Not really. Parasites exist in most systems and represent a legitimate (though culturally reprehensible) strategy in game theory, economics, etc.
That's true, but I think the parent was referring to the lawsuit lottery mentality whereby people dream of ways to snare wealthy corporations by suing them in unanticipated ways and thus get rich. In the US, no jury's findings are binding on another's, so if the first jury says, "placing a warning this way would have sufficed", and the corporation switches to that way, the next jury is free to rape it again for insufficient warning. Plus, juries are likely to rule out of sympathy ("Well, the doctor didn't really do anything wrong, but gee, it would really suck to be the patient now, and gosh, those insurance companies sure have unlimited money, so what the hell...") or desire for fame ("Hey, we can't get on Oprah unless we rule against the big evil corporation, and gosh, isn't that plaintiff's attorney so sweet the way he smiles...").
Does it happen in other countries? Sure, but not nearly as often. For example, Japan has a similarly developed economy but only a fraction of the lawyers per capita and "investment" in the legal system.
To many, this behavior is wrong (it certainly introduces greater inefficiencies), but at a minimal level, it provides the benefit of killing off the weak.
Well, it provides the "benefit" of killing off those who are weak *along a certain dimension*, but being weak along that dimension rarely means you're a drain on the economy somehow. Sure, Mr. Viklstein can't defend his bank against arsonists, but that doesn't mean he's a drain on the economy.
That said, I agree there should be a sort of "loser pays" system for frivolous suits like you've suggested.
Good idea. Remember, it's harder to defend a court order preventing a technology from being distributed if the only damages are loss of revenue, which is easy to correct later if it turns out it really infringes a patent. In other words, a "patent"holder will never ABSOLUTELY need the infringement to stop RIGHT NOW.
Also, it would be nice if a patent could be voided on the grounds that it was deliberately worded to obscure similarity to prior art.
If you don't cave to sponsors, you don't exist. I know it sucks, and I really hate that it is true, however something is better then nothing in my mind, and we do need more outlets for indy devs to get some recognition.
The problem was not that they used sponsors, or even that they obeyed the sponsors' demands, but rather, that they maintained a pretense that the sponsors would not have veto power strong enough to compromise the objectivity of the contest.
I haven't read all the fine print in the contest, so if it actually said somewhere something like "We reserve the right to disqualify a contestant at any stage at a sponsor's discretion", I stand corrected.
I can accept that war is always morally wrong by the latter standard, and it's not an unreasonably definition.
Actually, it is an unreasonable definition, because it basically says (for some circumstances), "everything you do is morally wrong." What was the GP's alternative? Well, none. He claimed the US *should* have gone to war. So, er, what was the purpose of deciding if it's morally wrong, again?
Yes, a morally wrong action may be the correct action to take if you're forced to do it to prevent something morally worse.
You know, it probably would have saved us a lot of time if you had just said upfront you were playing word games. "War is always wrong, and the US should have gone to war, but that doesn't mean they should have, but sometimes you should do something that you shouldn't, or else you'll be acting immorally."
What would Dominoes Pizza have against Brokeback Mountain? Is this like on the Simpsons? "We don't know if non-standard families eat our pizza, and quite frankly, we don't want to know."
Probably as soon as more than five people there can afford it. Though, you could get it earlier by buying from a street vendor, i.e., where you buy everything else. So no harm, no foul.
Incompressibility of a material is mediated by the electromagnetic force arising from the charges inside and between the atoms comprising a material. As such there is a fundamental limit to the magnitude of the incompressibility. You can always push those electrons closer together (until they disappear on you, creating a shower of new particles).
Okay, but I don't see how that answers my question. Why, specifically, can't the level of compressibility fall to such a level fall to that which allows compression waves to propogate faster than light (I know, I know, "light would travel in a vacuum")? Remember, at no point would a particle have to move faster than c.
"Speed of sound" simply refers to the speed of propagation of compression waves. The point was this: if I had a completely "incompressible" row of particles, and I push on one end, I could (again, in theory) cause them all to move as a mass. So even though each particle moved at the speed of the push, the information that it was pushed, traveled instantly. The fact that the particles moved slowly doesn't have anything to do with the information transmission.
This would be a good opportunity for someone to explain why it's impossible to fabricate a material with a high enough incompressibility that its local speed of sound exceeds that of light. That is, specifically what fundamental principle would you have to violate in the process.
That's too bad. Because I just explained to you why environmentalists are more interested in shutting down "big business" than simply assessing them their true quotal share of the costs.
There are tons of direct subsidies, which are well documented, so saying "there are no subsidies for oil producers" is wrong.
