The Wikipedia article goes to great lengths to explain how the demon can't violate the 2nd law -- that it must delete information, which increases entropy. Okay. But what keeps it from violating the 1st law: that energy is conserved?
Exactly. I'm tired of people jumping to the conclusion that Google used some crude, quickfix solution to googlebombs, like manually removing that particular bomb, or ending the use of links and pagerank. PLEASE -- give them just a teensy weensy bit of credit here. If you really think they just inserted those particular phrases (e.g., "miserable failure") directly into the search engine's code, then please -- try another Googlebomb. If the fix really was just for the known, existing googlebombs, you should have no problem stacking Google's results again. If you can't do that, then do us a favor, and shut the hell up until you know what you're talking about.
Doctors are a monopoly protected from competition. They don't feel they should have to deign to keep up with the latest research. Why should they? What are you gonna do, shop around for another doctor who will make you wait an hour to see him for an appointment in three weeks? They're the "professional"; you're just part of the unwashed masses. Heaven forbid you actually learn about the stuff going into your body.
The ads are a symptom of a more serious problem: that in order to get through to these doctors, pharmas have to dumb down the message and go through patients. I mean, how bad does a doctor have to be to get upstaged by a patient on a regular basis? I see it all the time:
"Well, looks like you're fine. Come back in a month so I can get more from your insurance." "Uh, what about problem X I told you about?" "Oh, it's nothing serious." "Damn straight it's serious. Why else would I have told you? What about the drugs I see on TV, like [example]?" "Well, we can do that, if you want." "What do you mean? You don't even want to bring that up without my prompting?" "Okay, I'll write you a prescription." "Don't you want to check if it's right for me? What are the alternatives?" "Meh." "What am I paying you for?" "The scrip. If we just let people get any drug without proper screening... horrible things could happen!" "You don't say."
It's not that the earth revolves around the sun; it's that the simplest (least informationally complex) model yielding accurate future predictions of the locations of celestial bodies as viewed from the earth, involves describing all planetary motions relative to the sun rather than the earth.
Oh, and one relevant thing I forgot to mention. I can't find the source now, but I believe it was the eminent Bucky Fuller who predicted that if we eliminated the extra effort going towards the "status" or "positional" aspect of the goods we consume, we could satisfy all of our needs PLUS entertainment wants on two hours of work per week. I think that's an exaggeration, of course, but I'd agree a huge fraction is due to zero-sum status games.
The overwhelming majority of the cost of a game now, seems to be having ever-more-detailed graphics, higher-paid actors, etc. If you want innovation in the game structure itself, it shouldn't be costly (it seems), to do a sort of "proof of concept" in Flash or C# or whatever works on a PC, and if that gets popular, then you know that that's the kind of thing gamers want.
Well put, except that I'd say your explanation of the Great Depression is not quite right, but I don't want to drag this too far off topic. There's something more important at play: given that all kinds of scarcity* have been eliminated, why do people keep "encouraging the beast"? As I said in my other post on this story, why don't people actively avoid advertised products, for the precise reasons that they're a) self-serving statements, and b) a clear sign that part of the product value has been diverted to making an ad? Why do people pay more just have the things advertisers have hyped?
It's easy to attribute all of this to the usual suspects, the advertisers, big corporations, etc. It's also wrong. If people were to quit playing this game, it would end overnight. You can't blame advertisers for having the money consumers gave them!
What would happen to you, personally, if you only bought discount products? I'm guessing that if you kept every car 15 years, and bought discount clothes, you'd be "the weird guy". There's a start for your answer.
*I'm using scarcity in the casual sense, not the strict economic sense. I know all the goods he mentioned are still economically scarce. You can shut up now.
Some studies have shown that victims of second-hand punches were twice as likely to die before 85, as those that weren't victims of second-hand punches.
Three words: you don't experience my consciousness, so don't presume to tell me what does or does not bother me.
What is with this focus on whether or not I follow some rote process for reducing energy usage? Why not focus on how much I'm actually using?
I average 300 kwh per month and drive a small car... yet that's not good enough, so you have to make my home's lighting unpleasant as well? Now, I can't even relax at home. Thanks, assholes.
