Good work! I'm getting my Ph.D. in economics, and mechanism design is one of my focuses. Not sure who's behind this, but what's the goals of the auction? There's no terribly good reason raising revenue should be one of the goals since it can be raised with other forms of taxation with less distortion; as you pointed out, a good bit of the incidence of this tax is going to be pushed onto mobile internet users in the form of higher prices, which is ultimately just another regressive tax most of us can't afford, like that on gasoline (which doesn't meaningfully reduce driving).
I would hope the goals would be to get the spectrum in the hands of the entity that will put it to its highest and best use for societal welfare. Profitability is some measure of this, and so the highest bidder may ultimately be the one able to create the most value, but making them pay as much as possible for the spectrum just ensures they will need to capture as much of that value for themselves as possible to pay for their bid.
I'm not sure about the technical details regarding spectrum and bandwidth in this case, but some kind of required-investment bidding would be a better approach. I believe that the theoretical max bandwidth is a function of type and width of spectrum (65 MHz of electromagnetic), but there's plenty of gains from capital investment to be had regarding hardware to run the networks and probably from signal optimization, depending on how they allocate their MHz across sections/channels (e.g. minimizing noise and interference, maybe some kind of dynamic/automatically re-sizing of spectrum divisions based on bandwidth needs of each section at any given time, etc). Bidding in $ of capital investment would be a decent approach since they have some motivation to make those $'s go as far as possible, but having some projected return on investment with respect to consumer experience would be nice. Unfortunately, that gives incentive to exaggerate one's efficiency, corrupting the usefulness of all such projections in the bid, and the projections themselves are hard enough to create that you'd be hard pressed to prove any misleading conduct beyond standard corporate optimism if they fall short.
Seriously, though, who the hell designed this auction, and why did they not consider any of these standard questions any auction designer worth her salt would have started with from the get go? Makes me more curious where the money from the bids will ultimately end up, since corruption is the only strong reason (I don't buy gov incompetence here).
Here here!! I'm working on my Ph.D. in economics with a non-market focuses, such as political economy. The sad fact is that even if government representatives are actually trying to do what's best for their constituents, they'll still do things that are harmful to most people to help the few who actively support them, meaning legislation on average is expected to be harmful. But it gets worse! because this type of legislation is difficult to get through congress unilaterally, legislators trade votes all the fucking time to get their bad policy passed in exchange for helping other bad policy pass. And this is assumes good-intentioned legislators who can be trusted to do their job as specified by the Constitution!
It's not that I don't think problems can be solved in a centralized manner. I don't even necessarily think the private market necessarily are more efficient when solving them. It's just that I don't trust any piece of policy that's gone through the legislative gauntlet of nearly 550 self-interested powerful individuals with almost no real accountability. It's binding legal language: they can literally change a few words to transform good policy into a legal means to rob us of billions of tax dollars often with ancillary consequences to boot. What's the chances the benefits of anything will outweigh its costs by the time it comes out of Congress? We're perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves and each other: deadlock sounds just fine to me; disempowerment sounds even better.
Like literally impossible. I know we generally refuse to believe that almost anything is impossible in the long run, and we have theories on how it might possibly be possible. But it might not be, and that could create a lot of isolated star clusters all colonized but with little practical ability reach stars separated by any great divide. I also don't think colonizing a planet such that it is massively productive can ever be accomplished quickly, especially if you have to transport the enormous stock of resources necessary to accomplish the feat at sub light speed.
I'm getting my Ph.D. in behavioral and institutional economics, so this is right up my ally. Carr's response, that "defining social relations as a pattern of stimulus and response makes the math easier" but misses the deeper structure is dead on, but it's more than this. Social norms may determine much of our behavioral responses, but norms vary tremendously by the institution from which they come: how your group of friends prefer to treat each other != how other's prefer to treat each other != how strangers are "supposed" to treat each other in NYC != out strangers are supposed to treat each other in a small town. Moreover, while these norms may be highly correlated with your behavioral responses, people select into institutions (friend circles, communities, neighborhoods, etc) to a large degree based off their compatibility with the institutions norms; e.g. think about outcomes of social group formation, from mostly scratch, freshman year of college.
