This kind of energy theft is why, whenever I am flying, I like finishing a bottle of water at altitude, sealing the lid good and tight and then opening it back at ground level. I feel I'm just doing my bit to spread the entropy.
A guy who has already built his reputation and established his "above wage earning" credentials in the industry wants all those that have yet to acquire that valuable resource to stop trying, or at least to start earning wages and preserve the satus quo that has served him so well so far.
Well unless the letter was a very elegant piece of irony (and I doubt it). He should STFU and help these young subversives bring down the pillars of the temple that has so elegantly enslaved us all. Ok that last bit is a little severe but it's pretty close.
No, the Mars thing is the many worlds thing. We, for all are faults have some outward looking characteristics. Couple this with the pretty classic zero, one or many nature of most things and you realise that if we can find two planets around our sun that have (or had) life then we know that as far as life is concerned we are in the many domain. Whoa. That is huge. If we know that we are in the many domain, then the search for other intelligent life becomes much more a search for life supporting suns than life supporting planets and that is a big deal, because we care about what is out there.
All this use of Free Software by institutions, government or not, where ever they may be is just iteration 1 of this process. Here they use FS to wring the extraordinary profit out of Microsoft etc and then the next iteration, they wring the margin out and then the final iteration they wring all the profit out. And then Free Software wins. Along the way FS might even get a few actual wins.
Do be mistaken, this process will take a number of years, maybe even a decade. But it will happen and I will run into the street and cheer when it does..
But beyond even that, India's break from colonialism was driven by a movement to reject external products and focus on the "internal" resources of India. In particular, the cotton industry.
The parallel with Free Software is powerful. I am not sure just how Ghandi's movement is viewed in today's India, but if is positive then this is an agenda that should be very successful at allowing India to once again internalise the proceeds of their economy, a very powerful tool in an economy such as theirs.
Until Linux is a complete entertainment package as well as a utility package, Linux will be hard pressed to take over the desktop.
I used to kind of agree, or rather I was resigned to it. But the number of cross console game titles of the last two years has made me change my mind. I reckon that it won't be long before we see "Available for Playstation2/XBox/GameCube/PC CD/Linux" appearing on games.
Notice the one big difference? There is no universal "stamp" that one could give a linux game to make that process verifyable. Perhaps that is something we should look at trying to define.
I believe that we should institute a "voucher" system. Everytime a child gets beaten up or abused for the stupid name their parents gave them, they should get a voucher, that they can redeem at a later date when they can return the beating to their parents with the interest it deserves.
Thankfully, the Moonunits and Dweezels of this world are limited, but there is no limit to fsking stupid names being dished out (you Americans and your "verb for a name" fixation. Come on! It's not hard, Skip and Chuck and Randy they are all _verbs_ m'kay and it is nouns that are the naming words. Remember?). A little work by the parents will stop the Kings naming their son Wayne or Joe (same goes for the Kerrs) and it should never be the burden of the daughter of Mr and Mrs Weir to be called Susan because children can be so cruel.
Clearly there can be cultural and circumstancial exemptions for the partents, one cannot blame a parent of a boy born befor about 1976 for the name Damien, though subsequent births need a good explanation.
But in general, parents, it is neither funny, nor cute, nor interesting to be burdened with a name that cause merriment amongst others at your expense for the formative years of your life.
And no, I am not so burdened, so this is not a vengeful rant. But I do know of a Wayne King and a Richard Face as well as a (non Scandic) Rune amongst others.
Classic example from Yes, Minister. About getting the desired result by asking the right questions (cut and paste of the quote from http://www.asmallvictory.net/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=1879);
Sir Humphrey: "You know what happens: nice young lady comes up to you. Obviously you want to create a good impression, you don't want to look a fool, do you? So she starts asking you some questions: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the number of young people without jobs?" Bernard Woolley: "Yes" Sir Humphrey: "Are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers?" Bernard Woolley: "Yes" Sir Humphrey: "Do you think there is a lack of discipline in our Comprehensive schools?" Bernard Woolley: "Yes" Sir Humphrey: "Do you think young people welcome some authority and leadership in their lives?" Bernard Woolley: "Yes" Sir Humphrey: "Do you think they respond to a challenge?" Bernard Woolley: "Yes" Sir Humphrey: "Would you be in favour of reintroducing National Service?" Bernard Woolley: "Oh...well, I suppose I might be." Sir Humphrey: "Yes or no?" Bernard Woolley: "Yes" Sir Humphrey: "Of course you would, Bernard. After all you told you can't say no to that. So they don't mention the first five questions and they publish the last one." Bernard Woolley: "Is that really what they do?" Sir Humphrey: "Well, not the reputable ones no, but there aren't many of those. So alternatively the young lady can get the opposite result." Bernard Woolley: "How?" Sir Humphrey: "Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the danger of war?" Bernard Woolley: "Yes" Sir Humphrey: "Are you worried about the growth of armaments?" Bernard Woolley: "Yes" Sir Humphrey: "Do you think there is a danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill?" Bernard Woolley: "Yes" Sir Humphrey: "Do you think it is wrong to force people to take up arms against their will?" Bernard Woolley: "Yes" Sir Humphrey: "Would you oppose the reintroduction of National Service?" Bernard Woolley: "Yes" Sir Humphrey: "There you are, you see Bernard. The perfect balanced sample."
