I graduated from school 6 years ago, and don't remember any of the details from my studies... however, the process (math heavy) of CS remains valuable. The MBA I picked up later rounded out my skill set, but if I had taken an accounting course or two plus a general management course or two, I could have saved the time and cash and gotten it later.
Right out of school, IT may be the more useful degree. Why CS grads can get any IT jobs easily, if the outsourced HR recruiting firm is looking for IT, you'll struggle, because if you can't check the boxes, you don't get the interviews. However, your first job should be on-campus recruiting, so if you're careful, it won't make a difference.
Ten or fifteen years out, we'd all like to think that nobody cares about degrees, but it isn't true. Once you move up the food chain a bit, management LIKES degreed people. They are happy to hire programmers with high school degrees or even drop outs that can sling code, but once they need a technical lead, they don't want the gut without the degree. Sure, plenty of people will post here about how they are just fine without the degree, but it is a limitation, and the original poster has already decided to get the degree.
In 15 years, the IT degree will seem like a slightly upgrade Vo-Tech degree, and the CS degree will seem like a real engineering degree. This shouldn't matter, but it will. When you start dealing with managers with Ivy League (equivalent in your case) degrees and pedigrees, they'll see the CS-guy as one of them but more technical, they'll see the IT guy as below them.
Think nobody will care in 15 years what you did in your early 20s? Most people are unimpressive, they don't really do much during their life... for those people, their MOST measurable accomplishments are schooling, so they trade on it, and respect others that do as well. Hell, my high school, that I went to for three years, remains on my resume, because it's the top school in my area, and most of the people I interview with are trying to send their kids there (or are sending their kids there), and after fighting with the increasingly draconian admissions process, figure anyone that went there must be top notch.
You never know what will help in the future, so run with it.
I'd be happy with a two-fold Copyright. A small amount of time based upon publishing, 3 years, 5 years, whatever, and a longer time if you register. If you got 5 years, renewable every 5 years (with an increasing fee) but had to place a reproducible digital format with the Library of Congress, I'd be okay with longer periods of time. My concern isn't stopping Disney from capitalizing on Walt's characters, but rather, protecting our culture.
A retool of Trademark/Copyright could work... Disney isn't actually concerned with losing Steamboat Willie, they are concerned with protecting Mickey Mouse. If Steamboat Willie entered the public domain, and everyone could download, cut, edit, their own 8 minute shorts, but couldn't commercially capitalize on Mickey Mouse, Disney would probably not object.
My wife is an amateur composer. One of her current projects is she is creating cel phone ring-tones based upon arranging some historical ethnic music. Armed with a fake book to get a starting point, and heavily arranging things, she is creating some new works using the public domain's creative commons. However, the fact that she can't use tunes from the 30s, 40s, and 50s is kind of a shame. Why is it that we can't take WW II era propaganda films (which have no commercial significance anymore) and use them to create new works. Whether lefties parodying our current events, or people simply looking at that period of time, the situation sucks.
WW II is a significant cultural event, and not being able to use things from that era upsets me.
While I don't like never ending copyright, I also understand why some authors think that it is their property and should last forever (I think that they are wrong, but I respect that view), so with that in mind, I'm completely okay with a compromise that lets commercially valuable works be protected nearly in perpetuity in return for releasing things that aren't commercially valuable entering the public domain. Given how much the IP Cartel companies benefit from the public domain, they might be okay with a solution that lets them keep their commercial works and characters protected forever in return for other loosening to build the public domain.
While I feel on some level that Disney's classic animations SHOULD become part of our public domain at some time, I'm willing to yield that (and even grant a perpetually renewable scheme to get their buy in) to worry about my bigger concern, cultural preservation.
If a video game maker goes under, happens all the time, I realize that their assets need to be sold to pay creditors. However, if the work isn't being exploited, turn it over to the public. Right now there is no provision for this, because even if the thing has zero value, since you get nothing for giving it to the public domain, fiduciaries want to protect it forever.
Perhaps some scheme could be devised that uses the fees paid for registration to A) pay for archival, and B) pay small fees to "purchase" the old works into the public domain. Perhaps something like 5% of sales could be used... That would no doubt get companies that have archives of old software to pony it up... Makers of CGA/EGA DOS games might be willing to pay someone a year to pull all the software out of the archive and "sell" it to the public, for small amounts.
I'm less concerned with breaking Disney's monopoly than preserving our culture. The rhetoric of those fighting copyright extension suggests the same, which is why I think a compromise might be reached. America's economy depends heavily on IP exports, so Congress isn't going to break that to serve some nebulous public good, and I can't fault them, but Disney might WANT to get more IP (that isn't theirs) into the public domain for them to exploit, and some method of preserving our culture should be reachable.
i.e. keep Dumbo forever in return for a small fee every five years PLUS a digital archive that you update on each release, but release stuff you don't want to exploit. OTOH, they might not want their name associated with less politically correct works from WW II. However, the fact that we are losing that part of our heritage SHOULD concern SOME members of Congress.
That is the rub... things from decades ago that are a part of American culture are simply gone. Walt Disney's first live-action movie, that included animated elements (the combination being a first), Song of the South is simply gone. It's part of American culture, a childhood memory for some, and if they wish to share it with their kids, they can't, because it's gone.
The real tragedy with it taking a while to work itself out is that certain elements that were never sold to the home (movies before VHS/DVD), they can simply vanish because the copyright holders wants them to.
Taking a stroll down memory lane, there was a series of Text adventures that I played on my Apple//c. I'm sure that the 5.25" disks were tossed at my parents house, but even if not, that's not usable directly on modern equipment. I was able to download images and an emulator to play them, but legally, that can't be done. If I wanted to show my son one of the first computer games I played, I don't have that ability, and it's tragic.
I think that if a work isn't commercially exploited for some reasonable amount of time (3 years? 5 years?) the copyright should be lost. In this day and age of digital distribution, there is no reason why works can't be commercially available indefinitely. There is a minimum run for DVDs (enough to cover the cost of mastering the DVD, which has dropped, but for a while kept niche markets like Anime in VHS for a while), a minimum run for VHS, but a iTMS movie? Simply upload and sell.
I think that 1 year is a bit short, things may need to be retooled, etc.
However, it kind of worries me that large chunks of American culture can disappear... the film reels not maintained, and nobody can do anything. Sure it hit the public domain almost a century later, but if the work was destroyed, it's gone.
Movies, old computer games, old video games, its kind of tragic. Now take Nintendo, their popular franchises are re-released on their hand-held units (can play all the old SMB games on Gameboy Color/Gameboy Advanced), so I don't begrudge them keeping their copyrights, they are still exploiting the works. But if it's not being exploited, let it go, and keep out culture.
It's not just a flawed business model. A lot of people do it as a hobby. [...] Most of all, its because this was all pretty much free to do until a few years ago.
So? Pay up, and continue to enjoy this hobby. I love horseback riding -- and I'm not alone -- but you don't see any complaints, that the horses aren't given away for free, nor is keeping yours at the stables complimentary (because you helped test the stables).
The worse part of the post you responded too, "it was all pretty much free to do until a few years ago." When the West was opening up, large chunks of land more or less went to whoever showed up and claimed it. When the "New World" was discovered, the explorers simply claimed the land and planted a flag... they later had to defend it as rival claims showed up.
However, I cannot go into a random place in the US and claim it now. Those property rights are assigned. It may not be "fair" that people have it for being first (like the guys that bought domain names for a song that are now worth a fortune), but to have property rights, someone has to own it, fair or not. In the "wild west" phase, people claim shit, stuff is free, etc., but it only lasts so long.
I used to get free stuff (physical objects) all the time during the wild west phase of the Internet... people were spending a fortune staking claims on the Internet, with no idea what would work. Most failed, but some people made a fortune. However, I don't sit around griping that those days are over.
And before people complain about it, contrast the development of the US west with robust property rights and its rapid development to areas of Israel. Israel adopted Ottoman law on property rights, which placed most of the land under state control. Everything is planned there, hence all the illegal construction (on both sides of the green line, by Jews and Arabs) because nobody owns anything. Your ability to get a house is your ability to know someone in the right department of the government, not simply the ability to buy land and place a building on it.
BTW, don't you feel slighted that when you were a kid, riding was "free" (paid for my parents, but to you free) and now you have to pay for it. Shouldn't you be entitled because it was free at first?
We all get form letters. However, if they are on target AND slightly customized, you develop a strong affinity for the Congressman. I remember reading a story in a political book about a guy running for Senate was campaigning in a diner or something similar. One of his constituents, and elderly woman, said that years ago when he was new in the House of Reps, she wrote to him for help, and got a lovely response detailing his efforts back (it was a form letter) in that area. She said to him that she'd vote for him in any election.
When I wrote my Congressman about something I find a travesty, the paperwork to get freaking Sinus medication, I got back her standard form letter about helping make health care more affordable... No loyalty from me there, as someone whose aids can't read a letter (typed up, but custom) and send a useful response doesn't seem like someone that can be counted on when issues come up.
In college, I wrote my rep about something I saw on Slashdot... it was about a guy sued for putting the building code online claiming that the statute for building codes was owned by the private company (trade org) that submitted it. You could look up other laws, but not this one. I sent a letter and included a copy of the news article that broke. I got a CALL from one of his aides, asked what this was about (given the article wasn't from my state), and said that the Rep would look into it. I have no idea whether he would or not, but I'm MUCH more likely to vote for him if he seeks higher office (I'm no longer in his district), because they addressed my concerns.
Good constituent relations can supposedly make a difference of 3%-5% in an election. Given that close elections are 5%, a Congressman who maintains good relationships with his constituents, addresses their letters, and helps them with government problems is basically untouchable on reelection. It separates the pros from the amateurs.
Each piece of software under the GPL is individually licensed by each copyright owner to each distributor. However, you simply download the license. Nothing would stop the coalition from creating a website where artists can submit AIF/WAV files of there music with a fee structure (free, per-play, annual license), and allowing Internet radio stations from electronically signing the agreement.
Individually license doesn't mean the legal department of the guy broadcasting in his dorm room needs to negotiate with legal from the garage band. It simply means that you can either "pay the Cartel" fee OR license the music. If the cartel fee is too high, instead of that, do a license system.
I've played GW games on and off over the years, more off then on, but every once in a while someone gets me into it. They decided to bring their GW Stores to the US, which decimated game stores that used to sell GW stuff, not because of competition, but because GW would play games with events, etc.
They also realized that their old-time base was mostly using their older miniatures, just updating rule books and adding a few neat elements. Their third edition tried to force changes by making the troops more powerful than the specialists, to encourage more purchases as well.
They found that with their game stores, they were able to bring in teenagers with disposable income, but the other gamers didn't want to play with teenagers... makes sense, if you're in your 30s and 40s and have kids at home, your hanging out with the guys night is less fun if there are 14 and 15 year olds there.
