Demand will always be there and as the worldwide population increases, it will only continue to rise.it will become so expensive that people will trade in their Hummers for a Prius or start taking advantage of public transport (where available).
As you so adeptly point out, yes, demand will always be there, but quantity demanded is not by any means constant. If the quantity demanded remains constant as the quantity supplied decreases, the price increases, as consumers compete with each other to purchase a commodity. If supply is constant, but demand increases, the equilibrium price increases, for the same reason.
but instead of spending record profits on upgrading infrastructure, it's just going straight into the bank.
Of course. It's not in the company's best interest to invest in technologies that will make their current business model obsolete.
There are a hundred excuses at any given time and they are all lies. During Katrina, when we saw a huge spike, it was because Gulf refineries were damaged. Another week and it's trouble in Venezuela or Nigeria. Another week and it's failures in Iraq.
It's simple really. They increase the price because it makes them more money to do so. If they increase the price of gasoline by 10% (say from $100 to $110 units, just to make it easy) and the quantity purchased only decreases by 1% (from 100 units to 99 units), then the company makes more money than they would have if they had not changed the price. (110 * 99 = 10890 as opposed to 100 * 100 = 10000) So ultimately, why does the price go up, because on balance, we, the consumers, are still willing to pay it.
I really hate to even think of the US economy and fuel prices because the system is so corrupt there's not much you can do to influence change at this point. Just pray that we get a better administration in 2008.
An otherwise well formed post capped off by utter nonsense. This is market economics here. You blame the current administration for what?? Not regulating the free market?? More economic problems than I can count have been the direct result of government interference in free markets. If you want to blame Bush for high gas prices, do so at your own peril, because I'm keen to point out that we just this week equalled the inflation-adjusted gasoline price from the end of Jimmy Carter's presidency -- who for the uninformed, was of the opposite political party of the current administration.
The reality is that as long as we're willing to pay $3.50/gallon, we can't blame oil companies for being willing to charge it.
Additionally, aluminum smelting almost certainly does not using "electricity" produced from a power plant; instead the smelting furnace is almost certainly heated with natural gas.
"Aluminium ore, most commonly bauxite, is plentiful and occurs mainly in tropical and sub-tropical areas: Africa, West Indies, South America and Australia. There are also some deposits in Europe. Bauxite is refined into aluminium oxide trihydrate (alumina) and then electrolytically reduced into metallic aluminium. Primary aluminium production facilities are located all over the world, often in areas where there are abundant supplies of inexpensive energy, such as hydro-electric power.
Two to three tonnes of bauxite are required to produce one tonne of alumina and two tonnes of alumina are required to produce one tonne of aluminium metal."
The real fun comes when the aluminum plant loses power, and all the molten alumina metal solidifies within four hours. Then they get to chip it out of the vats with jackhammers. The Alcoa facility in Bellingham, Washington takes a HUGE amount of energy to operate. A new smelter (the most efficient yet) uses 14 kWh (enough power to run a 100w light bulb for the better part of a week) to make 1 kg of aluminum.
We'd be far better off using nuclear power and electric cars.
...is a Hybrid drivetrain with an Ethanol or Biodiesel engine.
The real issue isn't in that it will cost you $8 a gallon to drive to work, it's that farmers will be spending $8 a gallon on mechanized agriculture, driving up the overall cost of living.
If this were a three-light traffic light, there's no excuse for getting your truck smashed by color-blindness. So I'll assume it's a minimally controlled one-light signal aka "electrified stop sign". I'll also assume that at a one-light signal where you can get into a wreck over it, that the signal was either yellow or red (not green). So, if you know that that blinking light is either yellow or red, but you don't know which, wouldn't it make sense to err on the side of caution, and stop at it?
And do you not have to pass a color differentiation test to get a license?
I know it's completely off topic, but seriously, that's almost darwin-worthy...
So when someone writes shoddy code on a site that google indexes and caches, which contains the connection details for the database running said site, would said site's owner be within their rights to have Google shut down???
Of course not, becuase the average domain owner doesn't have f*cktons of money.
What's sad is that the 20% that modded me troll likely wouldn't have, if I hadn't added the "now mod me up..." comment, pointing out that all it usually takes to get a +5 Insightful is to bash the president, microsoft, et al.
Better yet, one big display in the middle and two smaller displays flanking it. Then you can get a lot of code on your main screen, your reference material on one and debug/test output on the other smaller display. Cradle to grave, from reference, to code, to output.
Also, I would LOVE a ginormous display. I work in Excel A LOT, and a bigger display means I can see more data at once whilst keeping it all readable. And in this case, for me, more is definately better.
