I wasn't vaccinated as a child and had measles and rubella (2 out of the 3 MMR diseases). Sure, it was unpleasant, but I was a kid and kids deal with these things. I have a little trouble with your statement that these diseases are "far more horrible than you can imagine".
I think you are not aware of the potential seriousness of measles. You were lucky (not extraordinarily lucky - the odds were in your favour - but lucky non-the-less). According to our friend Wikipedia
"Statistically out of 1000 measles cases, 2-3 patients die"
A 0.2 percent death rate isn't something we should expect kids to "deal with" - it would mean that of the kids in an elementary school of 500, about one would succumb to the disease. Considering the anguish when any child in a school dies for any reason, I doubt that would be socially acceptable. Even if childhood infections are less dangerous than ones in adults, we still have to "think of the adults" and make sure these diseases are not spread through the population.
I wonder if anyone would be successful in suing any of the anti-vaccine people if their child died or got serious complications by not being vaccinated? Maybe I could start a class-action suit against one of them due to their efforts to reduce the "herd immunity" of the community and thereby endangering us all? Maybe I should look for a lawyer to start the ball rolling? Does Jenny have much money?
Yeah, I suppose Wikipedia is full of dreck. But their time-line seems pretty accurate. Other than your general disdain, do you have anything else to offer?
The original "bondi blue" iMac was the first computer to offer USB ports without offering "legacy" ports. That's right -- no serial ports, no ADB. This changes the network effects. Before the iMac showed up, there were many millions of PC users who had no USB ports and perhaps a couple of million who had a USB port and also legacy ports. The biggest market in 1998 was in serial and parallel ports (or joystick ports, PS/2 ports, and so on) -- there was no reason to target the USB market. That would just restrict your audience.
The iMac presented a ready-made market of users who chose the Mac line for its graphics capability. In turn, the iMac offered a captive audience of users who would buy a USB peripheral but would not buy any other kind of peripheral. These users provided a market for USB peripherals that wasn't facing competition from other port choices. The result was a flood of USB devices in white-and-blue plastic. This was a crucial turning point that created a reason (tied to a proven system choice) to prefer USB to non-USB ports.
Once adoption was foist onto this substantial segment of users, the technical merits of the technology won out easily. USB's technical superiority (for most peripherals) to the conglomeration of a half-dozen different port types was unambiguous.
Humm, that's not my memory. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus#History The USB 1.0 specification was introduced in January 1996. The original USB 1.0 specification had a data transfer rate of 12 Mbit/s.[5] The first widely used version of USB was 1.1, which was released in September 1998. I recall virtually no USB devices available at all until after the iMac, which didn't even have Firewire until the "Summer 2001".
Someone as intelligent as you (or at least not as "fucking stupid" as myself) can surely see that a large market share is not required to "create a market". There was already an existing ecosystem of peripheral makers already selling into the (relatively) small Macintosh market - anyone making ADB devices was only selling to Macintosh users since ADB was only used by Apple for example. These companies were forced to produce USB products in order to maintain their existing customers moving forward and as a bonus they got to sell to those PC users with USB cards and/or built-in USB.
If you can find reference to more than one mouse, one printer, and one external hard drive available for purchase before the introduction of the iMac, I would be interested to learn of it. (I jest, I am sure there were more than one of each, but they certainly were not ubiquitous.) After the iMac it seemed as though virtually everyone was making the things. Granted, it could have just been a case of good timing on the part of Apple and that all those products would have been available regardless of what Apple in the same time frame, however there certainly seemed to be a lot of "bondi blue" at the trade shows for a while there.
If it wasn't for Apple, PCs would probably still have RS232 and floppy drives. Again, Apple let the way there, replacing/removing obsolete technology whilst the rest of the industry were too scared to be different.
Oh please, pull the other one.
Unused ports die when their time is up. Seen a gameport off an audio board lately? Nope. Why? USB.
