It would definitely be counter-productive to not take advantage of markets that will pay more or those that will only pay less.
Maybe I'm too hung up on the word "productive" here, but: how's that so?
In the standard microeconomy 101 model, you have buyers willing to pay up to b_i for each unit and sellers willing to sell for down to s_j for each unit.
If buyer i pays p_i, then he "profits" (not in terms of money but in terms of gaining something worth more than the money he spent) the difference, i.e. b_i - p_i. [economists use the term surplus instead of profit]. Similarly for sellers.
Pair the most generous seller with the most generous buyer as long as the buyer is willing to pay more than the seller requests. The market price is somewhere between the b_i and the s_j of the last created pair. If everybody trades at this price, as much "profitable" ("surplusable"?) trade as possible takes place, which maximizes the total surplus (also called social welfare).
Letting sellers sell at market price to some customers, but also sell at higher prices to some customers, that means the sellers get a larger part of the total surplus, but no more surplus is generated.
[for this to make sense, you need it to be difficult or costly to resell the goods, otherwise people would undercut the high sellers by reselling at market price.]
So: price discrimination is just a way for sellers to grab a large piece of the pie.
There's one situation, though, where it's also to the benefit of the buyers. If a seller wants to cover $20 in fixed and variable costs and there's a market of four buyers, willing to pay $3, $4, $7 and $8, what price do you charge?
It's readily seen that if you don't sell at one of those four prices, you can earn more by "rounding" up to the nearest of those prices.
So at $3 you sell four copies, $4 three, $7 two and $8 one, grossing you either $12, $12, $14 or $8. But if you can charge each customer the price they're willing to pay, you gross 3+4+7+8=22, which is enough to cover your costs and net $2. [fuzz the numbers a bit if you want to give the buyers some surplus from the seller].
There, price discrimination enables a socially beneficial exchange that the market doesn't enable.
I started out by asking how you're counter-productive if you don't price discriminate. I've given my answer which only applies in some situations. It sounds like you suggest one should price-discriminate all the time. Care to elaborate?
What would Guitar Hero have been without songs that people recognize?
What drove me to buy Guitar Hero was playing it and playing through songs I didn't know (but by bands I know) and learning that this button-mashing thing is kinda' fun. I did know 5 of the ~70 songs when I bought GH3, and a lot of the bands, but I've come to like more songs by playing the game than I knew already.
So... maybe the answer is a cheaper but just as fun game?
I've found that most games are missing out in terms of either polish, patching (which on consoles means better pre-release testing because there is no patching) and usability.
Let's take a quick consideration of my wii games.
Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess: the game can deadlock in more that one way; i.e. your have a save in a game state where it's impossible for you to progress (and thus complete the game).
Guitar Hero III: the menu structure is horrible: it's slow to navigate (too deep); it has an irrelevant step; identical words mean different things in different contexts; the same meaning have different words in different contexts; there's too much "are you sure?" and not enough undo (for instance, to "give up" a song, you select what amount to "quit", then get told that your progress will be lost [duh!] and are you sure, and then "where to you want to quit to? main menu, set list or retry song").
Okami: set aside that your sidekick Issun too often talks to the 15yo male player and not to the much (infinitely?) older sun goddess character; the dodging maneuver (swinging the nunchuk) is too hard to execute reliably. A bit more polish and better motion sensor programming would be great.
Mortal Kombat: Armageddon: the menu structure is too slow to nagivate--some submenus spend "forever" (i.e. at least a whole second) fading in and fading out. Either that's poor design or it takes an absurd amount of time loading a new wallpaper and the code for ten instances of three kinds of widgets.
Super Mario Galaxy: I can seemingly never make the camera point at what I want it to while I'm moving around, and it's too damn hard to see which direction Mario is pointing at when swimming.
A lot of those issues are easy to fix, in that the hard part isn't knowing what to do instead but knowing that you should be doing something else. A system for patching and patches that improve the game implementation quality would be great.
I know this won't happen, but letting people who care fix these things would be great too. I know I'd be fixing some of the issues with GH3 if no one else would.
