Don't worry, AMD won't die. Instead, much like most other oligopolistic industries, Intel and AMD will realize that it's far more profitable to collude and to create the appearance of competition where there is none. That way, they can get around those pesky antitrust laws while maintaining the most wonderful thing in business: plausible deniability.
Of course, either way, consumers will lose.
No offense to the parent specifically, but why are these kinds of posts continually modded funny? I see at least five of the "patent patents" joke in every patent-related thread, and they got old extremely quickly.
IANA mathematician, but I have constructed the real numbers, starting from ZFC and working my way up. If you don't mind me asking, how exactly would you go about constructing the element i in the language of set theory? Is it sufficient to pick some random set, like i={{1}}?
Why should my company pay taxes then I pay taxes on the same income?
Because a corporation is, at least nominally, a social contract between the People (indirectly through government) and corporate stockholders. In exchange for paying taxes, you are indemnified for almost any financial liabilities and many legal liabilities that your corporation might incur.
So, to answer to your question, you pay taxes twice because the government has removed much of the risk involved with starting and maintaining a business. At worst, if something bad happens to it, you will lose your initial investment. Without incorporation, you would be held personally liable if, for example, a middle manager sexually harassed an employee to the tune of millions of dollars. You could lose it all: your business, your savings, your house, and any other forms of property you might own. You would be bankrupt.
You do not have the right to form a corporation: it is a privilege that the government grants you in exchange for tax dollars. There's nothing stopping you from forming a company out of your own pocketbook without incorporating, but don't complain if you lose everything as a result.
The set of complex numbers is no less "real" than the set of real numbers. Both are simply definitions arising from some set of mathematical axioms, usually those of an axiomatic set theory like ZFC. In fact, the definition of i as sqrt(-1) that you learn in high school is mathematically unsound: the correct way to define the complex numbers is as the set of ordered pairs of real numbers. When combined with an expected addition (a,b)+(c,d)=(a+c,b+d) and a funky multiplication (a,b)*(c,d) = (ac-bd,bc+ad), this allows you to define a+bi as shorthand for (a,b). (Note that i*i=(0,1)*(0,1)=(0-1,0+0)=(-1,0)=-1, as expected.)
Neither the real and complex numbers are "real" in the sense that they physically exist, but are on equal footing in the sense that they represent real, physical quantities. Complex quantities simply appear when dealing with pairs of real quantities. Take the (complex) wavefunction representing a quantum state, as an example. Sure, you could formulate the Schroedinger equation as a pair of coupled differential equations, but why bother, especially when it's much more elegant to express it as a single, complex equation?
Libertarians support the FREE MARKET. Free markets do not operate where monopoly or oligopoly exist. Libertarians do not support a corporate-run, completely unregulated economy!
If that's truly the case, then why is Paul against antitrust law? The only conceivable reason would be on grounds of Constitutionality, but I sincerely doubt that anyone would seriously argue that the existence of multinational corporations completely dominating an industry doesn't fall under the purview of the Commerce Clause.
First of all, I would define an assault weapon as one that exceeds a certain fire rate. I don't know enough about guns to know what that rate should be, however. Secondly, I would say that it is fair to ban assault weapons because doing so does not infringe on a person's right to defend themselves (whether from an intruder or a usurping government), and ultimately, this is what the Second Amendment is about. Phrased another way, while assault rifles are a sufficient condition for defense, they are not a necessary one: many other types of guns will suffice.
I am arguing that a line needs to be created defining what arms are permitted to bear and what aren't. If you disagree with this statement, you are affirming that the Constitution guarantees you the right of each citizen to bear nuclear arms. I am assuming this is not the case.
Now, you say that using my logic, one could ban the Internet because it is more effective than the printing press. This is incorrect. First of all, there isn't such a thing as "too much" freedom of speech, or "too much" freedom of the press. As I already demonstrated, however, there is such as thing as "too much" right to bear arms. Therefore, while no line needs to be drawn for freedom of the press, one does need to be drawn for the right to bear arms. Secondly, and more importantly, I am not arguing that assault rifles are too effective; I am arguing that while they might be protected by the letter of the law, they are not covered by the spirit of it.
To use an example, suppose that in the future, the phrase "the Press" becomes slang for "randomly kill someone on the street for sport." Would you then have freedom of "the Press?" Certainly not! The spirit of the Second Amendment is to allow you to be able to protect yourself and your neighbors, either from an intruder, a foreign government, or a hostile domestic one. As long as you are able to do this, your rights are preserved.
