But that in no way explains why Sweden and Norway are doing so well. Why should their size make socialism better? Would the U.S. be better off Socialist if we made each state effectively an independent country?
Regards to markup being your major opposition to buying Apple: what's wrong with the mini?
3-D graphics performance. While it's reasonable for a very low end machine to have the hardware the Mac Mini has, the "problem" is that there's a real gap between the Mac Mini and any step up from it. (Not to mention any step from it loses the wonderful teeny case.)
Because a main viewing room size HDTV costs $1000+ and a decent CRT costs $200-300.
Seven years ago the first, expensive DVD players arrived. Somewhere around two years ago, VHS no longer mattered. Five years ago, writeable DVDs were $25 or more. Now they're well under $1 each. Costs come down, and hi-res displays are among the fastest droppers now. That 50" plasma that was $11,000 not long ago is now $3,000. We're not arguing about what will happen, we're arguing about when. Granted, I'm UMC, but I was planning on buying a fancy big screen before the end of this year until I bought a surplus VGA res projector from my office.
One thing to remember is that the compactness of flat screens makes them a popular replacement with wives who don't want that huge RPTV dominating the living room. That's even more an issue in space-constrained Japan.
I have no worship of "corporation", a fictional entity created by a grant of limited liability by government.
So you would destroy corporations completely?
Massive executive bonuses ? Is that envy I see?
No, I hate suffering. I hate seeing the suffering of the poor of New Orleans and the like, while rich execs vote each other ever more outrageous bonuses and built ridiculously large homes, yachts, etc. for no reason but vanity.
I noticed that your list of abuses in your latter sentence are all related to abuse of government power.
Abuses done on behalf of their corporate friends. You really think there's a big difference between the two? They're in bed with each other, and have been for a long time. Dubya's first Sec of Agriculture? The former director of Calgene. The previous secretary, Dan Glickman? Now he's chief lobbyist of the MPAA. Cheney serves under Bush 1, then gets megamillions through Halliburton because of the value of his gov't connections.
Remove the power to enact such limited liability
That's a pretty radical change. Do the Mises folk actually advocate that?
Successful entrepreneurial management is measured by things easily understood from our day to day lives.
Namely, massive executive bonuses.
I'll grant you there's lots of bureaucratic inefficiency, but please stop praying at the altar of corporate worship. Happy customers? How many sucks.com websites are there? How few Slashdotters can't tell you tales of businesses that ripped them off in various ways? Happy employees? U.S. pension funds are so underfunded that if they used the same accounting systems for their regular books, the executives would be jailed. And of course corps use the government and manipulate the government to get what they want, be it polluting without consequence, patent and copyright extensions (patents in terms of what is covered, not time), the DMCA, little or no taxes in exchange for their liability shield, and far more than I can mention in a slashdot posting.
That's certainly what you see from looking at the law. However...
Prior art and prior patents don't necessarily invalidate new patents. Patent review requires judgement and knowledge that an examiner may not have and may not havetime to investigate. Once the patent is issued, even if it would be found invalid by most courts, it can still have a chilling effect.
Also, some have claimed that in the pharmaceutical industry, slight changes in formulation that marginally improve effectiveness can allow a new patent on essentially the same substance.
Why? Because you coulod build it in a 10th the time. If it doesn't deflect the rock, you would have a second ready to go while a manned plan is still designing the crew module. And believe it or not, we can actually deal with the lag. It's not like the rocket is going to run into something on its way to the asteroid, get blown off course, etc.
There are multiple clocks, multiple mechanisms, all of which point to a consistent approximation of dates. Moreover, even if you question the timing, the sequence is even less questionable.
But maybe it did all happen in the mind of God in an instant, ~6000 years ago. Seems to me we're still studying the mind of God, then. Questioning the motivations of God seems a fool's errand, but God certainly seems to have created a world that is consistent Him setting it up billions of years ago such that it would eventually create humanity, into whom he could breathe souls.
ID could even be considered an insult to God -- "You couldn't set it up to work that way without cheating!" Why do you think God isn't capable of setting up such a universe?
Look in rocks estimated to be 100 million years old? You'll see 100 million year old fossils, with characteristics similar to 110 million year old fossils and 90 million year old fossils. You will not see any interaction with critters from today or from hundreds of millions of years prior. That's a prediction, borne out by fossils discovered long after Darwin proposed his theory. Darwin's theory needed a mechanism, and Watson and Crick discovered its form. And what did we discover? That it behaves exactly as we would expect, that creatures we think evolved from a common ancestor have similar DNA, and so on.
