OK, let's forget all of the quibbling about what IQ actually measures, and what intelligence actually is.
Let's suppose it's true. So what? Does it mean that "men are smarter than women?" Well, no, because all men are not the same and all women are not the same. IQ scores are described by a more or less normal statistical distribution. 5 points is not much; it's considerably less than one standard deviation. So if you are male and happen to meet a random woman, this gives you virtually no basis to guess whether she is likely to be smarter than you are not. Most of us are fairly close to the middle of the distribution. So for a typical male--or even an unusually bright male--there is still going to be a huge number of women who have a higher IQ than he does. Perhaps the person with the highest IQ in the world is more likely to be a man than a woman, but I'm not that guy. I don't think I even know that guy (and I know some pretty smart people).
There are clear differences in the brains of men and women. It is well established that some intellectual skills are differently distributed between men and women. So it is clearly possible to find measures in which one or the other will come out ahead, and which sex scores higher on a one-dimensional test such as IQ depends upon how those skills are weighted. But for all of those measures, there is a huge overlap of the distributions. As human beings, we are ethically obligated to deal with one another as individuals, not as stereotypes. So who is brightest (whatever the hell that means) on the average shouldn't make a damned bit of difference.
So let's quit obsessing over which population--male, female, black, white, asian--has the highest IQ. Arguing about it only gives the misleading impression that it matters.
Fuck that. The minute they have intermissions I'm not going. You bastards can learn to control your bladder like the rest of us, and stop drinking 48 ounces of liquid during the movie.
Congratulations upon your large bladder. It is a rare distinction and you should justly be proud. I don't doubt that it is your finest feature.
There was a time when movies longer than about 90 minutes routinely had intermissions. "2001" and "Lawrence of Arabia" both had intermissions when they were originally shown. Just one of those little amenities that have vanished as theaters began trying to pack one more showing into the day to maximize profits.
Now, I think that some of those theories are completely valid. Commercials in the theaters absolutely piss me off. If I'm going to spend 9 bucks to watch a movie, they better not force me to watch commercials before it.
I agree. With the improving quality home video, a theater has to offer me a positive experience to get me there for more than the handful of movies that I feel that I absolutely have to see on the big screen. Commercials are big deterrent to moviegoing. So are movies without intermissions. And overlarge, overexpensive low quality snacks. Moviemakers think Americans are impatient with long movies--we're actually impatient with climbing over people's legs to run down the hall to the bathroom and missing a crucial scene. At home, you just hit "pause."
While other console companies existed before Nintendo, they were largely unprofitable. Atari's abysmal failures in Pac-man and E.T. are just one example.
However, those followed numerous huge successes. It was Atari that basically invented the home videogame industry, and for a while they were hugely profitable.
However, I think that many people overrate the importance of home systems in building videogames. Most of the real creativity at the time was in the coin arcade arena. Yes, many people have fond, nostalgic memories of playing at home with their Atari or NCS, but most of those games they remember were slow, ugly, blocky clones of games that had already succeeded in the arcades. Videogames didn't really break into the mainstream until the technology developed to the point that home consoles and home computers could offer graphics that were at least approximately competitive with the coin arcades--which really began with the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo generation.
Another important source of creativity in game development was early home computers with color graphics, specifically the Apple II, Atari 400/800, Commodore 64, and Amiga, which was pretty much independent of what Nintendo was doing at the time.
The "roots" of gaming were FUN games, easy play, and great simple control. Gaming really needs to get back to its roots and stop trying to be the next multi-billion hollywood-like crap industry.
Such games still exist, although they have largely migrated to hand-helds. Check out Kirby Canvas Curse on the Nintendo DS, for example--a game that combines the simplicity of classic arcade games (simple control by drawing and tapping with a stylus) with modern technology (dual screens, touch sensitive screen).
Or Nanostray, also on the DS -- a classic vertical scrolling shooter with graphics on a level with classic quarter munchers.
Or any of the Nintendo GBA Metroid and Castlevania games.
Or any one of the Metal Slug games, available for PS2, XBox, and GBA. Classic side-scrolling shooter with brilliant animation.
