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Ah yes - please tell that to laborers in China or India, where such solutions don't exist.

I agreed with you up until here. Chinese and Indian laborer's lives have improved greatly since their markets have opened up. They each now have millions of millionaires as well as billionaires. Though more than 2 years old here's 2 lists of Greater China's 40 Richest and India's 40 Richest. On Fortune's List of billionaires for 2008 India has 56 and is tied with Germany.

You may think of working in one of China's factories as working in a sweat shop but Chinese compeat to get those jobs. After a few years working and saving money they can then have enough money to start their own business.

Falcon

I've lived in both East Asia and Europe for the past 6 years of my life and every time I come back home I am just shocked at the utter disdain towards people who don't drive.

Its no wonder why Americans are the fattest people in the world

The U.S. ranks ninth.

Canada 35th, about the same as Mongolia, Germany, Cuba or the Bahamas.

Japan, 163.

But below that you are not talking "thin" - you are talking "starved." World's Fattest Countries

The pedestrian and the cyclist of the 1890s felt persecuted as well. It has much to do with the way the American city evolved.

The eastern American city is the creation of the railroad and the streetcar.

There was never any great need or desire to build cities as densely packed as those of Europe or Asia - and the migration of the middle class to the suburbs was well under away before the American Civil War.

The American city of the south and southwest is a creation of the air conditioner. Their explosive growth belongs to the post-war years of the 1950s. A generation earlier, they looked - and felt - very different.

Electronic Arts pre-tax profit margin -25.2%

Either they are selling games at too high a price to sell enough, or they are not charging enough for the games they are selling, because they aren't making a profit!

Ubisoft net profit margin 6.5%

Not much profit...

Nintendo net profit margin 15%.

Of course, they actually make physical things as well (Wii).

Back when I worked at Dell, the department head of logistics or something emailed out copies of this article.

    http://www.forbes.com/1999/04/21/feat2.html/

I think back to it now and then. Dell took all that was good in the company and sold it out to MBA's and exported the rest out of the country.

It was better when Dell didn't give a fuck who it employed as long as they did the damn job.

Don't let the government fool you. They're not in the business of taxing you less or taking taxes away. They're in the business of lining their pockets.

Well, they do a pretty poor job of it here in the U.S. then, since our overall tax burden is lower than most every other developed nation. (Interesting that Japan and Switzerland, the only nations with a comparable standard of living with lower taxes, have almost no military.)

I wouldn't call it a "failed" industry, but an industry which has lived out its life and is reaching the end.
Failed would be an industry like using nuclear weapons to act as steamshovels.

Which is why Microsoft, with its thousands of patents, so easily struck down Google when all it had was a couple of patents on search technology, effectively cutting Google off at the knees and leaving Microsoft free to dominate the search engine market.

I think the main reason that Microsoft didn't do that, is because Microsoft completely missed the initial boat as far as the Internet is concerned.

The fact that large companies regularly go rent seeking with small companies is fairly well documented, even though most companies don't advertise this fact (which company would want to publicise that they're at the mercy of a patent owner?). Unless a case goes to court, you're unlikely to ever read anything in the press about it. Nevertheless, e.g. IBM's rent seeking tactics have been documented fairly well.

"Imagine the outcry if the courts were to legalize patents on English prose. Suddenly, you could get a "literary patent" on novels employing a particular kind of plot twist..."

Copyright on literary concepts is strong enough to survive conversion from book to film, even when nothing remains of the original dialogue. It's strong enough to cover original sequels. Read Harry Potter and the Unauthorized Sequel. The concept of "scenes a faire" covers the concept of literary "prior art" and prevents re-copyrighting the obvious. This is generally considered workable, although it took some litigation in the 1980s before the law settled down as regarding video game "look and feel".

"Small businesses and nonprofit organizations far removed from the traditional software industry have IT departments producing potentially infringing software. The Brookings Institution's Ben Klemens has" documented that this is not a theoretical problem"

Following the "documented" link leads to a set of PowerPoint slides by someone listed as "Senior Statistician, Mood and Affective Disorders, NIMH". (Where does the Cato Institute find these people?) He's grumbling about infringement lawsuits directed against the Green Bay Packers, Caterpillar, Kraft Foods, J. Crew, Linens and Things, McDonalds, Dole Food, and Oprah Winfrey. All occupy dominant positions in their industry. (Technically, the Green Bay Packers are a "small business", with only 189 employees, but the business is valued at $911 million.) None is a nonprofit.

Emphasis on "credible": ridiculous conspiracy theories and other random youtube bullshit about magic snipers don't quite pass the test, especially considering the very clear video footage we all saw on live TV of the Chavista thugs shooting freely down at the march from the bridge.