Moreover, it has plenty of predictive power, it just takes longer than most of us are alive for most species. But Bush and co. are proposing spending billions on a prediction that avian flu may mutate to a form that spreads easily to and across species. Sounds like an evolution prediction to me.
I don't understand why people have a a problem with them making a profit.
Not the issue.
Look, they don't charge more for a DVD of a $100 million dollar movie than they do for a $10 million dollar movie. Production cost is largely irrelevant. What we're talking about (mainly) is optimal pricing.
When you have something like digital files, where the per-copy "production" cost is trivial, you have huge flexibility in pricing. $1 a copy may be a better price than $8 if you sell 20 times as many copies. What Sony et al need to figure out is that optimal price, and in so doing, they need to analyze what they're selling against. And they're selling against DVDs, Netflix, Peerflix, libraries, what's on TV, and legal and illegal sharing. You don't have to undercut all of these on price, but you do need to make your product more appealing than the alternatives in enough situations to make it worth it to customers.
It's my judgement and the judgement of others here that $8 is too high. Some here claim it is immorally too high. I disagree, morals are not the issue, competitive pricing is.
At least under U.S. law, I can give you a gift of somewhat more than $10,000 without tax issues. Granted, the IRS would look askance if there was anything that looked like an employer/employee relationship, but I don't think they could see that here.
You gotta wonder though, how exactly would other country's laws matter? Someone from Tuvalu creates a cool plug-in, so Gerv and co. ship him a neat gadget. How would any country's cops ever get involved?
Or, if the Moz folks said "we're going to send neat gadgets to the coolest extensions introduced before 1.5 is released", would that avoid the contest issues? That's a declaration of action, not a contest per se.
If you want a cheaper solution than netflix, look into peerflix. No regular fee, just a very low price per DVD, plus time spent mailing ones you're done with. Selection depends on the other folks in the system, and response time isn't super-fast, but if you don't watch that many movies, it's much cheaper than netflix.
I got their email notice the other day and I thought, "who would go through all the trouble of a class action lawsuit just to get approx 3-4 DVD rentals for free[...]"
Nobody. Instead, the plaintiff got $2k, and the lawyers got $2.5 million.
There should be a modification to class action law that limits the lawyers' payment to at most 1/3rd of the cash value of the benefits actually claimed by the class members.
My point being that technologies like wind and solar capture much more energy for a given amount of land used for their production, and often don't have the inefficient intermediate steps (plant->fuel->energy). Solar in particular can make use of otherwise unproductive areas like rooftops (and my mother-in-law, without power since Wilma, would love to have rooftop solar right about now...)
Ultimately we as a society will have to fundamentally change the way we live.
Perhaps, but this isn't an argument for biodiesel over other non-fossil fuel power sources.
In some ways I think Australia may turn out to be the bellwether for alternative power. The Aussies have some uranium, but otherwise they're a net importer of energy. Meanwhile, they have a lot of sunlit land per person, as well has areas like the bay off of Darwin that could house thousands of windmills. It's also in Australia that the massive solar power tower is being planned.
Biodiesel has a big flaw: the efficiency of the production method.
1) Plants aren't that efficient at turning sunlight into energy. They don't really need to be for their purposes, and they ignore certain wavelengths (such as green) altogether.
2) Once you have the plant, you need to turn it into diesel. Again, this is highly inefficient.
3) Once you have diesel, you must turn it into energy. Combustion engines are less efficient than fuel cells or power plant turbines.
Consider how much land we use for farming. Then consider how much more energy our cars use than we do.
I believe the Acura RL's navigation system claims to have real-time traffic monitoring already, and it would definitely be a popular feature in future nav systems.
Out of curiosity, how would you design an experiment that would demonstrate that macro-evolution was false?
Find a t-rex fossil with rat bones in its stomach. Find human fossil remains in rocks that a geologist would tell you is 10 million years old. Find an actual trilobite swimming around.
Slashdot Mirror
But that in no way explains why Sweden and Norway are doing so well. Why should their size make socialism better? Would the U.S. be better off Socialist if we made each state effectively an independent country?
Regards to markup being your major opposition to buying Apple: what's wrong with the mini?
3-D graphics performance. While it's reasonable for a very low end machine to have the hardware the Mac Mini has, the "problem" is that there's a real gap between the Mac Mini and any step up from it. (Not to mention any step from it loses the wonderful teeny case.)
Because a main viewing room size HDTV costs $1000+ and a decent CRT costs $200-300.