There is *NO* news source out there that you could say does not have a 'side' to a story.
you are right in the sense of editorial opinion, but the issue with the BBC is that it's charter demands that it gives unbiased coverage, that means that if they do provide an "article" that is covering one viewpoint then they are under a fairly strict obligation to provide access to the alternative view. Now this is no perfect world so it does not work perfectly but the BBC is pretty unbiased when it comes to most news coverage
The difficult thing in this case is that the organisation is the subject of the news story itself. A very difficult position. There is a very fine line that it must pursue and it is one that it largely pursues well. There are other such issues, it's just that this one strikes so fundamentally at the heart of how the current Uk government has fscked up in its duty to the public particularly with respect to its use of non public service and non elected people in the process of government. They were so horrified at the way the last labour government got presented to the public that they went way overboard doctoring every emission from the channels of government to be "on message" and "controlled" by head office that they lost sight of their duty. The Kelly case is a tragic example of this and it is my great fear that the lumps that the BBC will take for their handling of a very difficult situation (where the government essentially accused them of lying and making statements without evidence, when the evidence was from the person in question, Dr Kelly, who subsequently killed himself [conspiracy theories aside]) will only serve to detract from the disgraceful way the current government has handled itself over the last two terms, culminating in the naming of this source of information about the dubious nature of the Iraqi "45 minutes to launch chemical weapons" claim and the tragic consequences.
Now I am totally in support of this kind of development, but it presents an interesting scenario.
Opposing forces have mined their no man's land. One force plans action in a couple of months and so plants the flower to reveal the mines. The other force notices and pumps out a whole bunch of defoliant to kill the flowers, everyone dies in 20 years from the defoliant.
Unfortunately it's a lot easier to deflect a blow if the guy spins around first, you have a lot more time to react.
True, but with a light sabre, its cutting power means that a lateral sweep must be defended, lest even if you jab your opponent in the face (killing him) you will still get cut in half by the momentum of the blade after he (or she) is dead. My point was not that the blow should be harder to deflect by all the faffing, but rather that it is only by using the faffing that one can draw ones opponent out of the "predict" everything phase into one where the opponent is reacting to your moves and thus opening up a chance for a move they can neither predict nor defend.
After all, what's the point of doing any kind of spin or wind-up movement... to build up more momentum which doesn't even affect an energy beam?
Well, here's a thought. Jedi's ability to "feel" the force (remember the drone whose laser bolts LS deflects in his novice training in ANH) means that all the spinning and stuff is necessary to even attempt to defeat their ability to put the light sabre in the right place at the right time to deflect a blow. Now, I am not trying to offer a "coherent" defence of all the faffing around, but just that it is _plausible_ that such dynamism is necessary in order to create the opportunity for an attack at some point during the fight.
For god's sake there were only three seasons of TOS and they were mostly shit as well. Modern day US television is like Starbucks, they just keep increasing the content until the marginal return starts to fall and then they know they have wrung every dollar they can out of the idea/franchise/theme and they move on.
Don't misunderstand, I am not dissing Star Trek per se, but it is so rare for a US series to leave the audience wanting more, they make 2 - 4 times as many episodes per year as any other country and they make as many years as they can rather than stopping once they have had enough of the writing.
And there's the rub. Most US shows are team written whilst most (non-soap) shows in the UK, at least, are artist written, once the writers become bored/stale the show ends or even once their commission ends, the show is over. Again, not a criticism of the team method per se, but it certainly changes the dynamic of the content when writers can come and go regularly during a series.
Whilst I used to drive a lot and there was a reversse parking (or parallel parking as you call it) component to my driving test, I have only sporadically driven a car for the last seven years and even then only when I am in Australia.
I remember once going to a formerly regular haunt of mine, a cafe, and being presented with the option of reverse parking up a hill, right in front of the cafe, or just nosing into an illegal park on the other side of the (one way) road. I took the easy option and parked on the other side of the road (thankfully no ticket) but even had I been booked, it would have been a small price compared to the enourmous risk of failing miserably to do the reverse park and losing so much face that I could not have even gone into the cafe.
