Nope, I don't agree. I realize to the impoverished teenybopper and college-student set the issue of whether you get your music for 99 cents or 0 cents per song is VERY IMPORTANT, almost as important as whether you get laid on Saturday night, and I realize as well that various adult Asperger's types who have a hard time setting priorities have a habit of wanting to see massive social sledgehammers applied to any fiddling small inconsistency and injustice in the justice system -- but to cranky ol' middle-aged me, it doesn't work that way.
The resources of the justice system -- including that of the Supreme Court -- are highly limited, and I think there are far more important Constitutional questions to settle these days. This particular question can easily be settled by statute and the political process. If people are really pissed about $750/song, they can just ring up their Congressman and tell him so, send money to his opponent who supports rationalizing the amount, and so forth and so on. On the consumer front they can organize boycotts of vendors of songs for the downloading of which people are being sued, organize candlelight vigils and get on the evening news, contribute their small change to the legal team of the defense in these cases, so that the RIAA has to litigate each and every case and goes bankrupt from the legal costs, et cetera and so forth.
That's how we settle generic small- and medium-scale problems in the Republic, and that's how it should be done. Cases that must reach the Supreme Court and result in the Court speaking ex cathedra as to the One Final Truth in the Constitution should be reserved for only the most urgent and fundamental issues, the kinds of things that can otherwise break the Republic, like whether you can own people as slaves, kill them before they're born or when they're severely disabled, and what the limits are to the President's power to take the nation into war or keep it there.
There are good reasons, also, for wanting legal issues surrounding copyright to remain murky for another decade or so. Who knows what technology will bring? Maybe some of the current "problems" with digital rights will vanish with advancing technology, or maybe they'll get worse, or maybe both. We don't know. But one thing we do know is that the legal system moves like a glacier compared to technology and the market. Once the justice system has examined the copyright issue under its jaundiced microscope and declared that this is constitutional and that is not -- well, we're stuck with it, whatever the future brings. Easier to get a river to flow backwards than get a Court to reverse itself, especially when the weight of cases decided on the basis of the decision gets heavier and heavier.
And anyone who has actual experience with a judge deciding important questions in his personal or professional life will tell you it's a surrealistic horror to be avoided at almost any cost, whether you "win" or "lose." Better for everyone to wait a few more years and see what develops, before we invite J. Random Judge to cast his personal opinion of what oughta be copyrighted and how into stone and bind us all to it forever. Brrr.
If you read the motion in question, you'll see one thing this is not is Big Evil Government joining forces with Big Evil Recording Industry.
The background is that, as part of his defence (and a counterclaim), the defendant in the RIAA suit has said that (1) not only is he innocent, but (2) the act of Congress establishing the basis under which he was sued is unconstitutional. That's certainly going for the Moon.
In any case in which a Federal law might be declared unconstitutional, not surprisingly the Federal Gov't takes an interest, and might decide to defend the constitutionality of the law. Should they succeed, that does not mean the defendant loses, of course. It only means he can't get a bye, in the sense that the very law under which he was charged vanishes.
The only thing unique about this case is that the Federal Gov't asserts that it did not previously receive sufficient notice of the case to have time to decide, in the routine way, whether or not to defend the constitutionality of the law in question. So they filed a motion with the Court asking for 60 days to think it over. This motion was unopposed by the defendant, who apparently realizes (at least more so than certain credulous/. editors), that this is utterly routine and has about zero bearing on whether or not he'll win the case.
I mean, unless you're so naive as to think that the argument in Court will go like this:
RIAA (pointing skeletal finger): You broke the law, fiend!
Defendant: Did not. And besides, the law's unjust and should not exist.
Judge: Really? What makes you think so?
Defendant: Well, I...
Uncle Sam (interrupting): Hold on thar a gosh-darned minute! I say that law is fair!
Judge (bowing to Uncle Sam): Well, in THAT case, it must be. Defendent, you lose.
Defendant: Curses! If only Uncle Sam hadn't known about this trial...
You're missing the point. In the new post-modernist mediafied worldview the perception is the reality, and it's far easier for the MBTA to create the perception of a forward-looking, dynamic, responsive agency through this kind of eco-frippery than by trying to solve any of the knotty real-world engineering problems you mention.
Take a really far-fetched hypothetical case: imagine a US administration that decided to use covert operations to influence an election to keep itself in power.
That is too far-fetched even for science fiction. I can't imagine any "covert operation" that would succeed in altering the vote-count of a US Presidential Election by more than a tiny fraction of a percent, maybe a few tens of thousands of votes. That's meaningless noise. The weather on Election Day has a bigger effect.
Do I care whether a very close election is bumped one way or the other? I do not. If the vote is that close, that is excellent empirical evidence that, as far as the voters are concerned, the candidates are equally preferable, and any random method, from a coin-toss to a silly "covert operation" will suffice to choose one. The only case that would be important is if an operation altered tens of millions of votes, completely thwarting the will of the people. What kind of operation would that be? How would it be kept covert?
Well, in the first place, you'll note I said "intelligence services" not "CIA," and "intelligence services" certainly includes the FBI. So I think your mention of the restrictions on the CIA's activities is a bit of red herring. If you like, you can read my "intelligence services" as meaning "the CIA and/or the FBI, NSA, DoD intelligence services, et cetera and so forth as indicated and appropriate." Does that make you happier?