Moreover, if someone picks up a copyrighted work and intentionally breaks the license agreement
(IANAL, TINLA, someone beat me with a cluebat if I'm wrong so I don't misinform the world.)
In this case, i.e. the GPL, there is no license agreement. A license is a set of permissions given to "you", the licensee, by the copyright holder. A license agreement is a contract between (typically?) "you" and the copyright holder. Your gain from the contract is a license to use the software. Their gain is (typically) your promise to not do certain things you would otherwise be allowed to (reverse engineering being a common one; saying bad things about the company which made your web authoring tool is another one, which I hear FrontPage has going for iself).
Briefly: A license is a one-sided gift. A license agreement is a two-sided bargain.
[why is this distinction useful? Heck if I know. Probably has something to do with contract law, civil procedures and the amount of money that can be extracted from you]
What does the community get out of the fact that YouSee, Stofa, and Viasat use Linux?
It gets valuable proof that Linux is a serious industrial strength system
And as Joe Public, why do I care?
As Jonas "The Zealot" Slashbot I care about Linux gaining renown in the industry and (eventually, hopefully) the wider population. That's all fine and good, and you say some very nice words about why Jonas Slashbot should be happy.
But why Joe Public? What does he care about? American Idol, and that the equipment he watches it on works well, is easy to use, and is cheap. I think that is your parent's question.
And I hope, wearing my Zealot hat again, that the answer is that with Linux(-based systems) you have better reliability, usability and price. Hopefully:-)
On the other hand, you might argue that what's good for Linux is good for the people at large, because it destroys a monopoly and monopolies are (according to microeconomy 101) always bad for the people. This sounds like it might be your position---you come close to outright saying it, in my mind, but who am I to say?
In any case, I think "better, easier, cheaper" is an easier sell that "Willingness to pay [...] willingness to sell [...] market clearing price [...] monopoly [...] area between graphs is not maximized [...]".
He has credibility with investors because he called Facebook and Twitter (among others) as a buy pretty early in their lifecycles.
I call *everything* a buy. Woo, credibility here I come.
How many bad buys did he call? How many good and bad no-buys did he call? Does he perform better than the average investor?
Here's a neat scam: find 256 random people (say, buy their mail addresses from a spammer). Pick eight random stocks. Mail each one "Stock number i will go {up, down}" for all i for a period of a few weeks. Choose all different combinations. You will get 100% right for at least one person. Suggest to that person that you should manage their funds. When you get their money, run.
(I do not encourage illegal activity. The above is for educational purposes only. #include )
When Andreessen is credited with guessing Facebook and Twitter right, what data isn't being reported?
Hi. I'm sad to hear that people so often choose colors that are bad for the color-blind.
If you run Compiz (do you run Linux or some other system which uses X11 for its GUI needs?) and use the "Color Filter" plugin, there's a filter called "blueish-filter". I don't know for sure, but it might be what you want.
Two of the filters are called "deuteranopia" and "protonopia" which are fancy words for two kinds of colorblindness (the filters "induce" colorblindness, i.e. transforms the picture so it looks like it would in the eyes of a colorblind person).
I guess that the people who did that came up with the idea of assisting the colorblind, and maybe "blueish-filter" is their attempt at doing so.
In any case, try it out and see if it works. Or write your own fragment shader script;-)
Wait, there's something wrong. Aren't the Chinese supposed to be the experts in brainwashing and water-based torture (dripping as seen on Mythbusters, not waterboarding), not the US?
Or is this just me being unable to distinguish between the pigs and the humans?
And they have just finished proving that first few lines of code they wrote. In another five decades they hope to be able to have Notepad proven and ready to run so you can actually get some work done!
I completely agree with your sentiment here (somewhat sadly, I might add; it would be nice to have a provably correct linux/gcc/glibc/emacs/firefox/nethack).
People have seen the value of [formal verification, I assume] since the first days of programming. In fact, the value is so enormous that no one can afford it...
That is [in my economics dictionary] a contradiction in terms.
People finding something valuable can be understood as them being willing to give up a lot of resources, i.e. forgo a lot of alternative uses of the resources, i.e. pay a lot of money, to get it.
