I haven't read the essay, but that sentence makes no sense. Finding companies when they are young enough to yield high returns on investment is what VCs do. Paul Graham is saying that companies who raison d'être is completely unrelated to investment (e.g. running a search engine) should compete with VCs in their own bailiwick? That's like saying "What companies should do is go out and purchase stocks when they're low-priced, before professional investors have puffed them up into something that costs hundreds dollars per share to acquire."
The Unites States currently has nine super-carrier battle groups, which is nine more than the rest of the world combined. What was the last major conflict in which the Navy played a significant role? From a pure resource-allocation point of view, the huge amounts of money being put into the Navy are pointless.
All my relatives and friends regularly read my blog, and they appreciate it for the window it gives into my mind.
Exactly the parent poster's point! It's useful for your relatives and friends; the other 6 billion people on the planet don't give a fuck. The problem is that you and the rest of the bloggers don't languish in the obscurity you deserve because you all link to each other in a frenzy of self-congratulation, effectively Google-bombing yourselves over more useful, authoritative sources of knowledge. What you should do is restrict access to your blog, much like LiveJournal does with its "friends-only" option, so that people who care can read your opinions and everyone else can go about their business without wading through your brainclutter.
Was there DRM before Napster? Nope. So this is all a reaction to your sleazoid thievery and it just royally pisses me off.
Wrong. Read about the movie industry's reaction to the invention of the VCR and you'll see that the content owners have always wanted DRM; the reason they're only getting now is that 1) it's now technologically feasible, and 2) they've successfully bribed enough Congressman (I'm looking at you, Billy Tauzin).
If they don't want to pay for a commercial QT license, they are in exactly the same boat that they would be if they wrote a GTK app; i.e., if they want to distribute, they have to distribute under GPL. The difference is that if they don't want to distribute under GPL, they can pay a reasonable amount of money and distribute a QT app any way they want, whereas if they don't want to distribute a GTK app under GPL they are shit out of luck. In other words, using QT increases your options, not decreases them. Get your facts straight.
I don't believe that the Palestinians' tactic of murdering civilians is ever justified in any circumstance, and in general I find myself to the right of the people I know on this subject; I would call myself "pro-Israel." Nevertheless, the basic fact is that Israel is the occupier, "Palestine" is the occupied. Even Ariel Sharon has acknowledged this. They don't call them "the occupied terroritories" for nothing. I daresay the Israelis would be more than happy to sign a peace treaty right now, considering that they are currently in possession of the land that is in dispute.
Regarding the grandparent post, there's no need for anything as baroque as poison darts. Sheik Ahmed Yassin was killed by Hellfire missiles launched by an Apache. Hellfires are laser-guided, so there was either an IDF soldier on the scene or a remote drone like the one in the article. It's easy to imagine the Apache being replaced by a highflying Predator or other unmanned craft, with target designation being performed by a drone. Gregg Easterbrook blogged about this today.
That's because the character was an avatar in the traditional sense of the word; the plot of Ultima IV was the character's quest to become an embodiment and exemplar of the 8 virtues. It has nothing to do with the word "avatar" in the VR sense, which is the usage that is being discussed here.
avatar n.
2. An embodiment, as of a quality or concept; an archetype: the very avatar of cunning.
They transplated the nucleus of a somatic cell into an egg, cultured it to the blastocyst stage, then extracted the stem cells from them. In what sense does that not involve a cloned embryo? If they had implanted the egg into a uterus instead of extracting the stem cells it would have developed into a more or less normal human.
of economic theory. Comparative advantage is not about "one place is inherently better at doing something than another." Read this piece to find out what it actually means. Here's the money paragraph:
Comparative advantage, though frequently confused with absolute advantage, is actually a concept about relative relationships, not absolute ones. What the principle of comparative advantage actually implies is that each nation should specialize in what it does best relative to all the other things it could be doing and then trade with others for other needs. At its most basic level, comparative advantage is about opportunity cost: The country with the lowest opportunity cost of producing a good (i.e., the cost of producing that good in terms of other goods) should specialize in production of that good.
...hidden underneath the ignorant ranting, which is that the GPL requires strong enforcement of licenses to function. It has nothing to do with Communism, piracy, or human rights. Countries like China simply don't have the legal infrastructure to deal with license violations. There are some indications that companies are getting away with GPL violations in the U.S.; how much easier will it be for them to do so in China, where the FSF has no legal representation?
There is more than one way to make a distro. Some distros are about choice, others are about easy of deployment, administration, and development. UserLinux is intended for corporate desktops, and in that situation you don't want to have to support two desktop environments, one of which uses a toolkit you have to pay money to use in commercial development.