I don't know where you where at the time, but you obviously were not paying much attention. Apple is widely acknowledged to have created the market for USB with the introduction of the iMac (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3 ) which had no floppy and nothing but USB. Companies producing periferals for the Macintosh were forced to support USB, which created enough products that PC builders were able to justify its inclusion on motherboards and thus wider adoption. Probably without Apple, USB would have replaced those other options eventually, but it is very unlikely it would have happened so quickly. The legacy is the glut of candy-coloured USB devices introduced before 2000 for the iMac market.
I have an efax.com number that is free that I use for incoming faxes (and voice mail for that matter), they get sent to me as email attachments. I recall that they do a good attempt at steering you towards their pay products, but last I looked they still offered the free service. When I look now, I cannot seem to find their incoming free fax products, so maybe they have discontinued that offering.
j2.com also no longer seems to still offer a free incoming product. Maybe they all figured out they couldn't make much money by setting their price at "free".
The way to "share openly" their newly made discoveries is by publishing them. If they publish lots and are a good instructor, there would seem to be little in the way of them getting tenure.
Constantly getting "scooped" (someone else publishing before they do on the same topic) could be a problem I suppose, but in practice in the fields I am familiar with, sharing your results over coffee at a conference poses little risk since in order to publish anything they would actually have to completely repeat the experiment or calculation quick enough to beat the original investigator to publication.
Perhaps sharing ideas for future research might be something worth being discrete about.
... Or, more concerningly, that an accident at the speed I'm doing, with an oncoming car is like hitting a wall at that, speed, not the combined speeds of both cars because they are in opposite directions. Stuff that I presumed, maybe naively, that most people know just by default.
At two identical particle collision at speed "v" is essentially identical to a one particle collision at speed "v" with an immovable wall. The energy and momentum changes for the cars are the same (if we ignore the differences between steel/steel collisions compared to steel/stone and stuff like that). By comparison, traveling at twice the velocity into the wall, the car will undergo twice the change in momentum and four times the change in kinetic energy as it comes to a crumpled rest.
One method of perhaps thinking about the similarity of the same-speed collisions is to imagine supporting a thin opaque sheet right at the point of impact, so that the car under observation cannot "see" what it is colliding with - all that it "knows" is that as its parts touch the sheet, they experience forces strong enough to cause them to come to rest (or bounce a bit back) - the outcome is the same if there is a wall behind the sheet or if it is another car approaching at an identical speed.
Alternatively, forget the cars and get out the pencil and paper and do a bit of figuring for perfectly elastic balls - the speed of the ball bouncing off the wall will be -v and the speed of the ball bouncing off the approaching ball will also be -v (with conservation of energy what else could it be?) For less than perfectly elastic balls, chose any coefficient of restitution and you get the same result: the ball-wall is equivalent to the ball-ball situation only when the speeds are equal - if the ball-wall speed (in the wall rest frame) is double that of the ball-ball situation (in the centre of mass frame of course), the bounce-back-ball will be much more energetic.
If I've screwed up somewhere in my understanding or exposition, please let me know.
The counter example was actually medicare vs private insurance. Midicare costs something like 3% for overhead, private insurance costs something like 12%.
There are a variety of reasons for this disparity, but none of them have to do with laws prohibiting competition in that field. In this case, "the government" system is cheaper than the "competing companies" system.
If one is going to say ALWAYS, then a single counter-example is sufficient.
If you meant "always except when it isn't", then you should be careful to state that.
If you want to go on talking about what the government should or should not be involved in you should probably be aware that it is unlikely that you will be able to find ANY position that "most thinking people will agree" upon - even without going outside of the USA for those people.
I do not think you have as wide a consensus as you might think.
