The difference is that we have evidence that there is one (semi)intelligent species of life in the galaxy. If there is one, there might reasonably be another one. Simple induction would lead us to conclude this.
We have no such evidence for a god. Without evidence for the first instance of god, what is rational?
If the market were free to determine the price of software, it would be a very low price. People at large don't see tangible value in something that can be copied at the cost of a couple of joules of electrical energy.
I'm sorry, that just doesn't make sense. First, the market does determine the price of software. If you want to be precise, the software market is an oligopolistic one, with few providers, but very real limits to what can be charged for the product. To see this, envision MSFT charging $10,000/PC for windows. If they did that, the PC market would shrink to nothing, because the value received by a casual user doesn't warrant the expense. MSFT has actually driven the cost of OS and productivity software down very low, to where it's actually perceived by the average non geek as being pretty reasonable. You can see this through the bundled sales of Office through channels like Dell and HP, where it's a discretionary purchase, but volume is still high.
The cost of replication of software is indeed tiny. The cost of creation of software is of course, much higher. The cost of replication has always been miniscule in relation to the overall cost of production, and has never affected the value proposition for software. Even back in the day, when a copy of VMS, for example, was shipped on a tape that cost $50, the cost of the tape was minor in relation to the overall cost of the system.
Your argument is essentially saying that, since stealing is easy and cheap, it should invalidate the price that a vendor wants to charge. It's easy and cheap to take GPL licensed work, strip it of the copyright info, and sell it for your own profit. By your logic, that should make it OK to do so. Similarly, it's quite easy to steal your car, and quite cheap for a criminal to do so. Does that make it right?
We may not like MSFT, but for better or worse, they spent a lot of money developing their products. It's completely moral and valid for them to charge what the market will bear for the product, and no more moral for someone to steal their product (through unauthorized replication) than it is for someone to steal your car. If you don't want to pay MSFT, use another product.
and those guys shooting at me in Afghanistan were all peaceful farmers and herdsmen defending their homeland from the imperialist invaders!
Um, were they in your back yard, or were you in theirs? I'm not dissing the original mission in Afghanistan, but it's not hard for me to understand why some folks that had nothing to do with the Taliban might resent our presence there. I wish we'd bring you and your buddies home. Soon.
I traveled from Seattle to Tuscon recently. I neglected to remove a swiss army knife from my day pack. It passed through security Xray with flying colors. This was a mid sized pocket knife with about a 3" blade.
I regularly leave a metal golf ball mark repairing tool in my pocket to see if the detector goes off. It's a piece of metal about 1/2" x 3". Kind of like a knife blade. In about 12 attempts now, I have -never- had the detector go off. The range of airports includes Chicago, Seatac, Denver, Phoenix, Atlanta, Dallas/forth wirth*, Honolulu and San Francisco.
I beg to differ, somewhat. The good news is that while telephony used to be a natural monopoly, technology has intervened and created competition. You have cell phone and internet based VoIP for voice, you've got DSL, cable, clearwire, verizon Fios and satellite for internet. While it's not a fully open market, the number of offerings is enough to be putting price and service pressure on the various players. I'm cautiously hopeful that the consumer will ultimately benefit.
If porn caused sexual activity, we should see a lot of data to that effect. If anything, we see the opposite. Barriers to access to porn have efectively vanished (see this. (NSFW) It's free, it's -widely- available to anyone with access to a computer, and the quality is quite good. If porn cases sexual violence, we should be seeing an epidemic of sexual violence, as more and more people have satisfied their urges. Instead, sexual violence rates have declined in recent years in the US, along with all violent crime. For data, see this.
I recall reading some study a while back that in the case of sexual offenders in particular, they found that access to porn reduced likelihood of reoffense. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is as surprising as finding that masturbation satisfies sexual urges.
As to pot leading to hard drugs, if you believe that old canard, then you're a hopeless case. I won't waste bandwidth refuting this.
In moderation it's not harmful, but excessive exposure can be damaging.
Um, sez who? You and your baptist minister? Perhaps you can look to Denmark for evidence - porn is freely available, has been for a long time. Perhaps their low sex crime rates are evidence of porn causing a harmful repression of initiative, or...?;-)
I would submit that anyone that pornogrpahic material can 'harm' has already been harmed by some other cause. People with anything resembling a healthy mental state are not moved to violent acts by pictures. I further submit that children are not harmed by porn. Having had a certain amount of exposure from the time I was 12, I feel qualified to comment that until you are old enough to care about sex, porn is uninteresting, and then once you -are- old enough, it tends to lead to fairly predictable behavior. If masturbation strikes you as illegal and dangerous, perhaps porn is harmful. But few will agree with you, I'm afraid.