This all matters for the article's context because the behavioral parameters they estimate only approximate social norm's suggested behavior, but the suggestions ultimately come from those who chose to adhere to that particular set of norms; trying to "tune" people in ways they don't intrinsically want will fail because they'll just reselect or simply ignore the competing suggestions in favor of those authentic to the group into which they selected. If they take into account that all norms are highly idiosyncratic to their parent institution, it may help with better targeting of products, programs, and information, but the targeting will still have to be revised as people revise their norms; an institution will not revise its norms to conform to what an outside entity feels they should be. So, yeah, I don't think catering to the current observed state of the world can keep norms and society from evolving any more than, say, de jure segregation laws catering to status quo racists/-ism can keep people from forming revising their views about the morality of racism, the laws surrounding it, and their behavioral responses to such societal "tuning", especially over years and generations.
Sure, dude, I'm always down for creating music with others. I typically produce (and DJ) in Ableton, but have been looking into FMOD for video game work.
I haven't posted here in years, partly because I've been too focused on my music career.
First off (-topic), fuck Cubase, Ableton is waaaay better and just as easily pirated. And while on the subject of piracy, musicians spend more money on music (shows, instruments, hardware, etc) than anyone else, all while actively giving back to the music community by producing art; if they pirate music software, I say good as long as they can't afford it, because it at least allows them to create their art, which is good for everybody. I haven't paid for my copy of Ableton yet, but I definitely plan on it once I can.
Now regarding primary points of the article. Say what you want, but making beautiful expressive music is extremely difficult in a digital environment. Sure you can correct your mistakes, layer a dozen parts by yourself, and accomplish musical feats with the press of a button that, e.g., concert pianists might spend their whole life practicing to achieve, but none of that has to do with the artistic side of music. What the author really means is that humans no longer have to spend years practicing fine muscle coordination to be able to create complex music, but that doesn't free the musician of the burden of turning sound into art with real expression behind it.
This is why a lot of electronic music sounds stale and repetitive. If you don't know, there exist "construction kits" which allow me to create, e.g., an above average trap song in about an hour (including mastering). A lot of people do this, but a lot fewer go--or even know to go---to the trouble of creating real expressive content so that the music is not only aurally pleasing and cerebrally interesting, but also emotionally evocative. Evocativeness used to be a given in music, but these days it has to be sought out. That said, all the best producers reliably achieve it, even in the digital space, which can add challenges since expression is fundamentally an analog creature.
What's true is there's a lot more noise around the signal. This can make it a lot harder for good musicians to succeed, but most of the doom-and-gloom perspective comes from the masses of shitty musicians who've entered the market now that the barriers to entry are lowered: Talent still rises to the top, but all these n00bs who create digitally perfect tracks that sound like music are whining en mass that no one listens to their songs and that it must the system's fault because their tracks sound good. People don't listen to music because it "sounds good", they listen to it because it's art, i.e. it has content and is moving. Everything else is just icing on the cake, but who wants to eat just icing all the time.
I don't need to be a rock star to be a satisfied musician. That said, if you don't believe there exist rock stars and legends these days, clearly you've never been to a Bassnectar concert or are otherwise not paying attention.
If you're in front of her, use your left hand and pinch your thumb and first two fingers fingers together on either side of the clasp. If you're behind her, use your right hand.
That's why I'm excited for the (potentially) upcoming Halo movie. They've have a whole universe to work with, the franchise's underlying concept is relatively accessible for a sci-fi movie, and the nature of the conflict offers a lot of opportunity for good action, breathtaking scenery and visuals, and interesting scenes. Other perks: good sized projected budget, potential Peter Jackson direction, huge fan base, and I saw blood in the brief live-action clip that was produced, so maybe it won't get mangled trying to make it "family friendly". But who knows, they might throw in some absurd romantic subplot between Master Chief and some trollop played by Megan Fox that never culminates in seeing her naked.
There are little box-shaped things you can get that act as a key dispenser or sorts. It's a key-length tall, a key-width deep, and wide enough to fit ~5-6 keys side by side the thin way. Each key fits into a slot at the top so that all keys are in the box, and each slot has a slider on the side of the box that pushes the respective key out far enough to expose the teeth, but still in the box and able to be retracted after use. It's sort of like those big pens that can write in a bunch of different colors, except they're your keys. It fits on a keychain, oversize keys won't fit, but it's a good start. Googled quickly, found this, but there are cheapo versions around as well.
This assumes he can sell it for that much right away. If he holds the property until it goes back up to $2000, then profits is a misleading metric. IRR would be better, but that decreases as the length of the investment increases, like if he needs to wait to sell the place, so things don't look as good as you might think.