Seven years ago the first, expensive DVD players arrived. Somewhere around two years ago, VHS no longer mattered. Five years ago, writeable DVDs were $25 or more. Now they're well under $1 each. Costs come down, and hi-res displays are among the fastest droppers now. That 50" plasma that was $11,000 not long ago is now $3,000. We're not arguing about what will happen, we're arguing about when. Granted, I'm UMC, but I was planning on buying a fancy big screen before the end of this year until I bought a surplus VGA res projector from my office.
One thing to remember is that the compactness of flat screens makes them a popular replacement with wives who don't want that huge RPTV dominating the living room. That's even more an issue in space-constrained Japan.
I have no worship of "corporation", a fictional entity created by a grant of limited liability by government.
So you would destroy corporations completely?
Massive executive bonuses ? Is that envy I see?
No, I hate suffering. I hate seeing the suffering of the poor of New Orleans and the like, while rich execs vote each other ever more outrageous bonuses and built ridiculously large homes, yachts, etc. for no reason but vanity.
I noticed that your list of abuses in your latter sentence are all related to abuse of government power.
Abuses done on behalf of their corporate friends. You really think there's a big difference between the two? They're in bed with each other, and have been for a long time. Dubya's first Sec of Agriculture? The former director of Calgene. The previous secretary, Dan Glickman? Now he's chief lobbyist of the MPAA. Cheney serves under Bush 1, then gets megamillions through Halliburton because of the value of his gov't connections.
Remove the power to enact such limited liability
That's a pretty radical change. Do the Mises folk actually advocate that?
Clonetrooper:
I was born on Geonosis, that's why they call me Cody!
I was thinking more along the lines of
"Springtime for Sith Lords and Vader, the Empire is happy and gay!"
Anyone want to complete the filk?
Successful entrepreneurial management is measured by things easily understood from our day to day lives.
Namely, massive executive bonuses.
I'll grant you there's lots of bureaucratic inefficiency, but please stop praying at the altar of corporate worship. Happy customers? How many sucks.com websites are there? How few Slashdotters can't tell you tales of businesses that ripped them off in various ways? Happy employees? U.S. pension funds are so underfunded that if they used the same accounting systems for their regular books, the executives would be jailed. And of course corps use the government and manipulate the government to get what they want, be it polluting without consequence, patent and copyright extensions (patents in terms of what is covered, not time), the DMCA, little or no taxes in exchange for their liability shield, and far more than I can mention in a slashdot posting.
Yes, but in this legal climate, who would prescribe anything but the marginally more effective version?
That's certainly what you see from looking at the law. However...
Prior art and prior patents don't necessarily invalidate new patents. Patent review requires judgement and knowledge that an examiner may not have and may not havetime to investigate. Once the patent is issued, even if it would be found invalid by most courts, it can still have a chilling effect.
Also, some have claimed that in the pharmaceutical industry, slight changes in formulation that marginally improve effectiveness can allow a new patent on essentially the same substance.
UNMANNED.
Why? Because you coulod build it in a 10th the time. If it doesn't deflect the rock, you would have a second ready to go while a manned plan is still designing the crew module. And believe it or not, we can actually deal with the lag. It's not like the rocket is going to run into something on its way to the asteroid, get blown off course, etc.
There are multiple clocks, multiple mechanisms, all of which point to a consistent approximation of dates. Moreover, even if you question the timing, the sequence is even less questionable.
But maybe it did all happen in the mind of God in an instant, ~6000 years ago. Seems to me we're still studying the mind of God, then. Questioning the motivations of God seems a fool's errand, but God certainly seems to have created a world that is consistent Him setting it up billions of years ago such that it would eventually create humanity, into whom he could breathe souls.
ID could even be considered an insult to God -- "You couldn't set it up to work that way without cheating!" Why do you think God isn't capable of setting up such a universe?
I would check that site, but I think it's a bit out of date:
Posted By: Michael Thomas - 08:00:00 Wed, December 31, 1969
The bulk of the database is complete and I have put up the first of many tools to access the database with.
---
Are those tools magnetic cores or has it advanced to punch cards, I wonder?
(ps: that dress was dried out and now appears in an art gallery in Paris.)
Until some janitor mistakes it for some leftover jerky.
Evolution has plenty of predictive power.