Why would we pay all this money for these fancy machines when we have to basically fall back on a paper ballot system to make sure they're reliable?
Because if you have an electronic system that you trust, you can tabulate the results immediately, and do some other useful cross checks quickly (number of votes compared to number of voters registered, etc).
While I understand the caution of the/. community on this issue, I am eager to see the country get to an electronic approach. Further, I'd like to see it distributed and delivered via the web, to increase voter convenience and thus participation. I fully realize the challenges involved, but I don't think we should cease trying to do something, just because it's hard.
Well, I like antique firearms as well. I just don't carry them.;-)
I've never been much of a fan of the 1911. They seem to require too much extra lovin' in order to perform well, as you note through your purchase of aftermarket magazines. My Taurus PT-140 shot reliably and accurately straight from the box, and cost half of what a bottom line quality 1911 would.
If I was using a full size pistol, the H&K USP in.40 S&W gets my vote.
The issue with a gold standard is that it limits the supply of money to the availability of gold. If your economy wants to grow faster than the available gold, your currency supply will constrain the growth, which will cause prices to fall. This gets reflected in wages, and what happens is that the average person ends up earning fewer nominal dollars as time goes on. It's the reverse of what the US has seen over the last 30 years, where you borrowed money in year x, and paid it off with cheaper dollars in year x+n.
Every decision you make in monetary policy benefits someone. Choosing a gold standard would benefit those holding dollar denominated assets, at the expense of people earning wages/salaries at current price levels. Inflationary monetary policy has the opposite effect.
Ron Paul and other gold bugs' fatal misunderstanding is that allowing the money supply to grow in a controlled manner greases the wheels of the economy, and is necessary. Good monetary policy manages that growth to the same rate as that of the underlying economic growth.
The real issue in the US isn't the stability of the dollar, it's that our deficit spending and trade deficit are out of control.
[Bucking for an off-topic mod] and packs a.45 (best caliber ever!
The.45 acp has been shown to suck heavily as a handgun cartridge for self defence. See this. It over pentrates, most 1911's won't feed anything but hardball, and the actual stoppage rate is lower than even a 9mm. Plus the size of the cartridge limits magazine capacity.
The.40 S&W is where it's at, Bill's choice not withstanding. That's why all the cops carry them these days.
BTW, I agree with you about Bill Richardson.
(this should prove to our foreign readers that we -are- all crazy gun nuts over here.)
I believe Edgar Dijkstra said it well: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." Profilers exist for a reason, which is that in significant systems, it can be hard to predict where the system and users will spend all their time. It's not economic for a project to optimize everything, all the time. Nor should you - the job is to get good work done. A slow, correct routine is often just fine, for my work at least.
Yeah, but that sender phone number is programmed into the machine, and can be set to -any- phone number. To check what number the fax really came from, you;d need to check the ANI information on the call (caller ID). That information often doesn't correspond to the actual number of the fax, if the fax is routed through a PBX.
Fax machines were not widely used in the 70's. It was the mid 80's when they became cheap enough to become ubiquitous. I distinctly remember the President of my company getting one in the 80's, probably around 1984, because he was bragging to all his buddies that didn't have one yet. It was a bit of a white elephant for a while, because the only person he could fax anything to was the lawyers, as no-one else had them.
I started using email regularly in about '92. So I'd guess faxes have about an 8 year jump on email.
My understanding (based on the contracts I have worked with over the years) is that this condition isn't a legal condition, but rather something that is specified in the agreements between companies. Our contracts specifically call out that faxed approvals are sufficient, and newer contracts say the same about e-mail. This is working with financial institutions on matters such as project approvals and change control approvals.
I wouldn't do this for big deals involving large amounts of money (exceeding 6 or 7 figures), but I for one don't worry too much about an email approval.
9000 servers * 500 watts/server =~ 4.5 megawatts, just for server power. AC probably adds 25-50%. So, for a high level estimate, 6 megawatts, or, at 120 volts, a 50,000 amp service.
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Lawyers represent thier client, but they are first and foremost Officers of the Court. Their first duty is to the court, and then to their client.
While I understand that this is how it is supposed to be, one has to ask, how much does The Court pay them, in comparison to what their clients pay?
The difference is that we have evidence that there is one (semi)intelligent species of life in the galaxy. If there is one, there might reasonably be another one. Simple induction would lead us to conclude this.
We have no such evidence for a god. Without evidence for the first instance of god, what is rational?