They found that getting teenagers into the game, who would drop money then disappear when they got older gave them a constant supply of people buying miniatures. The guy playing the same Imperial Guard army for 10 years doesn't generate that much revenue.
They took a very anti-fan approach, and while it gave them a bump in sales, they have become one of the companies hated by gamers... including those that play their games.
I really think that it's absurd that Apple chose to make the battery non-user-replaceable. I mean, there's a reason every phone in the history of cell phones has let you replace the battery yourself, it just makes sense. If this is the "revolution" iPhone fanatics have been talking about, count me out.
About two weeks ago, my 11-month old son found my wife's cel phone, managed to knock off the battery cover, and crawl around playing with it. It took us a week to find it, and in that week, her phone was unstable because the batteries would pop out. Another time with another phone, I dropped it and the cover cracked... used masking tape for a bit, and realized that it was time for a new phone anyway. Number of cel phones where we lost the battery cover in the past 5 years, 2.
The last time I replaced the battery on my phone was my Samsung i330 where I bought the extra-length battery for around $50 to last longer, and it's battery time remained shorter than the iPhone. This was back in 2002 or 2003. Number of batteries I've replaced in the past 5 years, 1.
So given the choice between non-user accessible battery covers, or a slightly more expensive battery replacement in the unlikely event that I need to replace the battery, I think that Apple made the right call.
Microsoft has publicly stated that they do not agree to the terms of the GPL v3, will not provide support to Novell customers using software under the GPL v3, and want nothing to do with it. As the License is a contract between the copyright holder and the licensee to distribute said software, Microsoft not agreeing to said terms means Microsoft does not accept them. If a Microsoft employee hands a friend a Red Hat disc, previous to this statement, you might be able to argue that Microsoft is distributing software. However, Microsoft's statement makes it pretty clear that they do not agree to distribute.
Now, if Microsoft or their agents distributes GPL v3 code, have expressly denied agreeing to the GPL v3, they are in copyright violation. They have copied someone else's software without permission, violating their copyright.
This statement is clever, because it means that if someone at Microsoft inadvertently distributes GPL v3 software, prior to this one MIGHT have argued that the implicitly agreed to GPL v3's terms, and attempted to get court order to force Microsoft to comply (and release some code). Now you have to sue them for copyright infringement.
Why is this important? Well, if they distribute software with GPL v3 code, you can probably get an injunction to stop them, you'll be able to sue for damages (although illegally copying software that you are giving away for $0 albeit with copying restrictions seems hard to do... you've been wronged, but damages are probably $0. The USFL sued the NFL and won an anti-trust suit, however, since the USFL's poor business decisions were determined to run them out of business, the award was $1, after appeals and interest added, the USFL Collected $3.76. I presume that a copyright infringement suit against Microsoft would be similar, collect $1, since no monetary damages were awarded.
I am not a lawyer, but this is my game theory read on the case.
Some of the health care reforms and HMO take-over in the 90s drastically lowered Doctor incomes. They had to change how they practice medicine, and start ordering extra tests to keep their incomes up, etc. This caused a temporary savings in spending as they ratcheted down reimbursements, and then an increase as they over treated... basically, the doctors had become accustomed to a lifestyle and kept supporting it.
However, the newer, younger doctors, were unable to start practices as easily in the 80s, as it became difficult to get on the HMO lists, etc. More of them work for the older doctors for lower pay, more work at hospitals, coops, clinics, etc. Doctors make less money.
But, you won't see the effects for decades... you SEE it in Canada and Britain, whose single payer systems are starting to suffer, badly. The best and brightest don't go into medicine, or leave for the US, you're importing your Doctors.
Why don't you see it for decades? Let's look at the status quo...
Imagine you're a 45 year old specialist, making great money, $500k/year. You're living on $400k, putting away $100k, and planning to retire in 5 years at age 50. Now, your income is cut by the HMOs by 20%, you're now making $400k, living on $400k. You now have to wait for your older investments to fund retirement, so you wait until 60. Nobody is going to shed a tear for this guy, but the income cut kept him in practice an extra 10 years, so you see an increase in doctors.
Now, shouldn't less income mean you work less, or find other work, it depends. If you're a 21 year old biology major junior, you might decide that instead of spending 4 years in medical school and 6 years in residency, you'll spend 3 years in law school, expecting to make more money. Sure SOME Doctors make half a million, but lots "get by" at $100k-$200k... sure that's a lot of money, but remember that they have an extra $200k in education, plus 6 years as a resident to specialize in elite specialties. So at age 32 they are making $100k+, but all their friends that went to law school are making $100k+, and have been working for 7 years, own a house, etc.
Another scenario, you're 31, in your 5th year as a resident for your specialty, and the HMOs start chopping pay. Now, if you could go back at 22, you might decide to go to law school and be on your way at 25, but if you switch to law school now, you'll be 34 when you finish, competing with 25 year olds. You do your 6th year and suck it up and bear.
When pay cut, the older doctors stayed on longer, so we saw no shortage. The people in the residency track trucked on, because the "wasted time" is a sunk cost... Those in their 1st year saw the changes, and cut their losses and went into family practice. Others in med school found specialties that didn't take 6 years before you earned a living.
Basically, for a good 10 years after the HMO crack-down, we had a surge in doctors, as retirements got delayed. We also kept all our doctors in the pipeline because their next best alternative sucked. A 4th or 5th year resident was better off spending 2-3 more years to complete their specialty than they were switching to a new option...
However, in another 10 years, we're going to see the consequences of cutting doctor pay... we'll have more intelligent lawyers, and less intelligent doctors. We'll import doctors because American doctors are still better paid than British or Canadian doctors, and they'll import doctors from India who speak fluent English and find the British/Canadian doctors paid better. However, this model isn't sustainable.
If you compare most doctors in their 30s with those in their 50s, really talk to them, the former are NOT as intelligent as the latter. We have a decade or two of doctors that aren't that bright (the brightest got a JD), and we're going to lose our elite older doctors to retirement.
I'm really excited to see if the Massachusetts experiment works. Each state needs to tailor theirs differently, New York with its
The problem with what you're looking at is GAAP numbers, which work wonderfully for manufacturing companies, not so great with IP companies.
Basically, R&D is expensed as incurred, but the benefits are in the future. However, since we don't know how to actually value that asset with precision (if you expect a 150% ROI on your research dollars, theoretically you should have an asset to amortize), GAAP says to make it simple, we call it $0.
As a result, Pharma companies do some research in house, but most of what gets done is a lot of seed money gets put into little research shops, and if the drug is a success, you buy the research shop. That way, you can put the R&D on your books as an asset.
Basically, if I spend $10m on R&D, I have a $10m expense. If I put $1m as investments into 10 different little shops, I have no expenses, because I have $10m in assets (my investments). In 5 years, 1 panned out, 9 flopped, so I write off $9m off the flopped shops (though I can do it over time to not eat the expense in 1 year, write one off each year, leave rest as shells), and buy the remaining shop for $10m. I then put the company on my books for $500,000 in assets (the lab equipment), and $9.5 million in good will.
As a result, Big Pharma doesn't do as much research in house as they do with seed money plus buying anyone who does anything cool. The in-house team is focused on FDA trials, not drug research. Look at that filing in front of you, look at the income statement for "minority interest" or whatever they call it. That means that the company owns over 80% of a firm (so consolidates the financials), but pays out the minority holder. So if they bought 90% of the research company, they essentially leave a 10% royalty to the guys that did the work, but instead of a royalty payment, it's in the much sneakier minority interest section.
The FDa trials can't always be amortized. Costs that have an unknown benefit in the future have to be expensed today, can't be amortized over time. I understand what you're saying, but you have to appreciate the damage that GAAP's rules have done to our pharma companies and how they operate.
Remember, you don't get a patent on a medication, you get a patent on the process to create the medication. Your 20-year clock starts upon developing the drug. If it takes 10 years to get through trials, you only have 10 years left on the patent.
My buddies aren't that low on the pole, aren't lying to me, and the situation is much more complicated than you think. If it was such a money mint, they'd be doing WAY MORE research in house. There are good things with the American system, and bad things, but if you take America out of the free market health care game, there will be a LOT FEWER dollars chasing new drugs. Medical research WILL SLOW DOWN, and that's a risk I'm uncomfortable with. The fact that the rest of the world free rides on us, because we are the only ones paying the premium to chase new drugs, is unfair, but I don't know how to fix it. A senator (who I won't name), stunned my friend when addressing the company's employees/friends/PAC at some event, and talking to people later, told them that if they don't want cheaper drugs re-imported from Canada, they should stop selling to Canada. There is a growing realization that letting the companies negotiate lower prices with Canada ENCOURAGES that free-riding. If there was legal re-importing, our costs would go down at first to the level of Canada's, but you won't see Canada getting such cheap pricing in the future.
I support the re-importation of drugs (at least from Western countries... I wouldn't allow it from Africa, because I want the companies to sell cheap stuff to the third world to help them build up). Our costs would go down, other countries would pay more, and the giant American subsidy of Canada and Europe would go away. I bet the Big Pharma companies would make more in the end, because Canada couldn't beat them up on pricing when the company knows that they essentially have to sell in the US for what they sell in Canada because of re-importation.
You ever deal with copyright complaints? I get them all the time. A former employee stuck an image from another site onto a site, nobody noticed, we get a DMCA take-down request.
I get notice from me ISP of the take-down request, they ask me to correct in 10 days.
If I can't in 10 days (takes longer to get a replacement image), I tell my ISP, and I work with their legal department, usually no problems if it is within 30 days. Outside of 30 days, they talk with the copyright holder, things get resolved.
You think that anyone else does it differently? If the BSA caught you using unlicensed software, well, to perform an audit they either need your permission or a court order, how fast do you think that happens? If you are caught owing money, how long do you think they'll give you to correct? I would expect 30 days, and if you can't in that time, you negotiate a longer period.
A small business has some unlicensed copies of Office, and agrees to an Audit, which finds that they need to buy $5000 in software. You think that the BSA expects them to comply that afternoon? Or what, shut down the business until they can get the cash? That's absurd, you either correct inside some window (10 days or 30 days), or negotiate a solution.
As far as I can tell, there is a "minor" issue, because it's LGPL and not GPL, we're not arguing that the whole package is illegal without source, just that they need to release their modifications to the library. So while the copyrights are being infringed, it is likely the modifications will be released and the copyright holders won't suffer any damages. We are 22 days in, so 16 business days into the matter, and the company as already acknowledged that there is a problem, and legal is looking at the matter to see what to do.
This to me is moving smoothly. The company has acknowledged an issue and is looking into how to resolve it. If you think that the copyright holders should threaten to sue, than frankly, you are crazy. What will they sue for? What damages are they suffering? They could probably get an injunction against Parallels shipping, but it's doubtful that they have any monetary damages seeing as how they give the software away for free. The company is working to correct.
You mention the RIAA, in all their harassment attempts, they ALWAYS offer to settle. You think that they are demanding a cashiers check that afternoon, or payment within 30 days.