ATM, I have two machines, two screens. Left is XP pro and I do my data analysis there. Right is suse 10.1 and I do my coding there. It's working rather well.
Mod this to oblivion, regardless of what positive action he takes, I still don't like him.
And if Santa Claus ever decided to murder a few million people, I'll bet you wouldn't hold that against him, either.
Sure, declining CD sales may be correlated with usage of P2P software. However, it's inconclusive whether CD sales dropped BECAUSE of increased usage of P2P software, or if P2P software use increased because of unwillingness to purchase CDs, potentially due to the cost of purchasing CDs or other factors.
The point is that ultimately, even if you COULD perfecty correlate P2P usage increases with retail purchase declines, you would NOT be able to establish a causal relationship in one direction or the other.
More noise is generated from the tire tread slamming into the pavement several thousand times each second times several thousand cars, rather than the comparatively quiet puttering of their motors. That tire tread impact isn't going to go away because the engine is no longer running gas fired pistons. Sorry.
"To sum up for those that can't be bothered: Apple owns the trademarks "IPOD" and "POD". These people filed a trademark application which incorporates those existing trademarks in their proposed trademarks. Apple would like them to withdraw the application. It's all part of the process. No harm, no foul. That's why you don't instantly get trademarks -- they go through this sort of review and examination process."
Apparently, you didn't RTFA either, as the letter clearly states that Apple does NOT own the POD trademark in the US. They have APPLIED for it. And upon that basis, they're asking podcast ready and mypodder to withdraw theirs. What hacks me off about the letter the lawyers sent was that they did all this ranting about podcast ready in the first 2/3 of the letter, then note in the 2nd to last paragraph, that they're not asking them to do change anything with podcast ready -- just mypodder. Clearly a scare tactic, which pretty much puts Apple on par with the RIAA.
So now, with the increased load on our power stations, they'll either divert the oil refining toward oil fired power plants and/or we'll start dumping a whole lot more coal into our coal fired plants, spewing out all kinds of wonderful things. Until we develop cleaner methods of power generation, all we do is shift the pollution to being generated somewhere else.
It's all about nuclear, kids. It's the cleanest, most efficient, least environmentally damaging power source we have. If people would get over 3-mile island (which was a SUCCESS story of our failsafe systems, btw) and chernobyl (which was a shitty russian reactor) they might just figure out that nuclear power is actually safer overall, than oil or coal fired plants.
Until you make people responsible for their own money, they'll never act responsibly. Right now, it doesn't cost consumers anything to be lax with their personal information. Start telling customers "too bad, not our fault you gave you information to someone" and they'll start being more careful who they give their information too. But ultimately, you'll still have banks not holding people responsible for fraud, and those banks' customer base will grow. Will it grow enough to make it worth the additional cost of paying for fraud?? That remains to be seen. But I know for certain that if you don't hold people responsible, they're far less like to ACT responsibly.
Do you seriously think the NSA can't break 128 bit encryption??
If they have your phone and internet tapped, obviously you're suspicious, and in that event, YES, they WILL decrypt your 128bit encrypted connection to whatever anonymizing service you use.
Here's a novel concept for those who don't want to get in trouble with the law...STOP BREAKING IT.
It's that simple. By continuing to live in a society that has certain laws, you implicitly agree to abide by those laws. If you don't like them, try to change them, while still abiding by them. If you're unwilling to abide by the law, move into a society that more closely fits in line with your ideals.
So either obey the laws of the land in which you choose to continue residing, or
try to change the laws while still obeying them, or
gtfo.
"In a 2005 poll covering 33 countries, Americans are the least likely (except for Turkish respondents)"
So, in other words, American's are the SECOND least likely, NOT the least likely. Yet another example of semantically altering the story to sensationalize it. Kudos.
Oh wait.
...the Hungarian Parliament voted this morning that they would not charge a toll to cross the future bridge. Instead, drivers will be required to tell a booth attendant his name, quest, and favorite color.
Slashdot Mirror
"This looks like it was written for (and BY) freshmen CS majors."
Please note, the top line of the article reads "Level: Introductory"
Now, kindly climb back up onto your self-constructed pedestal and leave us mere mortals alone.