Secondly, I doubt very much the CIA itself draws the nice sharp line you do around a website owned by an American and says, oh gee, this can't have anything to do with foreign intelligence. I suspect they -- and the appropriate Congressional oversight committee, and the judges before whom the issue might come -- are a lot more 21st century in their outlook. They realize that whether a website is "international" or "domestic" is a tricky question, one not likely to be decided by a simple question like whether the registered owner of the domain is a US citizen or not, or whether the server is located on American soil or not. I suspect any one of them would take the entire body of evidence -- who owns the server, who uses the site, where the traffic comes from and goes to, what goes on on the site -- and use that to decide whether it's in the CIA's bailiwick or the FBI's.
Really, the law is not nearly as rigid and precise as you seem to think. It's not like a computer program, where if the value of some integer variable is 1, it's the CIA, and if 0 it's the FBI. It's a lot grayer and subject to human judgment than that.
Erm, excuse me, but would you care to define "foreign website"? Is slashdot.org a "foreign" site? 'Cause last time I looked, there were plenty of non-US participants reading and posting on it, although I suppose the server is on US soil and I suspect all the editors are US citizens.
Good golly, if my country's intelligence services are not monitoring every major web site (plus a lot of obscure minor web sites of which I've never heard), then they're incompetent idiots and I want them all shot, or at least fired.
If they want to contribute true information to Wikipedia out of their own knowledge, well that's nice. If they want to contribute false information to Wikipedia for some obscure reason -- to fox the opposition, I guess, who are clueless newbs who believe anything they read on the 'net -- then that's an annoying waste of my tax dollars, but hardly seems worth raising a fuss over. If the Wikipedia has to rely on the honesty of every last J. Random Web User -- if they can't easily detect a nontrivial campaign of deliberate falsehood -- then they're clearly doomed. Because I can think of many groups other than "intelligence services" who would be very interested in easily spreading disinformation via a trusted source.
Oh come on, let's think this out. Are you suggesting people who do edit it do not edit it for their own purposes (fame, showing off, to feel part of a virtuous movement)? Or are you suggesting they're robots acting purely from instinct?
Surely imagining that anyone does anything without personal motivation is deluded. We're not insects. But just because you have a personal motivation doesn't mean what you do is suspect. I go to work primarily to get money to buy myself stuff. That is not the motivation of the company founder, but that doesn't mean my work is corrupt -- or even that it's of lower quality than the founder's. The fact that I'm there for different reasons doesn't mean we can't work together profitably. What's important is the result of one's work, not the motivation for it.
NASA is a dysfunctional bureaucracy that has killed dozens of our best and brightest people through carelessness, malfeasance, and incompetence.
No, they've killed one and a half dozen astronauts through making mistakes, and if you use your head for something other than keeping your ears apart you'll realize that making mistakes is part of their mission. That's what exploration and research are all about. How the hell do you expect to learn anything new if you don't make mistakes? Did you learn to walk without skinning your knees? Did you learn to use the toilet without crapping in your pants once or twice? Does any complex program compile the first (or fifth) time through without error?
Or do you think using chemical bombs to accelerate people and tons of hardware to 4 or 5 miles per second up into a hard vacuum, with reusable craft, over and over again, with randomly shifting priorities set by a bunch of accountants and lawyers is a trivial task, the kind of thing any moron can get right the first time?
Apparently you haven't learned that the way to avoid any mistake is totally obvious in hindsight, but that, alas, this profound wisdom has yet to reduce the frequency with which human beings make mistakes. Go accomplish something new and remarkable in your life, count up the goofs you make along the way, and then come back with a little more wisdom and a little less clueless arrogance.
While it's true that Murdoch is in somewhat of a unique position of both owning a largely used website, and a TV station...
Nah. The same organization owning a big Internet site and a big content source isn't new. That's what the famous AOL/TimeWarner merger was all about ten or so years ago. Remember how well that worked out?
I question what he'll really be able to do with it.
Yeah, I would too. This sounds more like dangerous overreach than the Rly Kewl Synergy the breathless teenybopper article suggests it is. I doubt serious investors who remember the 90s will touch this with a ten-foot pole.
Well, Scaled specialized in suborbital, and suborbital is a bit of a dead end without any clear relationship to orbital flight. Suborbital is all about launching as straight up as possible, and achieving maximum altitude with minimum expenditure of energy. You don't particularly care how fast you're going, so long as you reach your altitude.
But getting to orbit is defined by achieving orbital velocity, not any particular altitude. (You can achieve orbital velocity at ground level if you want to, if you have the thermal protection to survive the subsequent scorching transit of the atmosphere.) My impression is that Rutan and Scaled used their natural strengths -- designs that are very efficient at staying up in the air with minimum energy -- in the race for suborbital. But those natural strengths don't really apply to orbital flight, where the issues revolve around achieving economical hypersonic velocities and finding good but sturdy and cheap thermal protection systems.
So perhaps Rutan and the senior leadership concluded that they'd done all the innovating they could see their way clear to, in suborbital flight, and it was time to sell and move on, leaving behind a capable but fairly boring suborbital company. That might be a wise move. A man who doesn't know his limits can easily take his company, very successful in limited area X, and pilot it straight into the ground pursuing quixotic goal Y.
Indeed. From TFA, it sounds like what he was sending back and forth was megabytes of meaningless garbage. Entirely possible that an aggressive spam filter would dump it. It should, if it's doing a good job.