He'd have to first go learn something about economics.
If the market were free to determine the price of software, it would be a very low price. People at large don't see tangible value in something that can be copied at the cost of a couple of joules of electrical energy.
I'm sorry, that just doesn't make sense. First, the market does determine the price of software. If you want to be precise, the software market is an oligopolistic one, with few providers, but very real limits to what can be charged for the product. To see this, envision MSFT charging $10,000/PC for windows. If they did that, the PC market would shrink to nothing, because the value received by a casual user doesn't warrant the expense. MSFT has actually driven the cost of OS and productivity software down very low, to where it's actually perceived by the average non geek as being pretty reasonable. You can see this through the bundled sales of Office through channels like Dell and HP, where it's a discretionary purchase, but volume is still high.
The cost of replication of software is indeed tiny. The cost of creation of software is of course, much higher. The cost of replication has always been miniscule in relation to the overall cost of production, and has never affected the value proposition for software. Even back in the day, when a copy of VMS, for example, was shipped on a tape that cost $50, the cost of the tape was minor in relation to the overall cost of the system.
Your argument is essentially saying that, since stealing is easy and cheap, it should invalidate the price that a vendor wants to charge. It's easy and cheap to take GPL licensed work, strip it of the copyright info, and sell it for your own profit. By your logic, that should make it OK to do so. Similarly, it's quite easy to steal your car, and quite cheap for a criminal to do so. Does that make it right?
We may not like MSFT, but for better or worse, they spent a lot of money developing their products. It's completely moral and valid for them to charge what the market will bear for the product, and no more moral for someone to steal their product (through unauthorized replication) than it is for someone to steal your car. If you don't want to pay MSFT, use another product.
I believe the 9th covers it.
and those guys shooting at me in Afghanistan were all peaceful farmers and herdsmen defending their homeland from the imperialist invaders!
Um, were they in your back yard, or were you in theirs? I'm not dissing the original mission in Afghanistan, but it's not hard for me to understand why some folks that had nothing to do with the Taliban might resent our presence there. I wish we'd bring you and your buddies home. Soon.
I traveled from Seattle to Tuscon recently. I neglected to remove a swiss army knife from my day pack. It passed through security Xray with flying colors. This was a mid sized pocket knife with about a 3" blade.
I regularly leave a metal golf ball mark repairing tool in my pocket to see if the detector goes off. It's a piece of metal about 1/2" x 3". Kind of like a knife blade. In about 12 attempts now, I have -never- had the detector go off. The range of airports includes Chicago, Seatac, Denver, Phoenix, Atlanta, Dallas/forth wirth*, Honolulu and San Francisco.
Airport security is worthless.
*obligatory weak nerd humor
I beg to differ, somewhat. The good news is that while telephony used to be a natural monopoly, technology has intervened and created competition. You have cell phone and internet based VoIP for voice, you've got DSL, cable, clearwire, verizon Fios and satellite for internet. While it's not a fully open market, the number of offerings is enough to be putting price and service pressure on the various players. I'm cautiously hopeful that the consumer will ultimately benefit.
Woosh! Here's your sign.
Um, I think you're making my point for me.
If porn caused sexual activity, we should see a lot of data to that effect. If anything, we see the opposite. Barriers to access to porn have efectively vanished (see this. (NSFW) It's free, it's -widely- available to anyone with access to a computer, and the quality is quite good. If porn cases sexual violence, we should be seeing an epidemic of sexual violence, as more and more people have satisfied their urges. Instead, sexual violence rates have declined in recent years in the US, along with all violent crime. For data, see this.
I recall reading some study a while back that in the case of sexual offenders in particular, they found that access to porn reduced likelihood of reoffense. Not to put too fine a point on it, this is as surprising as finding that masturbation satisfies sexual urges.
As to pot leading to hard drugs, if you believe that old canard, then you're a hopeless case. I won't waste bandwidth refuting this.
In moderation it's not harmful, but excessive exposure can be damaging.
;-)
Um, sez who? You and your baptist minister? Perhaps you can look to Denmark for evidence - porn is freely available, has been for a long time. Perhaps their low sex crime rates are evidence of porn causing a harmful repression of initiative, or...?
I would submit that anyone that pornogrpahic material can 'harm' has already been harmed by some other cause. People with anything resembling a healthy mental state are not moved to violent acts by pictures. I further submit that children are not harmed by porn. Having had a certain amount of exposure from the time I was 12, I feel qualified to comment that until you are old enough to care about sex, porn is uninteresting, and then once you -are- old enough, it tends to lead to fairly predictable behavior. If masturbation strikes you as illegal and dangerous, perhaps porn is harmful. But few will agree with you, I'm afraid.