I could refute it line by line, but I know you probably haven't bothered to seriously read the stuff in that link yourself. You can hurl links at me all day long and I'll spend 20x as much time refuting them, only for you to move on to the next link. Nevertheless, it's the same crock: 1) The "tax subsidy" is simply because the oil industry has unusual structuring of capital expenses; any other industry with the same kinds of projects would be treated the same way. 2) Roads are a subsidy to transportation, *irresepective* of the fuel source of that transportation, and therefore cannot be counted as an oil subsidy; and they're are already paid for through taxes. Yes, there's a shortfall; this is due to expenditures on underused roads. 3) The sales tax bit is flat out wrong. The federal tax alone is more than the typical state sales tax.
Our Middle East policy has always been about two things: oil and Israel....
Completely non-responsive to the point I made. From the fact that leaders *believe* a Middle Eastern presence secures access to oil, it does not follow that they are correct or that it is necessary. Imagine that -- government officials being in error!
In 2003, as the Bush administration was telling us what a jolly grand war we'd be having, one of their main arguments was that it could be done cheaply; Iraqi oil revenues would finance both liberation and reconstruction. (Just as an aside, we shouldn't forget that we were the ones who destroyed Iraq's infrastructure, then placed an embargo so that they couldn't rebuild, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths in the process.)
Your parenthetical refutes your point. The oil revenues would just cover the cost of war. So where's the net gain in oil?
I don't know the particulars of how all the other countries you mention conduct their international affairs, but they probably get their oil the old-fashioned way: by asking for it, and offering some sort of goods and services in return.
DING DING DING DING DING DING DING! You're exactly right: you can get all the oil you want from these places simply by paying the market rate. Hence, no troops necessary. Hence, troops are not a true cost of getting oil. Hence, not having troop costs embedded in the price of oil is not a subsidy.
I'll set aside the fact that I only said the oil industry wanted to believe in infinity, not the market as a whole.
You said, "The market doesn't want to believe that oil (or any resource, for that matter) is finite." In fairness, I knew you had no clue what you were talking about, so I'll just look past that one.
Your arguments run up against what I consider one of the biggest flaws of the current markets: betting against something is much, much harder than betting in favor of something. For example, if I believe that the stock market as a whole is overvalued, how do I invest so as to take advantage of that fact? The financial tools just don't exist. But if I believe the stock market will keep going up, I'll just buy into an index fund.
Now tell me, how would I "short oil?"
Are you not listening? I told you to go LONG on oil. (See sig.) You can do that simply by buying an energy sector index fund. (You are familiar with those, right? Since after all, you'd never spout off on a topic like this without being informed.) Since you seriously know what you're talking about and seriously believe that current market prices do not accurately reflect the future scarcity of oil, then when this unanticipated oil shortage happens and oil becomes a really hot commodity, the value
That's my point -- the gangsta thug quite clearly does not care about his hearing. Last Friday I was stopped at a light with my windows down and this thug's music was so loud that, even with my windows down, it was *still* unbearably loud. I'm sure these same people wouldn't mind too terribly the noise such an engine would make, the concerns of others be damned.
Next time I'm in that situation, I swear, I will stand right in front of his car until he grows up.
The fact is, a bunch of 2+ year old systems wasn't any "saturating the market" or providing any competition at all.
Oh, I know, I know, when you said competition, you meant "real", "serious" competition. Not, in other words, the Saturn or the Sega CD or the CDi or the 3DO or the Turbo Duo or the Neo Geo. You meant the real, SOLID systems. Just like when you were saying that no Scotsman eats porridge, you were only referring to the true Scotsmen, not like, Angus. Sure, Angus eats porridge, but think about it -- he can't even play the bagpipes!
It really wasn't that hard to see where the market was going a few months after launch, even 10 years ago.
1) So build machines plant trees to act as carbon sinks. Fund this by charging each CO2 producer, including people who burn wood, in proportion to emissions. No one wants this, because everyone would laugh at how little they'd be paying. And the purpose of environmentalism was never to save the environment but to shut down "big business".
2) There are no subsidies for oil producers. The alleged impact on foreign policy says more about the policy makers than about the impact of oil. Fact: Singapore, Switzerland, China, Japan, South Africa, and India manage to import Middle Eastern oil without putting troops there. The cost of troops is not a true cost of getting the oil. If anything, a military presence impedes the flow of oil.
3) What a crock. Markets efficiently allocate goods intertemporally as well. It's called a "futures market". Look it up. Markets don't "believe" oil is infinite; prices already reflect current knowledge of just how finite oil is. If you really believe in that Peak Oil crap, go long on oil.
