Comments by willstewart

Would you share this?

She could not throw me that far

Many of them would not look out of place on my wall (or indeed iPod), either (& would be very welcome, they looked exciting to me). Whether one considers this a fault or a virtue depends upon how elitist one feels about owning (as opposed to making) art.

After all an important characteristic of digital art is easy, perfect, reproduction. So why does DH not make money by selling tens of thousands of copies at moderate prices instead of a few at high prices? Digital music by the very best artists costs £10 and sells millions - why not digital art?

A superb and well-argued piece. I hope the government is listening!

Perhaps RIM's troubles also show the dangers of focusing on the 'corporate' market. The UK's car makers did the same (for fleet sales) with equally dire results. The problem seems to be that in dealing with corporate departments one is speaking to central buyers and addressing their concerns. But in practice such people are only intermediaries - the real decisions are made by the actual corporate user-people, who have much the same concerns as all other users.

American Express may be on the same downward path.

'Unsightly' (that is planning) is indeed part of the problem. So rain-proof arcades would help, as would traffic-free centres (meaning nothing that could run over a child - no buses, taxis, deliveries etc.).

Superfast all-fibre optical broadband is [much] faster than superfast rail - and cheaper and quicker to deliver. And it saves businessman time and it is available to more people.

So it must be done - right?

A masterful and very important analysis. This is what is wrong with hedge funds and private equity.

But the lesson that marketing is not a long-term solution is hard to learn - no marketing executive should ever make it to CEO.

And the lesson for protectionist governments is NOT to protect one's major firms - it only encourages complacency and milking-for-cash.

It is interesting is it not that the desire of the current French to bash the British trumps the desire not to help Wall St?

It is unfortunate that the silence switch on the iPhone is not absolute - it should be.

The analogy with Apple fails, both because Apple stores DO let you try, and because they hold large stocks. And they do service and support.

Car sellers used to use big profits on sales to support service and other activities. The obvious way out is for these to separate, as is probably happening already.

The Economist should be ashamed of itself for falling for the, almost certainly unproven, 'everyone-will-lose' line. Basically this is about car dealers trying to maintain anti-competitive practices.

These things are more subtle than you suggest. Surely standard retail commodity businesses like Staples profit from this kind of approach, but the big stars (think Apple or Google) cannot be run this way, nor could the big Japanese successes. These require long-term vision and commitment to the non-obviously-profitable. Private Equity is pretty bad at this. Indeed in the present West it seems only possible for a few - most of the big private labs (think HP and Bell) have gone. Where is the next generation of wealth to come from? Sure Google is doing rather well in many fields - basically by ignoring the immediate money. Would Romney have done this? The US needs to.

All delusion I fear!

There will be no IQ-enhancing drugs - he brain responds mainly to be used (reading the Economist is a start!). And happiness-enhancing drugs are temporary in effect; your body adapts to them by making you less happy normally. In fact this is the answer to all such techniques - your brain/body is optimised by evolution to be as effective as possible; no easy chemical trick is going to improve it. The best method is the ancient one of using the right tools - today the best smartphone or tablet for example.

But everything inside your mind is part of you, whether you are aware of it or not. So 'you' are still responsible.

But I think as a non-US resident that I see more clearly than you what this is about, and you may have rather missed the point. As in previous incarnations of this 'debate' it is really about the, essentially religious, desire to make a distinction between 'you' as a person and 'you' as a physical object. Obviously such a distinction is silly but it seems important to religious types. If one ignores this 'distinction' then the entire debate becomes meaningless.

The original debate was related to Newtonian determinism, as largely misunderstood by philosophers. This has officially gone away with the inherent randomness of quantum physics (which Einstein famously did not like). But it was irrelevant anyway because non-quantum randomness is large in any case.

You should not believe it. This is quite a small study and it is preposterous that breathing smoke should have no effect on lung health (as any smoke does, not just tobacco).

You should not, perhaps like the researchers, allow your prejudices to distort your view.

And who needs another drug anyway? Alcohol and tobacco seem like enough. Can you not just learn to enjoy life without using drugs to make you artificially happier? (this is what all drugs do). Try playing music for example; not only will this not harm you, it may actually improve you!

What would be really helpful is to get out of the whole 'pensions' area, in favour of pure personal investment, with no tax dodges or 'employer contributions' of any kind. Then we could indeed see much more clearly what we are getting. Employers could help with advice.

Steam!? now there is a thought. Stockton-Darlington took much less than 10 years to build (though it was largely horse-drawn).

Now are we allowed to add a portion of the 10 years to the journey time of each passenger? A sort of NPV of time?

Looks OK to me, one can perhaps be over-literal.

On a similar note my teachers were concerned with the English prayer 'may the Lord prevent and follow me...' because of the changing use of 'prevent' , here just meaning 'go before'. Personally I was more concerned that there seemed to be two Lords - or perhaps there was only one but we are running round in circles?

You are missing two points:-

All 3D projection is digital (it would be far too difficult to register the two images in analogue) - thus the world is not far behind the US.

The death of 35mm has more to do with the vast prices (10's $k) demanded for duplicate copies than with the poor projectionist. He/she is just caught by the greed of the duplicators.

It is interesting - but also one in the eye for 'intelligent designers' (who of course know nothing about design). The system has clearly evolved rather than been designed as a whole, indeed this would probably be the only practical way to do it.