I don't think the distinction between advertising and information is as clear as you (and many others here) like to make it. For example, if I want to inform people about a product that a reasonable person actually might want, how do I present it? Should I present the information in dull, black and white text? Should I spell-check it? Anything beyond the minimum to convey the information would have to be classified as advertising, but it's hard to see how that necessarily makes it bad.
With that in mind, I agree that much of the justification for advertising has withered away with the internet. Community-run sites are much better at helping you figure out what exactly you want, and search engines are much better and finding the various ways to satisfy that particular want. For this reason, advertising has run into a sort of public goods problem: Once they convince you that, (just to grab a random example) fishing is fun, in order to get you to buy their fishing products, you can immediately turn around and find all existing discount fishing supply stores, and thus not have to buy from someone who had to pay for that advertisement. (Parallel to intellectual property there.) And this problem has long existed, but has been amplified by the internet.
Advertising has been a difficult problem for economists. Specifically, if it's really pure waste, why don't people systematically discount their estimations of the quality of products that had to be advertised, since this takes away from what can be devoted to making the product better? Here is a brief summary of the theories. (And a great blog generally.) To that, you can add my theory, that adverising signals that they have money to burn, and thus will be able to afford the judgment if you ever sue them regarding their product.
No. If an old friend or potential client or someone simply interested in your work emails you, that is not spam, even though you didn't ask to receive it. What makes it spam is when it is both unsolicited, and in bulk.
(I appreciate it, but this really doesn't deserve an informative mod.)
"Actually, the stuff in the iPhone was well-documented in radio waves, software, and sound encoding long before Apple. While credit should be delivered for implementing this scheme in a world of already-entrenched smartphones, it falls into the category of age-old telephony. This same scheme is used in the N-Gage -- a product at least 3 or 4 years old.
In a nutshell: cramming a bunch of functions onto one device."
Harvest spice? But I wanted to go down to the Toshi station to pick up some power converters!!!!!!!
Re:Interested....
on
Water From Wind
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Disclaimer: just my guesses:
1. Does this design perform better than other windmill designs (for generation).
No; conventional windmills have long been designed to extract the maximum amount of mechanical work from the air. This new windmill is not designed to do that, and works the same in any wind direction.
2. What will this do to the atmospheric conditions?
Small decrease in humidity.
3. If everyone has one....will it no longer rain?
It will still rain. The windmills couldn't possibly collect all evaporating air in a short radius. Even if they did, clouds call still blow in from over oceans and lakes.
The social situation regarding English is different from money. The problem I cited with money was that its value depends (almost) entirely on others still being willing to accept it. The only other value is as paper.
Is English like this? No. Even if everyone else in the entire world quit speaking English tomorrow, knowing English would still retain significant value for me:
-I can still read all the notes I have written for myself, and all previously written English records in existence. -I can still write new notes to myself and read them. -I can still teach English to others (perhaps those who don't yet know a language). -I can still teach the underlying concepts in English to those using languages that don't have them. Ex: encoding verbal sounds from a 26-character set and their meanings from a vocabulary.
My point was that US dollars don't have this separate value. Gold, on the other hand, has significant uses even when not money. If I'm stuck holding gold when it stops being used as currency, I can salvage most of its value by selling it to e.g. a research university in exchange for whatever the new currency is.
Others in the anthropological field question this identification, arguing that the meter-tall Hobbit was a modern human who had something wrong with her.
Right -- they're the ones that don't get the publicity or funding. Come on, how boring is that -- that the meter-tall body was just an abnormal human? Wouldn't it be so much *cooler* if there were a whole race of these!
"I find it hard to find things to be excited about, given that new rehashes of iWork and iLife are produced each year and it is hard to justify buying each new version, even modestly priced as they are."
Slashdot Mirror
The Wikipedia article goes to great lengths to explain how the demon can't violate the 2nd law -- that it must delete information, which increases entropy. Okay. But what keeps it from violating the 1st law: that energy is conserved?
Exactly. I'm tired of people jumping to the conclusion that Google used some crude, quickfix solution to googlebombs, like manually removing that particular bomb, or ending the use of links and pagerank. PLEASE -- give them just a teensy weensy bit of credit here. If you really think they just inserted those particular phrases (e.g., "miserable failure") directly into the search engine's code, then please -- try another Googlebomb. If the fix really was just for the known, existing googlebombs, you should have no problem stacking Google's results again. If you can't do that, then do us a favor, and shut the hell up until you know what you're talking about.