Or Katmari on PS, as simple as any classic game, but taking advantage of modern 3D graphics to provide a game mechanic that would have been impossible in the classic era.
I'm not even convinced that top-notch simple games are any more rare than they ever were. Rather, the market has expanded to support other tastes as well. Yes, the simple, easy-to-pick-up games are great, but it is not the only way to have fun. Today, there are video games for the sort of people who, back in "the day" would have been playing complex board games with lots of dice, cards, and tokens, and a rule book a quarter-inch thick.
It is instructive to read some of the actual studies on which these conclusions are based. Every one I've looked at has been utter garbage. The most common errors are:
1) No proper control. Games are exciting. So if you are looking for a specific effect of games, you need to control for nonspecific effects of general excitement. It is fairly obvious how to do this--you need another stimulus, perhaps a film of a sporting even that is equally exciting, and you have to verify that the control stimulus is indeed equally exciting, say by measuring change in pulse rate.
2) Conflating aggression with violence. Violence is often associated with aggression, but aggression is not violence. One can be verbally aggressive, for example. In circumstances--a sporting event for example, or a lawyer making a case--a certain amount of properly channeled aggression is appropriate and advantageous. So studies that measure aggression rather than violence are meaningless. It is crucial to verify that the method of evaluation is able to distinguish between aggression and violence.
3) Confusing rough play with violence. Fantasy play may involve miming of violent actions, but it can be distinguished from real violence in that serious injuries are rare. A common error is to characterize play as violent, even when there is no clear intent to cause harm. Scoring of actions as "violent" must be carried out by observers who are "blind" as to whether the subjects were exposed to the video game stimulus or the control stimulus (see #1).
None of this is rocket science--just obvious, minimal criteria for a valid study. Amazingly, most of the studies that I have read do not meet even these minimum standards.
Note that no information is being transmitted faster than the speed of light in such a case. Shadow may traverse across the spotlight faster than the speed of light, but the actual information that creates the shadow is still transmitted at the epeed of light from the spotlight to the wall.
Indeed, if you try to transmit information, say by changing the speed at which you move the object, that change will propagate to the wall only at the speed of light, even though the shadow itself is traversing the wall at greater than c.
This will let retailers advertise the lower price, which is just at the upper end of what parents are likely to be willing to pay for a game system, and then convince them in the store that they really need the more expensive model: "Do you really want to be tripping over those wires all the time? Or your kid gets excited and yanks the unit off the shelf, and it's an expensive repair (by the way, did I tell you about our extended warranty?) And the kids will need the hard drive and the headset for some of the best games, anyway. You'll end up spending a lot more buying all this stuff as accessories down the road, so why not buy the deluxe package and save money?"
The iBooks are technically the property of 'the people' because taxes paid for the hardware.
The $50 is like a service fee for picking up the iBook your taxes already paid for...
However, if that was the viewpoint, it is difficult to understand why the restriction to taxpayers was established only after local taxpayers complained. The original intent was clearly to sell them at $50 to all comers.
Moreover, handing out underpriced iMacs to a tiny fraction of the taxpayers is hardly a fair way to issue a refund. It would still have made more sense to sell the units at auction, and then (if local taxpayers really thought that their schools were overfunded) to divide up the proceeds and issue a refund check to each taxpayer. Or simply cut the property tax a bit for the next year.
I didn't realize restating a parents post passed as +1 Insightful nowadays.
Probably because you missed the point. It was not the case that the computers were bargain-priced as a gift to the taxpayers who had paid for them. In reality, the iBooks were initially offered at that low price to anybody. Local taxpayers protested and demanded first crack because of the fire-sale pricing, not the other way around. Had the iBooks been offered at auction to bring in funds for the school district, there probably would have been no local protest, and no riot.
It was another 3 hours before I got in and got my hands on one.
So how is it? There have been dire predictions that students will have beat the crap out of them, and they'll all have cracked screens and flaky hard drives....
Have you ever tried to support a 7-year-old computer? These aren't quite that old, but they're old enough that they are getting hard to support. You can't run modern software on them, and it's not like there's an "Old Software" catalog you can order from to get programs.