Demand will always be there and as the worldwide population increases, it will only continue to rise. it will become so expensive that people will trade in their Hummers for a Prius or start taking advantage of public transport (where available). As you so adeptly point out, yes, demand will always be there, but quantity demanded is not by any means constant. If the quantity demanded remains constant as the quantity supplied decreases, the price increases, as consumers compete with each other to purchase a commodity. If supply is constant, but demand increases, the equilibrium price increases, for the same reason. but instead of spending record profits on upgrading infrastructure, it's just going straight into the bank. Of course. It's not in the company's best interest to invest in technologies that will make their current business model obsolete. There are a hundred excuses at any given time and they are all lies. During Katrina, when we saw a huge spike, it was because Gulf refineries were damaged. Another week and it's trouble in Venezuela or Nigeria. Another week and it's failures in Iraq. It's simple really. They increase the price because it makes them more money to do so. If they increase the price of gasoline by 10% (say from $100 to $110 units, just to make it easy) and the quantity purchased only decreases by 1% (from 100 units to 99 units), then the company makes more money than they would have if they had not changed the price. (110 * 99 = 10890 as opposed to 100 * 100 = 10000) So ultimately, why does the price go up, because on balance, we, the consumers, are still willing to pay it. I really hate to even think of the US economy and fuel prices because the system is so corrupt there's not much you can do to influence change at this point. Just pray that we get a better administration in 2008. An otherwise well formed post capped off by utter nonsense. This is market economics here. You blame the current administration for what?? Not regulating the free market?? More economic problems than I can count have been the direct result of government interference in free markets. If you want to blame Bush for high gas prices, do so at your own peril, because I'm keen to point out that we just this week equalled the inflation-adjusted gasoline price from the end of Jimmy Carter's presidency -- who for the uninformed, was of the opposite political party of the current administration. The reality is that as long as we're willing to pay $3.50/gallon, we can't blame oil companies for being willing to charge it.
Additionally, aluminum smelting almost certainly does not using "electricity" produced from a power plant; instead the smelting furnace is almost certainly heated with natural gas.
t ml
n ges/energy.html
O RLY?
http://www.world-aluminium.org/production/index.h
"Aluminium ore, most commonly bauxite, is plentiful and occurs mainly in tropical and sub-tropical areas: Africa, West Indies, South America and Australia. There are also some deposits in Europe. Bauxite is refined into aluminium oxide trihydrate (alumina) and then electrolytically reduced into metallic aluminium. Primary aluminium production facilities are located all over the world, often in areas where there are abundant supplies of inexpensive energy, such as hydro-electric power.
Two to three tonnes of bauxite are required to produce one tonne of alumina and two tonnes of alumina are required to produce one tonne of aluminium metal."
http://www.world-aluminium.org/environment/challe
The real fun comes when the aluminum plant loses power, and all the molten alumina metal solidifies within four hours. Then they get to chip it out of the vats with jackhammers. The Alcoa facility in Bellingham, Washington takes a HUGE amount of energy to operate. A new smelter (the most efficient yet) uses 14 kWh (enough power to run a 100w light bulb for the better part of a week) to make 1 kg of aluminum.
We'd be far better off using nuclear power and electric cars.
...is a Hybrid drivetrain with an Ethanol or Biodiesel engine. The real issue isn't in that it will cost you $8 a gallon to drive to work, it's that farmers will be spending $8 a gallon on mechanized agriculture, driving up the overall cost of living.
I, for one, welcome our new little electronic box overlords!
If this were a three-light traffic light, there's no excuse for getting your truck smashed by color-blindness. So I'll assume it's a minimally controlled one-light signal aka "electrified stop sign". I'll also assume that at a one-light signal where you can get into a wreck over it, that the signal was either yellow or red (not green). So, if you know that that blinking light is either yellow or red, but you don't know which, wouldn't it make sense to err on the side of caution, and stop at it?
And do you not have to pass a color differentiation test to get a license?
I know it's completely off topic, but seriously, that's almost darwin-worthy...
So when someone writes shoddy code on a site that google indexes and caches, which contains the connection details for the database running said site, would said site's owner be within their rights to have Google shut down???
Of course not, becuase the average domain owner doesn't have f*cktons of money.
What's sad is that the 20% that modded me troll likely wouldn't have, if I hadn't added the "now mod me up..." comment, pointing out that all it usually takes to get a +5 Insightful is to bash the president, microsoft, et al.
(Marconi basically just used Tesla's insights to deliver a viable product for the war effort in WWI)
I hear he played the mamba, too!
When will our government learn that you can't legislate intelligence.
Hell, our population already proved we can't elect it, now mod me up for taking a crack at the President.
Note to flamers: the interweb is full of games for bored, vicious little pillocks. Don't play one-up in chat.
Duh, that's what slashdot is for...
The real story here is that they were able to unearth (to dig or get out of the earth; dig up.) the meteorite with RADAR. Quite a feat indeed.
Next thing you know, they'll be using SONAR to alter the behavior of sea mammals...