Your first item - "government will ALWAYS cost more" is demonstratively wrong. There are numerous counter-examples (health care is a big one). It is true that governmental systems have a variety of forces that tend to promote certain types of inefficiencies, but competing companies also have forces that promote inefficiencies - some of these forces are the same for the two types, and some are different. The costs associated with advertising for example could (and in some cases do) lead to competing companies costing more than a government monopoly operation. There are design and regulatory systems that can work towards countering these tendencies in both cases, and I would think that everyone would be able to agree that it is worthwhile to implement such systems - but I would of course be wrong. There are a large number of people who cannot seem to accept that all government programs are not inherently evil, and probably a similar number of people who could never accept that all companies are not inherently evil.
Personal experience also supports dowsing, astrology and talking to the dead. Granted, personal experience also supports special relativity, but for most people Newtonian and even Aristotelian mechanics are more strongly supported.
As for the polygraph, what sort of controlled study were you involved with? Why wasn't it published? Even without formal publication, a monograph describing the study construction and results would be interesting.
It's not perfect, nothing ever is, but it's still very useful, or they wouldn't do it.
Yeah, I suppose. It's not like they would ever do anything that wasn't useful.
That's why small doses of aspirin are used generally as prophylactic against heart disease. Oh, wait, that's been debunked. Well, we try to lower stress levels and provide ant-acids for peptic ulcers. Oh, wait, that's been debunked too.
Come to think of it, "they" do all sorts of things that aren't useful, and in many cases counter-productive.
I am sure that "they" THINK it is useful (or at least some of "they"). There just is not a lot of evidence to support that position, and a reasonable amount of evidence that goes counter to that position.
The fact that "they" are not doing significant studies demonstrating this effectiveness call into question the entire operation. Even staunch defenders agree the methods are not infallible - knowing what the best practices are and quantifying their effectiveness's would be very useful, but such studies are not being done.
If you told them about the anti-convulsive given as an example, they would know its effects on your physiology? Lie detector training includes a pharmacology degree? There are already VERY big questions as to the effectiveness of the whole enterprise, with essentially no rigorous studies as to effectiveness, best practices, etc. and that is without the effects of various legal prescription drugs. Does anyone think that even the all-knowing NSA has anything but the vaguest understanding how even the most well understood drug would influence the results?
If "capitalism" naturally tends in that direction, how did Europe end up not being that way?
Perhaps governmental regulation? Certainly Europe cannot be pointed to as an example of "unfettered Capitalism" at any time in their history.
Look, I agree with you that it is very difficult to regulate commerce in such a way that it does not have unintended consequences. I also very strongly feel that completely unregulated commerce has similar dangers, and there are numerous examples to show some validity to this argument - from stock market manipulations to anti-trust abuses.
I am not so sure about that. My kid in the third grade just did a whole bit about the California gold rush and the dudes at the Sacramento train museum presented a pretty damning picture of the monopoly formed in transportation around the time of the intercontinental railway system. Once a railway is put through, it is pretty hard to displace that monopoly, regardless of how abusive it gets.
Pricing about "what people think is reasonable" is the least of the issues. Once the company owns the factory, and the store, and the farms, it is pretty hard to displace them. Unfettered "capitalism" naturally tends in this direction.
The only time this doesn't happen is when the government intervenes to prevent the second party from producing a competing product. When that happens, you no longer have capitalism (what you have depends on the nature of the government intervention, but whether it is socialism, fascism, or full-blown communism, it is still a restriction on the freedom of the individual to make his or her own decisions about what is best).
What do you call it when the "first party" has such a stranglehold on the industry that no second party can form? Without some external intervention, is not the stable state for such a system to have only a single, very rich and powerful monopoly?
Once a monopoly is created, they have the ability to set prices, and "exploit the workers" to any extent desired, since the workers have no body else to go to since they control no capitol, and nobody else does either.
Seems like some sort of external regulation is necessary.
The "paper" one is cute, but that last one "under the ruler" is pretty nifty, with the wheel/gear moving backwards from the direction I would expect. My intuition clearly has not been well trained.
Below wind speed, use the prop to run the wheels. Over wind speed, use the wheels to run the prop.