I've got an even older 366 MHz "clamshell" G3 computer. It runs the current "Tiger" version of OS X and all modern software. Only thing missing is some of the fancy "eye-candy" graphic effects with Expose and Dashboard.
Obviously, whether or not there is an.xxx domain will have no impact on the availability of porn on the internet. The Bush administration is evidently worried that by allowing this, they will look like they are somehow countenancing porn.
If it had worked, the.xxx domain would have made it easier to protect kids from accidentally stumbling over porn (of course, nothing is going to stop kids from intentionally searching out porn).
But it wouldn't have worked.
If porn venders moved into.xxx, then there would be an immediate demand for libraries and the like to block all.xxx sites, followed by pressure on ISP's to do the same. Porn vendors would move back to.com to avoid the filters. Then there would be pressure to create laws to force them to use.xxx, which would of course fail because porn vendors would simply use international ISPs. Ultimately, we'd have a lot of bother, a lot of unnecessary regulations, and we'd be back to exactly where we are today.
The Henrico county residents convinced the school officials that they were entitled to the laptops because their taxes had paid for them in the first place. That's why the purchaser's had to bring proof of residency in order to buy them.
However, in reality it looks like it happened the other way around. Initially, the sale was announced with no restrictions. Only after locals protested was the sale restricted to residents.
After four years of use by public school kids, I wonder what kind of shape the iBooks were in. In my experience, kids are very hard on the things they get their hand on.
I'll bet they're in pretty good shape. iBooks are pretty robust, and I doubt if they are including any that have gross damage like smashed screens or broken hinges (if they are, they may have another riot on their hands). Worst damage is probably a few bad CD drives and old batteries that don't hold a charge too well.
Of course, the true problem is that the iBooks were sold at a price well below their true value.
My theory is the following: To get the money to purchase new laptops from Dell and Microsoft, somebody had to represent that the existing, perfectly-good iBooks were obsolete and near-worthless. If they had been offered at auction, they would have sold at a much higher price, exposing the fraud. So instead, they were offered to the public at fire-sale prices. The riot was the predictable outcome.
In fact, it is hard to imagine what student use would have required anything more powerful than a 500 MHz iBook. The only one that leaps to mind is video editing, and somehow I doubt that a large number of students needed to do that on their laptops.
I'd be happy if the biggest problem with licensed games was lack of innovation. The major problem is that most of them suck. If the industry is finally getting away from the "we don't need to make it good, we got a license" mentality, that is a good thing.
We are beginning to see real quality in license-based games (the Riddick game comes to mind), but most of them still clearly have that "rushed to make the movie release date" feel. If the game is to be a product on its own, and not just a marketing gimmick for the movie, then it should be just fine if the game comes out along with the movie DVD, or even the release to cable.
I allow cookies from the sites I navigate to. The convenience outweighs privacy issues as far as I'm concerned. I like having sites show me ads for stuff that I might actually be interested in.
If MS has the patent, then surely they can produce iPod look-a-likes and Apple can't sue them since they hold the patent?
That's assuming that there is only one patent. If the iPod is covered by multiple patents, as is commonly the case, then MS would only be able to copy the features covered by their patent.
The only way our Hypercapitalism will ever allow itself to invest in distributed energy systems is to have government control that enforces their entirely artificial command of profits. To wit: you will need to RENT solar panels, or be LICNESED (hence, taxed each year) to have them. Then the scumbag Capitalists will release "their" (in reality, OUR) billions to make solar power happen.
Relax. You underestimate the ingenuity of scumbag capitalists. Despite the fact that there is no way to meter air, capitalism manages to survive perfectly well despite the fact that we don't have to pay to breathe. If energy is free, they'll sell you the solar panels and appliances to run off of that free power. Besides, you're still going to need portable energy (hopefully, something cleaner than gasoline) for travel, and somebody will be happy to sell it to you. And if you don't live where the sun shines all the time, you'll need storage, and it will probably be cheaper to rent it than to buy your own. So don't worry--no matter how well your solar panels work, the capitalists will still find plenty of stuff to charge you for.
We are runing out of time and like the foresight institute said, what we need is a project similar to the atom bomb manhattin project: a Nanhattin project (run by nerds) to race to develop working nano machines (assemblers and cell repairing machines and the complicated software to run them).