In all seriousness, I think people should recognize that an 18th century arm is not quite the same as a 21st century arm. In the 18th century, it was a manually reloaded rifle or bayonet. Today, an arm can be anything from a handgun to an assault rifle to a nuclear weapon. No one argues that the Constitution guarantees the right to possess nukes, so the question is not whether to draw a line but where to draw it. Given this, I think that it is completely fair to ban assault rifles.
Keep in mind that Watergate didn't happen overnight. It's easy to forget (especially if you're like me and was born in 1986), but it unfolded over the period of a couple years, with legal battles to obtain documents and all. Mark Felt (a.k.a. Deep Throat) didn't just go to Woodward and Bernstein out of the blue: he did so after the story had already gained a lot of traction. It was a cumulative effect, and what started as a small story eventually led to the resignation of a president.
The Consoles themselves are NOT overpriced, theyre kind of like cellphones where the absolute minimum cost are covered in, in fact - they flat out lose money on them - every time!
Why shouldn't American graduate schools admit more domestic students? A good portion of graduate research is funded by the federal government, and I think it'd be unfair to the taxpayers if domestic students weren't given preferential treatment.
Have you at least looked through the TNR article? It's not just a few quotes or isolated pieces contained therein: it's dozens, and maybe even hundreds, spanning over fifteen years.
And before any of the Paulites offer a retort like, "Ron Paul says he didn't even write the newsletter," consider this. Whether he did or did not read the newsletter is completely irrelevant. The quotes are not isolated: for example, the entire "article" about the L.A. riots is a six-page racist tirade. Moreover, they span over a fifteen year period. Therefore, one can reasonably conclude that one of two things is true. Either a) Ron Paul read the newsletter and tacitly approved of what his ghost writer wrote or b) he didn't read the newsletter which he lent his name and support to once in fifteen years. Neither speaks well about his integrity.
I think that I sometimes annoy people because I like to maintain an above-average following distance. To someone behind me, it might appear that I'm braking for no reason, but in reality, I'm braking to someone pretty far ahead of me. Sure, it has its drawbacks (for example, people frequently use the opportunity to change lanes in front of me), but I think this is one of the reasons that I've never had an accident. Not only does this (obviously) give you the ability to avoid rear-ending people, it also helps to prevent yourself from being rear-ended should the person in front of you brake quickly. That is, because you won't need to brake so hard, neither will the person behind you.
Only on Slashdot would someone argue that antitrust laws make it harder for new companies to enter the market. By definition, a company can't become subject to the antitrust laws unless it is already a major player in the marketplace. The whole RAM price fixing debacle wasn't solved by the oh-so-perfect market. It was solved by billions of dollars in fines for the companies involved. IIRC, Samsung got a $300 million fine, and other companies got fines in excess of $100 million.
I see the market from an electrical engineering perspective. Overall, it's a complicated feedback system that is very nonlinear. To a certain extent, it can be modeled as a first-order linear system, and this is what the rabid free-marketeers see when they look at it. Any change in the input basically causes the market to immediately adjust its outputs to account for that. However, this perspective is simply wrong. At the very most, it's a rough approximation. First of all, the system has higher order components, by virtue of the fact that each entity in the marketplace roughly forms a first-order system in and of itself, and so the overall system has an order given by the number of entities in the market (about 6 billion). It's also very non-linear, and is subject to the whims of chaos (i.e., sensitive dependence on initial conditions). If, for example, a group of RAM manufacturers wanted to gouge the public and doubled all RAM prices, the demand for RAM wouldn't simply halve: it would decrease in some strange way.
It should also be stated that if Ron Paul had his way, collusion such as this would be perfectly legal.
Well, I would say that even a basic theory of conductivity requires QM. Sure, you could impose a proportionality ansatz, but this isn't very illuminating, and doesn't answer the question of why some charge carriers are free to move and others aren't.
Besides, even if I revise my GGGP statement to remove the "he didn't really understand the underlying physics" portion, does it really matter? He didn't ever make anything and didn't publish. These are two major criteria for something to be taken seriously by the EE/applied physics crowd. Just having a basic idea isn't enough: past issues of APL is littered with hundreds, maybe even thousands of basic ideas that never really worked. Had it not been for Bardeen and Brittain, the transistor might have been amongst the legions of also-rans. IMO, they deserve most of the credit for the transistor's invention. Shockley should also get a substantial piece of the pie, thanks to his invention of the BJT.