Okay, there is a list of authors. So what. Something not being okay doesn't mean it is legally challengeable.
Further, courts can offer monetary relief and injunctive relief, that' about it. Damages need to be translated into dollars.
They didn't follow the license, therefore, they are infringing upon WINE or those 800+ people's copyright, so what?
They are legally in the wrong, so what?
What are the damages? Do you want to foot the bill to just get injunctive relief?
One of the reasons to assign to FSF is they WILL foot the bill to get injunctive relief, which is a threat to businesses that makes the FSF credible. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that: 299 Shi Quan He (picked a line at random) is not going to drop a $20k retainer off at an attorney to file for an injunction to stop Parallels 3.0 from shipping...
SWSoft screwed up, seems to acknowledge that they need to fix it, and some jackass is all over Slashdot because 3 weeks later and legal is figuring out what to do.
Think for a moment and stop going off like an idiot. Someone contacted a company and said, "you are using my copyrighted material without complying with the terms of the license, the license is as follows, fix it."
Who do you think should make the decision as to what is legally required? Perhaps the legal department? Perhaps they have outside counsel like many small companies, and their lawyers needs to read the LGPL and figure out what it applies do.
You expect them to make a decision on a legal matter without finding out from legal what to do.
Legal isn't going to tell them that it's okay to violate someone's copyright, but legal is going to tell them what they need to do to comply with a legal request.
Companies that sold CDs and simply put links on their website to their modified code weren't complying with the GPL. Do you think that FSF's complaints about GPL violations were handled by the webmaster making his own legal call, or legal figured out what to do to comply?
... and according to that CNN poll, "The United States spends more than 15 percent of its GDP on health care -- no other nation even comes close to that number. France spends about 11 percent, and Canadians spend 10 percent." Those countries seem to have better health care for a lower expenditure. Hmm, I wonder how that can be? Oh, right: it's not a for-profit system.
It's not a fair straight comparison, because the US system is fundamentally different. Our costs are driven up by wealthy people (or people with good insurance) getting very expensive treatments that they wouldn't get elsewhere because of standardized payments and choices. Our costs are driven up by the rest of the world free riding on America's investment in drug research.
According to my friends working in "Big Pharma," basically the prices they sell overseas, including Canada are "profitable" on a per-unit basis, because drug duplication costs are close to zero but the research is high. It's not that dissimilar to the computer software model that we've seen here. And similarly, while Linux has been able to grow the "free" approach impressively, it doesn't do any real research or advancement, nor does it handle corner cases. In fact, as the "free" solutions get better, the niche players actually are raising prices (computer prices go down, but software has been flat, becoming a bigger percentage) because they are selling fewer units to those willing to pay the premium...
In Big Pharma's case, the extensive research into developing a safe, effective, and patentable drug are substantial, and it is the enormous profitability in the US that funds all that. That profit motive is also why we get so many drugs that handle America-specific problems (look at all the lifestyle drugs), all the profits come from here. If the rest of the world had an American-style health care system, we'd have a LOT more drug research, because there would be more profitability.
The profit motive is made out to be the bad guy, but if you look at what is going on, it's actually not responsible for the paperwork. Medicare standardized billing codes, and everyone piggy-backs off that. The profit element does take money out as profits, but also forces some degree of efficiencies. If you look at how non-profits and governments run, they are WAY more corrupt than for-profits. Sure, there are plenty of managers in for-profits that take company resources to benefit themselves, and stock options for senior managers are more or less fleecing the shareholders by steeling the company, and other bad things, but in non-profits there is usually no way to stop the abusers, while in for-profits, corrupt managers eventually get fired because their corruption causes under-performance. In the non-profits, eventually people donate money (and in governments, they just take it) and then corrupt people are attracting to piles of money with no accountability.
The problems that people have with health care in the US are:
Not getting what they paid for, insurance companies have lost interest in actuarial risk, and more interested in denying claims. This is scary.
Rapidly increasing costs. While it might be reasonable for our extremely rich society to pay more and more for health care, it's still hurting those whose incomes aren't rising.
Corruption in company benefits... for accidental reasons, we get health care through the employer, and top managers in HR make the call on what is offered, and they have a bias towards fancier plans that cost more, which drives up costs.
Adverse selection, since "normal" people get care in group plans through work, the people left in the individual market are more likely to be high risk, so they get their rates jacked.
Mis-regulation... government regulation of insurance is normally focused on costs, which the government is bad at and markets are good at, and not on transparency and forcing level of service, which governments are good at.
First off, their are statutory damages, but generally only for registered copyrights. Also, it's not clear what "damages" the copyright owner, we don't know who, has suffered. Your relief is based upon damages, and maybe a punitive component, not I don't like you.
The FSF requires copyright assigned because then there is a clear owner and clear damages, because the FSF with the GNU manifesto and other things has its defined benefit from GPL'd code. Makes it more likely you can gain relief... if they sue and ask for damages plus injunctive relief, there is a clear plaintiff, not "a bunch of hackers," that has standing.
22 days is no a long time. Generally, if you are dealing in legal action, 30 days is standard. Sure, obnoxious lawyers demand things with 10 days to correct, but generally, 30 is normal.
It appears to be a major screw-up, they released code based upon LGPL'd code. Legal needs to figure out what they did, what they are at risk for, and what they should do. They need to make certain that they can legally release code, and if that is sufficient.
The copyright holders should hold their feet to the fire, but public shaming and getting half stories out seems a bit premature at this stage of the game. What damages can the Wine project have had from not having access to derivative versions of their software from this company in 22 days? Lots of things can crop of and cause things to take a few weeks. Everyone chill, and don't prejudge until we see a resolution.
Everyone is "free to sue," but each wine copyright holder may or not have standing, and may or may not have sufficient damages to due and/or be granted injunctive relief. If you ask the court to stop them from distributing your software because they are doing so without a license, it's harder to claim that if various copyright holders have 10-15 lines of code.
There is no "class" here for a class action lawsuit.
People are different. The heavy rush of attempts to narrowly define normal and drug people into changing is disturbing. Take ADHD and other "diagnosis." At what percentage of showing up is something no longer legitimately a disorder, and rather is a type of person.
As a parent, I'm extremely nervous when we let people define "normal" and call everyone outside of normal a "disorder" that needs treatment. When you start with treating genetic code, there is a fine difference between treating a disease (a good thing), and fundamentally changing a child because they aren't how you want.
I notice that there is a lot of straw man stereotyping of people "religious types two posts ago" and from you "stupid idiots that ought to be arrested for severe child abuse." I've also noticed the people who feel other parents should be arrested for doing things that they don't approve of generally don't have children.
There was a time that people were allowed to be different. They might be mocked, ostracized, or made fun of, but being different and having different values shouldn't be criminal. There is no "one right way" to raise children.
The human gene pool is pretty shallow as is, this rush to eugenically change things isn't necessarily good for the species.
To go with SA-CD media centers, you will rip to the SA-CD equivalent of WAV now, and in 4-5 years, the equivalent of FLAC begins to make sense. You can't magically compress 2:1 losslessly. You CAN with CDs because there is zero compression, because when the CD spec came out, you didn't have processors in the CD player. The SA-CD/DVD-A are going to be as small as possible given the reasonable playback hardware.
Your comment is, whatever the content, I want to squeeze it into half the space. As compression is a function of compressible data (patterns) and processor, eventually you'll get enough horsepower to get a 2:1 ratio on the DVD-A content, but I wouldn't suggest that it's now. However, including a 128 MP3, AAC, AND WMA, just to make everyone happy, should use what, 10% of the space? If you only include one of them, say MP3, you're using 3% of the disc, that's a reasonable accomodation to the digital side.
The lossy codecs serve a purpose, portible machines. The CD hybrid layer serves a purpose, backwards compatibility. The SA-CD serves a purpose, high fidelity.
Alas, the recording industry didn't push this way, and instead gets eaten by Torrents...
Not only that, they sued the crap out of Napster, which was a sloppy way to find music but cool, and left in its place Torrents, which are best for trading LOTS of files. In the Napster days, you downloaded a song, after a lot of effort, and if you liked it, bought the CD. Now, you don't Torrent an MP3, too much effort, you grab the whole CD because why not.
Exactly, when I listen to my copy of Desperado on a CD with a good set of Sennheisers, I can really hear the quality of the recording. It probably isn't as good as the original vinyl was, but the quality is just so far beyond what an MP3 or some of the incredibly compressed 90s albums sound like. Granted, it can be an artistic statement, like with grunge, but most of the time it is just ignorance. Same goes from my old Jazz CDs or 70s era Funk, the sound quality is so much better when the compression is just enough to get it onto the disc
Vinyl has certain properties that limit acoustics. It is a physical process, so if you go to heavy/light on one part of the range, the needle would skip. That physical limitation means that if one is is releasing a Vinyl version, someone that knows how to master vinyl does the process. Often the CD and Vinyl releases have separate mastering processes.
CDs, being digital, can send whatever you want. Years ago, companies would send out masters to a few mastering engineers to get back their version. Every time, the contract went to whoever made it sound loudest, because on a single listening, especially an A/B comparison, the louder track sounded better. As a result, the only mastering engineers that stayed in business were those that learned to sound "loud." As a result, there is less interesting sounds, and only a fraction of the 16-bit range was used.
This had three effects... 1) MP3s sound almost as good, who cares if you drop the low-bit range if it is over-powered by the rest. 2) synthetic instruments and drum machines, which were improving with cheap processors anyway, sound closer and closer to the real thing as you compress the range that people listen to. 3) the need for a perfect studio environment/mixing environment went away as you just weren't releasing stuff as good.
This slit the throats of CD sales, as nobody cared that the MP3 "lost acoustic range," because Pop/Rock doesn't use that range anymore. The need for a band was lessoned, and studios focused on solo vocalists which was cheaper, and used drum machines instead of drummers and the occasional work-for-hire musician for instruments as needed. In addition, the explosion of independent labels in the 90s (that were bought up by the majors) benefited from the studios destroying the need for expensive studios... Sure the independents were mostly bought up, but if you think that letting competitors enter the market so you can buy them up at a premium is good for shareholder value... well then you'd be a corporate executive.
Loud sounds better as background music (but all my stereos have a volume knob), and on the radio when people listen over FM which nukes detail anyway and cars are noisy... but there was no reason not to "do things right," and master for vinyl, transfer that master to CD, and take singles you want radio play for and do a radio master, over-compressed and loud.. It would have cost "more," but mastering engineers are NOT the expensive part of music production.