Of course while he's waiting he gets to collect rent, so that will help a bit. But he also has to pay to maintain the building, pay interest on the loan (which will carry a high rate because banks aren't giving loans easily right now, especially with only 10% down). Don't forget insurance. And, of course, if any of your tenants can't pay rent, or they move, then you'll lose at least 1 month rent from them and have to go through the process of getting a new tenant, which may prove difficult if you want to get as much as the last person paid, a monthly rate that was set pre-recession. Oh, and don't forget taxes, and not just the taxes on your rental income, but also property taxes which are based on property value and may have an assessed value a great deal higher than you purchased the property for. Point: there's a reason these buildings are so cheap.
Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry
Blows my mind when they say things like that, it contains implicit assumptions about what "the industry" is. E.g., many indie labels are gaining significantly more exposure as a result of sites like last.fm. I'll agree that it's not net positive for Warner.
But this is a Good thing. Sure, producer surplus (profit) for the most major players has decrease somewhat, but consumer surplus (total benefit minus cost) has increased tremendously as we can now get tons of music for very cheap. But this is what happens when monopolies fall, they have to drop prices in order to compete and we are the beneficiaries. Who cares about Warner, people will always be making music, probably more now than ever since we're able to be exposed to so much more and culture begets culture. And now we have the tools to distribute that music without the big media companies.
Maybe. The interesting thing is that the exploit is both the attack also what is needed to fix it. There's a credible threat that others may use the same exploit, not just the one who found it. A company who did this openly, whose founding documents declare they only sell software vulnerability information with the software's creator, whose NDAs included clauses that they will never share this information with others in to perpetuity regardless of the potential client's decision on whether to buy the information... I think they could develop a defensible case and eventually a trusted brand image. Just because a company sells fire insurance doesn't mean they're really threatening to commit arson.
Another problem with the strategy is that more drugs will be produces. If you buy up all the drugs at high prices, you'll have artificially injected a huge amount of demand into the market, as well as effectively condoned drug production. The existing producers will produce much more, since they can move it, and other's will flock to the drug trade, knowing that the U.S. government will buy it. If we don't, they'll just sell it to the Taliban again and, since we never put it on the streets, they'll still receive good prices and have no problems moving it. Always remember to apply the game theoretical implications of any can of economic policy (which I've found very few in Congress do.
Wow, I know/.ers rarely read TFA, but did you even read the summary? They explicitly mention "white markets" where companies can do just that. If the white markets are well known about, learning of an exploit is often likely to be more valuable to the company than a hacker. A company can suffer liability for damages, lose clients, suffer hits to their company's good will, and, depending on the nature of the software and what it's used for, and the exploit and how it works, any number of other things. Those buying the exploits can't know how long it will be effective, or how profitable it will be. My guess is, the more profitable it could be, the quicker it will get fixed, so how much can the black market pay? Besides companies potentially paying better, there's the added bonus of not having to do something illegal, harmful and immoral, though I know that doesn't matter to some. And there might be the appeal of being on the side of preventing malicious attacks. Think about it, all the CS nerds will be able to effectively become digital Jack Bauers, and that's bound to get chicks.
At the time I used straight LaTeX, but I made it work. The trick was to get a good editor and set up keyboard shortcuts for common things to blaze through the process quicker. Add on top of that a bunch of renaming functions in the preamble to save keystrokes for other common actions and keeping up isn't much of a problem.
That being said, I'm going to cast my vote for Lyx because you can still do all I suggested above, but it greatly aids in building tables, matrices, and other things that'll slow you down a bit. And don't be afraid to use shorthand that won't format properly when necessary, as long as you know what it says you can always fix it after class or during a lull in the lecture; I find this typically takes less than 5 min. And use lots of white space. And reconsider what the best way to keep notes is; when you have a medium with the flexibility of files, folders, etc, I find it's usually better to take notes by topic instead of chronology of when it is said.
Funny story, took notes all semester for my stat class that way and we got to use 1 page of notes for the final. About 20-30 minutes of copy/paste-ing gave me every equation we used, qualitative descriptions of what they do and when to use them, and a whole host of other useful stuff. Never studied beyond doing my homework (which I only did most of the time) but I got a 297 out of 300, highest grade in a class of ~150 and about half a standard deviation above the next highest score...
Or most of them, anyhow. Wow, that's clever though. We've been trying to decide the outcome of wars around the world pretty regularly since WWII, this just provides a very efficient means of doing so. It also gives a big disincentive for people buying US weapons on the black market (well, the really bad ones).