Correlation does not imply causation.
Better yet, one big display in the middle and two smaller displays flanking it. Then you can get a lot of code on your main screen, your reference material on one and debug/test output on the other smaller display. Cradle to grave, from reference, to code, to output.
Also, I would LOVE a ginormous display. I work in Excel A LOT, and a bigger display means I can see more data at once whilst keeping it all readable. And in this case, for me, more is definately better.
ATM, I have two machines, two screens. Left is XP pro and I do my data analysis there. Right is suse 10.1 and I do my coding there. It's working rather well.
Mod this to oblivion, regardless of what positive action he takes, I still don't like him. And if Santa Claus ever decided to murder a few million people, I'll bet you wouldn't hold that against him, either.
Correlation does not imply causation.
Sure, declining CD sales may be correlated with usage of P2P software. However, it's inconclusive whether CD sales dropped BECAUSE of increased usage of P2P software, or if P2P software use increased because of unwillingness to purchase CDs, potentially due to the cost of purchasing CDs or other factors.
The point is that ultimately, even if you COULD perfecty correlate P2P usage increases with retail purchase declines, you would NOT be able to establish a causal relationship in one direction or the other.
More noise is generated from the tire tread slamming into the pavement several thousand times each second times several thousand cars, rather than the comparatively quiet puttering of their motors. That tire tread impact isn't going to go away because the engine is no longer running gas fired pistons. Sorry.
"To sum up for those that can't be bothered: Apple owns the trademarks "IPOD" and "POD". These people filed a trademark application which incorporates those existing trademarks in their proposed trademarks. Apple would like them to withdraw the application. It's all part of the process. No harm, no foul. That's why you don't instantly get trademarks -- they go through this sort of review and examination process."
Apparently, you didn't RTFA either, as the letter clearly states that Apple does NOT own the POD trademark in the US. They have APPLIED for it. And upon that basis, they're asking podcast ready and mypodder to withdraw theirs. What hacks me off about the letter the lawyers sent was that they did all this ranting about podcast ready in the first 2/3 of the letter, then note in the 2nd to last paragraph, that they're not asking them to do change anything with podcast ready -- just mypodder. Clearly a scare tactic, which pretty much puts Apple on par with the RIAA.
So now, with the increased load on our power stations, they'll either divert the oil refining toward oil fired power plants and/or we'll start dumping a whole lot more coal into our coal fired plants, spewing out all kinds of wonderful things. Until we develop cleaner methods of power generation, all we do is shift the pollution to being generated somewhere else.
It's all about nuclear, kids. It's the cleanest, most efficient, least environmentally damaging power source we have. If people would get over 3-mile island (which was a SUCCESS story of our failsafe systems, btw) and chernobyl (which was a shitty russian reactor) they might just figure out that nuclear power is actually safer overall, than oil or coal fired plants.
kind of sad that all it takes is a few economic buzzwords to get a +5 insightful mod rating. Basic market theory. Hardly insightful...
Until you make people responsible for their own money, they'll never act responsibly. Right now, it doesn't cost consumers anything to be lax with their personal information. Start telling customers "too bad, not our fault you gave you information to someone" and they'll start being more careful who they give their information too. But ultimately, you'll still have banks not holding people responsible for fraud, and those banks' customer base will grow. Will it grow enough to make it worth the additional cost of paying for fraud?? That remains to be seen. But I know for certain that if you don't hold people responsible, they're far less like to ACT responsibly.
Do you seriously think the NSA can't break 128 bit encryption?? If they have your phone and internet tapped, obviously you're suspicious, and in that event, YES, they WILL decrypt your 128bit encrypted connection to whatever anonymizing service you use. Here's a novel concept for those who don't want to get in trouble with the law...STOP BREAKING IT. It's that simple. By continuing to live in a society that has certain laws, you implicitly agree to abide by those laws. If you don't like them, try to change them, while still abiding by them. If you're unwilling to abide by the law, move into a society that more closely fits in line with your ideals. So either obey the laws of the land in which you choose to continue residing, or try to change the laws while still obeying them, or gtfo.
"In a 2005 poll covering 33 countries, Americans are the least likely (except for Turkish respondents)" So, in other words, American's are the SECOND least likely, NOT the least likely. Yet another example of semantically altering the story to sensationalize it. Kudos. Oh wait.
...and on how long it will take minority groups in the US to scream bloody murder that they're being profiled. If the shoe fits...
...the Hungarian Parliament voted this morning that they would not charge a toll to cross the future bridge. Instead, drivers will be required to tell a booth attendant his name, quest, and favorite color.