That would have preserved the oligopoly's hegemony, and not alienated DJs from the record industry as the vinyl releases were few and far between (and CDs/MP3s can be beat matched, but it takes the skill out and limited DJ expression). It's easy to say that teenagers don't care about audio quality, but I don't know that it's so true... crap sounds like crap... whenever an actually talented musician succeeds in pop, the other labels find knockoffs, who normally lack the talent, and don't become huge. Marketing people try to turn things into metrics that they can analyze, but if you don't have a good product, it shows in the end... the music industry stopped putting out good product. The teenagers that I encounter (friend with their parents), are not NEARLY as into music as we were 10 years ago, and we weren't nearly as into music as those whose teen years were in the 60s, 70s, or 80s... I don't think its the commercialization, that's been pretty constant since the 50s, I think it's the lousy quality.
Okay, we are moving to a high-capacity, modern disc format. One presumes that the data is compressed... CDs aren't because decompressing wasn't an option with the hardware then. Nothing released now won't compress to the level of cheaply available chips.
An option for Audiophiles? They HAVE the option, it's the SA-CD/DVD-A tracks, that's the audiophile version.
The whole point of the loss-less schemes was that rather than ripping WAV/AIFF files, you could get 2:1 compression with the advance in hardware from the late 1980/early 1990s to now, and therefore, we picked up the compression.
Why on earth would you release a high-end format, SA-CD/DVD-A with a "lossless" CD-quality format? Either you want convenience, so MP3, or you want quality, which means SA-CD/DVD-A. The point was, rather that let people rip, just include the 128 MP3s on there.
Moving to better audio would have been one approach... Movie industry figured that one out. However, they are so scared of their own shadow that the idea of a better product scares them. They are more interested in trying to preserve the status quo and release best-of CDs to milk cash.
SA-CD or DVD-A could have been their salvation, but that would have required pushing the format (all new releases in SA-CD/CD Hybrid discs, so you can use your old CD player and play the material). Houses have LOTS of CD players, 2 cars, home stereo, maybe the master bedroom and a teenagers room. Nobody is putting SA-CD players EVERYWHERE, but they might have bought 1-2 of them if all new CDs supported the new format.
Teenagers like to listen to music... SA-CD boomboxes would have helped make that a reality. But they decided that hey, let's try to collect $30 a SA-CD, and crushed the market. If they had moved up market, and included AAC/WMA/MP3 files ON THE DISC, people might have traded the MP3s online (but they can do that now with a simple CD purchase) and preserved/grew the market.
However, they decided to focus on "plugging the analog hole" and "preventing piracy," making the formats more complicated, players more expensive, and didn't release Hybrids... who the hell was going to buy a SA-CD that they couldn't play in their car. I remember my dad diligents copying every new CD, that went in the stereo case, to a cassette deck for the car for a while... that's unnecessary when Hybrid tech exists, and impossible when you don't make it easy to copy the new SA-CD to CD.
The desire to listen to music on the iPod in no way endangered CD sales inherently, but that would have required more effort to release good CDs, not overcompress the music by making everything LOUD, and encouraged better quality hardware... companies like Sony that do hardware and software could have raised the bar with inexpensive SA-CD bedroom stereos that sounded okay...
However, CDs sound better on a decent system than MP3s, and SA-CDs no doubt sound better, but the refusal to support SA-CD killed it. Digital audio is damned convenient, busy moving my old CD-Jukebox (400 disc, takes forever to change CDs if you want to mix up tracks) to a lossless media server, but there was no reason for the studios not to make that a reality, other than laziness and a fear of change.
Somehow, a combination of Congress and the IRS accidentally broke the classes down. The IRS created code 401(k), and all of a sudden, the middle class had an incentive to own wealth.
If you look at the social security reform debate, behind all the verbiage of "ownership society" or "risky scheme," at the heart of the debate was ownership of assets. If individuals own the assets, then they owned the means of production.
Compare a 401(k) account to a pension. In both cases, the money is tied up on stocks and bonds, growing accordingly. Economically, they appear similar. However, there is a crucial difference. The 401(k) owner actually owns assets, which can be passed along to offspring as an inheritance, or sold and used for their lifestyle. A pensioner receives a monthly check while alive, but owns none of the underlying assets behind their monthly check.
In modern America, there aren't "capitalist" and "workers," because the workers may own stock in the corporation through 401(k) matches in company stock, and the overextended managers may be using debt to finance a lavish lifestyle. Class in America is often tied to expenditures, not income, although certain "fields" are considered higher class. The upper-income Doctor or Lawyer will not see themselves as "the same" as an IT Consultant with comparable income, because the former tie their class status not to what they do but to their education. This is why Doctors are seen as higher "class" than lawyers, regardless of income levels, because the former has more education.
However, Marx's classes are gone. The class of the inherited wealthy is VERY small in the US. A wealthy capitalist has to divide his wealth amongst children, grandchildren, and palaces in his honor -- I mean buildings at Universities, which slowly dilutes the wealth. You rarely find more than 3 generations removed from the source of wealth still living off it, and that's for VERY wealthy families.
In terms of class, the Myspace/Facebook divide does inadvertently follow "class" in the US, not wealth. In the US, Class largely follows schooling, though wealth is correlated, it isn't direct. Studies show that the economic benefit of elite schools aren't a huge (if any) premium over that of state schools, but in terms of US class, it's night and day. If you are smart enough to get into Harvard, you'll likely do well whether you go to Harvard or state college, but in terms of cracking open upper-class American society, the right college goes a long way towards establishing your "class" hierarchy. In that regard, Myspace/Facebook clearly follows the divide in America, not causes it... and the divide in America doesn't reflect income, or wealth directly.
That said, since pensions, in this day and age, are more common for government employees, and 401(k)s are popular with the middle class, perhaps the tax code is forcing wealth to follow the class structure, but anyone can own capital in America, and the guy making 50k that lives below his means will acquire far more wealth than the business owner making 250k-500k that is leveraged to the hilt.
Solar makes more sense in suburban areas...
on
Vertical Farming
·
· Score: 1
Urban areas have some efficiencies, but access to sunlight is not one of them. Sunlight is a function of square footage, and urban areas by definition have more people/square foot.
Rural areas put land to use. But our tracts of suburbs, while I love living in one, are the worst use of space ecologically, a situation that could/should be rectified. Suburbs have relatively low people density, so you don't get the urban advantages of mass transit, centralized heating, etc., but use decent amounts of land inefficiently. Gardening may be a fun hobby, but individuals each have 1/8 - 1/2 an acre of lawn/gardening that are generally over-watered uses a lot of our available water supplies for personal vanity. Farms may use much more water, but its creating food. While I love having a vegetable/herb garden, it's more vanity than efficient use of resources. Lawns are similarly problematic.
However, with the right tax incentives, perhaps some of this can be changed. Suburban ranch houses have lots of roof:person ratios. Imagine if every new roof (so 30-50 years until they all change over) had one of the solar panel roofs. During the day, they generate more power than use, and with the right incentives, could generate more than used at night as well. Generally because of how net metering works (and some states you get paid back the wholesale rate on your surplus power, and pay the retail rate when you use power), you under-power your solar grids because there is no advantage to being a net producer of energy. However, if every house in the suburbs was a net producer of energy, we would drastically reduce our power usage.
Sure, we'd still have power plants, factories, office buildings, etc., use power and can't easily generate it on site, and we still need power at night when the solar panels are not available, but we could conceivably drastically cut down on our energy needs, reduce the need for more plants, and let the power companies decommission their old and inefficient plants.
One of the reasons for tiered power is that inexpensive and cheap plants (particularly cheap variable costs) run 24/7, but older and inefficient plants are only operated when there is a need for the energy. Reduce our energy needs, and you don't use those wasteful plants.
All that needs to happen is that the costs of the solar roofs not be much more than the cost of a replacement roof, and proper setups so that the power companies don't get screwed. If they had to pay solar net-producers at the rate of their most inefficient plant that operates, they'd find it a win, because they would actually find their power costs going down, because they'd stop bringing those plants online, and they'd still collect the markups. The need to operate power plants during the day would drastically diminish, though I wonder how the employees would like their jobs to mostly be night jobs.
However, how neat would it be if the only plants running during the day were nuclear plants that you can't start/stop, with clean-coal technology running at night. That would reduce our use of oil (oil plants would no doubt shut down), and we would drastically reduce our energy usage. The power companies would still make money... and if structured correctly, more money, so they'd be on board (sorry anti-capitalist environmentalists, you'll have to choose between the environment and Marxism), with less money tied up in power plants.
And it would, in the long run, drastically reduce energy costs, as solar panels/tiles would no doubt come down in price or increase in efficiency, as opposed to our current usage of increasingly expensive energy commodities, and it could largely be done without turning massive pieces of land into solar/wind farms, because it's already in used space.
What percentage of our power usage could we avoid, 10%, 20%? Given that 2%-3% swings in energy usage can have 10%-20% price swings, that seems like a net win to me.
Think about what the plants need...
on
Vertical Farming
·
· Score: 1
Okay, plants convert 1%-2% into energy, solar panels 6% - 16%, wahoo, science beats nature/God, you're happy... except for one thing...
You STILL need to give the plans the light to turn into energy, unless you figured out how to wire them with a low voltage line...:)
So, you collect 500 Watts of sunlight-based energy on a panel, that would give the plant 10 watts, instead your panels got 100 watts (assuming 20% efficient panels by the time you finished building this thing)... Okay, now I can throw off 100 Watts of light to the plants... Unless I figure out how to "plug the plants in" I now have 1/5th the light powered by the panels as I collected... The plants still need 100 Watts, even if they only get 2% of the energy.
Now, let's assume that incandescent waste most of the energy, and we can get 5x throughput by only giving plants the part of the spectrum that we think that they need. Now our 500 Watt-equivalent sunlight is turned into 100 Watts of power, which gives the equivalent amount of light as the original 500-Watts of energy.
I STILL only have enough light for 1 floor. Perhaps windows cover 50% of the needs (on the peripheral), so we can get 2 floors out of it... still not impressed.
This is a neat project, and conceptually an option for some buildings... 2-4 floors on top of the building might be viable. Maybe using something like a Solar Tube to bring natural light in will help... Maybe plants that need less than 100% light will work...
However, solar panels -> energy -> lights -> plants is unlikely to gain you ANY energy gain, before focusing on the energy to create the panels and setup this system.
However, roof-top gardens are popular with some, and maybe some buildings like college dorms with workstudy labor MIGHT get college students tastier foods. I think that drying to grow wheat/corn like this is absurd, but for vegetables, who knows.
True, Intel doesn't have debt on their balance sheet, but they "have it" in that the opportunity cost of having that cash tied up there.
If Intel were to sell $5 billion in bonds secured by the fabs, and then return that $5b to the shareholders, their economic position would be similar. The decision to carry debt or not versus give the cash to the shareholders is theoretically neutral. In evaluating the companies performance, one needs to compensate for the leverage difference. Basically, Intel chooses to NOT juice returns for shareholders with leverage, because they are cash rich.
AMD has 7.3b in debt and 5.7b in equity on their balance sheet, with a market cap of 7.5b.
