But if you have the only supply (Like you invented it and you keep how you make it secret) then there is naturally no competition as long as the situation remains the same.
And, precisely because there is no competition and it is difficult to impossible for new players to enter the market, you no longer have much incentive to innovate or keep your prices low. Consumers suffer accordingly.
It should be obvious to anyone with a brain that Google is going to become the next Microsoft once it succeeds in destroying the current one. And at least the current one doesn't have satellites watching us.
If you get sick and can't pay for your medical care, you don't deserve any, because it's proof positive that you've spent your life being a lazy socialist bum rather than a heroic Randian value-producer.
At least, I believe that's how the "thinking" goes.
And it definitely has nothing to do with people buying bigger TV's, better surround sound, newer computers, new cars, and buying the Jones' house.
Needless to say, it certainly has nothing to do with three decades of stagant or declining real wages, obscene higher-education costs, or anything like that.
Nah. It's all because people are buying bigger TVs.
If you didn't earn enough money to support yourself in the lifestyle you want, you have no right to that lifestyle. I'm sick of the entitlement attitude that permeates this society. The day that the American Dream went from a dream of liberty, to a house, 2 cars, middle class family, dog, cat, etc. was the day that this country sold itself out to the highest bidder. If Ben Franklin were alive, he'd probably add a corollary to his infamous quip about security: they that lust after wealth more than liberty deserve neither; it was from that lust for economic equality, unearned money and sense of entitlement that most of the horrors of the 20th century were born.
You know what's cool?
More and more people these days, especially under 40 or so, are recognizing this kind of "I've-got-mine-so-fuck-everyone-else" screed for the blinkered, juvenile, simpleminded cack it is.
There are a lot of other search engines out there. I use clusty.com myself. While it has Google-style ads, it doesn't have any connection to Google, AFAIK. It also doesn't censor its results just to do business in non-democratic countries -- the major reason I abandoned Google.
Interesting, thanks for the link. So I guess these data would imply that even though the number of US scientists per capita has remained roughly constant, their productivity (papers/scientist/year) has been slowly but steadily decreasing. I wonder why? (One suspicion I'd have, based on personal observation, is that the amount of time and effort that scientists, at least in academia, have to spend dealing with funding-related issues has increased substantially over the same period, thereby cutting down on their research output.)
All other things being equal, one could expect the number of scientists, and therefore scientific publications per year, to increase with population. So since the US population is ~15% larger today than it was ten years ago, it should be churning out 15% more publications per year compared to the mid-90s if no other significant factors have changed. If that's not the case, it implies that something has (e.g., funding levels, number of college students majoring in science, availability of research jobs, technological feasibility of obtaining new results, etc.).
Researchers as a group don't want to teach nor is teaching an optimal use of their time. The best teachers are usually not excellent researchers. The two fields are so different that it is uncommon to find an individual excellent in both.
I strongly disagree. I went through a physics Ph.D. program at a major research university. I did have one or two professors who fit the "genius researcher, terrible teacher" stereotype, but for the most part there was a big overlap between the good researchers and the good teachers. Moreover, they seemed to enjoy teaching as much as research, and several had written or were in the process of writing textbooks.
As I've said, every company that deals with China at all has to abide by Chinese laws. Do you have a television? Did any of its parts come from China? You obviously have a computer, who made all of the components in it?
While computer component manufacturers operating in China are also technically subject to Chinese censorship laws, as a practical matter, such laws are irrelevant because of the nature of their business. Google, by contrast, is an Internet content provider. Unlike computer component makers, in order to legally do business in China, Google necessarily has to be directly involved in enforcing/enabling these odious laws.
The moral (although unprofitable) choice for Google is to not do business in China. And a good choice for those looking for an alternative search engine which doesn't filter its results for any country is, IMO, http://clusty.com/.
And if you do that, then string theory can predict it just as well as Newton's theory of gravity, since the former reduces to the latter in the classical, weak field, slow motion limit.
Well -- isn't one of the biggest problems with string theory that we don't have more than an extremely sketchy idea of what the full, non-perturbative theory looks like? GR reduces to Newtonian gravity in that limit too, but a) we know what the complete theory of general relativity looks like and b) we have ways to experimentally test GR which verify it and falsify Newtonian gravity. You can't say either thing about string theory, AFAIK.
The experiment being discussed here is a possible falsification of the theory, if it were to be performed.
My impression is that people are objecting to this being characterized this as an experimental test of string theory per se. As others have pointed out, all of modern theoretical particle physics is basically going to be in serious trouble if LHC finds evidence of unitarity, Lorentz invariance, or analyticity being violated. Calling it a test of string theory is like calling Galileo's balls-on-inclined-planes experiment a test of general relativity -- technically true, since a mass-dependent gravitational acceleration would be incompatible (AFAIK) with GR, but misleading, since the opposite result doesn't verify GR to any greater extent than it does competing theories.
IOW, characterizing in this manner gives a false impression of the extent to which the experiment really "tests" string theory, or conversely, of the extent to which string theory can be tested.