At least for the little "toy" models, the prop doesn't run the wheels at low speeds (switching would require a shifting transmission), rather the whole structure (including the prop I suppose) provides enough air resistance to allow the wind to push it along to start. Once moving, the prop provides additional thrust to accelerate until the forward forces (forward wind pushes plus prop thrust) are balanced by the backward forces (rolling resistance plus backward air resistance). If the final speed is greater than the wind speed there is no forward wind push and if the final speed is less than the wind speed there is no backward air resistance.
Hum, that is a pretty simple four force "free body diagram" to think about the whole system. As the speed increases, the prop thrust increases and the wind push decreases, going to zero as the vehicle ground speed equals the wind speed. As the ground speed increases past the wind speed, the backward air resistance increases. I wonder what the rolling resistance does as a function of the ground speed?
Sorry to self reply, but they also claim it can self start so to get it started the propeller can't be getting energy from the wheels either (as they are stopped). It is all very strange.
For the self starting, it is just the wind pushing on all the parts of the vehicle. Since the vehicle is very light and has good bearings and stuff like that, just a little push will start it rolling and accelerating until it is up to a large enough speed that the motion of wheels drive the prop fast enough to get increased thrust to drive it up to, and beyond the speed of the wind.
It is pretty nifty, and I suppose that anyone who claims "it can't work" needs to build on of the simple models show that it in fact does not work. Generally I would place the onus of proof on the claimant for surprising results like this, but there seem to be a lot of people making such devices, leading to increased legitimacy. Maybe someone should get a factory somewhere to churn them out and sell them at "ThinkGeek" or something - they sell lots of pretty neat "impossible" things like that.
Don't get me wrong - it's great for kids ages 3-10. But given the availability of much better alternatives out there, your 14 year old will probably get turned off to programming if they use Scratch.
You could be right, we really have not played with it much. What better alternatives are there?
"Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.
As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively....."
I like one with a sliding scale of increasing costs. One could make the first "m" years free, but after that you need to register the copyright and pay a fee. This can be done in perpetuity if you (or your heirs) want - but the price doubles every year. The first year costs $2.
This type of system has the advantage that the vast majority of stuff would never get registered beyond the first few years - it just wouldn't be economically worthwhile. The central registration would make it easy to find out who owns the copyright of something that someone wanted to use - so it as some advantages for the content creators. If someone really thought that a piece of work was valuable, they can "protect" it as long as they want, but it doesn't take long for the registration fee to make that pointless.
The registration for any year "n" would cost $2^n, and assuming there are no free years to start with, the total cost of all the years registrations up through year "n" is ($2^(n+1)-$1).
year 1 -> $2 year 5 -> $32 ($63 total) year 10 -> $1024 ($2047 total) year 15 -> $32,768 ($65,535 total) year 20 -> $1,048,576 ($2,097,151 total) year 25 -> $33,554,432 ($67,108,663 total)
Of course one could play with the starting rate and/or the number of free years (or what year you started doubling things), but $2 at year one is simple to figure things out, and really, a few extra years does not make much difference in my mind. Due to the exponential price increase, it quickly becomes obvious that the vast majority of stuff would enter the public domain in a timely fashion, without depriving the creators with the opportunity to make some serious money for the years they do get monopoly protection.
Slashdot Mirror
But today's vaccines are not "different", so what is the issue?
I wasn't vaccinated as a child and had measles and rubella (2 out of the 3 MMR diseases). Sure, it was unpleasant, but I was a kid and kids deal with these things. I have a little trouble with your statement that these diseases are "far more horrible than you can imagine".
I think you are not aware of the potential seriousness of measles. You were lucky (not extraordinarily lucky - the odds were in your favour - but lucky non-the-less). According to our friend Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measles#Prognosis
"Statistically out of 1000 measles cases, 2-3 patients die"
A 0.2 percent death rate isn't something we should expect kids to "deal with" - it would mean that of the kids in an elementary school of 500, about one would succumb to the disease. Considering the anguish when any child in a school dies for any reason, I doubt that would be socially acceptable. Even if childhood infections are less dangerous than ones in adults, we still have to "think of the adults" and make sure these diseases are not spread through the population.