So you're saying because people are so eager to pay for it, no one can, right? i.e. the market price exceeds the willingness to pay of the highest (potentially-)paying customer. That doesn't make sense.
What does make sense is that the process of formal verification is so labor-consuming that the value it can generate (even if high) is less than the value of at least one thing the same (large) amount of labor could be spent to generate, i.e. people's time is better spent fixing bugs or adding features. At least according to what the market prices say. [we can then discuss whether the market for kernels works as it should.]
(When can then go on to discuss value in use vs. value in exchange vs. the value of research to increase further value in use which probably increases value in exchange and... you know, all of economics...:)]
(I assume "Weet je waarom" is dutch, and Weet ~= "Ved", the Danish for "know", "je" ~= "you" and "waarom" ~= "warum", German for "why"; the word order is the same as you'd expect in Danish and German for "Do you know why".)
People need the right to own what they've bought, but people don't need the right to own everything for free that's digital.
I think "need" is probably the wrong word---I think this is about what people want combined with what's economically feasible. But the choice of words is the least concern.
People want culture (music, film, literature), preferably well-made items of culture. They also want things to be cheap (preferably free). And they also want to obey the law. Those who make culture want to make money doing so (preferably more than less, but some are content with no money).
How they value each of those in relation to one another varies from person to person. Some prefer stuff with expensive (and maybe even good:D) production for free over obeying the law. Some prefer stuff that's free and obeying the law over expensive production. Some prefer expensive production and obeying the law over stuff that's free.
If a change to the copyright law, any change (including allowing redistribution for private purposes, or complete abolishment) gives the people as a whole something more valuable than what the current regime does, why shouldn't we make that change?
Your statement leaves me to conclude that you think allowing free redistribution of copyrighted stuff doesn't give people what they want (presumably due to the removed profit incentive on the producer side of the equation). Why do you think this?
I think it's an empirical question what the effect of changing copyright law would be. Would people stop making music? Probably not, but the amount and quality would probably decline. How about movies? They're much more expensive, so maybe we'd only have short films by film students posted on youtube. How happy or unhappy would people be about this? I think that's something we should measure (or at least approximate) rather than guesstimate.
Personally I think it sucks that the law prevents me from walking into Wal-Mart and grabbing all the money I can from the cash registers
Do you think it sucks that the law forbids (not prevents) Wal-Mart from walking into your living room and grabbing all the stuff it can from your shelves?
I would be in my best interest to take other people's stuff. However, it would not be in my best interest if taking people's stuff would generally be legal, and I have no basis to argue that the law should favor me when it comes to taking other people's stuff. So I make do with a law that's fair:-)
Judges need to stop being automatons that parse legalease, and start doing their jobs, i.e. delivering justice.
In a very abstract sense, the judge has listened to what the people have decided, through their elected representatives, justice means. And delivered accordingly.
I think that is where the real perversion of the system lies. Fix campaign contributions. Do away with the two-party system. Inform the public better. Hold politicians more accountable.
Then the judges will be put in such a position much less often.
What is your proposal to prevent organised crime using encrypted media to conceal their activities?
Here's mine: do nothing.
The people who value honest citizens' right to privacy over the police's ease of catching bad guys will probably be in favor. And it doesn't even have to be an absolutist question: people who favor (something close to) the particular trade-off between privacy and police efficiency enabled by a hands-off policy will be in favor.
But those people might not be the most numerous...
Unless you can point to a workable alternative solution
I will assert that "do nothing" works. It just works at something different which according to some [who?] is more valuable.
borda voting does away with the whole party primary nonsense: democrats field 4 or 5 presidential candidates, republicans field 4 or 5 presidential candidates. and the voters merely rank them.
You forgot the other partie... oh wait.
Make sure to point out how Borda Count might do away with the overemphasis on party affiliation and possibly, just maybe, make a third political party able to have some influence and maybe a seat or two in one of the parliament chambers.
Slashdot Mirror
It would definitely be counter-productive to not take advantage of markets that will pay more or those that will only pay less.
Maybe I'm too hung up on the word "productive" here, but: how's that so?
In the standard microeconomy 101 model, you have buyers willing to pay up to b_i for each unit and sellers willing to sell for down to s_j for each unit.