Sometimes the reward just isn't worht the humiliation. Their aint a lot of shame in not being able to reverse park (IMHO).
Close, but I think a previous poster had it closer. As I understand the HP and IBM pitch (and I have seen the HP pitch). You buy a big box from them which has lots of CPU/Disk/bandwidth and they plug in the CPU/Disk/bandwidth meter to the box. You pay for the amount of CPU/disk/bandwidth you use per period.
It is a very interesting model. Why? Well because under it, computing resources are like electricity. You pay for what you use and the kit they sell you is like the grid with all kinds of excess capacity built in so that they can feed your need when you need it without making you take the bit capital hit up front. Why does it work for them? Well because of the way hardware is going the marginal cost of shipping an extra CPU in the box is decreasing disproportionally faster than the marginal benefit of the extra CPU worth of power _at the most convenient time_ (that last bit is _real_ important).
Even more so, like you suggest in your post, as the problems of breaking computation down into the local/machine room/local region become solved, they can ship the box out of your machine room into the region and they can decrease the marginal cost of deployment by spreading it accross your business and the one next door, mapping processes to servers so that your peak times don't coincide. And you will already be comfortable with your monthly bill of FLOPS/Mb/Gb hours.
I figure it is the only way they can come close to arresting the slide in marginal revenue for computation power.
Please do not misunderstand, I am in no way making any implication about the actual existence or otherwise and prevalence of any of the P(AHD) conditions or whether they are or are not disorders. But, if we are accept that ther has been an increase in the reported cases then we have to ask why. Either there is an actual increase in the incidence or an increase in the circumstances that are interpreted as being an incidence when previously they wre not.
Let us assume that there is no actual increase in incidence, and that apart from the misdiagnoses, there are a number of sets of circumstances (I don't even want to use thw word symptoms) that are now being called ADD or whatever and that number is increased. How were these people "treated" before. Well I think that a huge number of them were socialised into modifying their behaviour. I hear all the people saying, "you can't know unless you can understand my complete inability to concentrate", well look at life in the 19th century. Go down a coal mine and fail to concentrate, either it will make no difference, your coworkers will beat the crap out of you for not helping them meet quota or you will die becuase you forgot to sure up the shaft. Same thing goes for social situations. Children were seen and not heard. The corporal punishment so often involved in abberant behaviour was a massive incentive to control the behaviour. Similarly the need for these people to be able to concentrate on life challenges or starve made them "self treating" (perhaps that lead to a lot of self medicating as well but I think more often not).
So what? I heare you cry. Well I think that the lives of a lot of these sufferers would have been pretty miserable. But then their actual lives were pretty miserable as well and so the fact that concentrating was impossible or they couldn't get along in school were luxuries that simply paled into insiginifcance given the shitful nature of their day to day lives. They found their happiness in other ways and buried the pain of their ADD or whatever along with the pain of blacking factory or the clerking rooms.
I think there are a number of features of modern life that become "problems" as a luxury of prosperity. I view ADD as one of them. I am not saying that the old ways were better, I mean a 19th century non middle classed life was pretty diabolical, but that socialisation meant that these circumstances just did not appear on the radar as problems. I think the same could be made to work today. Socialisation is the answer to ADD. For proof of this look to an analysis of the incidence of ADD behaviour _as a problem_ in different cultures. In th the pacific islands do they have the same incidence rates? What about Singapore, China, Sudan? Surely a positive variance would suggest that culture is a better treatment than drugs.
Now the only question is, is there anything there that I want to listen to?
I would go so far as to take 20$ from my wallet and pick the least objectionable $20 worth of stuff just to be able to use the example to fsck off the DRM weenies. In fact I probably will.
In short, there's no capital because it's all been bloody spent, and then some! Not because someone's sitting on it.
Your analysis is interesting, largely because it is true:-), but the issue of debt is not so simple. In continental Europe, business is funded to a large degree by debt. That is when a company wants money to expand, they issue bonds. In the UK, the US and other "British decendent" economies however, business expansion is largely driven by the raising of capital via shares and other non-debt related vehicles. The origins of this distinction are uncertain but very interesting, might it relate to the nature of the industrial revolution in the UK? Maybe the role of bankers in the non democratic states of europe? Who can say.
But the reality is that capital is handled very differently in these economies and so the debt feature of the European ecnomies is not a perfect example of their problems when comparing to the US and the UK. More importantly, debt is a critical feature of captialism and a very important factor in growth levels. The issues are very important and certainly beyond the scope of/. however, as examples, look at the countries with virtually no foreign debt (say Norway I would guess) and then a country like Australia where they have just examined the issue of "closing" the government debt market because they have the opportunity to eliminate (for all intents and purposes) their government debt or at least lower to a level where a market in that debt becomes impossible (report). They decided against it because, amongst other things, having a government debt market serves a useful economic purpose to help control the economy. Much like the control rods of the reactors on which this article is based:-).