That cannot be modded high enough.
... horrible things could happen!"
Doctors are a monopoly protected from competition. They don't feel they should have to deign to keep up with the latest research. Why should they? What are you gonna do, shop around for another doctor who will make you wait an hour to see him for an appointment in three weeks? They're the "professional"; you're just part of the unwashed masses. Heaven forbid you actually learn about the stuff going into your body.
The ads are a symptom of a more serious problem: that in order to get through to these doctors, pharmas have to dumb down the message and go through patients. I mean, how bad does a doctor have to be to get upstaged by a patient on a regular basis? I see it all the time:
"Well, looks like you're fine. Come back in a month so I can get more from your insurance."
"Uh, what about problem X I told you about?"
"Oh, it's nothing serious."
"Damn straight it's serious. Why else would I have told you? What about the drugs I see on TV, like [example]?"
"Well, we can do that, if you want."
"What do you mean? You don't even want to bring that up without my prompting?"
"Okay, I'll write you a prescription."
"Don't you want to check if it's right for me? What are the alternatives?"
"Meh."
"What am I paying you for?"
"The scrip. If we just let people get any drug without proper screening
"You don't say."
No, it's .01% -- he uses the Verizon Numerical Convention (VNC).
It's not that the earth revolves around the sun; it's that the simplest (least informationally complex) model yielding accurate future predictions of the locations of celestial bodies as viewed from the earth, involves describing all planetary motions relative to the sun rather than the earth.
Oh, and one relevant thing I forgot to mention. I can't find the source now, but I believe it was the eminent Bucky Fuller who predicted that if we eliminated the extra effort going towards the "status" or "positional" aspect of the goods we consume, we could satisfy all of our needs PLUS entertainment wants on two hours of work per week. I think that's an exaggeration, of course, but I'd agree a huge fraction is due to zero-sum status games.
The overwhelming majority of the cost of a game now, seems to be having ever-more-detailed graphics, higher-paid actors, etc. If you want innovation in the game structure itself, it shouldn't be costly (it seems), to do a sort of "proof of concept" in Flash or C# or whatever works on a PC, and if that gets popular, then you know that that's the kind of thing gamers want.
Well put, except that I'd say your explanation of the Great Depression is not quite right, but I don't want to drag this too far off topic. There's something more important at play: given that all kinds of scarcity* have been eliminated, why do people keep "encouraging the beast"? As I said in my other post on this story, why don't people actively avoid advertised products, for the precise reasons that they're a) self-serving statements, and b) a clear sign that part of the product value has been diverted to making an ad? Why do people pay more just have the things advertisers have hyped?
It's easy to attribute all of this to the usual suspects, the advertisers, big corporations, etc. It's also wrong. If people were to quit playing this game, it would end overnight. You can't blame advertisers for having the money consumers gave them!
What would happen to you, personally, if you only bought discount products? I'm guessing that if you kept every car 15 years, and bought discount clothes, you'd be "the weird guy". There's a start for your answer.
*I'm using scarcity in the casual sense, not the strict economic sense. I know all the goods he mentioned are still economically scarce. You can shut up now.
Some studies have shown that victims of second-hand punches were twice as likely to die before 85, as those that weren't victims of second-hand punches.
I think that pretty much settles it.
*sigh*
...
Let's go through this slowly.
I said there would be three words. Now, let's count them.
Word #1: you
Word #2
Wait.
Oh, I see what you're getting at. Good point, there were more than three words there. I guess that was kinda misleading.
I believe my question was "should", not "is", Drakey.
SMOKING AFFECTS OTHER PEOPLE
Punching affects other people too. Should professional boxing be banned?
(That analogy is better than it may appear on first glance. Please think about it for a minute.)
I'm aware that it doesn't have the same characteristics that annoy me. I'm now aware that they don't annoy me, because they do annoy me. Severely.
Now, go back to using twice the energy I do while claiming moral superiority.
Or, perhaps, that they don't use it as a steady white light source for the entire room.
What's that, Marxist? You're saying that a selfish, human concern like that can possibly override the goal of SAVING THE EARTH? No, it can't be!