If buyer i pays p_i, then he "profits" (not in terms of money but in terms of gaining something worth more than the money he spent) the difference, i.e. b_i - p_i. [economists use the term surplus instead of profit]. Similarly for sellers.
Pair the most generous seller with the most generous buyer as long as the buyer is willing to pay more than the seller requests. The market price is somewhere between the b_i and the s_j of the last created pair. If everybody trades at this price, as much "profitable" ("surplusable"?) trade as possible takes place, which maximizes the total surplus (also called social welfare).
Letting sellers sell at market price to some customers, but also sell at higher prices to some customers, that means the sellers get a larger part of the total surplus, but no more surplus is generated.
[for this to make sense, you need it to be difficult or costly to resell the goods, otherwise people would undercut the high sellers by reselling at market price.]
So: price discrimination is just a way for sellers to grab a large piece of the pie.
There's one situation, though, where it's also to the benefit of the buyers. If a seller wants to cover $20 in fixed and variable costs and there's a market of four buyers, willing to pay $3, $4, $7 and $8, what price do you charge?
It's readily seen that if you don't sell at one of those four prices, you can earn more by "rounding" up to the nearest of those prices.
So at $3 you sell four copies, $4 three, $7 two and $8 one, grossing you either $12, $12, $14 or $8. But if you can charge each customer the price they're willing to pay, you gross 3+4+7+8=22, which is enough to cover your costs and net $2. [fuzz the numbers a bit if you want to give the buyers some surplus from the seller].
There, price discrimination enables a socially beneficial exchange that the market doesn't enable.
I started out by asking how you're counter-productive if you don't price discriminate. I've given my answer which only applies in some situations. It sounds like you suggest one should price-discriminate all the time. Care to elaborate?
The new Anti-piracy Armour sound like its easy to trigger for people over they're. Especially if your grammer and speling is slidely of.
Fortunately, you can run it through your spelling chequer:
Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.
Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.
As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.
Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.
That was "Ode to the Spell Checker", by an "On-Gnome Arthur".
What would Guitar Hero have been without songs that people recognize?
What drove me to buy Guitar Hero was playing it and playing through songs I didn't know (but by bands I know) and learning that this button-mashing thing is kinda' fun. I did know 5 of the ~70 songs when I bought GH3, and a lot of the bands, but I've come to like more songs by playing the game than I knew already.
So... maybe the answer is a cheaper but just as fun game?
[Or do people play it differently than I do?]
I've found that most games are missing out in terms of either polish, patching (which on consoles means better pre-release testing because there is no patching) and usability.
Let's take a quick consideration of my wii games.
A lot of those issues are easy to fix, in that the hard part isn't knowing what to do instead but knowing that you should be doing something else. A system for patching and patches that improve the game implementation quality would be great.
I know this won't happen, but letting people who care fix these things would be great too. I know I'd be fixing some of the issues with GH3 if no one else would.
*grumble*
tl;dr. Just say "long bad"!
I think the incorrect occurrence of "there" was hogging his attention.
Moreover, if someone picks up a copyrighted work and intentionally breaks the license agreement
(IANAL, TINLA, someone beat me with a cluebat if I'm wrong so I don't misinform the world.)
In this case, i.e. the GPL, there is no license agreement. A license is a set of permissions given to "you", the licensee, by the copyright holder. A license agreement is a contract between (typically?) "you" and the copyright holder. Your gain from the contract is a license to use the software. Their gain is (typically) your promise to not do certain things you would otherwise be allowed to (reverse engineering being a common one; saying bad things about the company which made your web authoring tool is another one, which I hear FrontPage has going for iself).
Briefly: A license is a one-sided gift. A license agreement is a two-sided bargain.
[why is this distinction useful? Heck if I know. Probably has something to do with contract law, civil procedures and the amount of money that can be extracted from you]
What does the community get out of the fact that YouSee, Stofa, and Viasat use Linux?
It gets valuable proof that Linux is a serious industrial strength system
And as Joe Public, why do I care?
As Jonas "The Zealot" Slashbot I care about Linux gaining renown in the industry and (eventually, hopefully) the wider population. That's all fine and good, and you say some very nice words about why Jonas Slashbot should be happy.