You must be living in Venezuela, because in the US we didn't get to see live footage (except for the one that showed George W Bush saying that Chavez "deserved it", when the news of the coup was still just coming out, and we still all thought that the coup had succeeded). In any case, youtube has videos of both sides of the conflict. And since you're living in Venezuela (I assume), you should actually have an easier time than me in seeing which videos are true.

ridiculous conspiracy theories

Come on, don't you find it suspicious that the CIA operative who was in charge of the rebel death squads in Nicaragua during the Iran-Contra scandal became the US ambassador to Venezuela? And don't you find is suspicious that the president of the chamber of commerce suddenly believes one day that he's the new supreme leader of Venezuela? There was a conspiracy alright, there was an attempted coup after all. It's just that we're disagreeing on the nature of the conspiracy, and some of the main players involved.

Here, here is what happened on April 8th, three days before the attempted coup (notice that I'm linking to Forbes magazine, a magazine that is no friend of Chavez). The theory on Wall Street is that Hugo Chavez nationalized the oil fields, replaced its board of directors, and halted the export of oil from Venezuela (in collusion with Saddam Hussein who halted oil production in Iraq at the exact same time). Furthermore, and you'll have to forgive my lack of sourcing for all these conjectures (you certainly don't have to believe me if you don't want to). The idea is that Hugo Chavez knew that he was triggering the CIA coup against himself by doing this, but he did it anyway because that allowed him to predict the time, the date, and the location of the coup (in other words, he was following the exact same game plan that Fidel Castro had used for the Bay of Pigs).

And what the Irish documentary did not show was the real reason the coup failed. It was not just the fact that the people outside the palace asked for Chavez back, it was that Hugo Chavez had hidden a large contingent of loyal guards under the palace all along. And when the new self-selected "government" came to the palace, it came right into the trap Hugo Chavez had set for them (it was not the palace guards that took back the palace, it was the guards that were hidden underneath it that did it).

Yes, it takes government money, but more in the way that Blackwater takes government money than the way the US Army takes government money.

Except Blackwater faces real competition (from similar outfits world-wide), while MTA is enjoying government-like monopoly power over millions of people.

In a parallel sub-thread I argue, that benefits of having a single outfit run the "natural monopoly" is dwarfed by the losses from stupidity, complacency, and outright corruption, that inevitably befall such outfits.

One only needs to recall AT&T, and what it did with its monopoly on "long-distance" phone service... But, at least, AT&T was profitable...

The bridge and tunnel authority, which is actually now owned by the MTA, has always been profitable

Their ability to raise tolls at whim surely helps. In Massachusetts, the toll-collector's salary can reach $90K. In New York it is very good money as well — for a job, that requires nothing, but high school diploma. Why does it have to be a cushy union-backed position, rather than something like burger-flipping, that a youngster (or someone down on their luck temporarily) can always count on? It does not have to be this way, of course, but it is, because MTA need not compete with anybody (unlike burger-chains)...

• William Gates III
• Warren Buffett
• Lawrence Ellison
• Jim Walton
• S Robson Walton
• Alice Walton
• Christy Walton & Family
• Michael Bloomberg
• Charles Koch
• David Koch
• Michael Dell
• Paul Allen
• Sergey Brin
• Larry Page
• Sheldon Adelson
• Steven Ballmer
• Abigail Johnson

Most readers will instantly recognize most of the names on the list and be aware of the source of the wealth of over 1/2 of them. Looking through this list, the four Waltons wealth is probably mostly "inherited" (first generation). The Kochs one can debate about - they inherited the family business which, based on a transaction in which Charles and David bought out the other two brothers' interests for $1.1B in 1983, was probably worth $2.2B in 1983 -- but Charles and David are now worth (collectively) $38B - so probably about $33B of this is "self made" (adjusting the guesstimate of 1983 value into 2008 dollars). Abigail Johnson is a bit hard to tell, but it looks like mostly "inherited" (first generation) but she is actively involved in day to day work at the family company - Fidelity Investments. I think all the others are self made rather than inherited. Working on these assumptions, the net worth of these 17 people is cumulatively about $395B - 29% inherited, 71% "accumulated". So, for the wealthiest 17 people in America, their aggregate inherited wealth seems to be swamped by their accumulated wealth. Note also that these 17 people possess about 25% of the net worth of the top 400 richest Americans. The 400th richest American is worth only $1.3B - about 25 people tie for this $1.3B of wealth and a quick skim indicates that the vast majority of these people accumulated (i.e., through investments and/or building/growing a company they had a stake in) rather than inherited their wealth.

Also, one needs to be careful with statistics about inherited vs. accumulated wealth... Consider a married couple in a community property state (such as California) who have been married to each other through their entire "earning" life. Each spouse owns 1/2 the assets and is free to leave them to whoever they want (some exceptions for things like 401(k)s). Usually one dies befor

Cops don't make it into the top ten, they don't even make it into the top 20. You want a dangerous job? Go fish. Literally. Or try logging, or being a cabbie, those are dangerous. Driving around while heavily armed and wearing ballistic vests, with dozens of similarly equipped confreres a radio call away, is hardly "dangerous" -- hundreds of phony, "I love the police, because they keep me safe from legions of zombies", police shows aside. http://www.forbes.com/2008/08/25/dangerous-jobs-fishing-lead-careers-cx_mk_0825danger.html http://money.msn.com/content/invest/extra/P63405.asp http://socyberty.com/work/ten-most-dangerous-jobs-in-america/ About 60 police officers are killed every year in America, and the number is dropping. Astoundingly none of those deaths have been attributed to blogs! http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-10-30-police-killings_x.htm So please stop telling us how fraking dangerous it is to be a cop.