You can't put an effective muffler on a turbine engine. Most drivers would be unwilling to wear hearing protection to drive to their local Safeway. Plus, the vehicle would violate many city's noise ordinances.
Apparently, you haven't been stopped at a light near some thug playing his gangsta tunes as loud and as deep as he possibly can.
Whatever ordinances you're talking about, they're not enforced.
The original Playstation didn't have any strong competition until the N64 came which by that time, was doing just fine.
What are you counting as strong competition? At the time of the original PS, it had to compete with the Saturn, Sega CD, CD-i, Turbo Duo, 3DO, Jaguar, and Neo Geo. The point is, it was a very saturated market, and the PS didn't have much momentum initially.
No one will have "Won" or "Lost" until sometime in 2008 but (as far as I know) no company has recovered from a poor start when there was strong competition
What about the original Playstation? From what I remember, it had a slow start, in an environment where there were lots of competitors using CD media, but gradually won out.
It's a negative feedback loop, and the stronger it is, the more they'll need to do to counter it. (An AAA+++ title or a huge price cut or both)
On that note, is there anything to the rumor that MGS4 could be ported to the Xbox 360? I bet MS could crush the PS3 in its infancy if they lured MGS4 and maybe the next Final Fantasy by offering the developers zero licensing fees, which wouldn't be much of a sacrifice since they weren't planning to get license revenue from either of them in the first place.
Scripting in SL has a steep learning curve and many people who do building in SL avoid scripting because it is such a pain.
I'm sure a lot of people avoid it altogether since they don't like programming. But when I tried it, it was pretty easy. Just like C++ with a few extra functions you have to learn. Within minutes I was scripting listening bugs, "throwing" my voice by naming objects after players and having them make offensive remarks, and setting up an automatic bank to game the SL welfare system. Now, granted, this was back in '03, so they may have made it harder since then specifically because you could do things like that.
Slashdot Mirror
Not really. Parasites exist in most systems and represent a legitimate (though culturally reprehensible) strategy in game theory, economics, etc.
That's true, but I think the parent was referring to the lawsuit lottery mentality whereby people dream of ways to snare wealthy corporations by suing them in unanticipated ways and thus get rich. In the US, no jury's findings are binding on another's, so if the first jury says, "placing a warning this way would have sufficed", and the corporation switches to that way, the next jury is free to rape it again for insufficient warning. Plus, juries are likely to rule out of sympathy ("Well, the doctor didn't really do anything wrong, but gee, it would really suck to be the patient now, and gosh, those insurance companies sure have unlimited money, so what the hell...") or desire for fame ("Hey, we can't get on Oprah unless we rule against the big evil corporation, and gosh, isn't that plaintiff's attorney so sweet the way he smiles...").
Does it happen in other countries? Sure, but not nearly as often. For example, Japan has a similarly developed economy but only a fraction of the lawyers per capita and "investment" in the legal system.
To many, this behavior is wrong (it certainly introduces greater inefficiencies), but at a minimal level, it provides the benefit of killing off the weak.
Well, it provides the "benefit" of killing off those who are weak *along a certain dimension*, but being weak along that dimension rarely means you're a drain on the economy somehow. Sure, Mr. Viklstein can't defend his bank against arsonists, but that doesn't mean he's a drain on the economy.
That said, I agree there should be a sort of "loser pays" system for frivolous suits like you've suggested.
Good idea. Remember, it's harder to defend a court order preventing a technology from being distributed if the only damages are loss of revenue, which is easy to correct later if it turns out it really infringes a patent. In other words, a "patent"holder will never ABSOLUTELY need the infringement to stop RIGHT NOW.
Also, it would be nice if a patent could be voided on the grounds that it was deliberately worded to obscure similarity to prior art.
The earth is actually older than 6,000 years.
*please mod informative, please mod informative*
If you don't cave to sponsors, you don't exist. I know it sucks, and I really hate that it is true, however something is better then nothing in my mind, and we do need more outlets for indy devs to get some recognition.
The problem was not that they used sponsors, or even that they obeyed the sponsors' demands, but rather, that they maintained a pretense that the sponsors would not have veto power strong enough to compromise the objectivity of the contest.
I haven't read all the fine print in the contest, so if it actually said somewhere something like "We reserve the right to disqualify a contestant at any stage at a sponsor's discretion", I stand corrected.
I can accept that war is always morally wrong by the latter standard, and it's not an unreasonably definition.