I wonder if anyone would be successful in suing any of the anti-vaccine people if their child died or got serious complications by not being vaccinated? Maybe I could start a class-action suit against one of them due to their efforts to reduce the "herd immunity" of the community and thereby endangering us all? Maybe I should look for a lawyer to start the ball rolling? Does Jenny have much money?
I did not know that.
Yeah, I suppose Wikipedia is full of dreck. But their time-line seems pretty accurate. Other than your general disdain, do you have anything else to offer?
These dates seem to match fairly well
http://books.google.com/books?id=fRvbxgH4wmsC&pg=PA7#v=onepage&q&f=false
From IBM is a pretty similar analysis of the economics and the significant role of the iMac: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/power/library/pa-spec7.html
Enter the iMac.
The original "bondi blue" iMac was the first computer to offer USB ports without offering "legacy" ports. That's right -- no serial ports, no ADB. This changes the network effects. Before the iMac showed up, there were many millions of PC users who had no USB ports and perhaps a couple of million who had a USB port and also legacy ports. The biggest market in 1998 was in serial and parallel ports (or joystick ports, PS/2 ports, and so on) -- there was no reason to target the USB market. That would just restrict your audience.
The iMac presented a ready-made market of users who chose the Mac line for its graphics capability. In turn, the iMac offered a captive audience of users who would buy a USB peripheral but would not buy any other kind of peripheral. These users provided a market for USB peripherals that wasn't facing competition from other port choices. The result was a flood of USB devices in white-and-blue plastic. This was a crucial turning point that created a reason (tied to a proven system choice) to prefer USB to non-USB ports.
Once adoption was foist onto this substantial segment of users, the technical merits of the technology won out easily. USB's technical superiority (for most peripherals) to the conglomeration of a half-dozen different port types was unambiguous.
Humm, that's not my memory. According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Serial_Bus#History The USB 1.0 specification was introduced in January 1996. The original USB 1.0 specification had a data transfer rate of 12 Mbit/s.[5] The first widely used version of USB was 1.1, which was released in September 1998. I recall virtually no USB devices available at all until after the iMac, which didn't even have Firewire until the "Summer 2001".
Someone as intelligent as you (or at least not as "fucking stupid" as myself) can surely see that a large market share is not required to "create a market". There was already an existing ecosystem of peripheral makers already selling into the (relatively) small Macintosh market - anyone making ADB devices was only selling to Macintosh users since ADB was only used by Apple for example. These companies were forced to produce USB products in order to maintain their existing customers moving forward and as a bonus they got to sell to those PC users with USB cards and/or built-in USB.
If you can find reference to more than one mouse, one printer, and one external hard drive available for purchase before the introduction of the iMac, I would be interested to learn of it. (I jest, I am sure there were more than one of each, but they certainly were not ubiquitous.) After the iMac it seemed as though virtually everyone was making the things. Granted, it could have just been a case of good timing on the part of Apple and that all those products would have been available regardless of what Apple in the same time frame, however there certainly seemed to be a lot of "bondi blue" at the trade shows for a while there.
If it wasn't for Apple, PCs would probably still have RS232 and floppy drives. Again, Apple let the way there, replacing/removing obsolete technology whilst the rest of the industry were too scared to be different.
Oh please, pull the other one.
Unused ports die when their time is up. Seen a gameport off an audio board lately? Nope. Why? USB.
I don't know where you where at the time, but you obviously were not paying much attention. Apple is widely acknowledged to have created the market for USB with the introduction of the iMac (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac_G3 ) which had no floppy and nothing but USB. Companies producing periferals for the Macintosh were forced to support USB, which created enough products that PC builders were able to justify its inclusion on motherboards and thus wider adoption. Probably without Apple, USB would have replaced those other options eventually, but it is very unlikely it would have happened so quickly. The legacy is the glut of candy-coloured USB devices introduced before 2000 for the iMac market.