The right solution is to overhaul the US tax system so it is no longer confiscatory.

Compared to almost every other industrialized nation, the U.S. is under-taxed. Switzerland and Japan have slightly lower taxes -- and almost no military.

Early 20th century the US government tool ~3% of GDP

In the early 20th century the U.S. was still mostly an agrarian nation. An industrialized nation (at least, in the form of industry we know) requires a lot more governmental overhead.

Now, a wannabe world empire with a thriving military-industrial complex requires even more; we could certainly lower taxes if we stopped trying to run the world in a manner favorable to American commercial interests.

Government is threatening to take over 40+ to even 50+ % of GDP.

Citation needed. U.S. taxation is about 35% of the GDP.

If government policy doesn't change regarding GDP but the tax system tightens up, you'll find even more companies choosing to leave the US entirely.

The idea that we should have a system in which we are held hostage to big business, where were should grovel and scrape to have large corporations stay with us, nauseates me.

The existence of a corporation is a privilege, not a right. If, say, Microsoft, wants to move to Mexico so that its top stockholders can realize slightly higher profits, we are under no obligation to allow it to do so. The federal government has the authority to regulate international trade; the government of Washington state has the ability to dissolve it entirely by revoking its charter.

Anyway, where are these companies going to go? As I said, U.S. tax rates are lower than most other industrialized nations.

needed

And replacing batteries every 2 years, you did say "battery will last for 2 years max", if not sooner will be expensive for GM. Some Slashdotters above said the Volt was going to cost $35,000, however here's a "Forbes news item that says it will cost $40,000. Now I don't know how much the batteries cost but if they cost $2000 replacing them every 2 years, if not sooner, will cost more than $10,000 over 10 years. And that's just counting the cost of the battery not labor or other expenses. Suddenly that $40,000 is now less than $30,000. That is unless the costs of the batteries fall.

And your Prius thing is just one of the ignorant arguments that need to die. Toyota uses different chemistry there (NiMH to be exact).

Okay, so I may of been wrong in using the batteries Toyota uses as an example of how how they will last. I was ignorant, didn't know, they used different battery technologies.

Falcon

Their argument will not protect you from malware or attacks on the infrastructure. Take the recent SMS vulnerability as an example. Your phone is vulnerable right now; no jailbreaking required.

Keep in mind that if someone actually launched an attack using that SMS vulnerability, it is already illegal to do so. Additional laws will not help you here.

---

AI Feed @ Feed Distiller

Unfitting though it may be, it's the case. It's not so much a corporate/individual thing as it is a patent office thing.

Tamiflu's effectiveness is waning.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/hscout/2009/03/02/hscout624591.html

So Amazon, Google, Yahoo, NYSE, and so on choose bsd, linux, or solaris, with good reason. While LSE managers apparently think that the OS that they run on their desktop for word processing is up to the task of running an exchange because, well... why not, they use it all day long!

"Wall Street Embraces Linux" : http://www.forbes.com/2002/03/27/0327linux.html

"NYSE Moves to Linux" (from UNIX): http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/12/14/2312210

Hawaii is now banned also.

http://www.forbes.com/2006/04/13/cx_lr_06slate_prisonslide.html?Partner=msnedit

3. Cleveland, Ohio - Jobs available: 211

Perhaps -- but Cleveland is gonna turn around in no time, thanks to these promotional videos!

• Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video
• Hastily Made Cleveland Tourism Video: 2nd Attempt

(Full disclosure: I was born and raised in Dayton, one of Forbes magazine's Fastest Dying Cities in America. So it's not like I have any room to throw stones.)

(First, I must acknowledge the authors of TFA started it off by saying it was "snarky and unscientific". Noting that...)

How could Boston make this list? It is a serious hotspot for technology. There are numerous smaller tech specific schools, as well as the MIT factor (assuming that four hundred yards across the Charles is still considered "Boston" from the article's point of view). There are numerous financial companies that are always hiring for IT, or at least hiring from other Boston based consulting firms. Then there's Big Pharma. If you consider Boston to be "within the 495 belt", you have a huge number of opportunities. If you consider Boston to JUST be Boston proper, then the traffic is a non-issue, as you should be taking public transport anyway.

The traffic...I'm not going to say it is great, but it doesn't make the Forbes 12 Worst. However, it does make number eight on Jalopnic's list in 2008. That being said, there are alternatives to driving your car to most city locations.