And, er, good luck on trying to convince millions of Joe 'n' Jane Sixpacks (who are not, typically, sending 1.9 Mb PowerPoint slides to each other) that a hyperaggressive spam filter is a bad thing.
(I leave entirely aside the digg.com(TM) style teenage hysteria about mail fraud and conspiracy. Geez, the same guy who wants the gummint to intrusively monitor and regulate a private company's e-mail business probably shrieks like a little girl at the notion that the NSA might wiretap recent immigrants of Saudi extraction who make an unusual number of satellite phone calls to the lawless uplands of Pakistan. Talk about mental inconsistency -- it's a wonder some people's brains don't segfault twice a day.)
Go here and look at the nice picture on the right-hand side. Notice that the combustion takes place in the exhaust stream, heading out of the engine. Not inside a cylinder.
Sounds like someone failed basic understanding-of-how-things-work class.
This isn't totally humorous, incidentally. Think of aircraft carriers. You can achieve very short take-off distances without putting the giant (noisy) vertical-flight machinery on your aircraft -- because you can just leave it on the ground behind you. But you must then accept the fact that you can only launch in certain places.
Still, I'd bet there's a market for a cheap skycar that can only launch at certain public facilities but can land nearly anywhere.
Are the power to weight ratios comparable to current internal combustion engines?
You probably mean the external combustion engine, also known as the jet engine. Only small airplanes use pistons and such. And the answer is: of course not. This is yet another PR stunt aimed at the Gasoline Is Eeeeeeevil ninnies of the world who failed freshman chemistry.
If not, what about fuel cell powered dirigibles?
I don't think the problem with dirigibles is how to power them. I think the problem is that there's just about zero demand for a transport service that's about as slow as a ship or train but neither as efficient nor as reliable.
A big cargo ship carrying 70,000 tons of cargo can cruise at 15 knots with its 50,000 HP engines running at 80%. The EPA helpfully estimates big marine engine fuel consumption as about 250 grams per kilowatt-hour, which lets you work out that a cargo ship consumes about 4 grams of fuel per ton of cargo per kilometer traveled.
Four locomotives pulling a hundred-car freight train at 60-80 MPH, with each car carrying 100 tons of cargo, will burn about 7.5 gallons each per mile. That works out to 7 grams of fuel per ton of cargo per kilometer traveled.
There's no way any vehicle that flies can ever come close to that kind of fuel efficiency. So who would want cargo delivery that's just as slow, but much more expensive?
I guess you can't mean any ordinary physical crime, like robbing someone or burglarizing his house, for which a wireless access is wholly unnecessary.
So what could you do with wireless access from your black-painted car or truck that you can't do as easily (or with equal difficulty) from the comfort of your regular crime lair, or from the Starbucks down the street?
students don't have to pay for expensive dead tree books that they rarely open.
The average cost of a year of (private) college is $28,000 and rising fast, and you're worried about an extra $150 textbook? Say what?
A dead-tree book is about the most cost-efficient possible way to get an education. Beats the heck out of forking over (assuming you take 8 courses a year, tuition is half the total cost of college, and each course has about 30 one-hour lectures) roughly $1-2 a minute to listen to a lecture on the subject.
I only wish it were possible to buy the books, do some original research in the field (e.g. visit Rome, the National Archives, a farm, or a GM plant for yourself), discuss with your fellow students electronically -- and then turn up at the college for two weeks to take final exams. That'd save me (with two kids) a cool quarter of a $million...
Drat. What was I thinking? In fact, now I recall you don't even need a space-storm, if you have an Infinite Improbability Drive -- just a cup of good, strong, hot tea.
You need to induce a very large magnetic field (relative to the nucleus) to induce NQR
I'd say there's the rub. I'm sure everyone here has seen the enormous magnets used in nuclear magnetic imaging, if only on the television. And at that an MRI patient has to sit still for half an hour. You can't take half an hour to scan a bag, you've got to do it in a second or two. So that means you need a truly huge, multimillion-dollar magnet, to collect your signal fast enough.
Sheesh. Much cheaper to just put a bin of loaded.38s next to the boarding gate, for any interested adult to bring on board, just in case. (Another bin near the exit gate collects the unwanted weight afterward.)
I think the Earth's field is about 1 gauss, barely enough to move a compass needle, and at that only when the needle is carefully balanced on a good bearing. That is, the forces involved in the aurora are exceedingly weak.
Anyway, in the first place, you're totally wrong about the poor "obviously" not being well-represented in the market, because you've confused a poor person with all poor people. A priori one would expect poor people to be quite well represented in the market, because however miniscule one poor person's spending is, the spending of millions of them is quite substantial.
Don't believe me? Ask yourself why there are such things as check-cashing services, or bail bondsmen, or second-hand clothing stores, and so forth and so on. There are plenty of services for the poor, and that's because they do, as a class, wield significant spending force.
In any event, if you think about it a bit, I'm sure you'll realize that market influence as a function of income is a function that probably first rises with income (as income grows faster than the number with that income shrinks), and then falls (as the number with that income shrinks faster than income grows). Where exactly it peaks is hard to say. Given that income distribution is highly pyramidal -- the mean greatly exceeds the median -- I'd guess it probably peaks at a fairly low income, something like lower middle-class, and that's why there are more Burger Kings than cordon bleu five-star restaraunts, a bigger demand for mortgage officers than private investment counselors, and a more robust market in small cars than eighty-foot yachts.