Of course, specific models constructed within the framework of QFT can make detailed predictions. But then, so can models constructed within string theory.
How detailed are these predictions, exactly? I recall a string theorist friend of mine a few years back telling me that people hadn't even been able to derive actions from it yet, much less equations of motion. Compared to the immensely precise and verifiable predictions of, say, QED, that's a bit of a contrast.
No, a company deceptively advertising its product is worthy of anger. I don't mind straightforward, candid advertising -- well, actually I do, but I mind it a lot less. If you see a TV commercial or a web ad, you know it's being paid for by the company that made the product and can therefore treat its claims with appropriate skepticism. You can even, as you recommended, ignore it. With viral marketing, you're led to believe that people with no connection to the company are independently praising its product. You therefore might be more inclined to believe what they're saying. You don't know that you should ignore it.
Viral marketing is deception, pure and simple. I don't know about you, but I don't like being deceived.
It's happening all the time, and all over the place... better get used to it instead of getting all bent out of shape, I say.
Er. ..huh? Just because it's increasingly common doesn't mean we shouldn't get pissed off at it -- indeed, that may be a good reason to be more pissed off at it.
The push to teach creationism in public schools is a growing trend too. Should we be blasé about that?
Actually, New York State does have the death penalty (reinstated around 1995 IIRC). However, bin Ladin, if he were ever caught, would be tried under federal law, which also has the death penalty.
Namely, wouldn't it be worse to have no google than a filtered google?
Since there were already search engines available in China prior to Google (such as Sina.com), it's not clear that Google's entry made any difference one way or the other -- except, of course, to Google's profits.
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of Internet companies in the US. So far, two or three have said they want to do this. They are large, but they are not without competition.
And how many of them (I assume you mean Internet service providers) compete in the same markets?
The fact that there may be a bunch of ISPs in the country as a whole doesn't mean squat if there is only one in your town.
Your comments don't correspond to reality. Where I live, there are exactly two options for high-speed Internet (which is a virtual necessity these days): DSL, through the phone company that owns the phone lines in my neighborhood; or broadband, through the cable TV company that owns the TV cables in my neighborhood. That's it. And they've both been jacking up their prices recently. There is not a free market for ISPs in my city, and that's true in most places across the country. What we have an unregulated monopoly (or duopoly). That's the worst of both worlds: consumer choice is restricted, and prices go way up.
And the idea of Mom and Pop Internet service providers is a chimera. The costs of entry into the ISP business are prohibitively high for all but large corporations. Who else would be able to afford the expense of laying hundreds of miles of wires?
Since we don't and, most likely, can't have a free market for ISPs, we need government regulation to ensure reasonable prices and access.
Ever heard of that management console snap-in called Event Viewer [microsoft.com]? You might want to look into that.
The Event Viewer has its uses, but IMO it doesn't hold a candle to the various logs automatically generated in Linux in terms of specific and useful information content.
the terrible voice acting and dialogue drive me especially insane
Personally, I enjoy it, because I find the NPC dialogue bugs and oddities to be hilarious. Like when a beggar who sounds like an American suddenly switches to a strong Cockney accent when you give him a coin. And I always crack up when my (male) character walks past a (male) city guard who gushes "Look at the muscles on you!"
Slashdot Mirror
But if you have the only supply (Like you invented it and you keep how you make it secret) then there is naturally no competition as long as the situation remains the same.
And, precisely because there is no competition and it is difficult to impossible for new players to enter the market, you no longer have much incentive to innovate or keep your prices low. Consumers suffer accordingly.
It should be obvious to anyone with a brain that Google is going to become the next Microsoft once it succeeds in destroying the current one. And at least the current one doesn't have satellites watching us.
At least, I believe that's how the "thinking" goes.
Needless to say, it certainly has nothing to do with three decades of stagant or declining real wages, obscene higher-education costs, or anything like that.
Nah. It's all because people are buying bigger TVs.
You know what's cool?
More and more people these days, especially under 40 or so, are recognizing this kind of "I've-got-mine-so-fuck-everyone-else" screed for the blinkered, juvenile, simpleminded cack it is.
Any actual evidence, studies, etc., that support this claim? Does your "average" include people working at places like Fermilab and NASA?
I trust the government to do very little right.
So who is it you'd have us place our trust in instead? Bear Stearns?
Well, of course. Because. . .Google is edgy and hip, or something.
There are a lot of other search engines out there. I use clusty.com myself. While it has Google-style ads, it doesn't have any connection to Google, AFAIK. It also doesn't censor its results just to do business in non-democratic countries -- the major reason I abandoned Google.
Interesting, thanks for the link. So I guess these data would imply that even though the number of US scientists per capita has remained roughly constant, their productivity (papers/scientist/year) has been slowly but steadily decreasing. I wonder why? (One suspicion I'd have, based on personal observation, is that the amount of time and effort that scientists, at least in academia, have to spend dealing with funding-related issues has increased substantially over the same period, thereby cutting down on their research output.)