Of course there's always the fear of hackers figuring out a way to kill the kill switch, but at least it's one more obstacle. It'd probably be a good idea to ensure none of our craft, etc, have these kill switches though, just the ones we sell. I'm sure we try very very hard to protect the switches, but security systems of all kinds get broken, it's easier to find exploits than it is to create a system that has none whatsoever. If lives (potentially thousands or more) depend on it, why take the chance?
Most of us probably download most all our shows anyway, and with RSS it really doesn't take much effort to get everything you want. It'll help send a message to the cable companies, you'll save money, etc. The only catch is you're less likely to run across new shows by accident, but a little effort on the internet will give plenty of suggestions (e.g. look at number of seeds on a torrent). Cable is obsolete (sorta).
I remember hearing about a system that uses photography and computer anaysis on the cars to figure out exactly how long you parked and whose car it is. Tie that to a credit card and you don't have to do anything. Except it also ends parking ticket revenues, which is priced in to the system. Would you be willing to pay more so that you'd never pay late fees again (a la Netflix)to compensate for the revenue loss? Perhaps capturing each minute of all cars who weren't paying for parking before (the ones who would have gotten tickets) would take care of it. If that's the case, it's really win win, if you think about it.
Looking at bills from 17 cities, it's no surprise that the city with the highest level was Washington DC, where up to 95% of bills gathered there tested positive.
Why is this no surprise? New York has Wall St, coke is imported into many Florida and California cities, etc. The only thing remarkable about DC is the presence of the Government, and since so many people here (I'm a resident of the District) want to get high levels of clearance for their jobs, most won't touch any illegal drugs. Really surprised by this, even though I do know where to get dank coke;-)
No, but I was just thinking about this. A meta-wiki would be amazing, as for each high level subject there could be a page talking about the main bits of it, but then also link to the subject's own wiki for which you can explore all the different aspects of that subject. The only catch is that currently all the wikis are independently run, so there's some loss of standardization (which is useful) and of course the problem of selecting the proper sub-wiki (if it even exists). Perhaps best not to use existing subject wikis and instead to start the meta-wiki with the ability to create new subject wikis on the fly, like metawiki.com/wikisubject/currentpage where the wikisubject can be created fresh and contains an entire wiki where each page is after the/. This way you could have a notability requirement only on the main wiki for subjects, so that there might be a wiki on web-comics (which is a notable subject) and that wiki could have as obscure web-comic related articles as it likes. There'd have to be a mechanism for articles to be cross listed across wikis if they fall under multiple categories, but that should be easy enough. Besides that, it might also be useful to be able to create sub-sub-wikis and such too, like a wiki on computer games, and then another sub wiki on WoW or something, and theoretically you could go to deeper levels as well. I don't know, just a thought.
Can I just say I love your rage and how everyone seems to ignore it because you're speaking sense. "Bullshit, you motherfucking liar." "Now go back to sucking Obama's cock, you know-nothing retard." Brilliant, though I would have added a few !s for good measure.
And to add my $0.02 to those environmentalists who don't seem to get it, if we crush the economy we crush our ability to innovate right now, and we crush education (our ability to innovate in the future). Innovation is the only way to solve these problems; we have too many people in the world now, and unless you want to give up all your tech (including your computers and the Internet), we aren't getting back to a sustainable level without it.
This is dead on, and I've been saying it for years. Too often people hear there's potentially a problem and think "We have to solve it!" What they don't do is ask any of the above questions. I've seen worse ideas than cap and trade, but as an economist (by degree and profession) I can tell you that it doesn't work how they suggest it will.
The Government really doesn't need to do anything to solve the global warming problem. Innovation is obviously the only real solution, and every energy company and tons of private equity funds are investing billions of dollars to create green technologies and green energy sources. They do this because they know if they can create something that is economically viable, they'll make more money than God. They also know that, besides as a potential goldmine, it also acts as a preventative measure in case bills like this do pass. Game theory suggests that all we really need is a credible threat that something like this might pass to spur innovation, we don't really need to force them to act right. And as an added bonus, it's much cheaper and more effective than passing this type of legislation, since their research budgets aren't crippled by bad policy. Why punish those who are already playing by the rules?
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Good work! I'm getting my Ph.D. in economics, and mechanism design is one of my focuses. Not sure who's behind this, but what's the goals of the auction? There's no terribly good reason raising revenue should be one of the goals since it can be raised with other forms of taxation with less distortion; as you pointed out, a good bit of the incidence of this tax is going to be pushed onto mobile internet users in the form of higher prices, which is ultimately just another regressive tax most of us can't afford, like that on gasoline (which doesn't meaningfully reduce driving).