But why Joe Public? What does he care about? American Idol, and that the equipment he watches it on works well, is easy to use, and is cheap. I think that is your parent's question.
And I hope, wearing my Zealot hat again, that the answer is that with Linux(-based systems) you have better reliability, usability and price. Hopefully :-)
On the other hand, you might argue that what's good for Linux is good for the people at large, because it destroys a monopoly and monopolies are (according to microeconomy 101) always bad for the people. This sounds like it might be your position---you come close to outright saying it, in my mind, but who am I to say?
In any case, I think "better, easier, cheaper" is an easier sell that "Willingness to pay [...] willingness to sell [...] market clearing price [...] monopoly [...] area between graphs is not maximized [...]".
</ramble>
Remember, computers run on magical mystical blue smoke
Incidentally, lawyers don't breath air but the same magical smoke. Don't let any of them near your computers! ;-)
He has credibility with investors because he called Facebook and Twitter (among others) as a buy pretty early in their lifecycles.
I call *everything* a buy. Woo, credibility here I come.
How many bad buys did he call? How many good and bad no-buys did he call? Does he perform better than the average investor?
Here's a neat scam: find 256 random people (say, buy their mail addresses from a spammer). Pick eight random stocks. Mail each one "Stock number i will go {up, down}" for all i for a period of a few weeks. Choose all different combinations. You will get 100% right for at least one person. Suggest to that person that you should manage their funds. When you get their money, run.
(I do not encourage illegal activity. The above is for educational purposes only. #include )
When Andreessen is credited with guessing Facebook and Twitter right, what data isn't being reported?
Hi. I'm sad to hear that people so often choose colors that are bad for the color-blind.
If you run Compiz (do you run Linux or some other system which uses X11 for its GUI needs?) and use the "Color Filter" plugin, there's a filter called "blueish-filter". I don't know for sure, but it might be what you want.
Two of the filters are called "deuteranopia" and "protonopia" which are fancy words for two kinds of colorblindness (the filters "induce" colorblindness, i.e. transforms the picture so it looks like it would in the eyes of a colorblind person).
I guess that the people who did that came up with the idea of assisting the colorblind, and maybe "blueish-filter" is their attempt at doing so.
In any case, try it out and see if it works. Or write your own fragment shader script ;-)
Luckily it's provbably the only non-opensource-program you'd want to install on such a device anyway.
Where's the proofb?
In communist China, TV brainwash y...
Wait, there's something wrong. Aren't the Chinese supposed to be the experts in brainwashing and water-based torture (dripping as seen on Mythbusters, not waterboarding), not the US?
Or is this just me being unable to distinguish between the pigs and the humans?
And they have just finished proving that first few lines of code they wrote. In another five decades they hope to be able to have Notepad proven and ready to run so you can actually get some work done!
I completely agree with your sentiment here (somewhat sadly, I might add; it would be nice to have a provably correct linux/gcc/glibc/emacs/firefox/nethack).
People have seen the value of [formal verification, I assume] since the first days of programming. In fact, the value is so enormous that no one can afford it...
That is [in my economics dictionary] a contradiction in terms.
People finding something valuable can be understood as them being willing to give up a lot of resources, i.e. forgo a lot of alternative uses of the resources, i.e. pay a lot of money, to get it.
So you're saying because people are so eager to pay for it, no one can, right? i.e. the market price exceeds the willingness to pay of the highest (potentially-)paying customer. That doesn't make sense.
What does make sense is that the process of formal verification is so labor-consuming that the value it can generate (even if high) is less than the value of at least one thing the same (large) amount of labor could be spent to generate, i.e. people's time is better spent fixing bugs or adding features. At least according to what the market prices say. [we can then discuss whether the market for kernels works as it should.]
(When can then go on to discuss value in use vs. value in exchange vs. the value of research to increase further value in use which probably increases value in exchange and... you know, all of economics... :)]
You sir, are a nerd's nerd.
Talking about being upset about typography, there's this guy called Donald Knuth whom you might have heard of... ;-)
Tell me again how the geek spins this story in a way that inspires confidence in Linux and FOSS?