When Gollum falls into the Cracks of Doom, he actually appears to still be alive even as he sinks below the surface. If he had actually fallen into liquid hot mag-ma he would have burst into flame long before hitting the surface. I found that very distracting.
Once again a technological and social solution can do what convoluted legislation cannot.
There's no proof here that the internet will somehow make legislation obsolete. It would be perfectly possible to pass a law that put a hard cap on the amount of money an individual could donate or spend to promote a candidate. The problem is that there's this little thing called the First Amendment that many people interpret to mean that if I want to take out a commercial to say something about a candidate, I should be able to without an arbitrary limit. That's the reason the McCain-Feingold bill is complex.
It should also be noted that G.W. Bush has raised many times more cash than Dean using old-fashioned centralized large-donor fund-raising, so there's no evidence that the internet is changing anything even within the context of this one election.
to break down boundaries of countries and slowly form a single world government
Sorry, but your understanding of the U.N. is completely ignorant and wrong, and I say that as a critic of the U.N. First of all, it's ludicrous to speak of the U.N. as having its own goals and agenda; the Secretary-General has no actual authority, and every decision is made at the whim of the permanent members of the Security Council.
The problem with the U.N. is not that it doesn't respect its members' sovereignty but the exact opposite: that it places members' sovereignty above such goals as peace or justice. That's why the U.N. was completely ineffective in stopping the genocide in Rwanda, why the Clinton administration had to go to NATO to intervene in the Balkans, and why the U.N. vigorously opposed the war in Iraq; in each case, it was terrified of stepping on the toes of sovereign states (even when those states were killing their own or another state's citizens) or offending the sensibilities of its members.
Think of it this way: if you were going to set up one world government, would you set it up so that resolutions could be vetoed by any single member of the Security Council? The idea of the U.N. as the coming of one world government is a canard perpetuated by isolationists and politicians who want to make hay out of jingoism. I am constantly amazed at people who resent the U.N. "taking over the world" yet have nothing to say about the WTO or World Bank, which actually do march into and completely reorganize entire countries (and even manage to make U.S. policy, as Bush's reversal on steel tariffs shows).
Uh yeah, God forbid anyone should actually have an opinion on the work that they're doing. Hey Einstein, how about you just shut up and keep your opinions on the uses of atomic technology to yourself? Edward Teller, stop spouting off on your diatribes! Fire the FSF lawyers! Disband the EFF!
when someone mentions Stallman..., do you immediately think of code they've written, or an image of them jumping up and down on a soapbox?
When I think of Stallman I think of Emacs, GCC, and the FSF. Maybe you need to learn some history.
There is a place for apolitical techies like Linus and another place for visionaries and advocates like Stallman and Perens. This may be news to you, but code doesn't just float in the void; without the right legal and social environment OSS doesn't exist. It's fine for Linus to ignore SCO -- that's not his job to deal with it -- but if everyone ignored it we'd all be up shit creek when SCO walked out of some courtroom with legal rights to our code.
Excellent Atlantic Monthly article...
on
Diamonds & the RIAA
·
· Score: 2, Informative
...about how De Beers essentially invented the global diamond market by both controlling the supply and creating the demand:
Refrigerators are meant to keep cool things cool, not make hot things cold; the compressor on the fridge would work itself to death within weeks, if it were able to maintain a low temperature at all.
Personally, though, I'd love to see more people go into thermal engineering. A day hasn't gone by this summer when I haven't thought that there must be a better way to cool the subway cars in NYC than pumping hot air onto the platforms!
RTFA. The method described in the article is a purely statistical method, NOT a semantic one; it has zero "knowledge" of grammar, syntax, or meaning. So having more than one "known" language to start with would not help in the slightest, because the advantages that you describe are only applicable to semantic methods.
I agree though that the analogy to the Rosetta Stone is a poor one.
What you are saying is technically true, but in fact the falling dollar will have no appreciable effect on the trade imbalance. This is because the biggest source of the imbalance by far is trade with China, and the Chinese yuan is tied to the dollar.
You're missing the point.
on
Shuttle Politics
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
You're doing a risk-benefit analysis without looking at the benefit side. The risk to the astronauts would be acceptable if there were actual science being accomplished. I am not one of those profiteers who disdains "pure science," but any reasonable assessment of the shuttle program's scientific accomplishments has to conclude that sending old people into space and observing spiderwebs in zero gravity is not worth the tremendous cost in money and lives.