Regarding the sports championships that were brought up...that's just stupid. As somebody already said, they list SF because of the LACK of championships, but list Boston because there are too many. Silly. If you are into sports, you will find a very educated (although biased) fan base for every major sport (excluding NASCAR). I could go on regarding the sports situation, but I'm pretty sure anyone that cares about sports is already aware of the mark Boston has made on the sports world in the past decade.

History. Someone complained that the town felt "old". Really? The city with the first university on this continent, the first battles of the Revolutionary war, the longest continuously run restaurants in the country, the first public park in the country, some of the oldest churches in the country, the oldest surviving naval vessel in the country, the first post office, the oldest professional sports venue(Fenway) in the country, and the first underground rail system in the country? That city came across as old? We prefer to view it as historic.

Considering Boston is one of the cities in this country with the longest and most influencial histories and is also a long standing technology innovator, I would think there would be some understanding as to why there might be a level of pride.

To bring home the point, you will notice that the author of TFA gave the number of job postings available for every other city on the list, except Boston and SF. That is because Boston (I don't know about SF) is still a power house in the tech world. The author complained about traffic and his home town teams losing too many sporting events to Boston's teams. Which is about as snarky and unscientific as you can get...

Did they confiscate his earnings too? He supposedly made $3 million by spamming. If he's just being fined $1 million and gets to keep the other $2 million, I'd hardly call this effective even with the prison sentence.

Here's a Forbes Magazine interview with the CEO of Nvidia: Nvidia's Plan For Beating Moore's Law: Chief Jen-Hsun Huang on how GPUs could get ahead of CPUs. But read the comments. Readers are not impressed.

There is a general impression now, apparently correct, that Nvidia is not honest and cannot be trusted. HP bought Nvidia graphics chips, and when they were found defective, neither company was completely honest about fixing the defects, articles say.

An Inquirer article, Nvidia cuts out reviewers for the GTS250, says "IT IS ALWAYS funny when an unethical company turns on its own supporters as Nvidia did with the latest 'all new' GT250 cards. This time however, their PR stunts cross the line from unethical to purposely false, and hilarity ensues."

Another quote from the Inquirer story: "This time however, they crossed the line from plausible deniability to flat out deception. In the middle of last week we heard what Nvidia was up to this time around, but just couldn't believe they would be THAT sleazy."

Now that Intel is integrating faster GPUs into its chipsets, there is a perception that eventually there will be little room for Nvidia.

Indeed, why go to the expense of government agents when the "human flesh search engines" will do the job for you? I've heard of similar things taking place, mostly in China, where zealous nationalists and other general vigilantes have both the power of numbers and the internet to track down and harrass ne'er-do-wells in real life. It even carries over to the US occasionally; a Chinese student at Duke was targeted after she tried to mediate between Chinese and Tibetan student groups. I wonder how prevalent this will become in the US; Iranians don't have quite the numbers as the Chinese but really, anyone with say, someone's real name and location, and enough patience and determination can make that person's life pretty miserable.

Thanks, I appreciate your response.

I didn't think of the financial sector when you mentioned white collar crime, and this is the first I've heard of Canadian banks' stability. Interesting stuff.

I am of the opinion that what led to the bust was the boom, and that the speculation boom itself was due to a number of factors, not least being the Fed's artificially low interest rates and Congress' "mandate" for affordable housing. I see the entire "Systemic Differences" section of the article you linked as being more influential in the bubble and the bust than any lack of regulation. Canada's different outlook (and their regulations) kept their banks from participating heavily in the boom, so naturally the bust affected them less as well. My belief in a more fundamental cause for the crash sort of sidesteps any meaningful discussion about the financial regulation issue, so I'll focus more on the second half of your post.

Corporations reserve the right to lie about their products, defeating the purpose of the free market entirely. Regulations work - once the public pressure became too great, all of these items were regulated and outright banned in some cases.

They didn't have a right to lie about their products--they all committed fraud by claiming their products were safe when they knew otherwise, and they got caught. It wasn't the regulations that did the job, it was the public's awareness of the problem. If you know that lead paint is harmful especially to children, and you have children, are you going to paint your house with it? Of course not! Once the problem is discovered the market takes care of it on its own: people stop buying lead paint, and companies selling it either change their product or shrivel and die.

If regulations took no effort to follow (i.e. "don't put lead in your paint") then I'd be more okay with them. In reality, the regs are closer to "all of your paint must now be tested for lead," a process which costs money. That cost does two things: (1) raises the price of the good, since the cost of testing gets passed on to the consumer, and (2) crowds out small and medium-sized businesses who can't handle the new overhead of testing, while allowing supercorps with capital to burn to fill the vacuum.

For an example of recent horrible regulation, check out this piece on CPISA, last year's for-the-children lead scare response.

"Either they take all the children's books off the shelves," Associate Executive Director Emily Sheketoff of the American Library Association told the Boston Phoenix, "or they ban children from the library."

SOX killed a lot of smaller corporations due to the cost of compliance.

