man through thoughtcrime.
If you want an interesting read, try reading the two back to back. They're like the bookends of a trilogy.
This is true. HOWEVER (since you seem to like caps for emphasis), Apple doesn't have a monopoly on either mp3 players or "mp3" distribution. See here for a list of a few other places you can go to choose where to buy mp3s that can be used on any player. The ipod doesn't lock you into any one music store; it plays mp3s from any source, so no lock in there.
Now it's true that ITMS "locks" you into using the iPod, but this would only seem to hurt Apple by reducing the potiential number of end-users that can use their media. You CAN get the vast majority of the music in the ITMS catalog from other sources, you know.
There is no monopoly in digital media distribution (music stores) or consumption (mp3 players). Consumers have lots of choice.
I think this statement, taken very litterally, is the crux of the matter. There should be a lot of freedom to create new software, even if it does the exact same thing as existing (even patented?) software. It's the old mouse trap situation: you can patent a new kind of mouse trap, but not the idea of a mousetrap.
I guess I've been hanging around academic crowd too long. In academia, people come up with parallel or independant discoveries all the time, and no one is crying foul here. Makes me wonder about academic patents. . .
350 years ago, Newton would have patented calculus and sued the pants off of Leibniz. The case would probably still be in court! Then again, Leibniz would have patented his notation, and we'd all have to pay his decendents royalties any time we wanted to find out how fast we're going (dx/dt).
It used to be 10%, but some priest got greedy and wanted to collect more money, so he proposed "Tithing^2 -- Taking god's money to the MAX!".
It was much later that he realized his mistake.
Those guys are not planning on building a massive travel corridor from Canada to Mexico. From their website:
and
Looking over their website, they are more a lobbying coallition getting state and federal funding to maintain and improve the highways/railways in order to benefit the communities near this transporation corridor. I don't think of lobbying as a big project, no matter how many "gifts" they give our elected officials.
I think it's more an extreme case of risk aversion and myopic planning than complacency.
There is no way a public company would invest enough time to pull off something like this, and, as you mentioned, private companies don't have enough money to do it.
Governments (at least here in the States) won't do anything like this, anymore for the same reasons public companies won't do it. They think need results now or their voters (~stockholders) won't vote for them and they'll lose all that precious power they hold so dear.
Big projects don't get done because MBAs are running the world.
I have a serious question about who decides what makes it into "standards". I know that there's an organization that makes up what standards are. I know (at least I've read a lot here on /.) that IE is not compliant to those standards. BUT Microsoft still has around 90% market share (I'm not arguing that this is a good thing at all), so for all intents and purposes, their protocalls, and whatnot should be the de facto standard, if not the official one, right? Develop for IE and you reach 90% of your audience (much more for many sites), but write 100% compliant code for a site, and you might alienate 90% of your audience. I just don't get it.
Dreadful security and dated UI aside, ahy are we going after MS to change IE rather than adapt new browsers to the IE "standards"? Are IE "standards" not widely used because they are closed and opaque to developers, thereby locking any developer into using their tools? Does IE follow any standard? Has the W3C standardized on things that are easier to use and will age more gracefully? In short, and this is an honest question, why aren't the IE "standards" standard?
I know I'm exposing my ignorance to all things concerning web development with this post, but every time I see people getting up in arms about IE not being compliant I wonder about this.
-- Thanks for taking the time to read this and using your precious mod points to bury this post. --
There are some interesting things to think about in your post, but I think that your saying that
is a little flawed. Even if his numbers are off by an order of magnitude, he still points out that Craigslist could make twice what it is making now.So let's assume that he's off by $475 million. That still leaves a very interesting question: "What company with only a couple dozen employees leaves $25 million on the table?" There are already a number of posts with answers that are probably pretty close to the mark. Whatever the answer, it will baffle Wall-Street types who are obsessed with short-term growth at all costs.
Your statement makes you come off like a hypocrite. Whereas it is obvious that you do speak our language (take that England!), have access to our mainstream media, and have probably visited, I don't think that you know what the citizens of the US are focused on.
Yes, we have more than our share of slack-jawed yokels who want to have a drink with the president, and yes, there are an alarming number of people that celebrate stupidity on all levels. But to imply, as you do, that people/governments of other countries all too busy making the rest of the world a great place to screw people over and make stupid decisions/policies is a stretch. There are plenty of apathetic citizens celebrating stupidity the world over, and there are plenty of people, conservative and liberal, here in the States who are pissed off at what our politicians are doing to our country (and the world, too, I guess). Please stop blaming all the world's problems on us.