So debt isn't quite the evil that the original poster made out.
the blame is really with our whole capitalist system that demands shareholder value at all costs
I am sorry but that is such a crock. First of all your phrase "shareholder value" is so general as to be meaningless. Market capitalisation of listed companies is built on two ideas; dividend income from operating profitable businesses and amortised values of future earnings, largely through growth. Funnily enough both these factors are also definitions of shareholder value. Look at the PE of a banking stock compared to say a biotech stock.
Capitalism is built upon a number of simple principles, one of which is risk versus return. History shows so many examples of capital investing in risky projects and generating the appropriate return when those projects succeed. The entire rail industry in the 19th century was essentially privately funded. Would "shareholder value at any cost" have been able to justify those projects?
If there is a criticism to be levelled at shareholders today, it is the fact that they have failed to accept risk and return and in fact you could argue that it is risk averse investors that are driving the lack of forsight in the flows of capital. It is pretty tough to blame capitalism as a whole. Certainly one cannot blame Capitalisms principle of "shareholder value at all costs" since no such principle exists.
Please note. That is not to say that Capitalism does not have problems, just that they are not the one you mention.
First, the whole Blade Runner thing about how (amongst other things) the only time you see the sun is at the end once the revelation has been made and how the director is saying this and that. The reality of where the closing scene came from just highlights the idiocy of PM analysis.
The second is a film (the name of which escapes me) where the final third is in B&W and the PMistas draw all kinds of meaning from this, the reality is that the film makers ran out of money and colour stock so they finished it with B&W. No meaning, no nothing.
Er, no. People want something for a fair price. What is a fair price is a good question, but regardless of the answer there is one reality and that is that over time the price of content approaches zero. For different bits of content, the times at which this marginal change takes place vary, but the reality is that once content is no longer timely then the price tends towards zero. Want proof? See how much you have to pay for stock prices delayed by 20 minutes. Then see how much a real time price feed is. The difference? Timeliness.
Music, movies, everything - no different. The metric of when this zero pricing starts, changes but not the reality. For movies it probably starts about a year after it is "released". Go and ask a distributor to show the ROI over time for their product. Even with their bullshit anti-competitive behaviour it is still true.
b) People want something before it's officially made available.
Officially, Ofsmishilly, they made the fscking DVD available in HK 2 years ago, they just don't think there is enough of a market in the US to justify and official release, but can you just buy the HK version and use in the US? No, because of the freakin' regional encoding (replace countries and times with parameters of your choosing and the statement will still be true). The whole parallel importing thing is just reaching offensive levels at the moment. The industry is trying so hard to screw over consumers, the line will soon be crossed. Watch cdWow for the battlefield.
c) People want to impress other people with something they have but the other's don't.
Some people just have small dicks, they have to have something to compensate. Better this than have them driving Porsches, makes the world a safer place IYAM.
Piracy (and it really is such a bad word) exists because the price at which the product is offered does not reflect its actual value and bad law is in place to force the price. On top of that most people are enourmously price sensitive to these products, they will take a shitty copy of a movie camcordered from a screening for nothing, but if you offer them a legit copy, for 2$ they still won't pay because it is the zero cost that makes the product purchasable. This is not the same as what you said "People want something for nothing", but rather it is true that, for some things, people will take a thing if it costs nothing, but that same thing at any price over zero has no utility. Given that they are already paying for their broadband connections the marginal cost of this movie or that song, is zero. Mind you, there are a number of purchasers that are not so price sensitive to the acquisition of this content and so they will pay something for a legit version, but the vast majority of those people are being frozen out of the market because the content creators are still above their utility level in the vast majority of cases. But even then, some not, because DVD and CD are still being sold. The issue is that the model the industry uses to determine price is so contrary to the realities of their product that they will continue to suffer until they work it out. And, no, $0.99 a song is not the right price, just better than $10.00 for 15 songs, 12 of which you don't want.
As for your list of things to do. I follow 'em all. Plus, I don't buy DVD at all (anymore) since I will not play their stupid game of funding their crusade against my rights of fair use. I am unable to resist going to the cinema, but at least the cinema owner gets (some microscopic at times) part of my money and I never go in the first few weeks to try and make sure they get the most possible, but I am close on boycotting it totally. Plus I don't download priated material. Sure, I have less amenity in my life than I would have if the industry sorted itself out, but I simply will not fund their erosion of my rights to use my purchases as I wish.