Look in rocks estimated to be 100 million years old? You'll see 100 million year old fossils, with characteristics similar to 110 million year old fossils and 90 million year old fossils. You will not see any interaction with critters from today or from hundreds of millions of years prior. That's a prediction, borne out by fossils discovered long after Darwin proposed his theory. Darwin's theory needed a mechanism, and Watson and Crick discovered its form. And what did we discover? That it behaves exactly as we would expect, that creatures we think evolved from a common ancestor have similar DNA, and so on.
Moreover, it has plenty of predictive power, it just takes longer than most of us are alive for most species. But Bush and co. are proposing spending billions on a prediction that avian flu may mutate to a form that spreads easily to and across species. Sounds like an evolution prediction to me.
I don't understand why people have a a problem with them making a profit.
Not the issue.
Look, they don't charge more for a DVD of a $100 million dollar movie than they do for a $10 million dollar movie. Production cost is largely irrelevant. What we're talking about (mainly) is optimal pricing.
When you have something like digital files, where the per-copy "production" cost is trivial, you have huge flexibility in pricing. $1 a copy may be a better price than $8 if you sell 20 times as many copies. What Sony et al need to figure out is that optimal price, and in so doing, they need to analyze what they're selling against. And they're selling against DVDs, Netflix, Peerflix, libraries, what's on TV, and legal and illegal sharing. You don't have to undercut all of these on price, but you do need to make your product more appealing than the alternatives in enough situations to make it worth it to customers.
It's my judgement and the judgement of others here that $8 is too high. Some here claim it is immorally too high. I disagree, morals are not the issue, competitive pricing is.
At least under U.S. law, I can give you a gift of somewhat more than $10,000 without tax issues. Granted, the IRS would look askance if there was anything that looked like an employer/employee relationship, but I don't think they could see that here.
I'm sure an extremely high percentage of Antarcticans are nerds indeed.
Really? I would have thought an extremely high percentage are penguins.
They're not nerds -- for one thing, they spend their lives outside...
You gotta wonder though, how exactly would other country's laws matter? Someone from Tuvalu creates a cool plug-in, so Gerv and co. ship him a neat gadget. How would any country's cops ever get involved?
Or, if the Moz folks said "we're going to send neat gadgets to the coolest extensions introduced before 1.5 is released", would that avoid the contest issues? That's a declaration of action, not a contest per se.
If you want a cheaper solution than netflix, look into peerflix. No regular fee, just a very low price per DVD, plus time spent mailing ones you're done with. Selection depends on the other folks in the system, and response time isn't super-fast, but if you don't watch that many movies, it's much cheaper than netflix.
I got their email notice the other day and I thought, "who would go through all the trouble of a class action lawsuit just to get approx 3-4 DVD rentals for free[...]"
Nobody. Instead, the plaintiff got $2k, and the lawyers got $2.5 million.
There should be a modification to class action law that limits the lawyers' payment to at most 1/3rd of the cash value of the benefits actually claimed by the class members.
My point being that technologies like wind and solar capture much more energy for a given amount of land used for their production, and often don't have the inefficient intermediate steps (plant->fuel->energy). Solar in particular can make use of otherwise unproductive areas like rooftops (and my mother-in-law, without power since Wilma, would love to have rooftop solar right about now...)
Ultimately we as a society will have to fundamentally change the way we live.
Perhaps, but this isn't an argument for biodiesel over other non-fossil fuel power sources.
In some ways I think Australia may turn out to be the bellwether for alternative power. The Aussies have some uranium, but otherwise they're a net importer of energy. Meanwhile, they have a lot of sunlit land per person, as well has areas like the bay off of Darwin that could house thousands of windmills. It's also in Australia that the massive solar power tower is being planned.
Biodiesel has a big flaw: the efficiency of the production method.
1) Plants aren't that efficient at turning sunlight into energy. They don't really need to be for their purposes, and they ignore certain wavelengths (such as green) altogether.
2) Once you have the plant, you need to turn it into diesel. Again, this is highly inefficient.
3) Once you have diesel, you must turn it into energy. Combustion engines are less efficient than fuel cells or power plant turbines.
Consider how much land we use for farming. Then consider how much more energy our cars use than we do.
Most OSS bowsers have some larger players behind them...
Really? I thought Bowser only had the little Koopa Kids behind him...
I believe the Acura RL's navigation system claims to have real-time traffic monitoring already, and it would definitely be a popular feature in future nav systems.
Out of curiosity, how would you design an experiment that would demonstrate that macro-evolution was false?
Find a t-rex fossil with rat bones in its stomach. Find human fossil remains in rocks that a geologist would tell you is 10 million years old. Find an actual trilobite swimming around.