AMD could, tomorrow, sell half the company for 7.3b in cash (well, it would take months, sell equity, pay down debt, enterprise cap stays the same, but walk through the exercise) to pay down debt, and the new AMD would show:
Market Cap of 14.8b, $0 debt, 13b in equity on the balance sheet.
Now, shareholders are "equal" because they own half what they did before, but the company is worth twice what it was before, and the enterprise value is the same... Enterprise value = value of company - debts of the company... I'm oversimplifying the equation to illustrate the point...
AMD should be worth twice what it is now if it was debt free, however, AMD has chosen to finance expansion with debt instead of equity. This is seen as good for shareholders in good times, as debt holders get interest, but not growth, and gives them more bang for their buck.
Again, it's a "theoretically" neutral decision by corporate finance, not a matter of Intel having the cash or not. CFOs generally try to keep a certain leverage level, because that gives the shareholders the expected return that they are looking for. More leverage = more risk = more expected return... which also means lower price today...
Slashdot Mirror
I graduated from school 6 years ago, and don't remember any of the details from my studies... however, the process (math heavy) of CS remains valuable. The MBA I picked up later rounded out my skill set, but if I had taken an accounting course or two plus a general management course or two, I could have saved the time and cash and gotten it later.
Right out of school, IT may be the more useful degree. Why CS grads can get any IT jobs easily, if the outsourced HR recruiting firm is looking for IT, you'll struggle, because if you can't check the boxes, you don't get the interviews. However, your first job should be on-campus recruiting, so if you're careful, it won't make a difference.
Ten or fifteen years out, we'd all like to think that nobody cares about degrees, but it isn't true. Once you move up the food chain a bit, management LIKES degreed people. They are happy to hire programmers with high school degrees or even drop outs that can sling code, but once they need a technical lead, they don't want the gut without the degree. Sure, plenty of people will post here about how they are just fine without the degree, but it is a limitation, and the original poster has already decided to get the degree.
In 15 years, the IT degree will seem like a slightly upgrade Vo-Tech degree, and the CS degree will seem like a real engineering degree. This shouldn't matter, but it will. When you start dealing with managers with Ivy League (equivalent in your case) degrees and pedigrees, they'll see the CS-guy as one of them but more technical, they'll see the IT guy as below them.
Think nobody will care in 15 years what you did in your early 20s? Most people are unimpressive, they don't really do much during their life... for those people, their MOST measurable accomplishments are schooling, so they trade on it, and respect others that do as well. Hell, my high school, that I went to for three years, remains on my resume, because it's the top school in my area, and most of the people I interview with are trying to send their kids there (or are sending their kids there), and after fighting with the increasingly draconian admissions process, figure anyone that went there must be top notch.
You never know what will help in the future, so run with it.
I'd be happy with a two-fold Copyright. A small amount of time based upon publishing, 3 years, 5 years, whatever, and a longer time if you register. If you got 5 years, renewable every 5 years (with an increasing fee) but had to place a reproducible digital format with the Library of Congress, I'd be okay with longer periods of time. My concern isn't stopping Disney from capitalizing on Walt's characters, but rather, protecting our culture.
A retool of Trademark/Copyright could work... Disney isn't actually concerned with losing Steamboat Willie, they are concerned with protecting Mickey Mouse. If Steamboat Willie entered the public domain, and everyone could download, cut, edit, their own 8 minute shorts, but couldn't commercially capitalize on Mickey Mouse, Disney would probably not object.
My wife is an amateur composer. One of her current projects is she is creating cel phone ring-tones based upon arranging some historical ethnic music. Armed with a fake book to get a starting point, and heavily arranging things, she is creating some new works using the public domain's creative commons. However, the fact that she can't use tunes from the 30s, 40s, and 50s is kind of a shame. Why is it that we can't take WW II era propaganda films (which have no commercial significance anymore) and use them to create new works. Whether lefties parodying our current events, or people simply looking at that period of time, the situation sucks.
WW II is a significant cultural event, and not being able to use things from that era upsets me.
While I don't like never ending copyright, I also understand why some authors think that it is their property and should last forever (I think that they are wrong, but I respect that view), so with that in mind, I'm completely okay with a compromise that lets commercially valuable works be protected nearly in perpetuity in return for releasing things that aren't commercially valuable entering the public domain. Given how much the IP Cartel companies benefit from the public domain, they might be okay with a solution that lets them keep their commercial works and characters protected forever in return for other loosening to build the public domain.
While I feel on some level that Disney's classic animations SHOULD become part of our public domain at some time, I'm willing to yield that (and even grant a perpetually renewable scheme to get their buy in) to worry about my bigger concern, cultural preservation.
If a video game maker goes under, happens all the time, I realize that their assets need to be sold to pay creditors. However, if the work isn't being exploited, turn it over to the public. Right now there is no provision for this, because even if the thing has zero value, since you get nothing for giving it to the public domain, fiduciaries want to protect it forever.
Perhaps some scheme could be devised that uses the fees paid for registration to A) pay for archival, and B) pay small fees to "purchase" the old works into the public domain. Perhaps something like 5% of sales could be used... That would no doubt get companies that have archives of old software to pony it up... Makers of CGA/EGA DOS games might be willing to pay someone a year to pull all the software out of the archive and "sell" it to the public, for small amounts.
I'm less concerned with breaking Disney's monopoly than preserving our culture. The rhetoric of those fighting copyright extension suggests the same, which is why I think a compromise might be reached. America's economy depends heavily on IP exports, so Congress isn't going to break that to serve some nebulous public good, and I can't fault them, but Disney might WANT to get more IP (that isn't theirs) into the public domain for them to exploit, and some method of preserving our culture should be reachable.
i.e. keep Dumbo forever in return for a small fee every five years PLUS a digital archive that you update on each release, but release stuff you don't want to exploit. OTOH, they might not want their name associated with less politically correct works from WW II. However, the fact that we are losing that part of our heritage SHOULD concern SOME members of Congress.
That is the rub... things from decades ago that are a part of American culture are simply gone. Walt Disney's first live-action movie, that included animated elements (the combination being a first), Song of the South is simply gone. It's part of American culture, a childhood memory for some, and if they wish to share it with their kids, they can't, because it's gone.
//c. I'm sure that the 5.25" disks were tossed at my parents house, but even if not, that's not usable directly on modern equipment. I was able to download images and an emulator to play them, but legally, that can't be done. If I wanted to show my son one of the first computer games I played, I don't have that ability, and it's tragic.
The real tragedy with it taking a while to work itself out is that certain elements that were never sold to the home (movies before VHS/DVD), they can simply vanish because the copyright holders wants them to.
Taking a stroll down memory lane, there was a series of Text adventures that I played on my Apple
I think that if a work isn't commercially exploited for some reasonable amount of time (3 years? 5 years?) the copyright should be lost. In this day and age of digital distribution, there is no reason why works can't be commercially available indefinitely. There is a minimum run for DVDs (enough to cover the cost of mastering the DVD, which has dropped, but for a while kept niche markets like Anime in VHS for a while), a minimum run for VHS, but a iTMS movie? Simply upload and sell.
I think that 1 year is a bit short, things may need to be retooled, etc.
However, it kind of worries me that large chunks of American culture can disappear... the film reels not maintained, and nobody can do anything. Sure it hit the public domain almost a century later, but if the work was destroyed, it's gone.
Movies, old computer games, old video games, its kind of tragic. Now take Nintendo, their popular franchises are re-released on their hand-held units (can play all the old SMB games on Gameboy Color/Gameboy Advanced), so I don't begrudge them keeping their copyrights, they are still exploiting the works. But if it's not being exploited, let it go, and keep out culture.
The worse part of the post you responded too, "it was all pretty much free to do until a few years ago." When the West was opening up, large chunks of land more or less went to whoever showed up and claimed it. When the "New World" was discovered, the explorers simply claimed the land and planted a flag... they later had to defend it as rival claims showed up.
However, I cannot go into a random place in the US and claim it now. Those property rights are assigned. It may not be "fair" that people have it for being first (like the guys that bought domain names for a song that are now worth a fortune), but to have property rights, someone has to own it, fair or not. In the "wild west" phase, people claim shit, stuff is free, etc., but it only lasts so long.
I used to get free stuff (physical objects) all the time during the wild west phase of the Internet... people were spending a fortune staking claims on the Internet, with no idea what would work. Most failed, but some people made a fortune. However, I don't sit around griping that those days are over.
And before people complain about it, contrast the development of the US west with robust property rights and its rapid development to areas of Israel. Israel adopted Ottoman law on property rights, which placed most of the land under state control. Everything is planned there, hence all the illegal construction (on both sides of the green line, by Jews and Arabs) because nobody owns anything. Your ability to get a house is your ability to know someone in the right department of the government, not simply the ability to buy land and place a building on it.
BTW, don't you feel slighted that when you were a kid, riding was "free" (paid for my parents, but to you free) and now you have to pay for it. Shouldn't you be entitled because it was free at first?
We all get form letters. However, if they are on target AND slightly customized, you develop a strong affinity for the Congressman. I remember reading a story in a political book about a guy running for Senate was campaigning in a diner or something similar. One of his constituents, and elderly woman, said that years ago when he was new in the House of Reps, she wrote to him for help, and got a lovely response detailing his efforts back (it was a form letter) in that area. She said to him that she'd vote for him in any election.
When I wrote my Congressman about something I find a travesty, the paperwork to get freaking Sinus medication, I got back her standard form letter about helping make health care more affordable... No loyalty from me there, as someone whose aids can't read a letter (typed up, but custom) and send a useful response doesn't seem like someone that can be counted on when issues come up.
In college, I wrote my rep about something I saw on Slashdot... it was about a guy sued for putting the building code online claiming that the statute for building codes was owned by the private company (trade org) that submitted it. You could look up other laws, but not this one. I sent a letter and included a copy of the news article that broke. I got a CALL from one of his aides, asked what this was about (given the article wasn't from my state), and said that the Rep would look into it. I have no idea whether he would or not, but I'm MUCH more likely to vote for him if he seeks higher office (I'm no longer in his district), because they addressed my concerns.
Good constituent relations can supposedly make a difference of 3%-5% in an election. Given that close elections are 5%, a Congressman who maintains good relationships with his constituents, addresses their letters, and helps them with government problems is basically untouchable on reelection. It separates the pros from the amateurs.
Each piece of software under the GPL is individually licensed by each copyright owner to each distributor. However, you simply download the license. Nothing would stop the coalition from creating a website where artists can submit AIF/WAV files of there music with a fee structure (free, per-play, annual license), and allowing Internet radio stations from electronically signing the agreement.
Individually license doesn't mean the legal department of the guy broadcasting in his dorm room needs to negotiate with legal from the garage band. It simply means that you can either "pay the Cartel" fee OR license the music. If the cartel fee is too high, instead of that, do a license system.
I've played GW games on and off over the years, more off then on, but every once in a while someone gets me into it. They decided to bring their GW Stores to the US, which decimated game stores that used to sell GW stuff, not because of competition, but because GW would play games with events, etc.