I would hope the goals would be to get the spectrum in the hands of the entity that will put it to its highest and best use for societal welfare. Profitability is some measure of this, and so the highest bidder may ultimately be the one able to create the most value, but making them pay as much as possible for the spectrum just ensures they will need to capture as much of that value for themselves as possible to pay for their bid.
I'm not sure about the technical details regarding spectrum and bandwidth in this case, but some kind of required-investment bidding would be a better approach. I believe that the theoretical max bandwidth is a function of type and width of spectrum (65 MHz of electromagnetic), but there's plenty of gains from capital investment to be had regarding hardware to run the networks and probably from signal optimization, depending on how they allocate their MHz across sections/channels (e.g. minimizing noise and interference, maybe some kind of dynamic/automatically re-sizing of spectrum divisions based on bandwidth needs of each section at any given time, etc). Bidding in $ of capital investment would be a decent approach since they have some motivation to make those $'s go as far as possible, but having some projected return on investment with respect to consumer experience would be nice. Unfortunately, that gives incentive to exaggerate one's efficiency, corrupting the usefulness of all such projections in the bid, and the projections themselves are hard enough to create that you'd be hard pressed to prove any misleading conduct beyond standard corporate optimism if they fall short.
Seriously, though, who the hell designed this auction, and why did they not consider any of these standard questions any auction designer worth her salt would have started with from the get go? Makes me more curious where the money from the bids will ultimately end up, since corruption is the only strong reason (I don't buy gov incompetence here).
Here here!! I'm working on my Ph.D. in economics with a non-market focuses, such as political economy. The sad fact is that even if government representatives are actually trying to do what's best for their constituents, they'll still do things that are harmful to most people to help the few who actively support them, meaning legislation on average is expected to be harmful. But it gets worse! because this type of legislation is difficult to get through congress unilaterally, legislators trade votes all the fucking time to get their bad policy passed in exchange for helping other bad policy pass. And this is assumes good-intentioned legislators who can be trusted to do their job as specified by the Constitution!
It's not that I don't think problems can be solved in a centralized manner. I don't even necessarily think the private market necessarily are more efficient when solving them. It's just that I don't trust any piece of policy that's gone through the legislative gauntlet of nearly 550 self-interested powerful individuals with almost no real accountability. It's binding legal language: they can literally change a few words to transform good policy into a legal means to rob us of billions of tax dollars often with ancillary consequences to boot. What's the chances the benefits of anything will outweigh its costs by the time it comes out of Congress? We're perfectly capable of taking care of ourselves and each other: deadlock sounds just fine to me; disempowerment sounds even better.
Like literally impossible. I know we generally refuse to believe that almost anything is impossible in the long run, and we have theories on how it might possibly be possible. But it might not be, and that could create a lot of isolated star clusters all colonized but with little practical ability reach stars separated by any great divide. I also don't think colonizing a planet such that it is massively productive can ever be accomplished quickly, especially if you have to transport the enormous stock of resources necessary to accomplish the feat at sub light speed.
I'm getting my Ph.D. in behavioral and institutional economics, so this is right up my ally. Carr's response, that "defining social relations as a pattern of stimulus and response makes the math easier" but misses the deeper structure is dead on, but it's more than this. Social norms may determine much of our behavioral responses, but norms vary tremendously by the institution from which they come: how your group of friends prefer to treat each other != how other's prefer to treat each other != how strangers are "supposed" to treat each other in NYC != out strangers are supposed to treat each other in a small town. Moreover, while these norms may be highly correlated with your behavioral responses, people select into institutions (friend circles, communities, neighborhoods, etc) to a large degree based off their compatibility with the institutions norms; e.g. think about outcomes of social group formation, from mostly scratch, freshman year of college.
This all matters for the article's context because the behavioral parameters they estimate only approximate social norm's suggested behavior, but the suggestions ultimately come from those who chose to adhere to that particular set of norms; trying to "tune" people in ways they don't intrinsically want will fail because they'll just reselect or simply ignore the competing suggestions in favor of those authentic to the group into which they selected. If they take into account that all norms are highly idiosyncratic to their parent institution, it may help with better targeting of products, programs, and information, but the targeting will still have to be revised as people revise their norms; an institution will not revise its norms to conform to what an outside entity feels they should be. So, yeah, I don't think catering to the current observed state of the world can keep norms and society from evolving any more than, say, de jure segregation laws catering to status quo racists/-ism can keep people from forming revising their views about the morality of racism, the laws surrounding it, and their behavioral responses to such societal "tuning", especially over years and generations.