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This kind of energy theft is why, whenever I am flying, I like finishing a bottle of water at altitude, sealing the lid good and tight and then opening it back at ground level. I feel I'm just doing my bit to spread the entropy.
A guy who has already built his reputation and established his "above wage earning" credentials in the industry wants all those that have yet to acquire that valuable resource to stop trying, or at least to start earning wages and preserve the satus quo that has served him so well so far.
Well unless the letter was a very elegant piece of irony (and I doubt it). He should STFU and help these young subversives bring down the pillars of the temple that has so elegantly enslaved us all. Ok that last bit is a little severe but it's pretty close.
No, the Mars thing is the many worlds thing. We, for all are faults have some outward looking characteristics. Couple this with the pretty classic zero, one or many nature of most things and you realise that if we can find two planets around our sun that have (or had) life then we know that as far as life is concerned we are in the many domain. Whoa. That is huge. If we know that we are in the many domain, then the search for other intelligent life becomes much more a search for life supporting suns than life supporting planets and that is a big deal, because we care about what is out there.
All this use of Free Software by institutions, government or not, where ever they may be is just iteration 1 of this process. Here they use FS to wring the extraordinary profit out of Microsoft etc and then the next iteration, they wring the margin out and then the final iteration they wring all the profit out. And then Free Software wins. Along the way FS might even get a few actual wins.
Do be mistaken, this process will take a number of years, maybe even a decade. But it will happen and I will run into the street and cheer when it does..
But beyond even that, India's break from colonialism was driven by a movement to reject external products and focus on the "internal" resources of India. In particular, the cotton industry.
The parallel with Free Software is powerful. I am not sure just how Ghandi's movement is viewed in today's India, but if is positive then this is an agenda that should be very successful at allowing India to once again internalise the proceeds of their economy, a very powerful tool in an economy such as theirs.
Until Linux is a complete entertainment package as well as a utility package, Linux will be hard pressed to take over the desktop.
I used to kind of agree, or rather I was resigned to it. But the number of cross console game titles of the last two years has made me change my mind. I reckon that it won't be long before we see "Available for Playstation2/XBox/GameCube/PC CD/Linux" appearing on games.
Notice the one big difference? There is no universal "stamp" that one could give a linux game to make that process verifyable. Perhaps that is something we should look at trying to define.
D'oh (standard logic error, my bad, ok so it's and adjective, I meant none of [...] are nouns). Thank you and good night. :-)
When I first started reading the article, I figured they were talking about New York versus California.
Never a truer word spoken about cultural differences.
I believe that we should institute a "voucher" system. Everytime a child gets beaten up or abused for the stupid name their parents gave them, they should get a voucher, that they can redeem at a later date when they can return the beating to their parents with the interest it deserves.
Thankfully, the Moonunits and Dweezels of this world are limited, but there is no limit to fsking stupid names being dished out (you Americans and your "verb for a name" fixation. Come on! It's not hard, Skip and Chuck and Randy they are all _verbs_ m'kay and it is nouns that are the naming words. Remember?). A little work by the parents will stop the Kings naming their son Wayne or Joe (same goes for the Kerrs) and it should never be the burden of the daughter of Mr and Mrs Weir to be called Susan because children can be so cruel.
Clearly there can be cultural and circumstancial exemptions for the partents, one cannot blame a parent of a boy born befor about 1976 for the name Damien, though subsequent births need a good explanation.
But in general, parents, it is neither funny, nor cute, nor interesting to be burdened with a name that cause merriment amongst others at your expense for the formative years of your life.
And no, I am not so burdened, so this is not a vengeful rant. But I do know of a Wayne King and a Richard Face as well as a (non Scandic) Rune amongst others.
Classic example from Yes, Minister. About getting the desired result by asking the right questions (cut and paste of the quote from http://www.asmallvictory.net/mt/mt-comments.cgi?en try_id=1879);
Sir Humphrey: "You know what happens: nice young lady comes up to you. Obviously you want to create a good impression, you don't want to look a fool, do you? So she starts asking you some questions: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the number of young people without jobs?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think there is a lack of discipline in our Comprehensive schools?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think young people welcome some authority and leadership in their lives?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think they respond to a challenge?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Would you be in favour of reintroducing National Service?"
Bernard Woolley: "Oh...well, I suppose I might be."
Sir Humphrey: "Yes or no?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Of course you would, Bernard. After all you told you can't say no to that. So they don't mention the first five questions and they publish the last one."
Bernard Woolley: "Is that really what they do?"
Sir Humphrey: "Well, not the reputable ones no, but there aren't many of those. So alternatively the young lady can get the opposite result."