They also realized that their old-time base was mostly using their older miniatures, just updating rule books and adding a few neat elements. Their third edition tried to force changes by making the troops more powerful than the specialists, to encourage more purchases as well.
They found that with their game stores, they were able to bring in teenagers with disposable income, but the other gamers didn't want to play with teenagers... makes sense, if you're in your 30s and 40s and have kids at home, your hanging out with the guys night is less fun if there are 14 and 15 year olds there.
They found that getting teenagers into the game, who would drop money then disappear when they got older gave them a constant supply of people buying miniatures. The guy playing the same Imperial Guard army for 10 years doesn't generate that much revenue.
They took a very anti-fan approach, and while it gave them a bump in sales, they have become one of the companies hated by gamers... including those that play their games.
About two weeks ago, my 11-month old son found my wife's cel phone, managed to knock off the battery cover, and crawl around playing with it. It took us a week to find it, and in that week, her phone was unstable because the batteries would pop out. Another time with another phone, I dropped it and the cover cracked... used masking tape for a bit, and realized that it was time for a new phone anyway. Number of cel phones where we lost the battery cover in the past 5 years, 2.
The last time I replaced the battery on my phone was my Samsung i330 where I bought the extra-length battery for around $50 to last longer, and it's battery time remained shorter than the iPhone. This was back in 2002 or 2003. Number of batteries I've replaced in the past 5 years, 1.
So given the choice between non-user accessible battery covers, or a slightly more expensive battery replacement in the unlikely event that I need to replace the battery, I think that Apple made the right call.
Microsoft has publicly stated that they do not agree to the terms of the GPL v3, will not provide support to Novell customers using software under the GPL v3, and want nothing to do with it. As the License is a contract between the copyright holder and the licensee to distribute said software, Microsoft not agreeing to said terms means Microsoft does not accept them. If a Microsoft employee hands a friend a Red Hat disc, previous to this statement, you might be able to argue that Microsoft is distributing software. However, Microsoft's statement makes it pretty clear that they do not agree to distribute.
Now, if Microsoft or their agents distributes GPL v3 code, have expressly denied agreeing to the GPL v3, they are in copyright violation. They have copied someone else's software without permission, violating their copyright.
This statement is clever, because it means that if someone at Microsoft inadvertently distributes GPL v3 software, prior to this one MIGHT have argued that the implicitly agreed to GPL v3's terms, and attempted to get court order to force Microsoft to comply (and release some code). Now you have to sue them for copyright infringement.
Why is this important? Well, if they distribute software with GPL v3 code, you can probably get an injunction to stop them, you'll be able to sue for damages (although illegally copying software that you are giving away for $0 albeit with copying restrictions seems hard to do... you've been wronged, but damages are probably $0. The USFL sued the NFL and won an anti-trust suit, however, since the USFL's poor business decisions were determined to run them out of business, the award was $1, after appeals and interest added, the USFL Collected $3.76. I presume that a copyright infringement suit against Microsoft would be similar, collect $1, since no monetary damages were awarded.
I am not a lawyer, but this is my game theory read on the case.
Some of the health care reforms and HMO take-over in the 90s drastically lowered Doctor incomes. They had to change how they practice medicine, and start ordering extra tests to keep their incomes up, etc. This caused a temporary savings in spending as they ratcheted down reimbursements, and then an increase as they over treated... basically, the doctors had become accustomed to a lifestyle and kept supporting it.
However, the newer, younger doctors, were unable to start practices as easily in the 80s, as it became difficult to get on the HMO lists, etc. More of them work for the older doctors for lower pay, more work at hospitals, coops, clinics, etc. Doctors make less money.
But, you won't see the effects for decades... you SEE it in Canada and Britain, whose single payer systems are starting to suffer, badly. The best and brightest don't go into medicine, or leave for the US, you're importing your Doctors.
Why don't you see it for decades? Let's look at the status quo...
Imagine you're a 45 year old specialist, making great money, $500k/year. You're living on $400k, putting away $100k, and planning to retire in 5 years at age 50. Now, your income is cut by the HMOs by 20%, you're now making $400k, living on $400k. You now have to wait for your older investments to fund retirement, so you wait until 60. Nobody is going to shed a tear for this guy, but the income cut kept him in practice an extra 10 years, so you see an increase in doctors.
Now, shouldn't less income mean you work less, or find other work, it depends. If you're a 21 year old biology major junior, you might decide that instead of spending 4 years in medical school and 6 years in residency, you'll spend 3 years in law school, expecting to make more money. Sure SOME Doctors make half a million, but lots "get by" at $100k-$200k... sure that's a lot of money, but remember that they have an extra $200k in education, plus 6 years as a resident to specialize in elite specialties. So at age 32 they are making $100k+, but all their friends that went to law school are making $100k+, and have been working for 7 years, own a house, etc.
Another scenario, you're 31, in your 5th year as a resident for your specialty, and the HMOs start chopping pay. Now, if you could go back at 22, you might decide to go to law school and be on your way at 25, but if you switch to law school now, you'll be 34 when you finish, competing with 25 year olds. You do your 6th year and suck it up and bear.
When pay cut, the older doctors stayed on longer, so we saw no shortage. The people in the residency track trucked on, because the "wasted time" is a sunk cost... Those in their 1st year saw the changes, and cut their losses and went into family practice. Others in med school found specialties that didn't take 6 years before you earned a living.
Basically, for a good 10 years after the HMO crack-down, we had a surge in doctors, as retirements got delayed. We also kept all our doctors in the pipeline because their next best alternative sucked. A 4th or 5th year resident was better off spending 2-3 more years to complete their specialty than they were switching to a new option...
However, in another 10 years, we're going to see the consequences of cutting doctor pay... we'll have more intelligent lawyers, and less intelligent doctors. We'll import doctors because American doctors are still better paid than British or Canadian doctors, and they'll import doctors from India who speak fluent English and find the British/Canadian doctors paid better. However, this model isn't sustainable.
If you compare most doctors in their 30s with those in their 50s, really talk to them, the former are NOT as intelligent as the latter. We have a decade or two of doctors that aren't that bright (the brightest got a JD), and we're going to lose our elite older doctors to retirement.
I'm really excited to see if the Massachusetts experiment works. Each state needs to tailor theirs differently, New York with its
The problem with what you're looking at is GAAP numbers, which work wonderfully for manufacturing companies, not so great with IP companies.
Basically, R&D is expensed as incurred, but the benefits are in the future. However, since we don't know how to actually value that asset with precision (if you expect a 150% ROI on your research dollars, theoretically you should have an asset to amortize), GAAP says to make it simple, we call it $0.
As a result, Pharma companies do some research in house, but most of what gets done is a lot of seed money gets put into little research shops, and if the drug is a success, you buy the research shop. That way, you can put the R&D on your books as an asset.
Basically, if I spend $10m on R&D, I have a $10m expense. If I put $1m as investments into 10 different little shops, I have no expenses, because I have $10m in assets (my investments). In 5 years, 1 panned out, 9 flopped, so I write off $9m off the flopped shops (though I can do it over time to not eat the expense in 1 year, write one off each year, leave rest as shells), and buy the remaining shop for $10m. I then put the company on my books for $500,000 in assets (the lab equipment), and $9.5 million in good will.
As a result, Big Pharma doesn't do as much research in house as they do with seed money plus buying anyone who does anything cool. The in-house team is focused on FDA trials, not drug research. Look at that filing in front of you, look at the income statement for "minority interest" or whatever they call it. That means that the company owns over 80% of a firm (so consolidates the financials), but pays out the minority holder. So if they bought 90% of the research company, they essentially leave a 10% royalty to the guys that did the work, but instead of a royalty payment, it's in the much sneakier minority interest section.
The FDa trials can't always be amortized. Costs that have an unknown benefit in the future have to be expensed today, can't be amortized over time. I understand what you're saying, but you have to appreciate the damage that GAAP's rules have done to our pharma companies and how they operate.
Remember, you don't get a patent on a medication, you get a patent on the process to create the medication. Your 20-year clock starts upon developing the drug. If it takes 10 years to get through trials, you only have 10 years left on the patent.
My buddies aren't that low on the pole, aren't lying to me, and the situation is much more complicated than you think. If it was such a money mint, they'd be doing WAY MORE research in house. There are good things with the American system, and bad things, but if you take America out of the free market health care game, there will be a LOT FEWER dollars chasing new drugs. Medical research WILL SLOW DOWN, and that's a risk I'm uncomfortable with. The fact that the rest of the world free rides on us, because we are the only ones paying the premium to chase new drugs, is unfair, but I don't know how to fix it. A senator (who I won't name), stunned my friend when addressing the company's employees/friends/PAC at some event, and talking to people later, told them that if they don't want cheaper drugs re-imported from Canada, they should stop selling to Canada. There is a growing realization that letting the companies negotiate lower prices with Canada ENCOURAGES that free-riding. If there was legal re-importing, our costs would go down at first to the level of Canada's, but you won't see Canada getting such cheap pricing in the future.
I support the re-importation of drugs (at least from Western countries... I wouldn't allow it from Africa, because I want the companies to sell cheap stuff to the third world to help them build up). Our costs would go down, other countries would pay more, and the giant American subsidy of Canada and Europe would go away. I bet the Big Pharma companies would make more in the end, because Canada couldn't beat them up on pricing when the company knows that they essentially have to sell in the US for what they sell in Canada because of re-importation.
You ever deal with copyright complaints? I get them all the time. A former employee stuck an image from another site onto a site, nobody noticed, we get a DMCA take-down request.
I get notice from me ISP of the take-down request, they ask me to correct in 10 days.
If I can't in 10 days (takes longer to get a replacement image), I tell my ISP, and I work with their legal department, usually no problems if it is within 30 days. Outside of 30 days, they talk with the copyright holder, things get resolved.
You think that anyone else does it differently? If the BSA caught you using unlicensed software, well, to perform an audit they either need your permission or a court order, how fast do you think that happens? If you are caught owing money, how long do you think they'll give you to correct? I would expect 30 days, and if you can't in that time, you negotiate a longer period.
A small business has some unlicensed copies of Office, and agrees to an Audit, which finds that they need to buy $5000 in software. You think that the BSA expects them to comply that afternoon? Or what, shut down the business until they can get the cash? That's absurd, you either correct inside some window (10 days or 30 days), or negotiate a solution.
As far as I can tell, there is a "minor" issue, because it's LGPL and not GPL, we're not arguing that the whole package is illegal without source, just that they need to release their modifications to the library. So while the copyrights are being infringed, it is likely the modifications will be released and the copyright holders won't suffer any damages. We are 22 days in, so 16 business days into the matter, and the company as already acknowledged that there is a problem, and legal is looking at the matter to see what to do.