Three words: you don't experience my consciousness, so don't presume to tell me what does or does not bother me.
... yet that's not good enough, so you have to make my home's lighting unpleasant as well? Now, I can't even relax at home. Thanks, assholes.
What is with this focus on whether or not I follow some rote process for reducing energy usage? Why not focus on how much I'm actually using?
I average 300 kwh per month and drive a small car
I don't think the distinction between advertising and information is as clear as you (and many others here) like to make it. For example, if I want to inform people about a product that a reasonable person actually might want, how do I present it? Should I present the information in dull, black and white text? Should I spell-check it? Anything beyond the minimum to convey the information would have to be classified as advertising, but it's hard to see how that necessarily makes it bad.
With that in mind, I agree that much of the justification for advertising has withered away with the internet. Community-run sites are much better at helping you figure out what exactly you want, and search engines are much better and finding the various ways to satisfy that particular want. For this reason, advertising has run into a sort of public goods problem: Once they convince you that, (just to grab a random example) fishing is fun, in order to get you to buy their fishing products, you can immediately turn around and find all existing discount fishing supply stores, and thus not have to buy from someone who had to pay for that advertisement. (Parallel to intellectual property there.) And this problem has long existed, but has been amplified by the internet.
Advertising has been a difficult problem for economists. Specifically, if it's really pure waste, why don't people systematically discount their estimations of the quality of products that had to be advertised, since this takes away from what can be devoted to making the product better? Here is a brief summary of the theories. (And a great blog generally.) To that, you can add my theory, that adverising signals that they have money to burn, and thus will be able to afford the judgment if you ever sue them regarding their product.
No. If an old friend or potential client or someone simply interested in your work emails you, that is not spam, even though you didn't ask to receive it. What makes it spam is when it is both unsolicited, and in bulk.
(I appreciate it, but this really doesn't deserve an informative mod.)
Oh, come on, that guy deserves a Funny, not an Offtopic. :-P
"Actually, the stuff in the iPhone was well-documented in radio waves, software, and sound encoding long before Apple. While credit should be delivered for implementing this scheme in a world of already-entrenched smartphones, it falls into the category of age-old telephony. This same scheme is used in the N-Gage -- a product at least 3 or 4 years old.
:-P
In a nutshell: cramming a bunch of functions onto one device."
Make sure to read the context of it.
Harvest spice? But I wanted to go down to the Toshi station to pick up some power converters!!!!!!!
Disclaimer: just my guesses:
1. Does this design perform better than other windmill designs (for generation).
No; conventional windmills have long been designed to extract the maximum amount of mechanical work from the air. This new windmill is not designed to do that, and works the same in any wind direction.
2. What will this do to the atmospheric conditions?
Small decrease in humidity.
3. If everyone has one....will it no longer rain?
It will still rain. The windmills couldn't possibly collect all evaporating air in a short radius. Even if they did, clouds call still blow in from over oceans and lakes.
The social situation regarding English is different from money. The problem I cited with money was that its value depends (almost) entirely on others still being willing to accept it. The only other value is as paper.
Is English like this? No. Even if everyone else in the entire world quit speaking English tomorrow, knowing English would still retain significant value for me:
-I can still read all the notes I have written for myself, and all previously written English records in existence.
-I can still write new notes to myself and read them.
-I can still teach English to others (perhaps those who don't yet know a language).
-I can still teach the underlying concepts in English to those using languages that don't have them. Ex: encoding verbal sounds from a 26-character set and their meanings from a vocabulary.
My point was that US dollars don't have this separate value. Gold, on the other hand, has significant uses even when not money. If I'm stuck holding gold when it stops being used as currency, I can salvage most of its value by selling it to e.g. a research university in exchange for whatever the new currency is.
Others in the anthropological field question this identification, arguing that the meter-tall Hobbit was a modern human who had something wrong with her.
Right -- they're the ones that don't get the publicity or funding. Come on, how boring is that -- that the meter-tall body was just an abnormal human? Wouldn't it be so much *cooler* if there were a whole race of these!
"I find it hard to find things to be excited about, given that new rehashes of iWork and iLife are produced each year and it is hard to justify buying each new version, even modestly priced as they are."
There, now the opinion is more realistic.