Bernard Woolley: "How?"
Sir Humphrey: "Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the danger of war?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Are you worried about the growth of armaments?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think there is a danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Do you think it is wrong to force people to take up arms against their will?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "Would you oppose the reintroduction of National Service?"
Bernard Woolley: "Yes"
Sir Humphrey: "There you are, you see Bernard. The perfect balanced sample."
A classic.
There is *NO* news source out there that you could say does not have a 'side' to a story.
you are right in the sense of editorial opinion, but the issue with the BBC is that it's charter demands that it gives unbiased coverage, that means that if they do provide an "article" that is covering one viewpoint then they are under a fairly strict obligation to provide access to the alternative view. Now this is no perfect world so it does not work perfectly but the BBC is pretty unbiased when it comes to most news coverage
The difficult thing in this case is that the organisation is the subject of the news story itself. A very difficult position. There is a very fine line that it must pursue and it is one that it largely pursues well. There are other such issues, it's just that this one strikes so fundamentally at the heart of how the current Uk government has fscked up in its duty to the public particularly with respect to its use of non public service and non elected people in the process of government. They were so horrified at the way the last labour government got presented to the public that they went way overboard doctoring every emission from the channels of government to be "on message" and "controlled" by head office that they lost sight of their duty. The Kelly case is a tragic example of this and it is my great fear that the lumps that the BBC will take for their handling of a very difficult situation (where the government essentially accused them of lying and making statements without evidence, when the evidence was from the person in question, Dr Kelly, who subsequently killed himself [conspiracy theories aside]) will only serve to detract from the disgraceful way the current government has handled itself over the last two terms, culminating in the naming of this source of information about the dubious nature of the Iraqi "45 minutes to launch chemical weapons" claim and the tragic consequences.
Now I am totally in support of this kind of development, but it presents an interesting scenario.
Opposing forces have mined their no man's land. One force plans action in a couple of months and so plants the flower to reveal the mines. The other force notices and pumps out a whole bunch of defoliant to kill the flowers, everyone dies in 20 years from the defoliant.
Nice.
Unfortunately it's a lot easier to deflect a blow if the guy spins around first, you have a lot more time to react.
True, but with a light sabre, its cutting power means that a lateral sweep must be defended, lest even if you jab your opponent in the face (killing him) you will still get cut in half by the momentum of the blade after he (or she) is dead. My point was not that the blow should be harder to deflect by all the faffing, but rather that it is only by using the faffing that one can draw ones opponent out of the "predict" everything phase into one where the opponent is reacting to your moves and thus opening up a chance for a move they can neither predict nor defend.
After all, what's the point of doing any kind of spin or wind-up movement... to build up more momentum which doesn't even affect an energy beam?
Well, here's a thought. Jedi's ability to "feel" the force (remember the drone whose laser bolts LS deflects in his novice training in ANH) means that all the spinning and stuff is necessary to even attempt to defeat their ability to put the light sabre in the right place at the right time to deflect a blow. Now, I am not trying to offer a "coherent" defence of all the faffing around, but just that it is _plausible_ that such dynamism is necessary in order to create the opportunity for an attack at some point during the fight.
For god's sake there were only three seasons of TOS and they were mostly shit as well. Modern day US television is like Starbucks, they just keep increasing the content until the marginal return starts to fall and then they know they have wrung every dollar they can out of the idea/franchise/theme and they move on.
Don't misunderstand, I am not dissing Star Trek per se, but it is so rare for a US series to leave the audience wanting more, they make 2 - 4 times as many episodes per year as any other country and they make as many years as they can rather than stopping once they have had enough of the writing.
And there's the rub. Most US shows are team written whilst most (non-soap) shows in the UK, at least, are artist written, once the writers become bored/stale the show ends or even once their commission ends, the show is over. Again, not a criticism of the team method per se, but it certainly changes the dynamic of the content when writers can come and go regularly during a series.
Whilst I used to drive a lot and there was a reversse parking (or parallel parking as you call it) component to my driving test, I have only sporadically driven a car for the last seven years and even then only when I am in Australia.
I remember once going to a formerly regular haunt of mine, a cafe, and being presented with the option of reverse parking up a hill, right in front of the cafe, or just nosing into an illegal park on the other side of the (one way) road. I took the easy option and parked on the other side of the road (thankfully no ticket) but even had I been booked, it would have been a small price compared to the enourmous risk of failing miserably to do the reverse park and losing so much face that I could not have even gone into the cafe.
Sometimes the reward just isn't worht the humiliation. Their aint a lot of shame in not being able to reverse park (IMHO).