I have an efax.com number that is free that I use for incoming faxes (and voice mail for that matter), they get sent to me as email attachments. I recall that they do a good attempt at steering you towards their pay products, but last I looked they still offered the free service. When I look now, I cannot seem to find their incoming free fax products, so maybe they have discontinued that offering.
j2.com also no longer seems to still offer a free incoming product. Maybe they all figured out they couldn't make much money by setting their price at "free".
The way to "share openly" their newly made discoveries is by publishing them. If they publish lots and are a good instructor, there would seem to be little in the way of them getting tenure.
Constantly getting "scooped" (someone else publishing before they do on the same topic) could be a problem I suppose, but in practice in the fields I am familiar with, sharing your results over coffee at a conference poses little risk since in order to publish anything they would actually have to completely repeat the experiment or calculation quick enough to beat the original investigator to publication.
Perhaps sharing ideas for future research might be something worth being discrete about.
I guess that's why all those taxi drivers in Vancouver have swapped out to Priuses (my last visit, I swear I didn't see a single non-Prius taxi).
http://www.autospies.com/news/Prius-taxi-paid-for-itself-in-no-time-17638/
I think you might be overestimating the traction battery issue.
Or maybe it is me living in denial about our 7-year old 120,000 km Prius being about to fall apart.
... Or, more concerningly, that an accident at the speed I'm doing, with an oncoming car is like hitting a wall at that, speed, not the combined speeds of both cars because they are in opposite directions. Stuff that I presumed, maybe naively, that most people know just by default.
At two identical particle collision at speed "v" is essentially identical to a one particle collision at speed "v" with an immovable wall. The energy and momentum changes for the cars are the same (if we ignore the differences between steel/steel collisions compared to steel/stone and stuff like that). By comparison, traveling at twice the velocity into the wall, the car will undergo twice the change in momentum and four times the change in kinetic energy as it comes to a crumpled rest.
One method of perhaps thinking about the similarity of the same-speed collisions is to imagine supporting a thin opaque sheet right at the point of impact, so that the car under observation cannot "see" what it is colliding with - all that it "knows" is that as its parts touch the sheet, they experience forces strong enough to cause them to come to rest (or bounce a bit back) - the outcome is the same if there is a wall behind the sheet or if it is another car approaching at an identical speed.
Alternatively, forget the cars and get out the pencil and paper and do a bit of figuring for perfectly elastic balls - the speed of the ball bouncing off the wall will be -v and the speed of the ball bouncing off the approaching ball will also be -v (with conservation of energy what else could it be?) For less than perfectly elastic balls, chose any coefficient of restitution and you get the same result: the ball-wall is equivalent to the ball-ball situation only when the speeds are equal - if the ball-wall speed (in the wall rest frame) is double that of the ball-ball situation (in the centre of mass frame of course), the bounce-back-ball will be much more energetic.
If I've screwed up somewhere in my understanding or exposition, please let me know.
The counter example was actually medicare vs private insurance. Midicare costs something like 3% for overhead, private insurance costs something like 12%.
There are a variety of reasons for this disparity, but none of them have to do with laws prohibiting competition in that field. In this case, "the government" system is cheaper than the "competing companies" system.
If one is going to say ALWAYS, then a single counter-example is sufficient.
If you meant "always except when it isn't", then you should be careful to state that.
If you want to go on talking about what the government should or should not be involved in you should probably be aware that it is unlikely that you will be able to find ANY position that "most thinking people will agree" upon - even without going outside of the USA for those people.
I do not think you have as wide a consensus as you might think.