[citation needed]

http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2008/1222/028.html and the other million plus hits your lazy smug ass could find if you just went to google. You could also pay attention when SOX went live and MSNBC, CBS, CNN, and about 20 other news networks cover the nationwide bitch fest for 2 years.

Thank you for sleeping through that part of history. Get off your lazy ass and google it and wipe the smug shit eating grin off your face you brat.

Eisenhower was right with his beware the "military-industrial complex" With Bush / Cheney / Rumfeld we got exactly what he warned about.

I keep seeing people posting about how much more advanced than us a species would have to be to reach earth. I simply don't see why thats true. To my knowledge we have at least general knowledge of every major technology we would need to travel between stars, and thats with NASA never having had a budget over about $34B 2007 dollars, and currently closer to half of that. If we spent less time and money on killing each other and bailing each other out, and maybe cared about something other than our own social problems, there's no reason we couldn't have people on other planets as we speak.

Consider this:
For about $135B 2005 dollars we effectively went from flying propeller planes to repeatedly placing men on the moon.
Since 2001 we have spent about $865B in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Since Fall of 2008 we have committed about $12.2 Trillion Dollars to "Economic Recovery" plans


The barrier between us and the stars is not some insurmountable technology one, its a matter of money and willpower. The only hope I see is that private interests (including SpaceX and other companies) will pursue these technologies (considering that hundreds of companies have higher revenue than NASA) otherwise I'm afraid we may never get off this miserable rock before we kill ourselves off. You wouldn't bet the uptime of a moderately important website on a single webserver, yet we continue to bet the survival of our species on a single rock floating in space.

Apple is about profit margin. Apple has enjoyed much higher profit margins than its competitors. That's starting to slip as iPhone and iPod prices come down, and the cheaper competitors get better.

Apple's reaction so far has been to raise iTunes prices. Something better than that will have to be done next.

I couldn't find the official court description/ruling on the case, but I did find this vastly more informative and balanced description of the case.

As I suspected, and as you probably suspected, the case in not the total abomination as the biased description paints it as. In my opinion it is an extremely icky situation, and while the outcome was rather unpleasant there was absolutely nothing improper or unreasonable in the judges' handling of it.

I read the "douchebag" school/first_amendment ruling, and the talk on that one is overblown as well. It wasn't about the student writing "douchebag", the student was inciting other with misinformation flood certain school officials with a disruptive number of calls to "piss them off" and the whole situation was threatening to spiral into a substantial in-school disruption and other details. The only "action taken against the student" was that the administration declined to endorse the student for student body office - and administration endorsement was a requirement to get on the ballot. The intended purpose/qualifications/educational_value of the extracurricular student government system was cooperative productive dispute resolution, and the student's behavior around this incident had been contrary to that. I am extremely queezy with any notion of school officials doing anything on the basis of outside-school-speech, and the ruling made an entirely-not-unreasonable link to in-school disruption, and to giving some latitude and deference to school officials in managing and preventing in-school disruption, and to the minimal and quite relevant nature of the school response in the student's extracurricular privileges. A very ugly case, but hardly gross judicial disregard for the 1st amendment.

The 4th amendment case someone was citing against Sotomayor was particularly absurd. A government agency had reasonable cause to suspect employee misuse of equipment, and examined its OWN computers sitting in its OWN offices. Judge Sotomayor actually did (in my opinion perhaps generously) extend some limited 4th amendment expectation of privacy in the contents of "their" work computers, but ruled that in this case the expectation of privacy was low and that this good-cause employer "search" of the computers was "reasonable".

If these are the worst and most offensive cases they can dig up out of Sotomayor's entire ~3,600 case history, it only serves to convince me she's an exceptionally good judge.

-

Why the fuck should I have to do the work when experts in the field such as Bruce Schneier has done it for me? of course I guess that Forbes magazine and Bruce Schneier are "less than half a chromosome closer to a chimpanzee" because they don't want a bloated piece of spying pig shit like Vista. Want some more Mr Troll? How about Shane O'Neil of CIO.com writing on PCWorld for the perspective of enterprise companies in all this. His answer: XP works and Vista don't.

I could go on all day troll. I could wallpaper this page with link after link after link, by heads of corporations, by security experts, and of course by the users that have been burnt. Vista is a POS. Accept it and quit sucking the Ballmer cock. If you want an Apple so bad buy one. Ballmer is just as shitty a CEO as the Pepsi guy was for Apple Inc, he just has more money he can piss down a rat hole before they fire his monkey ass. Hell even their own executives got burnt on the whole Vista capable fiasco. Vista is DOA and I wouldn't be surprised if Windows 7 is just as big a can of fail.

Maybe after the next one bombs we can get Steve Ballmer fired and bring in someone who actually will give the customers what they want instead of wanting to be a ripoff of Steve Jobs and Apple Inc. But enjoy your big can of Vista failure troll, suck it down baby! As soon as Win7 comes out they will abandon you just like they did the WinME users a decade ago. Meanwhile I'm making the cash by cranking out new XP builds as fast as I can get the parts. I guess all those customers who are handing me money hand over fist just can't see the Vista "advantage" of protected media either, huh?