I don't see nanotech as an area where we need to be pumping in large amounts of public funds. The economic potential for nano-based materials science is so great that it is attracting lots of private investment. And I don't think that nanotech is anywhere close to a level at which a big push to build assemblers and nanobots would bear fruit. It would be like trying to set up a project to develop robotic assembly lines back in the 18th century.
I know I sure wouldn't buy more if they were a dime cheaper -- I don't lose any sleep over a buck a track.
I might buy more if they were a dime cheaper, but would I buy enough more? I'd have to buy at least 11% more (that's assuming zero per download cost for Apple) for them to break even.
So sure, people would undoubtedly buy more music if it was a dime a track instead of a buck--but would they really buy over ten times as much? So I agree, Apple is probably pretty close to the profit-maximizing price point.
Competition can not push prices below supply costs indefinitely and prices will inexorably rise until absolute quantity of oil is exhausted.
Oil will never be exhausted, but depletion will eventually push the price to a point at which it is more cost-effective to use alternative fuels than to extract the remaining oil. However, short-term price fluctuations provide little meaningful data for estimating long-term price changes, much as it is impossible to tell much about global warming from the difference between today's temperature and yesterday's. Of course, as the average price gradually drifts upward, the impact of short-term spikes in price will increase.
Why are people here so obsessed with space elevators all of the sudden, as if they had just discovered them? The tech isn't even close (~2GPa composites instead of >100GPa, and even the strongest *individual SWNTs* found thusfar were about 60GPa), so why are we treating them as if they're a "shuttle replacement" or whatnot?
Because
(a) materials technology is improving really fast. 60 GPa seems remarkably close, considering that just a few years ago there were no materials that were even in the ballpark, and
(b) it is now clear to everybody that rocket technology is never going to be cheap enough for large-scale private economic development off-earth, so we're not looking for a shuttle replacement, we're looking for something far better than a shuttle.
Slashdot Mirror
OK, let's forget all of the quibbling about what IQ actually measures, and what intelligence actually is.
Let's suppose it's true. So what? Does it mean that "men are smarter than women?" Well, no, because all men are not the same and all women are not the same. IQ scores are described by a more or less normal statistical distribution. 5 points is not much; it's considerably less than one standard deviation. So if you are male and happen to meet a random woman, this gives you virtually no basis to guess whether she is likely to be smarter than you are not. Most of us are fairly close to the middle of the distribution. So for a typical male--or even an unusually bright male--there is still going to be a huge number of women who have a higher IQ than he does. Perhaps the person with the highest IQ in the world is more likely to be a man than a woman, but I'm not that guy. I don't think I even know that guy (and I know some pretty smart people).
There are clear differences in the brains of men and women. It is well established that some intellectual skills are differently distributed between men and women. So it is clearly possible to find measures in which one or the other will come out ahead, and which sex scores higher on a one-dimensional test such as IQ depends upon how those skills are weighted. But for all of those measures, there is a huge overlap of the distributions. As human beings, we are ethically obligated to deal with one another as individuals, not as stereotypes. So who is brightest (whatever the hell that means) on the average shouldn't make a damned bit of difference.
So let's quit obsessing over which population--male, female, black, white, asian--has the highest IQ. Arguing about it only gives the misleading impression that it matters.
Fuck that. The minute they have intermissions I'm not going. You bastards can learn to control your bladder like the rest of us, and stop drinking 48 ounces of liquid during the movie.
Congratulations upon your large bladder. It is a rare distinction and you should justly be proud. I don't doubt that it is your finest feature.
There was a time when movies longer than about 90 minutes routinely had intermissions. "2001" and "Lawrence of Arabia" both had intermissions when they were originally shown. Just one of those little amenities that have vanished as theaters began trying to pack one more showing into the day to maximize profits.
Now, I think that some of those theories are completely valid. Commercials in the theaters absolutely piss me off. If I'm going to spend 9 bucks to watch a movie, they better not force me to watch commercials before it.