If we did away with the shuttle program (which over the years has turned into a huge pork barrel for the shuttle contractors), we could replace it with many more cheap unmanned flights plus manned flights with focused objectives. There's no reason to send an astronaut into space, at huge expense, to perform experiments that could just as easily be done on an unmanned craft. Instead, we should be sending those astronauts to Mars, which will never happen through the shuttle program.
Another way to "solve" it with Opera is to enable "Continue browsing from where I was last time"; then it doesn't matter if you close your Opera window, except that you may have to reload the pages that weren't in disk cache. Frankly I don't know how I ever managed to browse without this feature.
It's not particularly important per se, but the increasing numbers are an indicator that the sciences may be becoming more gender-blind. Unless you believe that there's a gender-inherent reason women don't become physicists, in a truly just world we should see an equal number of male and female physicists; maybe we're (slowly) getting there.
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't read the essay, but that sentence makes no sense. Finding companies when they are young enough to yield high returns on investment is what VCs do. Paul Graham is saying that companies who raison d'être is completely unrelated to investment (e.g. running a search engine) should compete with VCs in their own bailiwick? That's like saying "What companies should do is go out and purchase stocks when they're low-priced, before professional investors have puffed them up into something that costs hundreds dollars per share to acquire."
The Unites States currently has nine super-carrier battle groups, which is nine more than the rest of the world combined. What was the last major conflict in which the Navy played a significant role? From a pure resource-allocation point of view, the huge amounts of money being put into the Navy are pointless.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A111 60-2004May8.html
Remember, kids, no more bragging about those worms to real-life acquaintances!
If they don't want to pay for a commercial QT license, they are in exactly the same boat that they would be if they wrote a GTK app; i.e., if they want to distribute, they have to distribute under GPL. The difference is that if they don't want to distribute under GPL, they can pay a reasonable amount of money and distribute a QT app any way they want, whereas if they don't want to distribute a GTK app under GPL they are shit out of luck. In other words, using QT increases your options, not decreases them. Get your facts straight.
I don't believe that the Palestinians' tactic of murdering civilians is ever justified in any circumstance, and in general I find myself to the right of the people I know on this subject; I would call myself "pro-Israel." Nevertheless, the basic fact is that Israel is the occupier, "Palestine" is the occupied. Even Ariel Sharon has acknowledged this. They don't call them "the occupied terroritories" for nothing. I daresay the Israelis would be more than happy to sign a peace treaty right now, considering that they are currently in possession of the land that is in dispute.
Regarding the grandparent post, there's no need for anything as baroque as poison darts. Sheik Ahmed Yassin was killed by Hellfire missiles launched by an Apache. Hellfires are laser-guided, so there was either an IDF soldier on the scene or a remote drone like the one in the article. It's easy to imagine the Apache being replaced by a highflying Predator or other unmanned craft, with target designation being performed by a drone. Gregg Easterbrook blogged about this today.
That's because the character was an avatar in the traditional sense of the word; the plot of Ultima IV was the character's quest to become an embodiment and exemplar of the 8 virtues. It has nothing to do with the word "avatar" in the VR sense, which is the usage that is being discussed here.
avatar
n.
2. An embodiment, as of a quality or concept; an archetype: the very avatar of cunning.
They transplated the nucleus of a somatic cell into an egg, cultured it to the blastocyst stage, then extracted the stem cells from them. In what sense does that not involve a cloned embryo? If they had implanted the egg into a uterus instead of extracting the stem cells it would have developed into a more or less normal human.
of economic theory. Comparative advantage is not about "one place is inherently better at doing something than another." Read this piece to find out what it actually means. Here's the money paragraph:
...hidden underneath the ignorant ranting, which is that the GPL requires strong enforcement of licenses to function. It has nothing to do with Communism, piracy, or human rights. Countries like China simply don't have the legal infrastructure to deal with license violations. There are some indications that companies are getting away with GPL violations in the U.S.; how much easier will it be for them to do so in China, where the FSF has no legal representation?
There is more than one way to make a distro. Some distros are about choice, others are about easy of deployment, administration, and development. UserLinux is intended for corporate desktops, and in that situation you don't want to have to support two desktop environments, one of which uses a toolkit you have to pay money to use in commercial development.
When Gollum falls into the Cracks of Doom, he actually appears to still be alive even as he sinks below the surface. If he had actually fallen into liquid hot mag-ma he would have burst into flame long before hitting the surface. I found that very distracting.