Frequency doubled IR is not an option either because you can't modulate the beam fast enough.

Actually, the Corning green lasers in the ShowWX are freq doubled. True green is not expected for several years at least. More on the Corning lasers here.

Last year, Maryland raised marginal tax rate on millionaires. This year, the number of millionaires in Maryland dropped by 30% and total tax revenue collected from them dropped as well.

Lemme see. Last year, Forbes counted 1,125 billionaires in the world, and this year only 793. So the number of billionaires dropped by 30%. According to your logic, that's because they moved to... Mars?

Instead of one central purchasing order they will go after each state/county and government organisation parallely and independently.

And they'll say "Whoa, you're thinking of using what filthy hippy app? ...

The 1990's called, they want their talking points back. Notice that after all these years, the best MSFTers can do to counter RMS is to call him names? Can't handle any of the ideas or technologies, can they?

We've known for decades that FOSS is about making money. Some discussions which might make the point that FOSS concepts dovetail with that:

• Open Source Means Business
• Open Source and Capitalism
• Capitalist view of Open Source
• Is Open Source capitalist or communist?
• • Open Distribution vs Open Source
  • Open source is a capitalist's game
  • It's about capitalism, not freebies

and so on...

"Last year, the company took in $25 million in revenue, but it has the page views to earn much more. Craigslist is the seventh-most-viewed site online, according to Comcscore, yet it only makes money from fees for posting some apartment listings in New York and job listings in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York."

The only reason you've heard of Cory Doctorow is because he has published (or his father has) in the traditional way.

Well, not really. I heard of Cory Doctorow because I heard him speak at a conference. He was invited to the conference because he's written some really well-received books that fit in with the theme of the con. The reason they were well-received was because he rose out of obscurity by giving his books away for free.

I'm not saying that giving content away is a sure fire way to be noticed. Far from it. Skill is still the most important asset by far, but if you have that skill, then giving the content away for free is a great marketing strategy as long as the thing you have to sell (such as a hardcopy of the book) is tangibly worth more.

Also, I found the article that I was looking for. Doctorow explains the story a lot better than I could ever hope to.

Lowering spending is the only option. Raising taxes in never an option.

What is it about the topic of taxes that makes so many of my fellow Americans so stupid whenever the topic comes up?

When spending is too low, lowering it is not an option. When taxes are too low, raising them is an option.

Spending on basic physical and social infrastructure has been too low for decades, and much has fallen into disrepair from neglect. Lowering it is not an option if we want a decent quality of life in this country.

On the other hand, spending on building a military empire has been overly high, has as been spending on putting people in jail. That spending can certainly be lowered.

Compared to most other industrialized countries, the U.S. pays low taxes. Compared with our history, the top marginal tax rates are quite low. (The graph there is interesting. Note the decline in taxes that proceeded the Great Depression, and the decline in taxes that preceded our current financial shitstorm.) So yes, raising taxes is an option; we could go back to the 50% top rate of the socialist Regan years, or even the 91% top rate that applied during the communist reign of Eisenhower, and the nation would do quite well.

http://www.forbes.com/2009/04/01/cities-city-ten-lifestyle-real-estate-livable-cities_slide_16.html?thisSpeed=undefined seems to be mostly blue cities

I seem to have struck a nerve.

Nah, I just have an allergic reaction to persistent idiots who don't know wtf they're talking about.

I, and many others want our coffee served HOT!

It is served hot: 140 degrees is hot. If you want it hot enough to put in in danger of hospitalization and multiple surgeries, that puts you in the same category as those who like driving Ford Pintos with faulty gas tanks: nobody gives a shit about you.

As far as I am concerned...you, the white mule you rode in on, and your nanny state can all be shoved up your own ass.

You should try Denmark. Socialistic as fuck, yet it's the world's happiest place and it has a per capita GDP $16,000 higher than that of the U.S.

Look, buckwheat..my 'reading comprehension thing' is beyond what you can achieve in your limited lifetime apparently.

What a surprise, you have the bum eyes.

You can be as insulting as you can achieve, but you will not change my mind about 'facts' playing an important role in the Libertarian faith-based storyline.

Fixed that for you.

Don't despair, I think patents expire. We will look back at this time 200 years from now and wonder "what were we thinking!"

Patents expire, but a lot of harm can be done until they do and IBM is no stranger to playing the patent extortion game.

The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process.

After IBM's presentation, our turn came. As the Big Blue crew looked on (without a flicker of emotion), my colleagues--all of whom had both engineering and law degrees--took to the whiteboard with markers, methodically illustrating, dissecting, and demolishing IBM's claims. We used phrases like: "You must be kidding," and "You ought to be ashamed." But the IBM team showed no emotion, save outright indifference. Confidently, we proclaimed our conclusion: Only one of the seven IBM patents would be deemed valid by a court, and no rational court would find that Sun's technology infringed even that one.