Close, but I think a previous poster had it closer. As I understand the HP and IBM pitch (and I have seen the HP pitch). You buy a big box from them which has lots of CPU/Disk/bandwidth and they plug in the CPU/Disk/bandwidth meter to the box. You pay for the amount of CPU/disk/bandwidth you use per period.
It is a very interesting model. Why? Well because under it, computing resources are like electricity. You pay for what you use and the kit they sell you is like the grid with all kinds of excess capacity built in so that they can feed your need when you need it without making you take the bit capital hit up front. Why does it work for them? Well because of the way hardware is going the marginal cost of shipping an extra CPU in the box is decreasing disproportionally faster than the marginal benefit of the extra CPU worth of power _at the most convenient time_ (that last bit is _real_ important).
Even more so, like you suggest in your post, as the problems of breaking computation down into the local/machine room/local region become solved, they can ship the box out of your machine room into the region and they can decrease the marginal cost of deployment by spreading it accross your business and the one next door, mapping processes to servers so that your peak times don't coincide. And you will already be comfortable with your monthly bill of FLOPS/Mb/Gb hours.
I figure it is the only way they can come close to arresting the slide in marginal revenue for computation power.
Thanks for the suggestion, I do like "The Twin" and have some previous work, so I guess I shall have to try the "Boards of Canada" offering.
Please do not misunderstand, I am in no way making any implication about the actual existence or otherwise and prevalence of any of the P(AHD) conditions or whether they are or are not disorders. But, if we are accept that ther has been an increase in the reported cases then we have to ask why. Either there is an actual increase in the incidence or an increase in the circumstances that are interpreted as being an incidence when previously they wre not.
Let us assume that there is no actual increase in incidence, and that apart from the misdiagnoses, there are a number of sets of circumstances (I don't even want to use thw word symptoms) that are now being called ADD or whatever and that number is increased. How were these people "treated" before. Well I think that a huge number of them were socialised into modifying their behaviour. I hear all the people saying, "you can't know unless you can understand my complete inability to concentrate", well look at life in the 19th century. Go down a coal mine and fail to concentrate, either it will make no difference, your coworkers will beat the crap out of you for not helping them meet quota or you will die becuase you forgot to sure up the shaft. Same thing goes for social situations. Children were seen and not heard. The corporal punishment so often involved in abberant behaviour was a massive incentive to control the behaviour. Similarly the need for these people to be able to concentrate on life challenges or starve made them "self treating" (perhaps that lead to a lot of self medicating as well but I think more often not).
So what? I heare you cry. Well I think that the lives of a lot of these sufferers would have been pretty miserable. But then their actual lives were pretty miserable as well and so the fact that concentrating was impossible or they couldn't get along in school were luxuries that simply paled into insiginifcance given the shitful nature of their day to day lives. They found their happiness in other ways and buried the pain of their ADD or whatever along with the pain of blacking factory or the clerking rooms.
I think there are a number of features of modern life that become "problems" as a luxury of prosperity. I view ADD as one of them. I am not saying that the old ways were better, I mean a 19th century non middle classed life was pretty diabolical, but that socialisation meant that these circumstances just did not appear on the radar as problems. I think the same could be made to work today. Socialisation is the answer to ADD. For proof of this look to an analysis of the incidence of ADD behaviour _as a problem_ in different cultures. In th the pacific islands do they have the same incidence rates? What about Singapore, China, Sudan? Surely a positive variance would suggest that culture is a better treatment than drugs.
Now the only question is, is there anything there that I want to listen to?
I would go so far as to take 20$ from my wallet and pick the least objectionable $20 worth of stuff just to be able to use the example to fsck off the DRM weenies. In fact I probably will.
In short, there's no capital because it's all been bloody spent, and then some! Not because someone's sitting on it.
Your analysis is interesting, largely because it is true :-), but the issue of debt is not so simple. In continental Europe, business is funded to a large degree by debt. That is when a company wants money to expand, they issue bonds. In the UK, the US and other "British decendent" economies however, business expansion is largely driven by the raising of capital via shares and other non-debt related vehicles. The origins of this distinction are uncertain but very interesting, might it relate to the nature of the industrial revolution in the UK? Maybe the role of bankers in the non democratic states of europe? Who can say.
But the reality is that capital is handled very differently in these economies and so the debt feature of the European ecnomies is not a perfect example of their problems when comparing to the US and the UK. More importantly, debt is a critical feature of captialism and a very important factor in growth levels. The issues are very important and certainly beyond the scope of /. however, as examples, look at the countries with virtually no foreign debt (say Norway I would guess) and then a country like Australia where they have just examined the issue of "closing" the government debt market because they have the opportunity to eliminate (for all intents and purposes) their government debt or at least lower to a level where a market in that debt becomes impossible (report). They decided against it because, amongst other things, having a government debt market serves a useful economic purpose to help control the economy. Much like the control rods of the reactors on which this article is based :-).