Poor people cannot afford medicine because it's not a free market.
No, they can't afford medicine because they're poor. That is, because they can't pay the people who can invent medicine enough to cover the costs of inventing it. You're thinking of the market in medicine as if the key step in its production -- the step that sucks up 90% or more of the cost of production, which is the invention of the stuff -- can be treatred like some kind of magic manna that falls from the sky, as if new medicines grow on trees and they just need to be harvested and distributed. You're looking only at the costs of production once the stuff is invented, tested, proven safe, et cetera, and say, why, that's a lot cheaper than the price charged. But that's like saying that the cost to own a house is actually pretty low -- much lower than what people are charging -- if you just consider the cost of moving in, and forget entirely about the cost to acquire the land and build the thing in the first place.
Good economics always considers the entire cost of production, and medicine shares with software that strange property that the cost of production is fantastically front-loaded; that it costs a fortune to make the first item, but then peanuts to make the second through bazillionth. But when you focus on the cost of the second through bazillionth, you run the risk of forgetting that without the first, there will be no second et cetera.
profits are no longer derived from exclusivity but from productivity.
Dude...no drug is profitable unless it is highly effective and highly desired by the market. There are plenty of molecules that are patented and for which the patent is worthless -- because the drug is uninteresting, dangerous, or ineffective. It's not the patent that makes the drug valuable -- it's the fact that it's a good drug. So it is, indeed, the productivity of your pharmaceutical R&D that makes for fat profits, and not your ability to patent. You can patent any molecule. I can patent some glop I mix up in the garage. But it won't be worth a damn thing unless it's some very interesting, very effective glop.
A) there's a lot of history books, B) none of them say exactly the same thing, and C) nobody really knows every historical example of anything therefore such statements are unprovable and as meaningless as anecdotes unless you accompany them with thorough analysis.
Geez, sucked down a lot of post-modern relativist garbage in school, did we? Find me a
Well, this is either a sophomoric insult ("anybody who doesn't agree with me must be ignorant") or you're taking a wild guess that happens to be wrong (as it happens I took both micro and macro from Shlomo Maitel at MIT's Sloan School in the early 80s). Either way, going ad hominem in line 1 is not a promising way to begin an argument. I mean, unless you're arguing with someone like your girlfriend who gives a shit whether you like and respect her or not.
A market is...[textbook regurgitation]...A contract is...[more of the same]. No relationship.
Missing the forest for the trees, I think. My point is that if your primary working definition of "government-enforced monopoly" is just that it's a situation where government enforces restrictions on a buyer's options with respect to from whom he buys, why then even a legal contract becomes a "government-enforced monopoly." You need a much more complex definition of monopoly to say anything sensible about it. Such a definition must accomodate the enormous differences between, say, Merck's patent on Gardasil and Standard Oil in the 1920s. Neither the original article nor the post above gave any evidence of such understanding.
Furthermore, there is a deep conceptual parallel between government enforcement of a contract and a patent. In both cases government reduces the risk taken by producers when they invest capital in some production or service by restricting the rights of everyone else to just take what they want after someone else has gone to the risk and trouble of developing a product or implementing service. And in both cases it's done for the same general reason: by reducing the risk in investment or complex contracts you encourage them, and the social payoff in terms of innovation, stability and production is well worth the niggling cost in terms of mildly restricting the rights of consumers. You're free to disagree with this -- but then you join the long line of 1930s-era Marxist economists who have been proved so spectacularly wrong by events in the 20th century.
In a competitive market the consumer has the ability to buy the same commodity or service from multiple vendors.
Instantly? If there's only one supermarket in my town, do they have a "monopoly" on cabbage because I need to drive 60 miles to buy from someone else? How about 100 miles? What if I have to order it online and wait two weeks? Does Apple have a "monopoly" on iPods? Or is the fact that iRiver sells similar but not identical products mean they don't? Et cetera. All these issues have parallels in the drug market because, for example, a patent doesn't grant an indefinite right to control sale of a drug -- and rarely lasts longer than 5-7 years from when a drug gets to market -- and because a patent can only be applied to one specific molecule, so competing drug companies can and often do make tiny chemical changes to a successful drug molecules in order to evade patent restrictions.
That is, I think you're wildly oversimplifying a very complex issue -- consumer choice in the drug marketplace -- to jam it into a pejorative term the rubes will understand and dislike ("monopoly"). This is either ignorant, or, if we assume you know what you're talking about, like the Professor, dishonest.
You're also being deceptive about the purpose of a patent. A patent is not designed to keep good ideas out of the hands of everyone except their discoverers. Quite the contrary. A patent is designed to promote the movement of good ideas out of the hands of those who have them. In the absence of patents, you see, Merck would simply keep secret indefinitely the chemical formula of their superduper cancer-killer drug. The public would never be able to buy from someone else, because someone else would have to duplicate the entire chain of research (and have the same luck) as Merck. Won't happen.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, I don't agree. I realize to the impoverished teenybopper and college-student set the issue of whether you get your music for 99 cents or 0 cents per song is VERY IMPORTANT, almost as important as whether you get laid on Saturday night, and I realize as well that various adult Asperger's types who have a hard time setting priorities have a habit of wanting to see massive social sledgehammers applied to any fiddling small inconsistency and injustice in the justice system -- but to cranky ol' middle-aged me, it doesn't work that way.