Because proprietary kernels have at least as much code that hasn't been looked at for at least as long with more exploits.
And you can't prove me wrong, because no one has published those numbers!
(err... wait... *wipes foam off mouth*... My life for Aiur...)
I broke into nobody's account and took a peek at their files. Look what I found:
$ ls -l
-rwx------ 1 nobody nobody 12542 1000-07-24 12:45 predict_spanish_inquisition
"Weet je waarom ... ?" ("Do you why ... ?")
I assume that's "Do you know why ... ?"
(I assume "Weet je waarom" is dutch, and Weet ~= "Ved", the Danish for "know", "je" ~= "you" and "waarom" ~= "warum", German for "why"; the word order is the same as you'd expect in Danish and German for "Do you know why".)
People need the right to own what they've bought, but people don't need the right to own everything for free that's digital.
I think "need" is probably the wrong word---I think this is about what people want combined with what's economically feasible. But the choice of words is the least concern.
People want culture (music, film, literature), preferably well-made items of culture. They also want things to be cheap (preferably free). And they also want to obey the law. Those who make culture want to make money doing so (preferably more than less, but some are content with no money).
How they value each of those in relation to one another varies from person to person. Some prefer stuff with expensive (and maybe even good :D) production for free over obeying the law. Some prefer stuff that's free and obeying the law over expensive production. Some prefer expensive production and obeying the law over stuff that's free.
If a change to the copyright law, any change (including allowing redistribution for private purposes, or complete abolishment) gives the people as a whole something more valuable than what the current regime does, why shouldn't we make that change?
Your statement leaves me to conclude that you think allowing free redistribution of copyrighted stuff doesn't give people what they want (presumably due to the removed profit incentive on the producer side of the equation). Why do you think this?
I think it's an empirical question what the effect of changing copyright law would be. Would people stop making music? Probably not, but the amount and quality would probably decline. How about movies? They're much more expensive, so maybe we'd only have short films by film students posted on youtube. How happy or unhappy would people be about this? I think that's something we should measure (or at least approximate) rather than guesstimate.
Do you agree? If not, why not?
Well they're making tons of money, so they must be doing something right!
Just like the phone companies, right? ;-)
The secret fifth option, Wankers.
(Literally, not derogatorily!)
Personally I think it sucks that the law prevents me from walking into Wal-Mart and grabbing all the money I can from the cash registers
Do you think it sucks that the law forbids (not prevents) Wal-Mart from walking into your living room and grabbing all the stuff it can from your shelves?
I would be in my best interest to take other people's stuff. However, it would not be in my best interest if taking people's stuff would generally be legal, and I have no basis to argue that the law should favor me when it comes to taking other people's stuff. So I make do with a law that's fair :-)
Judges need to stop being automatons that parse legalease, and start doing their jobs, i.e. delivering justice.
In a very abstract sense, the judge has listened to what the people have decided, through their elected representatives, justice means. And delivered accordingly.
I think that is where the real perversion of the system lies. Fix campaign contributions. Do away with the two-party system. Inform the public better. Hold politicians more accountable.
Then the judges will be put in such a position much less often.
(I know, I'm dreaming again)
What is your proposal to prevent organised crime using encrypted media to conceal their activities?
Here's mine: do nothing.
The people who value honest citizens' right to privacy over the police's ease of catching bad guys will probably be in favor. And it doesn't even have to be an absolutist question: people who favor (something close to) the particular trade-off between privacy and police efficiency enabled by a hands-off policy will be in favor.
But those people might not be the most numerous...
Unless you can point to a workable alternative solution
I will assert that "do nothing" works. It just works at something different which according to some [who?] is more valuable.
borda voting does away with the whole party primary nonsense: democrats field 4 or 5 presidential candidates, republicans field 4 or 5 presidential candidates. and the voters merely rank them.
You forgot the other partie... oh wait.
Make sure to point out how Borda Count might do away with the overemphasis on party affiliation and possibly, just maybe, make a third political party able to have some influence and maybe a seat or two in one of the parliament chambers.
Also, if discussing voting theory, you could at least mention Condorcet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Condorcet_method
I really like the properties of that one.