In conclusion, yes, making "France surrenders" jokes is much more fun.
Hawking probably just read this , and panicked.
Apples and oranges (or apple juice and orange juice, if you prefer).
Nobody I know drinks a couple gallons of milk (approx. $3/gal) on their way to and from work every day. If they did, there would be a lot more complaining about high milk prices (not to mention complaining about crippling stomach pains). If people used one gallon of gas each week, instead of one tank, I think we'd see a lot less complaining about $3 gas.
I never did like that argument against "high" gas prices, and with your comment, I finally figured out why. Thanks.
It is in whales. You may have heard about the bandwidth of pigeons a while back (http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/03/ 31/2224227). Whales are even better. Not only do they have a vastly higher BPA (bytes per animal) than pigeons, but they can get your data to different continents!
It's the wave of the future!
The innevitable encroachment of commercials to sattelite radio doesn't change the fact that it's great now. However, the point of bringing it up is that people use the lack of mind-numbing commercials as the major selling point of sattelite radio (see original post). I'd bet that in the future, when commercials have discovered and populated this frontier, subscriptions don't drop significantly.
Of course there's no way of really proving this, but let's take a look at another industry that has increased advertising in the recent past: the movies. There was a time not too long ago that you could go to the movies and only see commercials for upcoming movies that were, more or less, relevant to the audience in the theater. As such, they weren't really that intrusive or annoying. Now, you can go to the movies and see ten minutes worth of automobile, soft drink, television, and a host of other commercials. Despite this universal annoyance (I've yet to meet a movie-goer who likes the new ads) people still go to good movies in droves.
I think that the same thing will happen to sattelite radio. People will still pay for the service because "lack of annoying commercials" is only one of the reasons to subscribe (reception in really remote places is my personal favorite). Just like people will still go to theaters to see movies, because there's something really cool about seeing stuff blow up on a really big screen.
(Oh, and before anyone brings up the fact that movie attendance is dropping, any movie that grosses even $100 million still has ten million people paying too much to see the movie in the theater)
One day, your precious (almost) commercial-free satellite radio content will go the way of commercial-free cable TV content. Prices will go up, and amount of content will go down owinf to commercials creep in "to pay the bills".
Looks into crystal ball
I predict that in the not-too distant future satellite radio stations will be just like their terrestrial ancestors.
Science isn't about facts.
Yes it is.
To me science is, basically, the pusuit to find out how everything in the universe works, not to find out how everything probably works. While it is true that we rarely get it right the first time (or even the second, or the third, etc.) getting it right (finding the facts) is the goal of science; that's what science is "about".
Papers in Nature, Science, or any other peer-reviewed journal aren't always right. They don't always agree with one another, and they just might be right enough today but really wrong next year. That is the process. It's OK when there are conflicts, it doesn't mean that someone's necessarily done "bad" science.
My point wasn't that the process of peer review is flawed, or anything of the sort. I know that science is continuously evolving. My point was that just because it has been reviewed, doesn't mean it's right, which was implied by the GGP.
There's a lot of bad science that has passed through peer review . . .
Granted, Nature is a very respected journal, but just because things are peer reviewed doesn't make them fact. Interesting ideas, right or not, are sometimes published to get more minds thinking on the problem. In a case like this, I'm sure this will stir things up a bit.
There is no doubt that critical thinking is in the long run more important than "just the facts", but at there has to be some level of rote memorization of the foundations of knowledge if anyone is to get any sort of education in under 30 or 40 years.
An example from the news: in my area there is a school district that is teaching "new math" that makes 3rd grade kids derive the times tables rather than memorize them. One result: the kids in this school district are well behind their peers in standardized tests.
I'm a geologist, so I like to think that I have some capacity for rational, analytical thinking. However, I would rather have someone explain the basic principles that are the basic foundation for the science. For example, I would rather have someone explain to me the basic concepts behind radioisotopic dating (decay constants, half life, etc.) than have to derive those concepts from first principles.
TFA is talking about the recent rash of fake memoirs that have duped millions.
/.
Textbooks are usually written by professors who, although they may let loads of bias into their writings, are at least somewhat faithful to some version of "the truth"; any good textbook has loads, and loads of references that you can check if you doubt the validity of what is presented.
By the way, it's probably not a great idea to believe everything you read on Wikipedia. Just browse the headlines here at