The resources of the justice system -- including that of the Supreme Court -- are highly limited, and I think there are far more important Constitutional questions to settle these days. This particular question can easily be settled by statute and the political process. If people are really pissed about $750/song, they can just ring up their Congressman and tell him so, send money to his opponent who supports rationalizing the amount, and so forth and so on. On the consumer front they can organize boycotts of vendors of songs for the downloading of which people are being sued, organize candlelight vigils and get on the evening news, contribute their small change to the legal team of the defense in these cases, so that the RIAA has to litigate each and every case and goes bankrupt from the legal costs, et cetera and so forth.
That's how we settle generic small- and medium-scale problems in the Republic, and that's how it should be done. Cases that must reach the Supreme Court and result in the Court speaking ex cathedra as to the One Final Truth in the Constitution should be reserved for only the most urgent and fundamental issues, the kinds of things that can otherwise break the Republic, like whether you can own people as slaves, kill them before they're born or when they're severely disabled, and what the limits are to the President's power to take the nation into war or keep it there.
There are good reasons, also, for wanting legal issues surrounding copyright to remain murky for another decade or so. Who knows what technology will bring? Maybe some of the current "problems" with digital rights will vanish with advancing technology, or maybe they'll get worse, or maybe both. We don't know. But one thing we do know is that the legal system moves like a glacier compared to technology and the market. Once the justice system has examined the copyright issue under its jaundiced microscope and declared that this is constitutional and that is not -- well, we're stuck with it, whatever the future brings. Easier to get a river to flow backwards than get a Court to reverse itself, especially when the weight of cases decided on the basis of the decision gets heavier and heavier.
And anyone who has actual experience with a judge deciding important questions in his personal or professional life will tell you it's a surrealistic horror to be avoided at almost any cost, whether you "win" or "lose." Better for everyone to wait a few more years and see what develops, before we invite J. Random Judge to cast his personal opinion of what oughta be copyrighted and how into stone and bind us all to it forever. Brrr.
If you read the motion in question, you'll see one thing this is not is Big Evil Government joining forces with Big Evil Recording Industry.
/. editors), that this is utterly routine and has about zero bearing on whether or not he'll win the case.
The background is that, as part of his defence (and a counterclaim), the defendant in the RIAA suit has said that (1) not only is he innocent, but (2) the act of Congress establishing the basis under which he was sued is unconstitutional. That's certainly going for the Moon.
In any case in which a Federal law might be declared unconstitutional, not surprisingly the Federal Gov't takes an interest, and might decide to defend the constitutionality of the law. Should they succeed, that does not mean the defendant loses, of course. It only means he can't get a bye, in the sense that the very law under which he was charged vanishes.
The only thing unique about this case is that the Federal Gov't asserts that it did not previously receive sufficient notice of the case to have time to decide, in the routine way, whether or not to defend the constitutionality of the law in question. So they filed a motion with the Court asking for 60 days to think it over. This motion was unopposed by the defendant, who apparently realizes (at least more so than certain credulous
I mean, unless you're so naive as to think that the argument in Court will go like this:
RIAA (pointing skeletal finger): You broke the law, fiend!
Defendant: Did not. And besides, the law's unjust and should not exist.
Judge: Really? What makes you think so?
Defendant: Well, I...
Uncle Sam (interrupting): Hold on thar a gosh-darned minute! I say that law is fair!
Judge (bowing to Uncle Sam): Well, in THAT case, it must be. Defendent, you lose.
Defendant: Curses! If only Uncle Sam hadn't known about this trial...
RIAA (twirls mustache): Ha ha ha!
You're missing the point. In the new post-modernist mediafied worldview the perception is the reality, and it's far easier for the MBTA to create the perception of a forward-looking, dynamic, responsive agency through this kind of eco-frippery than by trying to solve any of the knotty real-world engineering problems you mention.
Take a really far-fetched hypothetical case: imagine a US administration that decided to use covert operations to influence an election to keep itself in power.
That is too far-fetched even for science fiction. I can't imagine any "covert operation" that would succeed in altering the vote-count of a US Presidential Election by more than a tiny fraction of a percent, maybe a few tens of thousands of votes. That's meaningless noise. The weather on Election Day has a bigger effect.
Do I care whether a very close election is bumped one way or the other? I do not. If the vote is that close, that is excellent empirical evidence that, as far as the voters are concerned, the candidates are equally preferable, and any random method, from a coin-toss to a silly "covert operation" will suffice to choose one. The only case that would be important is if an operation altered tens of millions of votes, completely thwarting the will of the people. What kind of operation would that be? How would it be kept covert?
Well, in the first place, you'll note I said "intelligence services" not "CIA," and "intelligence services" certainly includes the FBI. So I think your mention of the restrictions on the CIA's activities is a bit of red herring. If you like, you can read my "intelligence services" as meaning "the CIA and/or the FBI, NSA, DoD intelligence services, et cetera and so forth as indicated and appropriate." Does that make you happier?
Secondly, I doubt very much the CIA itself draws the nice sharp line you do around a website owned by an American and says, oh gee, this can't have anything to do with foreign intelligence. I suspect they -- and the appropriate Congressional oversight committee, and the judges before whom the issue might come -- are a lot more 21st century in their outlook. They realize that whether a website is "international" or "domestic" is a tricky question, one not likely to be decided by a simple question like whether the registered owner of the domain is a US citizen or not, or whether the server is located on American soil or not. I suspect any one of them would take the entire body of evidence -- who owns the server, who uses the site, where the traffic comes from and goes to, what goes on on the site -- and use that to decide whether it's in the CIA's bailiwick or the FBI's.