I agree. With the improving quality home video, a theater has to offer me a positive experience to get me there for more than the handful of movies that I feel that I absolutely have to see on the big screen. Commercials are big deterrent to moviegoing. So are movies without intermissions. And overlarge, overexpensive low quality snacks. Moviemakers think Americans are impatient with long movies--we're actually impatient with climbing over people's legs to run down the hall to the bathroom and missing a crucial scene. At home, you just hit "pause."
While other console companies existed before Nintendo, they were largely unprofitable. Atari's abysmal failures in Pac-man and E.T. are just one example.
However, those followed numerous huge successes. It was Atari that basically invented the home videogame industry, and for a while they were hugely profitable.
However, I think that many people overrate the importance of home systems in building videogames. Most of the real creativity at the time was in the coin arcade arena. Yes, many people have fond, nostalgic memories of playing at home with their Atari or NCS, but most of those games they remember were slow, ugly, blocky clones of games that had already succeeded in the arcades. Videogames didn't really break into the mainstream until the technology developed to the point that home consoles and home computers could offer graphics that were at least approximately competitive with the coin arcades--which really began with the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo generation.
Another important source of creativity in game development was early home computers with color graphics, specifically the Apple II, Atari 400/800, Commodore 64, and Amiga, which was pretty much independent of what Nintendo was doing at the time.
The "roots" of gaming were FUN games, easy play, and great simple control. Gaming really needs to get back to its roots and stop trying to be the next multi-billion hollywood-like crap industry.
Such games still exist, although they have largely migrated to hand-helds. Check out Kirby Canvas Curse on the Nintendo DS, for example--a game that combines the simplicity of classic arcade games (simple control by drawing and tapping with a stylus) with modern technology (dual screens, touch sensitive screen).
Or Nanostray, also on the DS -- a classic vertical scrolling shooter with graphics on a level with classic quarter munchers.
Or any of the Nintendo GBA Metroid and Castlevania games.
Or any one of the Metal Slug games, available for PS2, XBox, and GBA. Classic side-scrolling shooter with brilliant animation.
Or Katmari on PS, as simple as any classic game, but taking advantage of modern 3D graphics to provide a game mechanic that would have been impossible in the classic era.
I'm not even convinced that top-notch simple games are any more rare than they ever were. Rather, the market has expanded to support other tastes as well. Yes, the simple, easy-to-pick-up games are great, but it is not the only way to have fun. Today, there are video games for the sort of people who, back in "the day" would have been playing complex board games with lots of dice, cards, and tokens, and a rule book a quarter-inch thick.
It is instructive to read some of the actual studies on which these conclusions are based. Every one I've looked at has been utter garbage. The most common errors are:
1) No proper control. Games are exciting. So if you are looking for a specific effect of games, you need to control for nonspecific effects of general excitement. It is fairly obvious how to do this--you need another stimulus, perhaps a film of a sporting even that is equally exciting, and you have to verify that the control stimulus is indeed equally exciting, say by measuring change in pulse rate.
2) Conflating aggression with violence. Violence is often associated with aggression, but aggression is not violence. One can be verbally aggressive, for example. In circumstances--a sporting event for example, or a lawyer making a case--a certain amount of properly channeled aggression is appropriate and advantageous. So studies that measure aggression rather than violence are meaningless. It is crucial to verify that the method of evaluation is able to distinguish between aggression and violence.
3) Confusing rough play with violence. Fantasy play may involve miming of violent actions, but it can be distinguished from real violence in that serious injuries are rare. A common error is to characterize play as violent, even when there is no clear intent to cause harm. Scoring of actions as "violent" must be carried out by observers who are "blind" as to whether the subjects were exposed to the video game stimulus or the control stimulus (see #1).
None of this is rocket science--just obvious, minimal criteria for a valid study. Amazingly, most of the studies that I have read do not meet even these minimum standards.
Note that no information is being transmitted faster than the speed of light in such a case. Shadow may traverse across the spotlight faster than the speed of light, but the actual information that creates the shadow is still transmitted at the epeed of light from the spotlight to the wall.
Indeed, if you try to transmit information, say by changing the speed at which you move the object, that change will propagate to the wall only at the speed of light, even though the shadow itself is traversing the wall at greater than c.
