Economics

Economic Confusion

Stories like this, about how much owners of intellectual property are losing to piracy, always bug me, because the industry press just accepts the figure without criticism or comment.

They claim that they lost almost thirty billion dollars last year to pirated software. They derive this number by estimating the number of pirated software installations, and multiplying by the price of the product. But it’s almost certain that their losses aren’t that high. The only amount of money that they’re out is the amount that the people using the software would have been willing to pay if they hadn’t been able to get it for free.

This kind of disingenuous story occurs because people don’t understand the difference between price, cost, and value. For software, the marginal cost (resources required of the seller to produce it) for the software is almost zero, while the price (the amount asked by the seller) may be very high relative to its actual value, which varies from individual to individual. No rational person will pay more for a product than they value it, so if they can’t get it for free, the only amount of money that the vendor is out is the sum of the value of it for all potential buyers. Clearly, it wasn’t worth the full price to many of those individuals, or they would have paid it, and I think that the amount of loss is vastly overstated–many of them would have simply gone without, rather than pay full price, so the revenue in that case would still be zero.

General

I Want To Share

My internet connection, that is.

Until I complete the move from California, and bring my Linux firewall and wireless router to Florida, I need to set up a quick’n’dirty router and port forwarder for the network here. I had a spare switch, so I just went out and picked up a second NIC for my main Windoze 2000 machine. The instructions for sharing the internet connection are seemingly simple, but they don’t seem to work. I’ve got the new network set up in DHCP mode, and the machines are talking to each other, but I can’t see the internet from the client (i.e., pinging a known IP address times out, though I can do internal network pings). I tried turning off the Zone Alarm firewall for the LAN, but it didn’t seem to help. I’m obviously posting this from the machine with the working connection.

Anyone have any ideas?

[Update on Thursday morning]

OK, when I do ipconfig on the host machine, I get this:

***************************************
Windows 2000 IP Configuration

Ethernet adapter Interglobal LAN:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 192.168.0.1
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :

Ethernet adapter AT&T DSL Connection:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
IP Address. . . . . . . . . . . . : 67.101.124.115
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.255.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . : 67.101.124.115

Ethernet adapter Local Area Connection 2:

Connection-specific DNS Suffix . :
Autoconfiguration IP Address. . . : 169.254.163.94
Subnet Mask . . . . . . . . . . . : 255.255.0.0
Default Gateway . . . . . . . . . :

*******************************************

Note that “Local Area Connection 2″ is the physical ethernet connection for the DSL (called here AT&T DSL Connection”)

netstat -n yields:

*******************************************

Active Connections

Proto Local Address Foreign Address State
TCP 127.0.0.1:445 127.0.0.1:3093 ESTABLISHED
TCP 127.0.0.1:3093 127.0.0.1:445 ESTABLISHED

*******************************************

I’m having trouble talking to client machines right now–the LAN seems to be flaky. I can ping client from host, but I can’t ping host from client. More when I get one of more of the in communication.

War Commentary

Dominoes Lining Up?

Well, well, well…

They’ve captured two Iranian agents in Baghdad, fomenting much of the murder and terrorism in the newly emerging nation. This, of course, is an act of war.

Allawi has been making justifiably belligerent noises toward Syria as well, saying that he wouldn’t necessarily mind if coalition forces were to take offensive action there.

I wonder how far off we are from a war between Iraq, and Syria and Iran (in which we would participate on the side of Iraq)? That would be a continued draining of the swamp, and we know that a majority of the Iranians, if not the Syrians, would like to see the end of their current government. If so, it would be the next step on the path toward a saner Middle East.

The problem, of course, is that if it happens before November, the conspiracy loons will claim that Bush is going to war out of desperation, in the face of the “exciting” (oh, be still, my heart) John-John ticket, to distract the populace with another war based on “lies.”

One thing that might help in the near term would be a UN resolution condemning Syria and Iran for their attempts to destabilize Iraq. Any bets on whether such a thing would pass? After all, it wouldn’t be condemning the US and Israel, which is the only kind of condemnation in which the UN has shown any historical interest…

Space

Political Tourism Barriers

Here’s an interesting article, on a couple of levels.

With demand waning for its traditional service – clearing Arctic shipping lanes – the Murmansk Shipping Company, which operates the world’s only fleet of atomic icebreakers, has started offering tourists a chance to chill out at the top of the world for $20,000 per head.

The business has outraged environmental groups such as Friends of the Earth Norway, which is urging would-be ticket buyers to consider the damage a nuclear accident can do to the pristine region’s fragile ecosystem…

… The green group has found an unexpected ally in the Russian Audit Chamber. Parliament’s budgetary watchdog, after investigating partially state-owned Murmansk Shipping’s finances earlier this year, urged the government to revoke the company’s license to operate the fully state-owned icebreakers because it had “improperly used $79 million worth of state property and cheated the state out of $7.3 million in revenues,” auditor Yury Tsvetkov said June 29.

The superficial (i.e., obvious) one is the issue of whether or not we’ll let environmental groups object to tourism on grounds either real or spurious (and in particular, the notion that it shouldn’t be allowed because it’s a nuclear-powered ship is extremely spurious, and one that we should expect to confront in the future as we start to use nuclear reactors in space).