Really, the law is not nearly as rigid and precise as you seem to think. It's not like a computer program, where if the value of some integer variable is 1, it's the CIA, and if 0 it's the FBI. It's a lot grayer and subject to human judgment than that.
Erm, excuse me, but would you care to define "foreign website"? Is slashdot.org a "foreign" site? 'Cause last time I looked, there were plenty of non-US participants reading and posting on it, although I suppose the server is on US soil and I suspect all the editors are US citizens.
Good golly, if my country's intelligence services are not monitoring every major web site (plus a lot of obscure minor web sites of which I've never heard), then they're incompetent idiots and I want them all shot, or at least fired.
If they want to contribute true information to Wikipedia out of their own knowledge, well that's nice. If they want to contribute false information to Wikipedia for some obscure reason -- to fox the opposition, I guess, who are clueless newbs who believe anything they read on the 'net -- then that's an annoying waste of my tax dollars, but hardly seems worth raising a fuss over. If the Wikipedia has to rely on the honesty of every last J. Random Web User -- if they can't easily detect a nontrivial campaign of deliberate falsehood -- then they're clearly doomed. Because I can think of many groups other than "intelligence services" who would be very interested in easily spreading disinformation via a trusted source.
However I don't edit it for my own purposes.
Oh come on, let's think this out. Are you suggesting people who do edit it do not edit it for their own purposes (fame, showing off, to feel part of a virtuous movement)? Or are you suggesting they're robots acting purely from instinct?
Surely imagining that anyone does anything without personal motivation is deluded. We're not insects. But just because you have a personal motivation doesn't mean what you do is suspect. I go to work primarily to get money to buy myself stuff. That is not the motivation of the company founder, but that doesn't mean my work is corrupt -- or even that it's of lower quality than the founder's. The fact that I'm there for different reasons doesn't mean we can't work together profitably. What's important is the result of one's work, not the motivation for it.
Is Berman the one who turned it into a show for girls and SNAGs?
NASA is a dysfunctional bureaucracy that has killed dozens of our best and brightest people through carelessness, malfeasance, and incompetence.
No, they've killed one and a half dozen astronauts through making mistakes, and if you use your head for something other than keeping your ears apart you'll realize that making mistakes is part of their mission. That's what exploration and research are all about. How the hell do you expect to learn anything new if you don't make mistakes? Did you learn to walk without skinning your knees? Did you learn to use the toilet without crapping in your pants once or twice? Does any complex program compile the first (or fifth) time through without error?
Or do you think using chemical bombs to accelerate people and tons of hardware to 4 or 5 miles per second up into a hard vacuum, with reusable craft, over and over again, with randomly shifting priorities set by a bunch of accountants and lawyers is a trivial task, the kind of thing any moron can get right the first time?
Apparently you haven't learned that the way to avoid any mistake is totally obvious in hindsight, but that, alas, this profound wisdom has yet to reduce the frequency with which human beings make mistakes. Go accomplish something new and remarkable in your life, count up the goofs you make along the way, and then come back with a little more wisdom and a little less clueless arrogance.
/* Design for computer poker player. Some implementation details missing. */
;
; ;
;
;
;
#include <stdio.h>
#include <poker.h>
int main() {
printf("Hello, world. I am a poker-playing robot. Prepare to lose your shirt.\n")
while (!win_poker_game()) {
printf("Curses! Another game, human?"\n")
}
printf("Ha ha!\n")
(void)rake_in_chips()
return(0)
}
While it's true that Murdoch is in somewhat of a unique position of both owning a largely used website, and a TV station...
Nah. The same organization owning a big Internet site and a big content source isn't new. That's what the famous AOL/TimeWarner merger was all about ten or so years ago. Remember how well that worked out?
I question what he'll really be able to do with it.
Yeah, I would too. This sounds more like dangerous overreach than the Rly Kewl Synergy the breathless teenybopper article suggests it is. I doubt serious investors who remember the 90s will touch this with a ten-foot pole.
Well, Scaled specialized in suborbital, and suborbital is a bit of a dead end without any clear relationship to orbital flight. Suborbital is all about launching as straight up as possible, and achieving maximum altitude with minimum expenditure of energy. You don't particularly care how fast you're going, so long as you reach your altitude.
But getting to orbit is defined by achieving orbital velocity, not any particular altitude. (You can achieve orbital velocity at ground level if you want to, if you have the thermal protection to survive the subsequent scorching transit of the atmosphere.) My impression is that Rutan and Scaled used their natural strengths -- designs that are very efficient at staying up in the air with minimum energy -- in the race for suborbital. But those natural strengths don't really apply to orbital flight, where the issues revolve around achieving economical hypersonic velocities and finding good but sturdy and cheap thermal protection systems.
So perhaps Rutan and the senior leadership concluded that they'd done all the innovating they could see their way clear to, in suborbital flight, and it was time to sell and move on, leaving behind a capable but fairly boring suborbital company. That might be a wise move. A man who doesn't know his limits can easily take his company, very successful in limited area X, and pilot it straight into the ground pursuing quixotic goal Y.