Here's links to some of my music:
https://soundcloud.com/mdmt-de...
https://soundcloud.com/mdmtmus...
Feel free to drop me a line at seepage87 at the gmail
I second this question! I love production and composition, and feel I should use my talents toward beneficial ends. Thanks!!
I haven't posted here in years, partly because I've been too focused on my music career.
First off (-topic), fuck Cubase, Ableton is waaaay better and just as easily pirated. And while on the subject of piracy, musicians spend more money on music (shows, instruments, hardware, etc) than anyone else, all while actively giving back to the music community by producing art; if they pirate music software, I say good as long as they can't afford it, because it at least allows them to create their art, which is good for everybody. I haven't paid for my copy of Ableton yet, but I definitely plan on it once I can.
Now regarding primary points of the article. Say what you want, but making beautiful expressive music is extremely difficult in a digital environment. Sure you can correct your mistakes, layer a dozen parts by yourself, and accomplish musical feats with the press of a button that, e.g., concert pianists might spend their whole life practicing to achieve, but none of that has to do with the artistic side of music. What the author really means is that humans no longer have to spend years practicing fine muscle coordination to be able to create complex music, but that doesn't free the musician of the burden of turning sound into art with real expression behind it.
This is why a lot of electronic music sounds stale and repetitive. If you don't know, there exist "construction kits" which allow me to create, e.g., an above average trap song in about an hour (including mastering). A lot of people do this, but a lot fewer go--or even know to go---to the trouble of creating real expressive content so that the music is not only aurally pleasing and cerebrally interesting, but also emotionally evocative. Evocativeness used to be a given in music, but these days it has to be sought out. That said, all the best producers reliably achieve it, even in the digital space, which can add challenges since expression is fundamentally an analog creature.
What's true is there's a lot more noise around the signal. This can make it a lot harder for good musicians to succeed, but most of the doom-and-gloom perspective comes from the masses of shitty musicians who've entered the market now that the barriers to entry are lowered: Talent still rises to the top, but all these n00bs who create digitally perfect tracks that sound like music are whining en mass that no one listens to their songs and that it must the system's fault because their tracks sound good. People don't listen to music because it "sounds good", they listen to it because it's art, i.e. it has content and is moving. Everything else is just icing on the cake, but who wants to eat just icing all the time.
I don't need to be a rock star to be a satisfied musician. That said, if you don't believe there exist rock stars and legends these days, clearly you've never been to a Bassnectar concert or are otherwise not paying attention.
In case you're interested:
https://soundcloud.com/mdmtmusic
https://soundcloud.com/mdmt-development
https://www.facebook.com/MDMTmusic
And if you're in the Denver area, we're playing at Cervantes on Sept 29th.
Primer... glwt :-)
If you're in front of her, use your left hand and pinch your thumb and first two fingers fingers together on either side of the clasp. If you're behind her, use your right hand.
That's why I'm excited for the (potentially) upcoming Halo movie. They've have a whole universe to work with, the franchise's underlying concept is relatively accessible for a sci-fi movie, and the nature of the conflict offers a lot of opportunity for good action, breathtaking scenery and visuals, and interesting scenes. Other perks: good sized projected budget, potential Peter Jackson direction, huge fan base, and I saw blood in the brief live-action clip that was produced, so maybe it won't get mangled trying to make it "family friendly". But who knows, they might throw in some absurd romantic subplot between Master Chief and some trollop played by Megan Fox that never culminates in seeing her naked.
There are little box-shaped things you can get that act as a key dispenser or sorts. It's a key-length tall, a key-width deep, and wide enough to fit ~5-6 keys side by side the thin way. Each key fits into a slot at the top so that all keys are in the box, and each slot has a slider on the side of the box that pushes the respective key out far enough to expose the teeth, but still in the box and able to be retracted after use. It's sort of like those big pens that can write in a bunch of different colors, except they're your keys. It fits on a keychain, oversize keys won't fit, but it's a good start. Googled quickly, found this, but there are cheapo versions around as well.
This assumes he can sell it for that much right away. If he holds the property until it goes back up to $2000, then profits is a misleading metric. IRR would be better, but that decreases as the length of the investment increases, like if he needs to wait to sell the place, so things don't look as good as you might think.