It's somehow hard to imagine that this will be a faithful version of a story in which the protagonist is essentially a terrorist.
This will let retailers advertise the lower price, which is just at the upper end of what parents are likely to be willing to pay for a game system, and then convince them in the store that they really need the more expensive model: "Do you really want to be tripping over those wires all the time? Or your kid gets excited and yanks the unit off the shelf, and it's an expensive repair (by the way, did I tell you about our extended warranty?) And the kids will need the hard drive and the headset for some of the best games, anyway. You'll end up spending a lot more buying all this stuff as accessories down the road, so why not buy the deluxe package and save money?"
It actually works by shooting a mist into the air and projecting an image onto said mist.
Disneyland has been using this technology in shows for years.
The iBooks are technically the property of 'the people' because taxes paid for the hardware.
The $50 is like a service fee for picking up the iBook your taxes already paid for...
However, if that was the viewpoint, it is difficult to understand why the restriction to taxpayers was established only after local taxpayers complained. The original intent was clearly to sell them at $50 to all comers.
Moreover, handing out underpriced iMacs to a tiny fraction of the taxpayers is hardly a fair way to issue a refund. It would still have made more sense to sell the units at auction, and then (if local taxpayers really thought that their schools were overfunded) to divide up the proceeds and issue a refund check to each taxpayer. Or simply cut the property tax a bit for the next year.
I didn't realize restating a parents post passed as +1 Insightful nowadays.
Probably because you missed the point. It was not the case that the computers were bargain-priced as a gift to the taxpayers who had paid for them. In reality, the iBooks were initially offered at that low price to anybody. Local taxpayers protested and demanded first crack because of the fire-sale pricing, not the other way around. Had the iBooks been offered at auction to bring in funds for the school district, there probably would have been no local protest, and no riot.
It was another 3 hours before I got in and got my hands on one.
So how is it? There have been dire predictions that students will have beat the crap out of them, and they'll all have cracked screens and flaky hard drives....
Have you ever tried to support a 7-year-old computer? These aren't quite that old, but they're old enough that they are getting hard to support. You can't run modern software on them, and it's not like there's an "Old Software" catalog you can order from to get programs.
I've got an even older 366 MHz "clamshell" G3 computer. It runs the current "Tiger" version of OS X and all modern software. Only thing missing is some of the fancy "eye-candy" graphic effects with Expose and Dashboard.
Obviously, whether or not there is an .xxx domain will have no impact on the availability of porn on the internet. The Bush administration is evidently worried that by allowing this, they will look like they are somehow countenancing porn.
.xxx domain would have made it easier to protect kids from accidentally stumbling over porn (of course, nothing is going to stop kids from intentionally searching out porn).
.xxx, then there would be an immediate demand for libraries and the like to block all .xxx sites, followed by pressure on ISP's to do the same. Porn vendors would move back to .com to avoid the filters. Then there would be pressure to create laws to force them to use .xxx, which would of course fail because porn vendors would simply use international ISPs. Ultimately, we'd have a lot of bother, a lot of unnecessary regulations, and we'd be back to exactly where we are today.
If it had worked, the
But it wouldn't have worked.
If porn venders moved into
The Henrico county residents convinced the school officials that they were entitled to the laptops because their taxes had paid for them in the first place. That's why the purchaser's had to bring proof of residency in order to buy them.
However, in reality it looks like it happened the other way around. Initially, the sale was announced with no restrictions. Only after locals protested was the sale restricted to residents.
After four years of use by public school kids, I wonder what kind of shape the iBooks were in. In my experience, kids are very hard on the things they get their hand on.
I'll bet they're in pretty good shape. iBooks are pretty robust, and I doubt if they are including any that have gross damage like smashed screens or broken hinges (if they are, they may have another riot on their hands). Worst damage is probably a few bad CD drives and old batteries that don't hold a charge too well.
Of course, the true problem is that the iBooks were sold at a price well below their true value.
My theory is the following: To get the money to purchase new laptops from Dell and Microsoft, somebody had to represent that the existing, perfectly-good iBooks were obsolete and near-worthless. If they had been offered at auction, they would have sold at a much higher price, exposing the fraud. So instead, they were offered to the public at fire-sale prices. The riot was the predictable outcome.