Indeed. From TFA, it sounds like what he was sending back and forth was megabytes of meaningless garbage. Entirely possible that an aggressive spam filter would dump it. It should, if it's doing a good job.
And, er, good luck on trying to convince millions of Joe 'n' Jane Sixpacks (who are not, typically, sending 1.9 Mb PowerPoint slides to each other) that a hyperaggressive spam filter is a bad thing.
(I leave entirely aside the digg.com(TM) style teenage hysteria about mail fraud and conspiracy. Geez, the same guy who wants the gummint to intrusively monitor and regulate a private company's e-mail business probably shrieks like a little girl at the notion that the NSA might wiretap recent immigrants of Saudi extraction who make an unusual number of satellite phone calls to the lawless uplands of Pakistan. Talk about mental inconsistency -- it's a wonder some people's brains don't segfault twice a day.)
Go here and look at the nice picture on the right-hand side. Notice that the combustion takes place in the exhaust stream, heading out of the engine. Not inside a cylinder.
Sounds like someone failed basic understanding-of-how-things-work class.
Oh I agree, definitely.
...or some kind of powered trampoline.
This isn't totally humorous, incidentally. Think of aircraft carriers. You can achieve very short take-off distances without putting the giant (noisy) vertical-flight machinery on your aircraft -- because you can just leave it on the ground behind you. But you must then accept the fact that you can only launch in certain places.
Still, I'd bet there's a market for a cheap skycar that can only launch at certain public facilities but can land nearly anywhere.
Are the power to weight ratios comparable to current internal combustion engines?
You probably mean the external combustion engine, also known as the jet engine. Only small airplanes use pistons and such. And the answer is: of course not. This is yet another PR stunt aimed at the Gasoline Is Eeeeeeevil ninnies of the world who failed freshman chemistry.
If not, what about fuel cell powered dirigibles?
I don't think the problem with dirigibles is how to power them. I think the problem is that there's just about zero demand for a transport service that's about as slow as a ship or train but neither as efficient nor as reliable.
A big cargo ship carrying 70,000 tons of cargo can cruise at 15 knots with its 50,000 HP engines running at 80%. The EPA helpfully estimates big marine engine fuel consumption as about 250 grams per kilowatt-hour, which lets you work out that a cargo ship consumes about 4 grams of fuel per ton of cargo per kilometer traveled.
Four locomotives pulling a hundred-car freight train at 60-80 MPH, with each car carrying 100 tons of cargo, will burn about 7.5 gallons each per mile. That works out to 7 grams of fuel per ton of cargo per kilometer traveled.
There's no way any vehicle that flies can ever come close to that kind of fuel efficiency. So who would want cargo delivery that's just as slow, but much more expensive?
Uh...what kind of crimes?
I guess you can't mean any ordinary physical crime, like robbing someone or burglarizing his house, for which a wireless access is wholly unnecessary.
So what could you do with wireless access from your black-painted car or truck that you can't do as easily (or with equal difficulty) from the comfort of your regular crime lair, or from the Starbucks down the street?
students don't have to pay for expensive dead tree books that they rarely open.
The average cost of a year of (private) college is $28,000 and rising fast, and you're worried about an extra $150 textbook? Say what?
A dead-tree book is about the most cost-efficient possible way to get an education. Beats the heck out of forking over (assuming you take 8 courses a year, tuition is half the total cost of college, and each course has about 30 one-hour lectures) roughly $1-2 a minute to listen to a lecture on the subject.
I only wish it were possible to buy the books, do some original research in the field (e.g. visit Rome, the National Archives, a farm, or a GM plant for yourself), discuss with your fellow students electronically -- and then turn up at the college for two weeks to take final exams. That'd save me (with two kids) a cool quarter of a $million...
Drat. What was I thinking? In fact, now I recall you don't even need a space-storm, if you have an Infinite Improbability Drive -- just a cup of good, strong, hot tea.
After reading a little further, I see it can be done without the magnet at all. Now all I need is a /. rewind widget...
You need to induce a very large magnetic field (relative to the nucleus) to induce NQR
.38s next to the boarding gate, for any interested adult to bring on board, just in case. (Another bin near the exit gate collects the unwanted weight afterward.)
I'd say there's the rub. I'm sure everyone here has seen the enormous magnets used in nuclear magnetic imaging, if only on the television. And at that an MRI patient has to sit still for half an hour. You can't take half an hour to scan a bag, you've got to do it in a second or two. So that means you need a truly huge, multimillion-dollar magnet, to collect your signal fast enough.
Sheesh. Much cheaper to just put a bin of loaded
I think the Earth's field is about 1 gauss, barely enough to move a compass needle, and at that only when the needle is carefully balanced on a good bearing. That is, the forces involved in the aurora are exceedingly weak.
Ach, geez, don't be so terse...
Anyway, in the first place, you're totally wrong about the poor "obviously" not being well-represented in the market, because you've confused a poor person with all poor people. A priori one would expect poor people to be quite well represented in the market, because however miniscule one poor person's spending is, the spending of millions of them is quite substantial.
Don't believe me? Ask yourself why there are such things as check-cashing services, or bail bondsmen, or second-hand clothing stores, and so forth and so on. There are plenty of services for the poor, and that's because they do, as a class, wield significant spending force.