Your first item - "government will ALWAYS cost more" is demonstratively wrong. There are numerous counter-examples (health care is a big one). It is true that governmental systems have a variety of forces that tend to promote certain types of inefficiencies, but competing companies also have forces that promote inefficiencies - some of these forces are the same for the two types, and some are different. The costs associated with advertising for example could (and in some cases do) lead to competing companies costing more than a government monopoly operation. There are design and regulatory systems that can work towards countering these tendencies in both cases, and I would think that everyone would be able to agree that it is worthwhile to implement such systems - but I would of course be wrong. There are a large number of people who cannot seem to accept that all government programs are not inherently evil, and probably a similar number of people who could never accept that all companies are not inherently evil.
A bit of a shame really.
Personal experience also supports dowsing, astrology and talking to the dead. Granted, personal experience also supports special relativity, but for most people Newtonian and even Aristotelian mechanics are more strongly supported.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelian_mechanics
As for the polygraph, what sort of controlled study were you involved with? Why wasn't it published? Even without formal publication, a monograph describing the study construction and results would be interesting.
It's not perfect, nothing ever is, but it's still very useful, or they wouldn't do it.
Yeah, I suppose. It's not like they would ever do anything that wasn't useful.
That's why small doses of aspirin are used generally as prophylactic against heart disease. Oh, wait, that's been debunked. Well, we try to lower stress levels and provide ant-acids for peptic ulcers. Oh, wait, that's been debunked too.
Come to think of it, "they" do all sorts of things that aren't useful, and in many cases counter-productive.
I am sure that "they" THINK it is useful (or at least some of "they"). There just is not a lot of evidence to support that position, and a reasonable amount of evidence that goes counter to that position.
The fact that "they" are not doing significant studies demonstrating this effectiveness call into question the entire operation. Even staunch defenders agree the methods are not infallible - knowing what the best practices are and quantifying their effectiveness's would be very useful, but such studies are not being done.
If you told them about the anti-convulsive given as an example, they would know its effects on your physiology? Lie detector training includes a pharmacology degree? There are already VERY big questions as to the effectiveness of the whole enterprise, with essentially no rigorous studies as to effectiveness, best practices, etc. and that is without the effects of various legal prescription drugs. Does anyone think that even the all-knowing NSA has anything but the vaguest understanding how even the most well understood drug would influence the results?
And if you lied about it they would know how?
If "capitalism" naturally tends in that direction, how did Europe end up not being that way?
Perhaps governmental regulation? Certainly Europe cannot be pointed to as an example of "unfettered Capitalism" at any time in their history.
Look, I agree with you that it is very difficult to regulate commerce in such a way that it does not have unintended consequences. I also very strongly feel that completely unregulated commerce has similar dangers, and there are numerous examples to show some validity to this argument - from stock market manipulations to anti-trust abuses.
I am not so sure about that. My kid in the third grade just did a whole bit about the California gold rush and the dudes at the Sacramento train museum presented a pretty damning picture of the monopoly formed in transportation around the time of the intercontinental railway system. Once a railway is put through, it is pretty hard to displace that monopoly, regardless of how abusive it gets.
Pricing about "what people think is reasonable" is the least of the issues. Once the company owns the factory, and the store, and the farms, it is pretty hard to displace them. Unfettered "capitalism" naturally tends in this direction.
.....
but other than that "phantom click" problem, it's a sweet machine....
The only time this doesn't happen is when the government intervenes to prevent the second party from producing a competing product. When that happens, you no longer have capitalism (what you have depends on the nature of the government intervention, but whether it is socialism, fascism, or full-blown communism, it is still a restriction on the freedom of the individual to make his or her own decisions about what is best).
What do you call it when the "first party" has such a stranglehold on the industry that no second party can form? Without some external intervention, is not the stable state for such a system to have only a single, very rich and powerful monopoly?
Once a monopoly is created, they have the ability to set prices, and "exploit the workers" to any extent desired, since the workers have no body else to go to since they control no capitol, and nobody else does either.
Seems like some sort of external regulation is necessary.