An awkward silence ensued. The blue suits did not even confer among themselves. They just sat there, stonelike. Finally, the chief suit responded. "OK," he said, "maybe you don't infringe these seven patents. But we have 10,000 U.S. patents. Do you really want us to go back to Armonk [IBM headquarters in New York] and find seven patents you do infringe? Or do you want to make this easy and just pay us $20 million?"

After a modest bit of negotiation, Sun cut IBM a check, and the blue suits went to the next company on their hit list.

IBM even tried to patent the patent protection racket.

And whenever something about IBM and patents comes up someone giddy over how IBM fought SCO in court says something stupid like it's just a defensive patent. IBM has a long history of being offensive with patents.

IBM set the standard for patent licensing in the early '90s. While Big Blue was in a steep decline, veteran employee and lawyer Marshall Phelps got the company to raise the fees it charged others for piggybacking on its ubiquitous technology. Phelps recalls that incoming CEO Lou Gerstner was skeptical of the program; at RJR Nabisco, he had been involved in a patent dispute with Procter & Gamble over soft chocolate-chip cookies. Phelps changed Gerstner's mind by cracking open an IBM PC and showing him all the components that came from other companies. In other words: hardware companies were interdependent, and as the biggest fish in the sea, IBM should exploit that fact. A few years, later IBM was raking in $2 billion a year of almost pure profit from licensing revenue.

Even the Moore himself thinks this will at least last til 2018 when silicon transistors reach their theoretical limit on the atomic scale. Whether or not the industry finds a suitable replacement for silicon or finds another way to go about making processors is another thing all together.

Or the C) option: ramp up production at the near smallest we can make transistors and make them so cheap and prevalent that we have the equivalent of today's desktops in our wrist watches running off our ambient body heat.

Anyone who has used a computer since a couple of years ago realizes that the continuous battle for the smallest chip is over. It doesn't matter who's got the smallest process anymore, it matters what you're building on that process. Case and point: Intel's shifted business strategies to building embedded-and-above chips like Atom, and is so eager to do so that they've done something that's almost unheard of in Intel's history: they've farmed out production to another company (TSMC). Even AMD realizes the jig is up; they dumped their fabs because they realized they didn't need them anymore. It's not about having the best damned process available anymore. It's about having the lowest power design, the smallest design, the widest/most-parallel design.

Chip design is becoming such a detail as to how and where we use computers that even Microsoft and Apple have gotten behind designing their own (though to differing degrees; Microsoft hired IBM to build theirs, Apple bought a low-power PowerPC chip company to design theirs).

While I'm sure people will bicker in 2020 about where to go next for real performance, whether it be on-chip optical networks or 3D chips, extremely-wide-instruction-computers, asymmetric computing dies, etc., etc., it's not what's going to matter as much as we'd like to think. Those chips will likely end up so expensive that the only consumers will be server clusters. Meanwhile, pervasive computing will explode into our every day lives, more than just being wired to our ears and hip pockets. The revolution's already started.

don't confuse "considered and rejected as laughably incorrect" with closed mind my friend. don't confuse "considered and rejected as laughably incorrect" with closed mind my friend.

The generally consensus, supported by real world data, that i have seen has said the laffer curve is only valid somewhere above 60% marginal max tax rate

So, where is this agreement among economists on what ranges are appropriate for the Laffer Curve? I googled economics "laffer curve" agreement ranges and checked a bunch of results and not one said there any agreement of the validity of a range of the Laffer Curve.

The generally consensus, supported by real world data, that i have seen has said the laffer curve is only valid somewhere above 60% marginal max tax rate,

One of the pages I found has this scenario:
"By June, you've already made a million dollars, and the progressive tax system promised to tax that income 50 percent. However, anything you make over a million will be taxed 90 percent. Why work the rest of the year when you know you can only keep 10 percent of your income? You'd probably take your half a million and retire to your beach house until next year. At this point, the taxes are discouraging work and tax revenue."

If you let your top marginal tax rate fall below a certain level you then start to perform wealth redistribution from the poor to the rich as the rich gain more benefit per tax dollar than the poor.

If you drop the marginal tax rate the wealthy will keep more money. And they will spend it and or invest it. More spending helps the economy grow, as does more investments. Where money is redistributed by government giving subsidies. Vary few poor people will see any of that whereas the already wealthy will get those subsidies. Cargill, one of the world's largest privately owned corporations, has been called a corporate welfare queen due to the massive subsidies it gets. Government is taking money out of poor workers and giving it to a hugh private business.

Falcon

You mean "an already established low-power design house like" PAsemi http://www.forbes.com/2008/04/23/apple-buys-pasemi-tech-ebiz-cz_eb_0422apple.html

They already own a chip maker. That bit of news was from last year. It shouldn't surprise you today that they plan on actually using the chipmaker they bought.