In any event, if you think about it a bit, I'm sure you'll realize that market influence as a function of income is a function that probably first rises with income (as income grows faster than the number with that income shrinks), and then falls (as the number with that income shrinks faster than income grows). Where exactly it peaks is hard to say. Given that income distribution is highly pyramidal -- the mean greatly exceeds the median -- I'd guess it probably peaks at a fairly low income, something like lower middle-class, and that's why there are more Burger Kings than cordon bleu five-star restaraunts, a bigger demand for mortgage officers than private investment counselors, and a more robust market in small cars than eighty-foot yachts.
Poor people cannot afford medicine because it's not a free market.
No, they can't afford medicine because they're poor. That is, because they can't pay the people who can invent medicine enough to cover the costs of inventing it. You're thinking of the market in medicine as if the key step in its production -- the step that sucks up 90% or more of the cost of production, which is the invention of the stuff -- can be treatred like some kind of magic manna that falls from the sky, as if new medicines grow on trees and they just need to be harvested and distributed. You're looking only at the costs of production once the stuff is invented, tested, proven safe, et cetera, and say, why, that's a lot cheaper than the price charged. But that's like saying that the cost to own a house is actually pretty low -- much lower than what people are charging -- if you just consider the cost of moving in, and forget entirely about the cost to acquire the land and build the thing in the first place.
Good economics always considers the entire cost of production, and medicine shares with software that strange property that the cost of production is fantastically front-loaded; that it costs a fortune to make the first item, but then peanuts to make the second through bazillionth. But when you focus on the cost of the second through bazillionth, you run the risk of forgetting that without the first, there will be no second et cetera.
profits are no longer derived from exclusivity but from productivity.
Dude...no drug is profitable unless it is highly effective and highly desired by the market. There are plenty of molecules that are patented and for which the patent is worthless -- because the drug is uninteresting, dangerous, or ineffective. It's not the patent that makes the drug valuable -- it's the fact that it's a good drug. So it is, indeed, the productivity of your pharmaceutical R&D that makes for fat profits, and not your ability to patent. You can patent any molecule. I can patent some glop I mix up in the garage. But it won't be worth a damn thing unless it's some very interesting, very effective glop.
A) there's a lot of history books, B) none of them say exactly the same thing, and C) nobody really knows every historical example of anything therefore such statements are unprovable and as meaningless as anecdotes unless you accompany them with thorough analysis.
Geez, sucked down a lot of post-modern relativist garbage in school, did we? Find me a
Wow. Clearly you have never taken any economics.
Well, this is either a sophomoric insult ("anybody who doesn't agree with me must be ignorant") or you're taking a wild guess that happens to be wrong (as it happens I took both micro and macro from Shlomo Maitel at MIT's Sloan School in the early 80s). Either way, going ad hominem in line 1 is not a promising way to begin an argument. I mean, unless you're arguing with someone like your girlfriend who gives a shit whether you like and respect her or not.
A market is...[textbook regurgitation]...A contract is...[more of the same]. No relationship.
Missing the forest for the trees, I think. My point is that if your primary working definition of "government-enforced monopoly" is just that it's a situation where government enforces restrictions on a buyer's options with respect to from whom he buys, why then even a legal contract becomes a "government-enforced monopoly." You need a much more complex definition of monopoly to say anything sensible about it. Such a definition must accomodate the enormous differences between, say, Merck's patent on Gardasil and Standard Oil in the 1920s. Neither the original article nor the post above gave any evidence of such understanding.
Furthermore, there is a deep conceptual parallel between government enforcement of a contract and a patent. In both cases government reduces the risk taken by producers when they invest capital in some production or service by restricting the rights of everyone else to just take what they want after someone else has gone to the risk and trouble of developing a product or implementing service. And in both cases it's done for the same general reason: by reducing the risk in investment or complex contracts you encourage them, and the social payoff in terms of innovation, stability and production is well worth the niggling cost in terms of mildly restricting the rights of consumers. You're free to disagree with this -- but then you join the long line of 1930s-era Marxist economists who have been proved so spectacularly wrong by events in the 20th century.
In a competitive market the consumer has the ability to buy the same commodity or service from multiple vendors.
Instantly? If there's only one supermarket in my town, do they have a "monopoly" on cabbage because I need to drive 60 miles to buy from someone else? How about 100 miles? What if I have to order it online and wait two weeks? Does Apple have a "monopoly" on iPods? Or is the fact that iRiver sells similar but not identical products mean they don't? Et cetera. All these issues have parallels in the drug market because, for example, a patent doesn't grant an indefinite right to control sale of a drug -- and rarely lasts longer than 5-7 years from when a drug gets to market -- and because a patent can only be applied to one specific molecule, so competing drug companies can and often do make tiny chemical changes to a successful drug molecules in order to evade patent restrictions.
That is, I think you're wildly oversimplifying a very complex issue -- consumer choice in the drug marketplace -- to jam it into a pejorative term the rubes will understand and dislike ("monopoly"). This is either ignorant, or, if we assume you know what you're talking about, like the Professor, dishonest.
You're also being deceptive about the purpose of a patent. A patent is not designed to keep good ideas out of the hands of everyone except their discoverers. Quite the contrary. A patent is designed to promote the movement of good ideas out of the hands of those who have them. In the absence of patents, you see, Merck would simply keep secret indefinitely the chemical formula of their superduper cancer-killer drug. The public would never be able to buy from someone else, because someone else would have to duplicate the entire chain of research (and have the same luck) as Merck. Won't happen.
Instead, the idea is that Merck is to