This to me is moving smoothly. The company has acknowledged an issue and is looking into how to resolve it. If you think that the copyright holders should threaten to sue, than frankly, you are crazy. What will they sue for? What damages are they suffering? They could probably get an injunction against Parallels shipping, but it's doubtful that they have any monetary damages seeing as how they give the software away for free. The company is working to correct.
You mention the RIAA, in all their harassment attempts, they ALWAYS offer to settle. You think that they are demanding a cashiers check that afternoon, or payment within 30 days.
Okay, there is a list of authors. So what. Something not being okay doesn't mean it is legally challengeable.
Further, courts can offer monetary relief and injunctive relief, that' about it. Damages need to be translated into dollars.
They didn't follow the license, therefore, they are infringing upon WINE or those 800+ people's copyright, so what?
They are legally in the wrong, so what?
What are the damages? Do you want to foot the bill to just get injunctive relief?
One of the reasons to assign to FSF is they WILL foot the bill to get injunctive relief, which is a threat to businesses that makes the FSF credible. I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that: 299 Shi Quan He (picked a line at random) is not going to drop a $20k retainer off at an attorney to file for an injunction to stop Parallels 3.0 from shipping...
SWSoft screwed up, seems to acknowledge that they need to fix it, and some jackass is all over Slashdot because 3 weeks later and legal is figuring out what to do.
Think for a moment and stop going off like an idiot. Someone contacted a company and said, "you are using my copyrighted material without complying with the terms of the license, the license is as follows, fix it."
Who do you think should make the decision as to what is legally required? Perhaps the legal department? Perhaps they have outside counsel like many small companies, and their lawyers needs to read the LGPL and figure out what it applies do.
You expect them to make a decision on a legal matter without finding out from legal what to do.
Legal isn't going to tell them that it's okay to violate someone's copyright, but legal is going to tell them what they need to do to comply with a legal request.
Companies that sold CDs and simply put links on their website to their modified code weren't complying with the GPL. Do you think that FSF's complaints about GPL violations were handled by the webmaster making his own legal call, or legal figured out what to do to comply?
It's not a fair straight comparison, because the US system is fundamentally different. Our costs are driven up by wealthy people (or people with good insurance) getting very expensive treatments that they wouldn't get elsewhere because of standardized payments and choices. Our costs are driven up by the rest of the world free riding on America's investment in drug research.
According to my friends working in "Big Pharma," basically the prices they sell overseas, including Canada are "profitable" on a per-unit basis, because drug duplication costs are close to zero but the research is high. It's not that dissimilar to the computer software model that we've seen here. And similarly, while Linux has been able to grow the "free" approach impressively, it doesn't do any real research or advancement, nor does it handle corner cases. In fact, as the "free" solutions get better, the niche players actually are raising prices (computer prices go down, but software has been flat, becoming a bigger percentage) because they are selling fewer units to those willing to pay the premium...
In Big Pharma's case, the extensive research into developing a safe, effective, and patentable drug are substantial, and it is the enormous profitability in the US that funds all that. That profit motive is also why we get so many drugs that handle America-specific problems (look at all the lifestyle drugs), all the profits come from here. If the rest of the world had an American-style health care system, we'd have a LOT more drug research, because there would be more profitability.
The profit motive is made out to be the bad guy, but if you look at what is going on, it's actually not responsible for the paperwork. Medicare standardized billing codes, and everyone piggy-backs off that. The profit element does take money out as profits, but also forces some degree of efficiencies. If you look at how non-profits and governments run, they are WAY more corrupt than for-profits. Sure, there are plenty of managers in for-profits that take company resources to benefit themselves, and stock options for senior managers are more or less fleecing the shareholders by steeling the company, and other bad things, but in non-profits there is usually no way to stop the abusers, while in for-profits, corrupt managers eventually get fired because their corruption causes under-performance. In the non-profits, eventually people donate money (and in governments, they just take it) and then corrupt people are attracting to piles of money with no accountability.
The problems that people have with health care in the US are:
First off, their are statutory damages, but generally only for registered copyrights. Also, it's not clear what "damages" the copyright owner, we don't know who, has suffered. Your relief is based upon damages, and maybe a punitive component, not I don't like you.
The FSF requires copyright assigned because then there is a clear owner and clear damages, because the FSF with the GNU manifesto and other things has its defined benefit from GPL'd code. Makes it more likely you can gain relief... if they sue and ask for damages plus injunctive relief, there is a clear plaintiff, not "a bunch of hackers," that has standing.
22 days is no a long time. Generally, if you are dealing in legal action, 30 days is standard. Sure, obnoxious lawyers demand things with 10 days to correct, but generally, 30 is normal.
It appears to be a major screw-up, they released code based upon LGPL'd code. Legal needs to figure out what they did, what they are at risk for, and what they should do. They need to make certain that they can legally release code, and if that is sufficient.
The copyright holders should hold their feet to the fire, but public shaming and getting half stories out seems a bit premature at this stage of the game. What damages can the Wine project have had from not having access to derivative versions of their software from this company in 22 days? Lots of things can crop of and cause things to take a few weeks. Everyone chill, and don't prejudge until we see a resolution.
Everyone is "free to sue," but each wine copyright holder may or not have standing, and may or may not have sufficient damages to due and/or be granted injunctive relief. If you ask the court to stop them from distributing your software because they are doing so without a license, it's harder to claim that if various copyright holders have 10-15 lines of code.
There is no "class" here for a class action lawsuit.
People are different. The heavy rush of attempts to narrowly define normal and drug people into changing is disturbing. Take ADHD and other "diagnosis." At what percentage of showing up is something no longer legitimately a disorder, and rather is a type of person.
As a parent, I'm extremely nervous when we let people define "normal" and call everyone outside of normal a "disorder" that needs treatment. When you start with treating genetic code, there is a fine difference between treating a disease (a good thing), and fundamentally changing a child because they aren't how you want.
I notice that there is a lot of straw man stereotyping of people "religious types two posts ago" and from you "stupid idiots that ought to be arrested for severe child abuse." I've also noticed the people who feel other parents should be arrested for doing things that they don't approve of generally don't have children.
There was a time that people were allowed to be different. They might be mocked, ostracized, or made fun of, but being different and having different values shouldn't be criminal. There is no "one right way" to raise children.
The human gene pool is pretty shallow as is, this rush to eugenically change things isn't necessarily good for the species.
To go with SA-CD media centers, you will rip to the SA-CD equivalent of WAV now, and in 4-5 years, the equivalent of FLAC begins to make sense. You can't magically compress 2:1 losslessly. You CAN with CDs because there is zero compression, because when the CD spec came out, you didn't have processors in the CD player. The SA-CD/DVD-A are going to be as small as possible given the reasonable playback hardware.
Your comment is, whatever the content, I want to squeeze it into half the space. As compression is a function of compressible data (patterns) and processor, eventually you'll get enough horsepower to get a 2:1 ratio on the DVD-A content, but I wouldn't suggest that it's now. However, including a 128 MP3, AAC, AND WMA, just to make everyone happy, should use what, 10% of the space? If you only include one of them, say MP3, you're using 3% of the disc, that's a reasonable accomodation to the digital side.
The lossy codecs serve a purpose, portible machines. The CD hybrid layer serves a purpose, backwards compatibility. The SA-CD serves a purpose, high fidelity.
Alas, the recording industry didn't push this way, and instead gets eaten by Torrents...
Not only that, they sued the crap out of Napster, which was a sloppy way to find music but cool, and left in its place Torrents, which are best for trading LOTS of files. In the Napster days, you downloaded a song, after a lot of effort, and if you liked it, bought the CD. Now, you don't Torrent an MP3, too much effort, you grab the whole CD because why not.
Exactly, when I listen to my copy of Desperado on a CD with a good set of Sennheisers, I can really hear the quality of the recording. It probably isn't as good as the original vinyl was, but the quality is just so far beyond what an MP3 or some of the incredibly compressed 90s albums sound like. Granted, it can be an artistic statement, like with grunge, but most of the time it is just ignorance. Same goes from my old Jazz CDs or 70s era Funk, the sound quality is so much better when the compression is just enough to get it onto the disc
Vinyl has certain properties that limit acoustics. It is a physical process, so if you go to heavy/light on one part of the range, the needle would skip. That physical limitation means that if one is is releasing a Vinyl version, someone that knows how to master vinyl does the process. Often the CD and Vinyl releases have separate mastering processes.
CDs, being digital, can send whatever you want. Years ago, companies would send out masters to a few mastering engineers to get back their version. Every time, the contract went to whoever made it sound loudest, because on a single listening, especially an A/B comparison, the louder track sounded better. As a result, the only mastering engineers that stayed in business were those that learned to sound "loud." As a result, there is less interesting sounds, and only a fraction of the 16-bit range was used.
This had three effects... 1) MP3s sound almost as good, who cares if you drop the low-bit range if it is over-powered by the rest. 2) synthetic instruments and drum machines, which were improving with cheap processors anyway, sound closer and closer to the real thing as you compress the range that people listen to. 3) the need for a perfect studio environment/mixing environment went away as you just weren't releasing stuff as good.
This slit the throats of CD sales, as nobody cared that the MP3 "lost acoustic range," because Pop/Rock doesn't use that range anymore. The need for a band was lessoned, and studios focused on solo vocalists which was cheaper, and used drum machines instead of drummers and the occasional work-for-hire musician for instruments as needed. In addition, the explosion of independent labels in the 90s (that were bought up by the majors) benefited from the studios destroying the need for expensive studios... Sure the independents were mostly bought up, but if you think that letting competitors enter the market so you can buy them up at a premium is good for shareholder value... well then you'd be a corporate executive.
Loud sounds better as background music (but all my stereos have a volume knob), and on the radio when people listen over FM which nukes detail anyway and cars are noisy... but there was no reason not to "do things right," and master for vinyl, transfer that master to CD, and take singles you want radio play for and do a radio master, over-compressed and loud.. It would have cost "more," but mastering engineers are NOT the expensive part of music production.
That would have preserved the oligopoly's hegemony, and not alienated DJs from the record industry as the vinyl releases were few and far between (and CDs/MP3s can be beat matched, but it takes the skill out and limited DJ expression). It's easy to say that teenagers don't care about audio quality, but I don't know that it's so true... crap sounds like crap... whenever an actually talented musician succeeds in pop, the other labels find knockoffs, who normally lack the talent, and don't become huge. Marketing people try to turn things into metrics that they can analyze, but if you don't have a good product, it shows in the end... the music industry stopped putting out good product. The teenagers that I encounter (friend with their parents), are not NEARLY as into music as we were 10 years ago, and we weren't nearly as into music as those whose teen years were in the 60s, 70s, or 80s... I don't think its the commercialization, that's been pretty constant since the 50s, I think it's the lousy quality.
Okay, we are moving to a high-capacity, modern disc format. One presumes that the data is compressed... CDs aren't because decompressing wasn't an option with the hardware then. Nothing released now won't compress to the level of cheaply available chips.