Actually, it is an unreasonable definition, because it basically says (for some circumstances), "everything you do is morally wrong." What was the GP's alternative? Well, none. He claimed the US *should* have gone to war. So, er, what was the purpose of deciding if it's morally wrong, again?
Yes, a morally wrong action may be the correct action to take if you're forced to do it to prevent something morally worse.
You know, it probably would have saved us a lot of time if you had just said upfront you were playing word games. "War is always wrong, and the US should have gone to war, but that doesn't mean they should have, but sometimes you should do something that you shouldn't, or else you'll be acting immorally."
*falls out of chair*
What would Dominoes Pizza have against Brokeback Mountain? Is this like on the Simpsons? "We don't know if non-standard families eat our pizza, and quite frankly, we don't want to know."
Oh, come on, +3 Funny? He's had, what, seven years now to think that joke up? How long do you think he's been saving it for?
Probably as soon as more than five people there can afford it. Though, you could get it earlier by buying from a street vendor, i.e., where you buy everything else. So no harm, no foul.
What about when they want to hold an inflationary currency?
Incompressibility of a material is mediated by the electromagnetic force arising from the charges inside and between the atoms comprising a material. As such there is a fundamental limit to the magnitude of the incompressibility. You can always push those electrons closer together (until they disappear on you, creating a shower of new particles).
Okay, but I don't see how that answers my question. Why, specifically, can't the level of compressibility fall to such a level fall to that which allows compression waves to propogate faster than light (I know, I know, "light would travel in a vacuum")? Remember, at no point would a particle have to move faster than c.
"Speed of sound" simply refers to the speed of propagation of compression waves. The point was this: if I had a completely "incompressible" row of particles, and I push on one end, I could (again, in theory) cause them all to move as a mass. So even though each particle moved at the speed of the push, the information that it was pushed, traveled instantly. The fact that the particles moved slowly doesn't have anything to do with the information transmission.
The question is about the transmission of information, not particles. And "speed of sound" is not an expression I just made up.
This would be a good opportunity for someone to explain why it's impossible to fabricate a material with a high enough incompressibility that its local speed of sound exceeds that of light. That is, specifically what fundamental principle would you have to violate in the process.
I'm not dignifying this with a response.
...
That's too bad. Because I just explained to you why environmentalists are more interested in shutting down "big business" than simply assessing them their true quotal share of the costs.
There are tons of direct subsidies, which are well documented, so saying "there are no subsidies for oil producers" is wrong.
I could refute it line by line, but I know you probably haven't bothered to seriously read the stuff in that link yourself. You can hurl links at me all day long and I'll spend 20x as much time refuting them, only for you to move on to the next link. Nevertheless, it's the same crock: 1) The "tax subsidy" is simply because the oil industry has unusual structuring of capital expenses; any other industry with the same kinds of projects would be treated the same way. 2) Roads are a subsidy to transportation, *irresepective* of the fuel source of that transportation, and therefore cannot be counted as an oil subsidy; and they're are already paid for through taxes. Yes, there's a shortfall; this is due to expenditures on underused roads. 3) The sales tax bit is flat out wrong. The federal tax alone is more than the typical state sales tax.
Our Middle East policy has always been about two things: oil and Israel.
Completely non-responsive to the point I made. From the fact that leaders *believe* a Middle Eastern presence secures access to oil, it does not follow that they are correct or that it is necessary. Imagine that -- government officials being in error!
In 2003, as the Bush administration was telling us what a jolly grand war we'd be having, one of their main arguments was that it could be done cheaply; Iraqi oil revenues would finance both liberation and reconstruction. (Just as an aside, we shouldn't forget that we were the ones who destroyed Iraq's infrastructure, then placed an embargo so that they couldn't rebuild, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths in the process.)
Your parenthetical refutes your point. The oil revenues would just cover the cost of war. So where's the net gain in oil?
I don't know the particulars of how all the other countries you mention conduct their international affairs, but they probably get their oil the old-fashioned way: by asking for it, and offering some sort of goods and services in return.
DING DING DING DING DING DING DING! You're exactly right: you can get all the oil you want from these places simply by paying the market rate. Hence, no troops necessary. Hence, troops are not a true cost of getting oil. Hence, not having troop costs embedded in the price of oil is not a subsidy.
I'll set aside the fact that I only said the oil industry wanted to believe in infinity, not the market as a whole.
You said, "The market doesn't want to believe that oil (or any resource, for that matter) is finite." In fairness, I knew you had no clue what you were talking about, so I'll just look past that one.