But the other one is that the Russian government itself is opposed to such tourism. That indicates to me that some there are starting to figure out what things actually cost, and that the tourist dollars don’t actually cover the operating costs.

While popular legend has it that Dennis Tito paid twenty millions bucks for his ride into space, reality is that such things are extremely negotiable, and that he actually paid much less (perhaps a little over half) of that amount. The Russian space program has survived largely on the basis of its prestige (one of the few things that Russia can surpass the US at, at least by some criteria). If they discover that tourist flights (and NASA payments) aren’t covering the true costs, will that continue?

Political Commentary

My Heart Bleeds

Not.

The SF Examiner is crying over the upcoming death of the “assault weapons” ban.

Boo hoo.

Remember all the upset with Bush when he said that he would sign a renewal?

I said that it didn’t matter, because he knew that there would never be a bill to sign. It still looks that way. Whether his pledge to sign it will still hurt him politically still remains to be seen, of course, but I can’t imagine the gun-rights activists being indifferent to a Kerry-Edwards presidency.

Space

Better Late Than Never (Or Even On Time)

The latest issue of The Space Review is up a day late (I assume due to the holiday yesterday) but it was worth waiting for. I’m too busy to post much, but go read about Oklahoma spaceports by Jeff Foust, an old study on asteroid deflection by Dwayne Day, a cautionary note to space entrepreneurs about patents from Sam Dinkin, and a report from Taylor Dinerman on the prospects for a new space military service to supercede the Air Force.

Political Commentary

Bad Business

Alan Murray implies that, with his pick of Senator John Edwards for veep, Senator Kerry just made a powerful enemy for himself.

…party wisdom that’s been passed down by former Democratic National Committee Chairman Robert Strauss, and now resides with Democratic economic guru Robert Rubin, is that big business does matter to Democrats. To be successful, a Democratic presidential candidate doesn’t need the active support of America’s CEOs, but he does need to keep them on the sidelines. Jimmy Carter lost his bid for re-election at least in part because business was determined to dump him. Bill Clinton won election and re-election at least in part because the business community, while not strongly supportive, wasn’t threatened by him.

Science And Society

Suspending Too Much Disbelief

John Derbyshire, contrarian that he is, didn’t like Spiderman II.

Even comic-book movies must obey certain unities. In the realm of science fiction — and c/b movies are a species, even if a low one, of science fiction — the golden rule is: You can have one highly implausible bit of science. The rest of the science should be sound, or at least should follow logically from the central implausibility. THE TIME MACHINE is a great sci-fi novel because, once you have granted the central, fairly preposterous, premise that time travel is possible, everything else is just basic Darwinism and stellar evolution, as it was understood at the time.

The central notion in SPIDERMAN is that if you get bitten by a spider whose genes have been messed about with in a certain way, you will develop the ability to shoot 100-ft silk threads from your wrists (without, apparently, any loss of body mass). This is preposterous — though not at a sensationally high level, as spider genes can be messed around with in an infinity of ways, and we don’t actually know what would happen if you were bitten by a spider whose genes had been messed around with in way No. 29,485,672.

Having been persuaded to suspend our disbelief with respect to Spidey’s powers, we should not then be asked to swallow any more preposterosities. And we know perfectly well what whould happen if you dumped a fusion reaction into the East River — ka-BOOM.

I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I intend to, and won’t let this curmudgeonly review put me off of it, though I actually agree with the principle. That was one of the things that bothered me about the first movie. Once you tell me he’s been bitten by a radioactive spider, then fine, I’ll buy the superpowers on the part of Spidey. I’ll even accept the notion that, as Derbyshire points out, he doesn’t have to conserve mass.

But Mary Jane has no superpowers, yet she performs a superfeat near the end of the movie, when she falls off the cable that’s being flung around (face it, she wouldn’t have been able to hang on to it that long without her arms being torn off), and then catches the side of the cable car as she falls some distance toward it.

Sorry, just Not.Gonna.Happen. It defies physics and the strength, both muscular and structural, of a normal human body, even one pumped on adrenalin. I enjoyed the movie up to that point, but that bit really bugged me, because there was no good reason for it–it could have been just as exciting while being realistic.

And of course, there’s the other thing that bothered me about the movie–the ending.

Parker was under no obligation to keep Harry in the dark about his father’s end. Just because he was requested to, he didn’t agree to the request, and he did himself and Harry a disservice by allowing Harry to continue to live on in a fantasy world about his father’s true nature, a world that’s likely to cause him to attempt to kill Parker’s alter ego (and hence Parker) in the future.

At a minimum, he should have at least pointed out to Harry that the fact that Spiderman returned his father’s body to his home didn’t mean that Spiderman was the killer. He might not have accepted it, but there would have been no harm in exercising a little logic on him, even if he wanted to spare him the knowledge that his father was a murderer (though again, I think that was no favor).

Also, he’s not protecting MJ by not reciprocating her love. The key is to keep his identity a secret (though not from her). I found it highly unsatisfactory, but apparently it was more important to them to set up some dubious sequel plot than to employ logic, or ethics.

I guess that SF movies will never get made right until they hire me as a script advisor. And listen.

[Update on Tuesday]

For those endlessly or otherwise fascinated by bad movie physics, check out this site (including a review of Spidey I). It says The Core (which I haven’t seen, and probably won’t) takes the prize for the worst movie ever in this regard.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!