In fact, it is hard to imagine what student use would have required anything more powerful than a 500 MHz iBook. The only one that leaps to mind is video editing, and somehow I doubt that a large number of students needed to do that on their laptops.
I'd be happy if the biggest problem with licensed games was lack of innovation. The major problem is that most of them suck. If the industry is finally getting away from the "we don't need to make it good, we got a license" mentality, that is a good thing.
We are beginning to see real quality in license-based games (the Riddick game comes to mind), but most of them still clearly have that "rushed to make the movie release date" feel. If the game is to be a product on its own, and not just a marketing gimmick for the movie, then it should be just fine if the game comes out along with the movie DVD, or even the release to cable.
I allow cookies from the sites I navigate to. The convenience outweighs privacy issues as far as I'm concerned. I like having sites show me ads for stuff that I might actually be interested in.
If MS has the patent, then surely they can produce iPod look-a-likes and Apple can't sue them since they hold the patent?
That's assuming that there is only one patent. If the iPod is covered by multiple patents, as is commonly the case, then MS would only be able to copy the features covered by their patent.
The only way our Hypercapitalism will ever allow itself to invest in distributed energy systems is to have government control that enforces their entirely artificial command of profits. To wit: you will need to RENT solar panels, or be LICNESED (hence, taxed each year) to have them. Then the scumbag Capitalists will release "their" (in reality, OUR) billions to make solar power happen.
Relax. You underestimate the ingenuity of scumbag capitalists. Despite the fact that there is no way to meter air, capitalism manages to survive perfectly well despite the fact that we don't have to pay to breathe. If energy is free, they'll sell you the solar panels and appliances to run off of that free power. Besides, you're still going to need portable energy (hopefully, something cleaner than gasoline) for travel, and somebody will be happy to sell it to you. And if you don't live where the sun shines all the time, you'll need storage, and it will probably be cheaper to rent it than to buy your own. So don't worry--no matter how well your solar panels work, the capitalists will still find plenty of stuff to charge you for.
We are runing out of time and like the foresight institute said, what we need is a project similar to the atom bomb manhattin project: a Nanhattin project (run by nerds) to race to develop working nano machines (assemblers and cell repairing machines and the complicated software to run them).
I don't see nanotech as an area where we need to be pumping in large amounts of public funds. The economic potential for nano-based materials science is so great that it is attracting lots of private investment. And I don't think that nanotech is anywhere close to a level at which a big push to build assemblers and nanobots would bear fruit. It would be like trying to set up a project to develop robotic assembly lines back in the 18th century.
I know I sure wouldn't buy more if they were a dime cheaper -- I don't lose any sleep over a buck a track.
I might buy more if they were a dime cheaper, but would I buy enough more? I'd have to buy at least 11% more (that's assuming zero per download cost for Apple) for them to break even.
So sure, people would undoubtedly buy more music if it was a dime a track instead of a buck--but would they really buy over ten times as much? So I agree, Apple is probably pretty close to the profit-maximizing price point.
Competition can not push prices below supply costs indefinitely and prices will inexorably rise until absolute quantity of oil is exhausted.
Oil will never be exhausted, but depletion will eventually push the price to a point at which it is more cost-effective to use alternative fuels than to extract the remaining oil. However, short-term price fluctuations provide little meaningful data for estimating long-term price changes, much as it is impossible to tell much about global warming from the difference between today's temperature and yesterday's. Of course, as the average price gradually drifts upward, the impact of short-term spikes in price will increase.
Why are people here so obsessed with space elevators all of the sudden, as if they had just discovered them? The tech isn't even close (~2GPa composites instead of >100GPa, and even the strongest *individual SWNTs* found thusfar were about 60GPa), so why are we treating them as if they're a "shuttle replacement" or whatnot?
Because
(a) materials technology is improving really fast. 60 GPa seems remarkably close, considering that just a few years ago there were no materials that were even in the ballpark, and
(b) it is now clear to everybody that rocket technology is never going to be cheap enough for large-scale private economic development off-earth, so we're not looking for a shuttle replacement, we're looking for something far better than a shuttle.