So debt isn't quite the evil that the original poster made out.
Ah yes, sorry about that, I meant to put "British" in my example. I agree that the US experience was different.
the blame is really with our whole capitalist system that demands shareholder value at all costs
I am sorry but that is such a crock. First of all your phrase "shareholder value" is so general as to be meaningless. Market capitalisation of listed companies is built on two ideas; dividend income from operating profitable businesses and amortised values of future earnings, largely through growth. Funnily enough both these factors are also definitions of shareholder value. Look at the PE of a banking stock compared to say a biotech stock. Capitalism is built upon a number of simple principles, one of which is risk versus return. History shows so many examples of capital investing in risky projects and generating the appropriate return when those projects succeed. The entire rail industry in the 19th century was essentially privately funded. Would "shareholder value at any cost" have been able to justify those projects?
If there is a criticism to be levelled at shareholders today, it is the fact that they have failed to accept risk and return and in fact you could argue that it is risk averse investors that are driving the lack of forsight in the flows of capital. It is pretty tough to blame capitalism as a whole. Certainly one cannot blame Capitalisms principle of "shareholder value at all costs" since no such principle exists.
Please note. That is not to say that Capitalism does not have problems, just that they are not the one you mention.
First, the whole Blade Runner thing about how (amongst other things) the only time you see the sun is at the end once the revelation has been made and how the director is saying this and that. The reality of where the closing scene came from just highlights the idiocy of PM analysis.
The second is a film (the name of which escapes me) where the final third is in B&W and the PMistas draw all kinds of meaning from this, the reality is that the film makers ran out of money and colour stock so they finished it with B&W. No meaning, no nothing.
a) People want something for nothing.
Er, no. People want something for a fair price. What is a fair price is a good question, but regardless of the answer there is one reality and that is that over time the price of content approaches zero. For different bits of content, the times at which this marginal change takes place vary, but the reality is that once content is no longer timely then the price tends towards zero. Want proof? See how much you have to pay for stock prices delayed by 20 minutes. Then see how much a real time price feed is. The difference? Timeliness.
Music, movies, everything - no different. The metric of when this zero pricing starts, changes but not the reality. For movies it probably starts about a year after it is "released". Go and ask a distributor to show the ROI over time for their product. Even with their bullshit anti-competitive behaviour it is still true.
b) People want something before it's officially made available.
Officially, Ofsmishilly, they made the fscking DVD available in HK 2 years ago, they just don't think there is enough of a market in the US to justify and official release, but can you just buy the HK version and use in the US? No, because of the freakin' regional encoding (replace countries and times with parameters of your choosing and the statement will still be true). The whole parallel importing thing is just reaching offensive levels at the moment. The industry is trying so hard to screw over consumers, the line will soon be crossed. Watch cdWow for the battlefield.
c) People want to impress other people with something they have but the other's don't.
Some people just have small dicks, they have to have something to compensate. Better this than have them driving Porsches, makes the world a safer place IYAM.
Piracy (and it really is such a bad word) exists because the price at which the product is offered does not reflect its actual value and bad law is in place to force the price. On top of that most people are enourmously price sensitive to these products, they will take a shitty copy of a movie camcordered from a screening for nothing, but if you offer them a legit copy, for 2$ they still won't pay because it is the zero cost that makes the product purchasable. This is not the same as what you said "People want something for nothing", but rather it is true that, for some things, people will take a thing if it costs nothing, but that same thing at any price over zero has no utility. Given that they are already paying for their broadband connections the marginal cost of this movie or that song, is zero. Mind you, there are a number of purchasers that are not so price sensitive to the acquisition of this content and so they will pay something for a legit version, but the vast majority of those people are being frozen out of the market because the content creators are still above their utility level in the vast majority of cases. But even then, some not, because DVD and CD are still being sold. The issue is that the model the industry uses to determine price is so contrary to the realities of their product that they will continue to suffer until they work it out. And, no, $0.99 a song is not the right price, just better than $10.00 for 15 songs, 12 of which you don't want.
As for your list of things to do. I follow 'em all. Plus, I don't buy DVD at all (anymore) since I will not play their stupid game of funding their crusade against my rights of fair use. I am unable to resist going to the cinema, but at least the cinema owner gets (some microscopic at times) part of my money and I never go in the first few weeks to try and make sure they get the most possible, but I am close on boycotting it totally. Plus I don't download priated material. Sure, I have less amenity in my life than I would have if the industry sorted itself out, but I simply will not fund their erosion of my rights to use my purchases as I wish.