By the way, would I be correct in guessing that you are from Germany or Austria? I only ask because I did my undergrad at the University of Illinois, and your initial post touched a nerve in me since Bardeen is one of my intellectual "heroes." I would call him the Einstein of solid state physics and electronics, but Einstein never won two Nobel prizes.:)
Lilienfeld never made an actual device. In EE and applied physics you don't get credit for inventing something if you were never actually able to make it. Moreover, the reason Lilienfeld wasn't able to make one was because he didn't know the underlying physics. He couldn't have: quantum mechanics wouldn't even be around for a couple of years. So, here we have someone who never made a device and didn't really even understand what was going on theoretically. Oh yeah, and he filed a patent, but never published otherwise. I'd say that he deserves a footnote, but nothing more.
And yeah, I feel a little sympathy for Mataré and Welker. However, the sad fact is that they made their transistor a full two months after Bell Labs. Regardless of whether it was done independently of Bardeen, Shockley, and Brittain, they were second. I'd say that history got it right.
Retained sponges are also very costly from a medical-legal standpoint, where our broken tort system routinely hands out awards in the lower 6 figures for such events, even when there are no long term consequences for the patient, and much much more when there is true patient injury.
This is one reason that the whining of people about tort reform doesn't carry too much weight with me. If you can charge someone 6 figures to perform a surgery, why should you be surprised that juries are willing to hand out awards in the same range? If I walk into Best Buy and buy a DVD player, only to find that there's a huge gouge on the front of the machine, I'd be able to return it and get a refund. It doesn't matter that there are no "long term consequences" on the operation of the player: a large gouge on the front of the machine is still a major defect. It also wouldn't matter if such defects are rare (even 1 in 20,000).
I'd say that a sponge sewed up inside a person is a pretty large defect in the purchased surgery. However, if the doctor/hospital isn't willing to issue a refund, the only other option is legal recourse. I don't like the privatized health care system, mainly because it's not a market in any definition of the term, but I digress. This is just the logical consequence of it.
Slashdot Mirror
Obviously you've never played Heroin Hero. Sometimes, it's fun to just relax and chase the dragon.
Don't worry, AMD won't die. Instead, much like most other oligopolistic industries, Intel and AMD will realize that it's far more profitable to collude and to create the appearance of competition where there is none. That way, they can get around those pesky antitrust laws while maintaining the most wonderful thing in business: plausible deniability. Of course, either way, consumers will lose.
No offense to the parent specifically, but why are these kinds of posts continually modded funny? I see at least five of the "patent patents" joke in every patent-related thread, and they got old extremely quickly.
IANA mathematician, but I have constructed the real numbers, starting from ZFC and working my way up. If you don't mind me asking, how exactly would you go about constructing the element i in the language of set theory? Is it sufficient to pick some random set, like i={{1}}?
Why should my company pay taxes then I pay taxes on the same income?
Because a corporation is, at least nominally, a social contract between the People (indirectly through government) and corporate stockholders. In exchange for paying taxes, you are indemnified for almost any financial liabilities and many legal liabilities that your corporation might incur.
So, to answer to your question, you pay taxes twice because the government has removed much of the risk involved with starting and maintaining a business. At worst, if something bad happens to it, you will lose your initial investment. Without incorporation, you would be held personally liable if, for example, a middle manager sexually harassed an employee to the tune of millions of dollars. You could lose it all: your business, your savings, your house, and any other forms of property you might own. You would be bankrupt.
You do not have the right to form a corporation: it is a privilege that the government grants you in exchange for tax dollars. There's nothing stopping you from forming a company out of your own pocketbook without incorporating, but don't complain if you lose everything as a result.
The set of complex numbers is no less "real" than the set of real numbers. Both are simply definitions arising from some set of mathematical axioms, usually those of an axiomatic set theory like ZFC. In fact, the definition of i as sqrt(-1) that you learn in high school is mathematically unsound: the correct way to define the complex numbers is as the set of ordered pairs of real numbers. When combined with an expected addition (a,b)+(c,d)=(a+c,b+d) and a funky multiplication (a,b)*(c,d) = (ac-bd,bc+ad), this allows you to define a+bi as shorthand for (a,b). (Note that i*i=(0,1)*(0,1)=(0-1,0+0)=(-1,0)=-1, as expected.)
Neither the real and complex numbers are "real" in the sense that they physically exist, but are on equal footing in the sense that they represent real, physical quantities. Complex quantities simply appear when dealing with pairs of real quantities. Take the (complex) wavefunction representing a quantum state, as an example. Sure, you could formulate the Schroedinger equation as a pair of coupled differential equations, but why bother, especially when it's much more elegant to express it as a single, complex equation?