Your arguments run up against what I consider one of the biggest flaws of the current markets: betting against something is much, much harder than betting in favor of something. For example, if I believe that the stock market as a whole is overvalued, how do I invest so as to take advantage of that fact? The financial tools just don't exist. But if I believe the stock market will keep going up, I'll just buy into an index fund.
Now tell me, how would I "short oil?"
Are you not listening? I told you to go LONG on oil. (See sig.) You can do that simply by buying an energy sector index fund. (You are familiar with those, right? Since after all, you'd never spout off on a topic like this without being informed.) Since you seriously know what you're talking about and seriously believe that current market prices do not accurately reflect the future scarcity of oil, then when this unanticipated oil shortage happens and oil becomes a really hot commodity, the value
That's my point -- the gangsta thug quite clearly does not care about his hearing. Last Friday I was stopped at a light with my windows down and this thug's music was so loud that, even with my windows down, it was *still* unbearably loud. I'm sure these same people wouldn't mind too terribly the noise such an engine would make, the concerns of others be damned.
Next time I'm in that situation, I swear, I will stand right in front of his car until he grows up.
The fact is, a bunch of 2+ year old systems wasn't any "saturating the market" or providing any competition at all.
Oh, I know, I know, when you said competition, you meant "real", "serious" competition. Not, in other words, the Saturn or the Sega CD or the CDi or the 3DO or the Turbo Duo or the Neo Geo. You meant the real, SOLID systems. Just like when you were saying that no Scotsman eats porridge, you were only referring to the true Scotsmen, not like, Angus. Sure, Angus eats porridge, but think about it -- he can't even play the bagpipes!
It really wasn't that hard to see where the market was going a few months after launch, even 10 years ago.
I know. The past is rather predictable like that.
1) So build machines plant trees to act as carbon sinks. Fund this by charging each CO2 producer, including people who burn wood, in proportion to emissions. No one wants this, because everyone would laugh at how little they'd be paying. And the purpose of environmentalism was never to save the environment but to shut down "big business".
2) There are no subsidies for oil producers. The alleged impact on foreign policy says more about the policy makers than about the impact of oil. Fact: Singapore, Switzerland, China, Japan, South Africa, and India manage to import Middle Eastern oil without putting troops there. The cost of troops is not a true cost of getting the oil. If anything, a military presence impedes the flow of oil.
3) What a crock. Markets efficiently allocate goods intertemporally as well. It's called a "futures market". Look it up. Markets don't "believe" oil is infinite; prices already reflect current knowledge of just how finite oil is. If you really believe in that Peak Oil crap, go long on oil.
You can't put an effective muffler on a turbine engine. Most drivers would be unwilling to wear hearing protection to drive to their local Safeway. Plus, the vehicle would violate many city's noise ordinances.
Apparently, you haven't been stopped at a light near some thug playing his gangsta tunes as loud and as deep as he possibly can.
Whatever ordinances you're talking about, they're not enforced.
I think the way it's supposed to work is that you fit the theory to the facts, not the other way around.
The original Playstation didn't have any strong competition until the N64 came which by that time, was doing just fine.
What are you counting as strong competition? At the time of the original PS, it had to compete with the Saturn, Sega CD, CD-i, Turbo Duo, 3DO, Jaguar, and Neo Geo. The point is, it was a very saturated market, and the PS didn't have much momentum initially.
No one will have "Won" or "Lost" until sometime in 2008 but (as far as I know) no company has recovered from a poor start when there was strong competition
What about the original Playstation? From what I remember, it had a slow start, in an environment where there were lots of competitors using CD media, but gradually won out.
It's a negative feedback loop, and the stronger it is, the more they'll need to do to counter it. (An AAA+++ title or a huge price cut or both)
On that note, is there anything to the rumor that MGS4 could be ported to the Xbox 360? I bet MS could crush the PS3 in its infancy if they lured MGS4 and maybe the next Final Fantasy by offering the developers zero licensing fees, which wouldn't be much of a sacrifice since they weren't planning to get license revenue from either of them in the first place.
Also, on this one, I think sales numbers would be *less* reliable because they may double-count a sale if a failed scalper returns it.
(Yes, I do know someone like that.)
Scripting in SL has a steep learning curve and many people who do building in SL avoid scripting because it is such a pain.
I'm sure a lot of people avoid it altogether since they don't like programming. But when I tried it, it was pretty easy. Just like C++ with a few extra functions you have to learn. Within minutes I was scripting listening bugs, "throwing" my voice by naming objects after players and having them make offensive remarks, and setting up an automatic bank to game the SL welfare system. Now, granted, this was back in '03, so they may have made it harder since then specifically because you could do things like that.