The "paper" one is cute, but that last one "under the ruler" is pretty nifty, with the wheel/gear moving backwards from the direction I would expect. My intuition clearly has not been well trained.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-trDF8Yldc&NR=1
Below wind speed, use the prop to run the wheels. Over wind speed, use the wheels to run the prop.
At least for the little "toy" models, the prop doesn't run the wheels at low speeds (switching would require a shifting transmission), rather the whole structure (including the prop I suppose) provides enough air resistance to allow the wind to push it along to start. Once moving, the prop provides additional thrust to accelerate until the forward forces (forward wind pushes plus prop thrust) are balanced by the backward forces (rolling resistance plus backward air resistance). If the final speed is greater than the wind speed there is no forward wind push and if the final speed is less than the wind speed there is no backward air resistance.
Hum, that is a pretty simple four force "free body diagram" to think about the whole system. As the speed increases, the prop thrust increases and the wind push decreases, going to zero as the vehicle ground speed equals the wind speed. As the ground speed increases past the wind speed, the backward air resistance increases. I wonder what the rolling resistance does as a function of the ground speed?
Sorry to self reply, but they also claim it can self start so to get it started the propeller can't be getting energy from the wheels either (as they are stopped). It is all very strange.
For the self starting, it is just the wind pushing on all the parts of the vehicle. Since the vehicle is very light and has good bearings and stuff like that, just a little push will start it rolling and accelerating until it is up to a large enough speed that the motion of wheels drive the prop fast enough to get increased thrust to drive it up to, and beyond the speed of the wind.
It is pretty nifty, and I suppose that anyone who claims "it can't work" needs to build on of the simple models show that it in fact does not work. Generally I would place the onus of proof on the claimant for surprising results like this, but there seem to be a lot of people making such devices, leading to increased legitimacy. Maybe someone should get a factory somewhere to churn them out and sell them at "ThinkGeek" or something - they sell lots of pretty neat "impossible" things like that.
Don't get me wrong - it's great for kids ages 3-10. But given the availability of much better alternatives out there, your 14 year old will probably get turned off to programming if they use Scratch.
You could be right, we really have not played with it much. What better alternatives are there?
If he has any interest in creating something (game, interactive story, animation, etc.) it might be worth having him check out "Scratch" from MIT.
My pre-teens have played with it a bit - it can be pretty fun, and one can see how it introduces a lot of coding thoughts.
http://scratch.mit.edu/
"Scratch is a programming language that makes it easy to create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music, and art -- and share your creations on the web.
As young people create and share Scratch projects, they learn important mathematical and computational ideas, while also learning to think creatively, reason systematically, and work collaboratively. ...."
I like one with a sliding scale of increasing costs. One could make the first "m" years free, but after that you need to register the copyright and pay a fee. This can be done in perpetuity if you (or your heirs) want - but the price doubles every year. The first year costs $2.
This type of system has the advantage that the vast majority of stuff would never get registered beyond the first few years - it just wouldn't be economically worthwhile. The central registration would make it easy to find out who owns the copyright of something that someone wanted to use - so it as some advantages for the content creators. If someone really thought that a piece of work was valuable, they can "protect" it as long as they want, but it doesn't take long for the registration fee to make that pointless.
The registration for any year "n" would cost $2^n, and assuming there are no free years to start with, the total cost of all the years registrations up through year "n" is ($2^(n+1)-$1).
year 1 -> $2
year 5 -> $32 ($63 total)
year 10 -> $1024 ($2047 total)
year 15 -> $32,768 ($65,535 total)
year 20 -> $1,048,576 ($2,097,151 total)
year 25 -> $33,554,432 ($67,108,663 total)
Of course one could play with the starting rate and/or the number of free years (or what year you started doubling things), but $2 at year one is simple to figure things out, and really, a few extra years does not make much difference in my mind. Due to the exponential price increase, it quickly becomes obvious that the vast majority of stuff would enter the public domain in a timely fashion, without depriving the creators with the opportunity to make some serious money for the years they do get monopoly protection.