Of course while he's waiting he gets to collect rent, so that will help a bit. But he also has to pay to maintain the building, pay interest on the loan (which will carry a high rate because banks aren't giving loans easily right now, especially with only 10% down). Don't forget insurance. And, of course, if any of your tenants can't pay rent, or they move, then you'll lose at least 1 month rent from them and have to go through the process of getting a new tenant, which may prove difficult if you want to get as much as the last person paid, a monthly rate that was set pre-recession. Oh, and don't forget taxes, and not just the taxes on your rental income, but also property taxes which are based on property value and may have an assessed value a great deal higher than you purchased the property for. Point: there's a reason these buildings are so cheap.
Free streaming services are clearly not net positive for the industry
Blows my mind when they say things like that, it contains implicit assumptions about what "the industry" is. E.g., many indie labels are gaining significantly more exposure as a result of sites like last.fm. I'll agree that it's not net positive for Warner.
But this is a Good thing. Sure, producer surplus (profit) for the most major players has decrease somewhat, but consumer surplus (total benefit minus cost) has increased tremendously as we can now get tons of music for very cheap. But this is what happens when monopolies fall, they have to drop prices in order to compete and we are the beneficiaries. Who cares about Warner, people will always be making music, probably more now than ever since we're able to be exposed to so much more and culture begets culture. And now we have the tools to distribute that music without the big media companies.
Maybe. The interesting thing is that the exploit is both the attack also what is needed to fix it. There's a credible threat that others may use the same exploit, not just the one who found it. A company who did this openly, whose founding documents declare they only sell software vulnerability information with the software's creator, whose NDAs included clauses that they will never share this information with others in to perpetuity regardless of the potential client's decision on whether to buy the information... I think they could develop a defensible case and eventually a trusted brand image. Just because a company sells fire insurance doesn't mean they're really threatening to commit arson.
Another problem with the strategy is that more drugs will be produces. If you buy up all the drugs at high prices, you'll have artificially injected a huge amount of demand into the market, as well as effectively condoned drug production. The existing producers will produce much more, since they can move it, and other's will flock to the drug trade, knowing that the U.S. government will buy it. If we don't, they'll just sell it to the Taliban again and, since we never put it on the streets, they'll still receive good prices and have no problems moving it. Always remember to apply the game theoretical implications of any can of economic policy (which I've found very few in Congress do.
Wow, I know /.ers rarely read TFA, but did you even read the summary? They explicitly mention "white markets" where companies can do just that. If the white markets are well known about, learning of an exploit is often likely to be more valuable to the company than a hacker. A company can suffer liability for damages, lose clients, suffer hits to their company's good will, and, depending on the nature of the software and what it's used for, and the exploit and how it works, any number of other things. Those buying the exploits can't know how long it will be effective, or how profitable it will be. My guess is, the more profitable it could be, the quicker it will get fixed, so how much can the black market pay? Besides companies potentially paying better, there's the added bonus of not having to do something illegal, harmful and immoral, though I know that doesn't matter to some. And there might be the appeal of being on the side of preventing malicious attacks. Think about it, all the CS nerds will be able to effectively become digital Jack Bauers, and that's bound to get chicks.
At the time I used straight LaTeX, but I made it work. The trick was to get a good editor and set up keyboard shortcuts for common things to blaze through the process quicker. Add on top of that a bunch of renaming functions in the preamble to save keystrokes for other common actions and keeping up isn't much of a problem.
That being said, I'm going to cast my vote for Lyx because you can still do all I suggested above, but it greatly aids in building tables, matrices, and other things that'll slow you down a bit. And don't be afraid to use shorthand that won't format properly when necessary, as long as you know what it says you can always fix it after class or during a lull in the lecture; I find this typically takes less than 5 min. And use lots of white space. And reconsider what the best way to keep notes is; when you have a medium with the flexibility of files, folders, etc, I find it's usually better to take notes by topic instead of chronology of when it is said.
Funny story, took notes all semester for my stat class that way and we got to use 1 page of notes for the final. About 20-30 minutes of copy/paste-ing gave me every equation we used, qualitative descriptions of what they do and when to use them, and a whole host of other useful stuff. Never studied beyond doing my homework (which I only did most of the time) but I got a 297 out of 300, highest grade in a class of ~150 and about half a standard deviation above the next highest score...