95% of rapists have viewed porn. 100% of rapists were given milk as a child. Clearly we should also ban milk.
Sheesh, what passes for a math and logic education these days...
Why would we pay all this money for these fancy machines when we have to basically fall back on a paper ballot system to make sure they're reliable?
/. community on this issue, I am eager to see the country get to an electronic approach. Further, I'd like to see it distributed and delivered via the web, to increase voter convenience and thus participation. I fully realize the challenges involved, but I don't think we should cease trying to do something, just because it's hard.
Because if you have an electronic system that you trust, you can tabulate the results immediately, and do some other useful cross checks quickly (number of votes compared to number of voters registered, etc).
While I understand the caution of the
but if the only evidence presented at the case was the odd behavior you would be found not-guilty
Unless you're black or hispanic and live in Texas.
Let me guess, she thinks it's all in the patient's mind, and she has a special program for dealing with it...
You are smart. You will make our people strong.
There just isn't much more classic than the 1911.
;-)
.40 S&W gets my vote.
Well, I like antique firearms as well. I just don't carry them.
I've never been much of a fan of the 1911. They seem to require too much extra lovin' in order to perform well, as you note through your purchase of aftermarket magazines. My Taurus PT-140 shot reliably and accurately straight from the box, and cost half of what a bottom line quality 1911 would.
If I was using a full size pistol, the H&K USP in
The issue with a gold standard is that it limits the supply of money to the availability of gold. If your economy wants to grow faster than the available gold, your currency supply will constrain the growth, which will cause prices to fall. This gets reflected in wages, and what happens is that the average person ends up earning fewer nominal dollars as time goes on. It's the reverse of what the US has seen over the last 30 years, where you borrowed money in year x, and paid it off with cheaper dollars in year x+n.
Every decision you make in monetary policy benefits someone. Choosing a gold standard would benefit those holding dollar denominated assets, at the expense of people earning wages/salaries at current price levels. Inflationary monetary policy has the opposite effect.
Ron Paul and other gold bugs' fatal misunderstanding is that allowing the money supply to grow in a controlled manner greases the wheels of the economy, and is necessary. Good monetary policy manages that growth to the same rate as that of the underlying economic growth.
The real issue in the US isn't the stability of the dollar, it's that our deficit spending and trade deficit are out of control.
[Bucking for an off-topic mod] .45 (best caliber ever!
.45 acp has been shown to suck heavily as a handgun cartridge for self defence. See this. It over pentrates, most 1911's won't feed anything but hardball, and the actual stoppage rate is lower than even a 9mm. Plus the size of the cartridge limits magazine capacity.
.40 S&W is where it's at, Bill's choice not withstanding. That's why all the cops carry them these days.
and packs a
The
The
BTW, I agree with you about Bill Richardson.
(this should prove to our foreign readers that we -are- all crazy gun nuts over here.)
I believe Edgar Dijkstra said it well: "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." Profilers exist for a reason, which is that in significant systems, it can be hard to predict where the system and users will spend all their time. It's not economic for a project to optimize everything, all the time. Nor should you - the job is to get good work done. A slow, correct routine is often just fine, for my work at least.
Yeah, but that sender phone number is programmed into the machine, and can be set to -any- phone number. To check what number the fax really came from, you;d need to check the ANI information on the call (caller ID). That information often doesn't correspond to the actual number of the fax, if the fax is routed through a PBX.
Fax machines were not widely used in the 70's. It was the mid 80's when they became cheap enough to become ubiquitous. I distinctly remember the President of my company getting one in the 80's, probably around 1984, because he was bragging to all his buddies that didn't have one yet. It was a bit of a white elephant for a while, because the only person he could fax anything to was the lawyers, as no-one else had them.
I started using email regularly in about '92. So I'd guess faxes have about an 8 year jump on email.
My understanding (based on the contracts I have worked with over the years) is that this condition isn't a legal condition, but rather something that is specified in the agreements between companies. Our contracts specifically call out that faxed approvals are sufficient, and newer contracts say the same about e-mail. This is working with financial institutions on matters such as project approvals and change control approvals.
I wouldn't do this for big deals involving large amounts of money (exceeding 6 or 7 figures), but I for one don't worry too much about an email approval.
9000 servers * 500 watts/server =~ 4.5 megawatts, just for server power. AC probably adds 25-50%. So, for a high level estimate, 6 megawatts, or, at 120 volts, a 50,000 amp service.
I completely agree.