An option for Audiophiles? They HAVE the option, it's the SA-CD/DVD-A tracks, that's the audiophile version.
The whole point of the loss-less schemes was that rather than ripping WAV/AIFF files, you could get 2:1 compression with the advance in hardware from the late 1980/early 1990s to now, and therefore, we picked up the compression.
Why on earth would you release a high-end format, SA-CD/DVD-A with a "lossless" CD-quality format? Either you want convenience, so MP3, or you want quality, which means SA-CD/DVD-A. The point was, rather that let people rip, just include the 128 MP3s on there.
Moving to better audio would have been one approach... Movie industry figured that one out. However, they are so scared of their own shadow that the idea of a better product scares them. They are more interested in trying to preserve the status quo and release best-of CDs to milk cash.
SA-CD or DVD-A could have been their salvation, but that would have required pushing the format (all new releases in SA-CD/CD Hybrid discs, so you can use your old CD player and play the material). Houses have LOTS of CD players, 2 cars, home stereo, maybe the master bedroom and a teenagers room. Nobody is putting SA-CD players EVERYWHERE, but they might have bought 1-2 of them if all new CDs supported the new format.
Teenagers like to listen to music... SA-CD boomboxes would have helped make that a reality. But they decided that hey, let's try to collect $30 a SA-CD, and crushed the market. If they had moved up market, and included AAC/WMA/MP3 files ON THE DISC, people might have traded the MP3s online (but they can do that now with a simple CD purchase) and preserved/grew the market.
However, they decided to focus on "plugging the analog hole" and "preventing piracy," making the formats more complicated, players more expensive, and didn't release Hybrids... who the hell was going to buy a SA-CD that they couldn't play in their car. I remember my dad diligents copying every new CD, that went in the stereo case, to a cassette deck for the car for a while... that's unnecessary when Hybrid tech exists, and impossible when you don't make it easy to copy the new SA-CD to CD.
The desire to listen to music on the iPod in no way endangered CD sales inherently, but that would have required more effort to release good CDs, not overcompress the music by making everything LOUD, and encouraged better quality hardware... companies like Sony that do hardware and software could have raised the bar with inexpensive SA-CD bedroom stereos that sounded okay...
However, CDs sound better on a decent system than MP3s, and SA-CDs no doubt sound better, but the refusal to support SA-CD killed it. Digital audio is damned convenient, busy moving my old CD-Jukebox (400 disc, takes forever to change CDs if you want to mix up tracks) to a lossless media server, but there was no reason for the studios not to make that a reality, other than laziness and a fear of change.
Alex
Somehow, a combination of Congress and the IRS accidentally broke the classes down. The IRS created code 401(k), and all of a sudden, the middle class had an incentive to own wealth.
If you look at the social security reform debate, behind all the verbiage of "ownership society" or "risky scheme," at the heart of the debate was ownership of assets. If individuals own the assets, then they owned the means of production.
Compare a 401(k) account to a pension. In both cases, the money is tied up on stocks and bonds, growing accordingly. Economically, they appear similar. However, there is a crucial difference. The 401(k) owner actually owns assets, which can be passed along to offspring as an inheritance, or sold and used for their lifestyle. A pensioner receives a monthly check while alive, but owns none of the underlying assets behind their monthly check.
In modern America, there aren't "capitalist" and "workers," because the workers may own stock in the corporation through 401(k) matches in company stock, and the overextended managers may be using debt to finance a lavish lifestyle. Class in America is often tied to expenditures, not income, although certain "fields" are considered higher class. The upper-income Doctor or Lawyer will not see themselves as "the same" as an IT Consultant with comparable income, because the former tie their class status not to what they do but to their education. This is why Doctors are seen as higher "class" than lawyers, regardless of income levels, because the former has more education.
However, Marx's classes are gone. The class of the inherited wealthy is VERY small in the US. A wealthy capitalist has to divide his wealth amongst children, grandchildren, and palaces in his honor -- I mean buildings at Universities, which slowly dilutes the wealth. You rarely find more than 3 generations removed from the source of wealth still living off it, and that's for VERY wealthy families.
In terms of class, the Myspace/Facebook divide does inadvertently follow "class" in the US, not wealth. In the US, Class largely follows schooling, though wealth is correlated, it isn't direct. Studies show that the economic benefit of elite schools aren't a huge (if any) premium over that of state schools, but in terms of US class, it's night and day. If you are smart enough to get into Harvard, you'll likely do well whether you go to Harvard or state college, but in terms of cracking open upper-class American society, the right college goes a long way towards establishing your "class" hierarchy. In that regard, Myspace/Facebook clearly follows the divide in America, not causes it... and the divide in America doesn't reflect income, or wealth directly.
That said, since pensions, in this day and age, are more common for government employees, and 401(k)s are popular with the middle class, perhaps the tax code is forcing wealth to follow the class structure, but anyone can own capital in America, and the guy making 50k that lives below his means will acquire far more wealth than the business owner making 250k-500k that is leveraged to the hilt.
Urban areas have some efficiencies, but access to sunlight is not one of them. Sunlight is a function of square footage, and urban areas by definition have more people/square foot.
Rural areas put land to use. But our tracts of suburbs, while I love living in one, are the worst use of space ecologically, a situation that could/should be rectified. Suburbs have relatively low people density, so you don't get the urban advantages of mass transit, centralized heating, etc., but use decent amounts of land inefficiently. Gardening may be a fun hobby, but individuals each have 1/8 - 1/2 an acre of lawn/gardening that are generally over-watered uses a lot of our available water supplies for personal vanity. Farms may use much more water, but its creating food. While I love having a vegetable/herb garden, it's more vanity than efficient use of resources. Lawns are similarly problematic.
However, with the right tax incentives, perhaps some of this can be changed. Suburban ranch houses have lots of roof:person ratios. Imagine if every new roof (so 30-50 years until they all change over) had one of the solar panel roofs. During the day, they generate more power than use, and with the right incentives, could generate more than used at night as well. Generally because of how net metering works (and some states you get paid back the wholesale rate on your surplus power, and pay the retail rate when you use power), you under-power your solar grids because there is no advantage to being a net producer of energy. However, if every house in the suburbs was a net producer of energy, we would drastically reduce our power usage.
Sure, we'd still have power plants, factories, office buildings, etc., use power and can't easily generate it on site, and we still need power at night when the solar panels are not available, but we could conceivably drastically cut down on our energy needs, reduce the need for more plants, and let the power companies decommission their old and inefficient plants.
One of the reasons for tiered power is that inexpensive and cheap plants (particularly cheap variable costs) run 24/7, but older and inefficient plants are only operated when there is a need for the energy. Reduce our energy needs, and you don't use those wasteful plants.
All that needs to happen is that the costs of the solar roofs not be much more than the cost of a replacement roof, and proper setups so that the power companies don't get screwed. If they had to pay solar net-producers at the rate of their most inefficient plant that operates, they'd find it a win, because they would actually find their power costs going down, because they'd stop bringing those plants online, and they'd still collect the markups. The need to operate power plants during the day would drastically diminish, though I wonder how the employees would like their jobs to mostly be night jobs.
However, how neat would it be if the only plants running during the day were nuclear plants that you can't start/stop, with clean-coal technology running at night. That would reduce our use of oil (oil plants would no doubt shut down), and we would drastically reduce our energy usage. The power companies would still make money... and if structured correctly, more money, so they'd be on board (sorry anti-capitalist environmentalists, you'll have to choose between the environment and Marxism), with less money tied up in power plants.
And it would, in the long run, drastically reduce energy costs, as solar panels/tiles would no doubt come down in price or increase in efficiency, as opposed to our current usage of increasingly expensive energy commodities, and it could largely be done without turning massive pieces of land into solar/wind farms, because it's already in used space.
What percentage of our power usage could we avoid, 10%, 20%? Given that 2%-3% swings in energy usage can have 10%-20% price swings, that seems like a net win to me.
Okay, plants convert 1%-2% into energy, solar panels 6% - 16%, wahoo, science beats nature/God, you're happy... except for one thing...
:)
You STILL need to give the plans the light to turn into energy, unless you figured out how to wire them with a low voltage line...
So, you collect 500 Watts of sunlight-based energy on a panel, that would give the plant 10 watts, instead your panels got 100 watts (assuming 20% efficient panels by the time you finished building this thing)... Okay, now I can throw off 100 Watts of light to the plants... Unless I figure out how to "plug the plants in" I now have 1/5th the light powered by the panels as I collected... The plants still need 100 Watts, even if they only get 2% of the energy.
Now, let's assume that incandescent waste most of the energy, and we can get 5x throughput by only giving plants the part of the spectrum that we think that they need. Now our 500 Watt-equivalent sunlight is turned into 100 Watts of power, which gives the equivalent amount of light as the original 500-Watts of energy.
I STILL only have enough light for 1 floor. Perhaps windows cover 50% of the needs (on the peripheral), so we can get 2 floors out of it... still not impressed.
This is a neat project, and conceptually an option for some buildings... 2-4 floors on top of the building might be viable. Maybe using something like a Solar Tube to bring natural light in will help... Maybe plants that need less than 100% light will work...
However, solar panels -> energy -> lights -> plants is unlikely to gain you ANY energy gain, before focusing on the energy to create the panels and setup this system.
However, roof-top gardens are popular with some, and maybe some buildings like college dorms with workstudy labor MIGHT get college students tastier foods. I think that drying to grow wheat/corn like this is absurd, but for vegetables, who knows.
True, Intel doesn't have debt on their balance sheet, but they "have it" in that the opportunity cost of having that cash tied up there.
If Intel were to sell $5 billion in bonds secured by the fabs, and then return that $5b to the shareholders, their economic position would be similar. The decision to carry debt or not versus give the cash to the shareholders is theoretically neutral. In evaluating the companies performance, one needs to compensate for the leverage difference. Basically, Intel chooses to NOT juice returns for shareholders with leverage, because they are cash rich.
AMD has 7.3b in debt and 5.7b in equity on their balance sheet, with a market cap of 7.5b.
AMD could, tomorrow, sell half the company for 7.3b in cash (well, it would take months, sell equity, pay down debt, enterprise cap stays the same, but walk through the exercise) to pay down debt, and the new AMD would show:
Market Cap of 14.8b, $0 debt, 13b in equity on the balance sheet.
Now, shareholders are "equal" because they own half what they did before, but the company is worth twice what it was before, and the enterprise value is the same... Enterprise value = value of company - debts of the company... I'm oversimplifying the equation to illustrate the point...
AMD should be worth twice what it is now if it was debt free, however, AMD has chosen to finance expansion with debt instead of equity. This is seen as good for shareholders in good times, as debt holders get interest, but not growth, and gives them more bang for their buck.
Again, it's a "theoretically" neutral decision by corporate finance, not a matter of Intel having the cash or not. CFOs generally try to keep a certain leverage level, because that gives the shareholders the expected return that they are looking for. More leverage = more risk = more expected return... which also means lower price today...