All other things being equal, one could expect the number of scientists, and therefore scientific publications per year, to increase with population. So since the US population is ~15% larger today than it was ten years ago, it should be churning out 15% more publications per year compared to the mid-90s if no other significant factors have changed. If that's not the case, it implies that something has (e.g., funding levels, number of college students majoring in science, availability of research jobs, technological feasibility of obtaining new results, etc.).
Researchers as a group don't want to teach nor is teaching an optimal use of their time. The best teachers are usually not excellent researchers. The two fields are so different that it is uncommon to find an individual excellent in both. I strongly disagree. I went through a physics Ph.D. program at a major research university. I did have one or two professors who fit the "genius researcher, terrible teacher" stereotype, but for the most part there was a big overlap between the good researchers and the good teachers. Moreover, they seemed to enjoy teaching as much as research, and several had written or were in the process of writing textbooks.
While computer component manufacturers operating in China are also technically subject to Chinese censorship laws, as a practical matter, such laws are irrelevant because of the nature of their business. Google, by contrast, is an Internet content provider. Unlike computer component makers, in order to legally do business in China, Google necessarily has to be directly involved in enforcing/enabling these odious laws.
The moral (although unprofitable) choice for Google is to not do business in China. And a good choice for those looking for an alternative search engine which doesn't filter its results for any country is, IMO, http://clusty.com/.
And if you do that, then string theory can predict it just as well as Newton's theory of gravity, since the former reduces to the latter in the classical, weak field, slow motion limit. Well -- isn't one of the biggest problems with string theory that we don't have more than an extremely sketchy idea of what the full, non-perturbative theory looks like? GR reduces to Newtonian gravity in that limit too, but a) we know what the complete theory of general relativity looks like and b) we have ways to experimentally test GR which verify it and falsify Newtonian gravity. You can't say either thing about string theory, AFAIK.
The experiment being discussed here is a possible falsification of the theory, if it were to be performed. My impression is that people are objecting to this being characterized this as an experimental test of string theory per se. As others have pointed out, all of modern theoretical particle physics is basically going to be in serious trouble if LHC finds evidence of unitarity, Lorentz invariance, or analyticity being violated. Calling it a test of string theory is like calling Galileo's balls-on-inclined-planes experiment a test of general relativity -- technically true, since a mass-dependent gravitational acceleration would be incompatible (AFAIK) with GR, but misleading, since the opposite result doesn't verify GR to any greater extent than it does competing theories. IOW, characterizing in this manner gives a false impression of the extent to which the experiment really "tests" string theory, or conversely, of the extent to which string theory can be tested.
Of course, specific models constructed within the framework of QFT can make detailed predictions. But then, so can models constructed within string theory.
How detailed are these predictions, exactly? I recall a string theorist friend of mine a few years back telling me that people hadn't even been able to derive actions from it yet, much less equations of motion. Compared to the immensely precise and verifiable predictions of, say, QED, that's a bit of a contrast.
No, a company deceptively advertising its product is worthy of anger. I don't mind straightforward, candid advertising -- well, actually I do, but I mind it a lot less. If you see a TV commercial or a web ad, you know it's being paid for by the company that made the product and can therefore treat its claims with appropriate skepticism. You can even, as you recommended, ignore it. With viral marketing, you're led to believe that people with no connection to the company are independently praising its product. You therefore might be more inclined to believe what they're saying. You don't know that you should ignore it.
Viral marketing is deception, pure and simple. I don't know about you, but I don't like being deceived.
It's happening all the time, and all over the place... better get used to it instead of getting all bent out of shape, I say.
Er. .
The push to teach creationism in public schools is a growing trend too. Should we be blasé about that?
Actually, New York State does have the death penalty (reinstated around 1995 IIRC). However, bin Ladin, if he were ever caught, would be tried under federal law, which also has the death penalty.
Agreed. M$ and Google are both greedy, amoral whores. That's why I use Gentoo and Clusty, respectively. . .
Namely, wouldn't it be worse to have no google than a filtered google?
Since there were already search engines available in China prior to Google (such as Sina.com), it's not clear that Google's entry made any difference one way or the other -- except, of course, to Google's profits.
and, say, Clusty.com, except that the latter doesn't collaborate with the Chinese Communist Party.
And how many of them (I assume you mean Internet service providers) compete in the same markets?
The fact that there may be a bunch of ISPs in the country as a whole doesn't mean squat if there is only one in your town.
-K.Ai.-
And the idea of Mom and Pop Internet service providers is a chimera. The costs of entry into the ISP business are prohibitively high for all but large corporations. Who else would be able to afford the expense of laying hundreds of miles of wires?
Since we don't and, most likely, can't have a free market for ISPs, we need government regulation to ensure reasonable prices and access.
-K.Ai.-
-K.Ai.-
The Event Viewer has its uses, but IMO it doesn't hold a candle to the various logs automatically generated in Linux in terms of specific and useful information content.
Personally, I enjoy it, because I find the NPC dialogue bugs and oddities to be hilarious. Like when a beggar who sounds like an American suddenly switches to a strong Cockney accent when you give him a coin. And I always crack up when my (male) character walks past a (male) city guard who gushes "Look at the muscles on you!"