There's no proof here that the internet will somehow make legislation obsolete. It would be perfectly possible to pass a law that put a hard cap on the amount of money an individual could donate or spend to promote a candidate. The problem is that there's this little thing called the First Amendment that many people interpret to mean that if I want to take out a commercial to say something about a candidate, I should be able to without an arbitrary limit. That's the reason the McCain-Feingold bill is complex.
It should also be noted that G.W. Bush has raised many times more cash than Dean using old-fashioned centralized large-donor fund-raising, so there's no evidence that the internet is changing anything even within the context of this one election.
Sorry, but your understanding of the U.N. is completely ignorant and wrong, and I say that as a critic of the U.N. First of all, it's ludicrous to speak of the U.N. as having its own goals and agenda; the Secretary-General has no actual authority, and every decision is made at the whim of the permanent members of the Security Council.
The problem with the U.N. is not that it doesn't respect its members' sovereignty but the exact opposite: that it places members' sovereignty above such goals as peace or justice. That's why the U.N. was completely ineffective in stopping the genocide in Rwanda, why the Clinton administration had to go to NATO to intervene in the Balkans, and why the U.N. vigorously opposed the war in Iraq; in each case, it was terrified of stepping on the toes of sovereign states (even when those states were killing their own or another state's citizens) or offending the sensibilities of its members.
Think of it this way: if you were going to set up one world government, would you set it up so that resolutions could be vetoed by any single member of the Security Council? The idea of the U.N. as the coming of one world government is a canard perpetuated by isolationists and politicians who want to make hay out of jingoism. I am constantly amazed at people who resent the U.N. "taking over the world" yet have nothing to say about the WTO or World Bank, which actually do march into and completely reorganize entire countries (and even manage to make U.S. policy, as Bush's reversal on steel tariffs shows).
There is a place for apolitical techies like Linus and another place for visionaries and advocates like Stallman and Perens. This may be news to you, but code doesn't just float in the void; without the right legal and social environment OSS doesn't exist. It's fine for Linus to ignore SCO -- that's not his job to deal with it -- but if everyone ignored it we'd all be up shit creek when SCO walked out of some courtroom with legal rights to our code.
...about how De Beers essentially invented the global diamond market by both controlling the supply and creating the demand:
Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?
Refrigerators are meant to keep cool things cool, not make hot things cold; the compressor on the fridge would work itself to death within weeks, if it were able to maintain a low temperature at all.
Personally, though, I'd love to see more people go into thermal engineering. A day hasn't gone by this summer when I haven't thought that there must be a better way to cool the subway cars in NYC than pumping hot air onto the platforms!
RTFA. The method described in the article is a purely statistical method, NOT a semantic one; it has zero "knowledge" of grammar, syntax, or meaning. So having more than one "known" language to start with would not help in the slightest, because the advantages that you describe are only applicable to semantic methods.
I agree though that the analogy to the Rosetta Stone is a poor one.
www.bookpool.com
Mastering Regular Expressions, 2nd Edition
Our Price: $24.50
Bookpool is consistently the cheapest place to buy technical books. And no, I am not affiliated with them in any way.
What you are saying is technically true, but in fact the falling dollar will have no appreciable effect on the trade imbalance. This is because the biggest source of the imbalance by far is trade with China, and the Chinese yuan is tied to the dollar.
You're doing a risk-benefit analysis without looking at the benefit side. The risk to the astronauts would be acceptable if there were actual science being accomplished. I am not one of those profiteers who disdains "pure science," but any reasonable assessment of the shuttle program's scientific accomplishments has to conclude that sending old people into space and observing spiderwebs in zero gravity is not worth the tremendous cost in money and lives.
If we did away with the shuttle program (which over the years has turned into a huge pork barrel for the shuttle contractors), we could replace it with many more cheap unmanned flights plus manned flights with focused objectives. There's no reason to send an astronaut into space, at huge expense, to perform experiments that could just as easily be done on an unmanned craft. Instead, we should be sending those astronauts to Mars, which will never happen through the shuttle program.
If you get tired of the big-media spectacle and want some real information, Slate has a good list of online information sources. Especially interesting is the blog of a Baghdad resident.
Another way to "solve" it with Opera is to enable "Continue browsing from where I was last time"; then it doesn't matter if you close your Opera window, except that you may have to reload the pages that weren't in disk cache. Frankly I don't know how I ever managed to browse without this feature.
It's not particularly important per se, but the increasing numbers are an indicator that the sciences may be becoming more gender-blind. Unless you believe that there's a gender-inherent reason women don't become physicists, in a truly just world we should see an equal number of male and female physicists; maybe we're (slowly) getting there.