Or most of them, anyhow. Wow, that's clever though. We've been trying to decide the outcome of wars around the world pretty regularly since WWII, this just provides a very efficient means of doing so. It also gives a big disincentive for people buying US weapons on the black market (well, the really bad ones).
Of course there's always the fear of hackers figuring out a way to kill the kill switch, but at least it's one more obstacle. It'd probably be a good idea to ensure none of our craft, etc, have these kill switches though, just the ones we sell. I'm sure we try very very hard to protect the switches, but security systems of all kinds get broken, it's easier to find exploits than it is to create a system that has none whatsoever. If lives (potentially thousands or more) depend on it, why take the chance?
With any luck at least it might be able to be used as precedent against them. If they can weasel, othe
Most of us probably download most all our shows anyway, and with RSS it really doesn't take much effort to get everything you want. It'll help send a message to the cable companies, you'll save money, etc. The only catch is you're less likely to run across new shows by accident, but a little effort on the internet will give plenty of suggestions (e.g. look at number of seeds on a torrent). Cable is obsolete (sorta).
I remember hearing about a system that uses photography and computer anaysis on the cars to figure out exactly how long you parked and whose car it is. Tie that to a credit card and you don't have to do anything. Except it also ends parking ticket revenues, which is priced in to the system. Would you be willing to pay more so that you'd never pay late fees again (a la Netflix)to compensate for the revenue loss? Perhaps capturing each minute of all cars who weren't paying for parking before (the ones who would have gotten tickets) would take care of it. If that's the case, it's really win win, if you think about it.
Looking at bills from 17 cities, it's no surprise that the city with the highest level was Washington DC, where up to 95% of bills gathered there tested positive.
Why is this no surprise? New York has Wall St, coke is imported into many Florida and California cities, etc. The only thing remarkable about DC is the presence of the Government, and since so many people here (I'm a resident of the District) want to get high levels of clearance for their jobs, most won't touch any illegal drugs. Really surprised by this, even though I do know where to get dank coke ;-)
No, but I was just thinking about this. A meta-wiki would be amazing, as for each high level subject there could be a page talking about the main bits of it, but then also link to the subject's own wiki for which you can explore all the different aspects of that subject. The only catch is that currently all the wikis are independently run, so there's some loss of standardization (which is useful) and of course the problem of selecting the proper sub-wiki (if it even exists). Perhaps best not to use existing subject wikis and instead to start the meta-wiki with the ability to create new subject wikis on the fly, like metawiki.com/wikisubject/currentpage where the wikisubject can be created fresh and contains an entire wiki where each page is after the /. This way you could have a notability requirement only on the main wiki for subjects, so that there might be a wiki on web-comics (which is a notable subject) and that wiki could have as obscure web-comic related articles as it likes. There'd have to be a mechanism for articles to be cross listed across wikis if they fall under multiple categories, but that should be easy enough. Besides that, it might also be useful to be able to create sub-sub-wikis and such too, like a wiki on computer games, and then another sub wiki on WoW or something, and theoretically you could go to deeper levels as well. I don't know, just a thought.
Can I just say I love your rage and how everyone seems to ignore it because you're speaking sense. "Bullshit, you motherfucking liar." "Now go back to sucking Obama's cock, you know-nothing retard." Brilliant, though I would have added a few !s for good measure.
And to add my $0.02 to those environmentalists who don't seem to get it, if we crush the economy we crush our ability to innovate right now, and we crush education (our ability to innovate in the future). Innovation is the only way to solve these problems; we have too many people in the world now, and unless you want to give up all your tech (including your computers and the Internet), we aren't getting back to a sustainable level without it.
This is dead on, and I've been saying it for years. Too often people hear there's potentially a problem and think "We have to solve it!" What they don't do is ask any of the above questions. I've seen worse ideas than cap and trade, but as an economist (by degree and profession) I can tell you that it doesn't work how they suggest it will.
The Government really doesn't need to do anything to solve the global warming problem. Innovation is obviously the only real solution, and every energy company and tons of private equity funds are investing billions of dollars to create green technologies and green energy sources. They do this because they know if they can create something that is economically viable, they'll make more money than God. They also know that, besides as a potential goldmine, it also acts as a preventative measure in case bills like this do pass. Game theory suggests that all we really need is a credible threat that something like this might pass to spur innovation, we don't really need to force them to act right. And as an added bonus, it's much cheaper and more effective than passing this type of legislation, since their research budgets aren't crippled by bad policy. Why punish those who are already playing by the rules?