Libertarians support the FREE MARKET. Free markets do not operate where monopoly or oligopoly exist. Libertarians do not support a corporate-run, completely unregulated economy!
If that's truly the case, then why is Paul against antitrust law? The only conceivable reason would be on grounds of Constitutionality, but I sincerely doubt that anyone would seriously argue that the existence of multinational corporations completely dominating an industry doesn't fall under the purview of the Commerce Clause.
In case anyone's curious, I found one of the threads in question. Whoever started it really had an axe to grind.
First of all, I would define an assault weapon as one that exceeds a certain fire rate. I don't know enough about guns to know what that rate should be, however. Secondly, I would say that it is fair to ban assault weapons because doing so does not infringe on a person's right to defend themselves (whether from an intruder or a usurping government), and ultimately, this is what the Second Amendment is about. Phrased another way, while assault rifles are a sufficient condition for defense, they are not a necessary one: many other types of guns will suffice.
I am arguing that a line needs to be created defining what arms are permitted to bear and what aren't. If you disagree with this statement, you are affirming that the Constitution guarantees you the right of each citizen to bear nuclear arms. I am assuming this is not the case.
Now, you say that using my logic, one could ban the Internet because it is more effective than the printing press. This is incorrect. First of all, there isn't such a thing as "too much" freedom of speech, or "too much" freedom of the press. As I already demonstrated, however, there is such as thing as "too much" right to bear arms. Therefore, while no line needs to be drawn for freedom of the press, one does need to be drawn for the right to bear arms. Secondly, and more importantly, I am not arguing that assault rifles are too effective; I am arguing that while they might be protected by the letter of the law, they are not covered by the spirit of it.
To use an example, suppose that in the future, the phrase "the Press" becomes slang for "randomly kill someone on the street for sport." Would you then have freedom of "the Press?" Certainly not! The spirit of the Second Amendment is to allow you to be able to protect yourself and your neighbors, either from an intruder, a foreign government, or a hostile domestic one. As long as you are able to do this, your rights are preserved.
In all seriousness, I think people should recognize that an 18th century arm is not quite the same as a 21st century arm. In the 18th century, it was a manually reloaded rifle or bayonet. Today, an arm can be anything from a handgun to an assault rifle to a nuclear weapon. No one argues that the Constitution guarantees the right to possess nukes, so the question is not whether to draw a line but where to draw it. Given this, I think that it is completely fair to ban assault rifles.
Keep in mind that Watergate didn't happen overnight. It's easy to forget (especially if you're like me and was born in 1986), but it unfolded over the period of a couple years, with legal battles to obtain documents and all. Mark Felt (a.k.a. Deep Throat) didn't just go to Woodward and Bernstein out of the blue: he did so after the story had already gained a lot of traction. It was a cumulative effect, and what started as a small story eventually led to the resignation of a president.
The Consoles themselves are NOT overpriced, theyre kind of like cellphones where the absolute minimum cost are covered in, in fact - they flat out lose money on them - every time!
IIRC, Nintendo makes a profit on every Wii sold.
Why shouldn't American graduate schools admit more domestic students? A good portion of graduate research is funded by the federal government, and I think it'd be unfair to the taxpayers if domestic students weren't given preferential treatment.
Which I guess makes hydrogen the Paris Hilton of elements? Alone at the top??
It also bonds with pretty much anything it meets.
Have you at least looked through the TNR article? It's not just a few quotes or isolated pieces contained therein: it's dozens, and maybe even hundreds, spanning over fifteen years.
And before any of the Paulites offer a retort like, "Ron Paul says he didn't even write the newsletter," consider this. Whether he did or did not read the newsletter is completely irrelevant. The quotes are not isolated: for example, the entire "article" about the L.A. riots is a six-page racist tirade. Moreover, they span over a fifteen year period. Therefore, one can reasonably conclude that one of two things is true. Either a) Ron Paul read the newsletter and tacitly approved of what his ghost writer wrote or b) he didn't read the newsletter which he lent his name and support to once in fifteen years. Neither speaks well about his integrity.
I misspoke. I actually don't brake, and do lift off.