I think if you look at the history, you'll find that things like MS Word (for DOS) were around at the same sort of time you could get StarWriter on the PC. In any case, that's pretty academic, because neither modern office suite looks anything like those ancient predecessors. And if you look at how they've evolved, it's pretty clear who is the leader and who is copying the ideas.

Agreed, but the follow-the-leader approach is more of an artifact of the MS file-format monopoly than an inability for opensource to innovate. After years of vendor lock-in, many users are unwilling switch just because it requires learning a different set of tools and a different interface (your choice of GIMP is a great example of that). Openoffice must constantly play "catch-up" because in order to satisfy would be converts their interface must closely match MS Office, most of the same features need to be in place, and they need file-format compatibility, which they must laboriously reverse engineer because users such as you and I didn't have the foresight to worry about vendor-lock-in. Even if open-office developed independently and created a better designed, more feature rich, and easier to use, file-format lock-in and the learning curve for a new interface wouldn't allow them to eventually tip the balance; just like at Apple vs Microsoft.

You seem to be confusing copyright and patents.

No, just circles with rectangles, but that was merely for illustration.

OK, maybe that's good enough for you. I'm a professional, my time is valuable, my clients' time is valuable, and I want the best tools for the job. In -- as you might put it -- 98% of cases, that means paying some real money for a properly designed, easy to use, decently tested and actually finished and working commercial product. Or are you one of those amusing people who thinks the GIMP is OK as an alternative to Photoshop, despite the fact that approximately 100% of professional graphic artists disagree?

Your statement is confusing. Yes, GIMP is not easy to use, that is because it is designed for "professionals"; I hope you see the irony in this. Further, how can you tell if something is properly designed if you don't have the source code? If you really are "professional" you'd also be worried about how your company spends it's money, not just what's the latest and greatest. Moreover, just because the softwear comes in a box, doesn't mean it's any more finished than any other softwear, just look at gmail

I know several graphic designers; some who free-lance have made the switch, most of the rest that have not say they use photo-shop because that's what they were taught in school and they already own a copy, but that GIMP would be a perfectly acceptable alternate. Have you really polled a statically relevant sample size of graphic artists whom have tried both products recently? or are you one of those amusing people that believe that commercial software is always behind the curve?

I'm a scientific professional, and in nearly every instance an open source tool rises up to meet or defeat any proprietary solution, especially when it comes to whole systems integration. Maybe in your particular field it's different; I'm curious what are these "best tools" you cannot live without? Have you tested the open source alternatives?

Why would they use Solaris? Even Sun hardly seemed to use it that much ;o)

When you say stupid things, you might want to consider posting anonymously next time :)

Anyway....

When IBM was considering buying Sun, Forbes put out a video on Sun's legacy which some of you might find interesting.

It's sad to see Sun go down, but I'm optimistic about the merger with Oracle.

You are wrong. The primary cause of our deficits is not "skyrocketing health care costs"

It seems most of your complaints are local to LA, which I really don't know much about. I don't live there because it's overcrowded and overpriced. The California coast is just about the best land in the world, mostly ruined over the last 100 years by overpopulation.

Nationally, healthcare costs are the biggest impending financial disaster in the US, because of the horrendous growth rate in costs: "Medicare costs are projected to more than triple from 2.7 percent of GDP today to 9.4 percent by 2050. In current terms, a cost increase of 6.7 percent of GDP would equal $916 billion, or $7,930 per household annually. Even this projection assumes that per capita Medicare costs will grow only about 1 percentage point faster than GDP, even though Medicare costs have grown an annual average of 2.4 percentage points faster than GDP since the 1970s. If this trend continues, actual Medicare costs through 2050 could be double the current projection. Although aware of this coming crisis, Members of Congress have largely ignored it because all of the possible reforms are considered politically risky. " (cite).

When I'm called "greedy" for balking at my hard-earned wages being taken from me to pay for support and aid to a 17 year old single mother -- when both my wife and myself made the choice to wait for the benefit of our future family, this is unreasonable.

That money is really to benefit the baby moreso than the mother. Sure, having to support the baby is unfair. But which is more unfair, starving to death as a baby through no fault of your own, or being given the chance to grow up at the cost of having to pay a little extra in taxes once you mature? I think that is the root of a lot of libertarian frustration - thinking they should never be imposed upon. Unfortunately, life does impose on people. You can get sick and incur huge expenses, or die. You can be born to a poor family. You can be the victim of violent crime. You can be taxed. None of these are fair. For some reason, libertarians choose to minimize the unfairness of taxes exclusively, at the expense of all the others. Why?

My wife and I already pay 50%+ of our income in taxes. More than half my money being taken away is unreasonable.

Forbes says it is closer to 25%. Still a lot, but a lot less than 50%. How is the 50% figure tabulated?

A related article is from Forbes: America's Most Livable Cities. They rate the Portland, Maine metropolitan statistical area as the most livable city based on income growth, cost of living, crime, leisure, and unemployment.