I think that I sometimes annoy people because I like to maintain an above-average following distance. To someone behind me, it might appear that I'm braking for no reason, but in reality, I'm braking to someone pretty far ahead of me. Sure, it has its drawbacks (for example, people frequently use the opportunity to change lanes in front of me), but I think this is one of the reasons that I've never had an accident. Not only does this (obviously) give you the ability to avoid rear-ending people, it also helps to prevent yourself from being rear-ended should the person in front of you brake quickly. That is, because you won't need to brake so hard, neither will the person behind you.
Only on Slashdot would someone argue that antitrust laws make it harder for new companies to enter the market. By definition, a company can't become subject to the antitrust laws unless it is already a major player in the marketplace. The whole RAM price fixing debacle wasn't solved by the oh-so-perfect market. It was solved by billions of dollars in fines for the companies involved. IIRC, Samsung got a $300 million fine, and other companies got fines in excess of $100 million.
I see the market from an electrical engineering perspective. Overall, it's a complicated feedback system that is very nonlinear. To a certain extent, it can be modeled as a first-order linear system, and this is what the rabid free-marketeers see when they look at it. Any change in the input basically causes the market to immediately adjust its outputs to account for that. However, this perspective is simply wrong. At the very most, it's a rough approximation. First of all, the system has higher order components, by virtue of the fact that each entity in the marketplace roughly forms a first-order system in and of itself, and so the overall system has an order given by the number of entities in the market (about 6 billion). It's also very non-linear, and is subject to the whims of chaos (i.e., sensitive dependence on initial conditions). If, for example, a group of RAM manufacturers wanted to gouge the public and doubled all RAM prices, the demand for RAM wouldn't simply halve: it would decrease in some strange way.
It should also be stated that if Ron Paul had his way, collusion such as this would be perfectly legal.
Well, I would say that even a basic theory of conductivity requires QM. Sure, you could impose a proportionality ansatz, but this isn't very illuminating, and doesn't answer the question of why some charge carriers are free to move and others aren't.
:)
Besides, even if I revise my GGGP statement to remove the "he didn't really understand the underlying physics" portion, does it really matter? He didn't ever make anything and didn't publish. These are two major criteria for something to be taken seriously by the EE/applied physics crowd. Just having a basic idea isn't enough: past issues of APL is littered with hundreds, maybe even thousands of basic ideas that never really worked. Had it not been for Bardeen and Brittain, the transistor might have been amongst the legions of also-rans. IMO, they deserve most of the credit for the transistor's invention. Shockley should also get a substantial piece of the pie, thanks to his invention of the BJT.
By the way, would I be correct in guessing that you are from Germany or Austria? I only ask because I did my undergrad at the University of Illinois, and your initial post touched a nerve in me since Bardeen is one of my intellectual "heroes." I would call him the Einstein of solid state physics and electronics, but Einstein never won two Nobel prizes.
You certainly do need quantum mechanics to describe surface states, which is the main problem with his designs.
Lilienfeld never made an actual device. In EE and applied physics you don't get credit for inventing something if you were never actually able to make it. Moreover, the reason Lilienfeld wasn't able to make one was because he didn't know the underlying physics. He couldn't have: quantum mechanics wouldn't even be around for a couple of years. So, here we have someone who never made a device and didn't really even understand what was going on theoretically. Oh yeah, and he filed a patent, but never published otherwise. I'd say that he deserves a footnote, but nothing more.
And yeah, I feel a little sympathy for Mataré and Welker. However, the sad fact is that they made their transistor a full two months after Bell Labs. Regardless of whether it was done independently of Bardeen, Shockley, and Brittain, they were second. I'd say that history got it right.
Which is exactly why I never read any of his stuff when it's posted on Slashdot.
Retained sponges are also very costly from a medical-legal standpoint, where our broken tort system routinely hands out awards in the lower 6 figures for such events, even when there are no long term consequences for the patient, and much much more when there is true patient injury.
This is one reason that the whining of people about tort reform doesn't carry too much weight with me. If you can charge someone 6 figures to perform a surgery, why should you be surprised that juries are willing to hand out awards in the same range? If I walk into Best Buy and buy a DVD player, only to find that there's a huge gouge on the front of the machine, I'd be able to return it and get a refund. It doesn't matter that there are no "long term consequences" on the operation of the player: a large gouge on the front of the machine is still a major defect. It also wouldn't matter if such defects are rare (even 1 in 20,000).
I'd say that a sponge sewed up inside a person is a pretty large defect in the purchased surgery. However, if the doctor/hospital isn't willing to issue a refund, the only other option is legal recourse. I don't like the privatized health care system, mainly because it's not a market in any definition of the term, but I digress. This is just the logical consequence of it.